Ooh, I’m back already. I thought I was going to be stranded off-line until at least Tuesday, by which time I imagine you might have missed me, but due to the miracle of modern technology and the excellence service provided by Royal Mail, my popped router has now be replaced within thirty-six hours of its going pop.
In local news, Whitby has been shaken by the discovery of a rare haddock, worth its weight in gold. I thought the name of the chap they spoke to at the Sea Life Centre was appropriate, but I am still confused as to who is going to pay its weight in gold or equivalent currency. I sent roving reporter [...] out to Sandgate Seafoods to describe the scene.
"It was incredible," he said. That was it really.
Notice when an animal is described as a freak of nature it is considered to be of tremendous value.
I am odd I know, but I have been loving the BBC News website's Public Information Film Festival and today they had one about playing with matches starring Charley the cat. A work of genius.
Other highlights of the festival so far have included one from the Tufty Club, the emancipating Jobs for Young Girls and the frankly terrifying Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water.
I have to add that I am too young to remember any of these first hand but I'm sure that they showed us this one at school - I still have nightmares.
There is a scene in my book that I keep going over and over and over and over. It is no good going away from it and coming back to it in a while, as I have been doing this on and off for the last six months. It is not an important scene in so far as you probably wouldn’t remember it after you'd read the whole book, but it is kind of crucial in establishing an important relationship – if I can’t get it right, you won’t understand why people behave as they do later on.
My protagonist receives an unexpected visit from an old friend. The last time she saw this friend, all sorts of bad things happened, but that was many years ago. So she feels very conflicted, like you do. On the one hand, there is all this unresolved tension and upset suddenly dragged to the surface after all these years. On the other hand, there is that thing you get with old friends where, no matter what, you have a closeness, an affinity, I dunno – clearly I am emotionally illiterate, which is why I’m having such difficulty.
Thus the resulting conversation seems impossible to write. These two characters seem determine to launch into Tennessee Williams style speeches – they'll adopt the accents if I’m not careful. But people can say things in plays which they can’t say in books and dear God, it is awful. At one point they both started crying and I had to slap their faces and demand they get a grip. It seems unlikely that either of them would attempt to confront the past head-on, not during a first meeting after all these years.
Attempts to get through this have included giving my protagonist a cat. Honestly, I attempted intergrating this stupid cat into the entire plot just for the benefit of this one scene. My protagonist could remain cold and aloof, but the cat sat on her old friend’s lap and purred, symbolising her unspoken affection and… oh well you get the picture and it was even worse than it sounds.
I was about to explain other ways in which I have tried to get over this, but they were all so bad it would be embarrassing to even try to write it down. Whatever happens, I have to rewrite the current disaster which includes the line of dialogue:
“Last time we touched, you broke my collarbone.”
I’m now going to lie in a darkened room and consider alternative careers for a severely disabled twenty-five year old with no qualifications or work experience.
One of my low-energy activities involves looking at the pictures in books about Art and Photography without doing any actual reading. I also like looking at maps. I am positively enchanted with Google Earth and I must warn you that if I know your postcode, I have probably been spying on you from above. I have looking at any places anyone has mentioned, such as Sefton Park Library, which happened to be photographed on a day that Lady Bracknell paid a visit (well there’s a nearby dot which I have decided is Lady Bracknell and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise).
And then there’s the ordinary Atlas. All this is very childish, but I am not, as they say, a well man. I like to look at somewhere on the map and imagine what it is like, some little village somewhere I have never been to, especially if it has a comical name like Thwing, Pity Me or Six Mile Bottom. And I also like to plan fantasy journeys. Only sometimes these things get out of hand and lately, well I have begun to think, maybe, possibly…
I want to go visiting my netty friends. I have done this before, but really it is crazy even to think and talk about it given my current limitations. I haven’t even been out in my electric wheelchair since last August for cripe’s sake. But I did manage the journey to and from Suffolk all right – we were only delayed by one day because of me, and I am much better now than I was then.
I really ought to put the thing away. Yesterday I was looking at Underground routes across London and timetables! The Tube is completely inaccessible to me, even if my mobility was a bit better, I have only been on it twice since I got sick. And I don’t much like London. It is way too big and smells funny. Paris is very nice. You can sit outside the Les Deux Magots and talk to people about the meaning of life; “Je te plumerai le bec, je te plumerai la tête” I would say and everyone would be stunned into an awed silence. Dublin also seemed to be full of existentialists, musicians and people who could string words together in a random order and call it a tribute to James Joyce.
Glasgow smells a little bit funny, but I was there less than twenty-four hours and two complete strangers told me that I was beautiful. One of them was a rather camp waiter who thought I was romantically attached to the friend I was staying with, even though I was eighteen and she was forty something. My friend was extremely embarrassed and apologetic, but I kept thinking I could be whoever I liked in this place. The other person who told me I was beautiful was a drunk we met in the lift on the way up to her twenty-sixth floor flat. My friend had to translate his every word due to his inebriated state and extreme accent. And there were lots of seagulls. Seagulls are a good thing. I have been to London very many times and never seen any seagulls.
Naturally I have spent most of my time in London wandering round the City, which always seemed like a terribly exciting place to be. So many people, all packed close together. So many different people in pinstripe suits and so many important looking buildings, embassies and banking organisations, so much power. And then there's the West End, which once held all sorts of extraordinary fantasies for me. I'm sure my appreciation of the Barbican was blighted by an RSC performance of Romeo & Juliet; the worst dramatic production of any play I have ever seen in the whole world ever. But these places are all very exciting, that can't be denied.
But of course nobody talks to you in London, even to tell you that you are beautiful (unless perhaps if you are). There is the occasional homeless person who might engage you in conversation and in places like the National Gallery an uninhibited European tourist may invite your opinion on the nature of someone’s expression in The Umbrellas. But the worst thing is that if you smile at a native, they sneer back and after a few visits to London you begin to suspect that they don’t mean to be unpleasant, only they’ve been so long in that place that they’ve lost the use of the necessary muscles to do otherwise.
There, that’ll get me hate-mail. I am sure it is a lovely place really and indeed I know many very pleasant Londoners, but it is like being in a completely different culture and I don’t know the rules. Like in some parts of the world where it is rude to make eye contact or eat with your left hand. And since clearly my judgement might have been swayed the compliments of camp waiters and drunks, my opinion is not to be taken too seriously.
But why I am looking at Tube maps I don’t know. Why I have plotted out a three week itinerary of my journey around the country when I have neither the health nor the financial resources to achieve such a thing, I don't know.
I need wings. I shall start collecting feathers.
My theory of life, the universe and everything for a Thursday:
The more choice you give people, the more insecure they become about their decisions. The more insecure they are, they more defensive they become and the more eager they are to point out error in the choices of others. This is why there are so many miserable people about.
However, you still have to give people choice. Or else we’d never make any progress.
But it does irritate me that people try to tell others how to live, or at least how they ought to live. When it comes up that I don’t want children, I am often met by terrific defensiveness on the part of those that want or already have them; it is natural, they say, an instinct and anyway, someone has to sacrifice their resources and freedom in order to raise the next generation and care for us all in our old age.
The funny thing is that people who have made the same choice as us can be just as bad; we are the altruistic ones, the environmentally-conscious. People who have children make a selfish lifestyle choice, they get all sorts of employment privileges and state benefits and it’s all terribly unfair.
There is a similar divide between some single people and those in relationships; single people are miserable, nobody really chooses that – or they are promiscuous, no sticking power, they haven’t quite grown up yet. Similarly, marriage is a farce, people just pretend to be happy, but really it is just pride and a misplaced sense of duty holding them together. And so it goes on through every lifestyle choice there is; from home-ownership to holiday destinations. Of course it is quite natural to appreciate the benefits of one’s choices and to comment on those who we feel are making a mistake, but why can’t we also appreciate the fact that we could do things differently?
In the past they had much stronger concepts of social acceptability and of course older generations can pretend that there were really no choices at all. My Grandmother insists that having sex outside marriage was inconceivable in her day and yet I know that both her sisters had their first children within six months of their marriages. My parents claim that it would have been impossible for them to live together before they were married in 1974 and yet I know my Mum’s best friend cohabited with both her eventual husband and another boyfriend (though not simultaneously) for a good few years.
Oh and of course homosexuality didn’t exist at all before about 1983. People just hadn’t thought about that sort of thing before; it hadn’t even occurred to them before Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
What they mean is it would have been difficult, it would have meant stepping out of line. Now there are no longer nearly so many lines – or at least they are not nearly so rigid and yet folks seem to have the need to create and reinforce them.
And I really don’t get it. I am pretty insecure about a lot of things, but I hope I don’t ever suggest to people that a certain way of living is the best. I guess I have been critical when people talk in terms of obligation about things which are purely choice; we must buy a house, we must have a holiday, we need a shiny new car and we don’t have enough money.
But we really benefit from diversity, from what Mr Mill described as experiments in living. I'll try it my way, you try it yours and maybe we can share what we both learn?
We need values; we need not to fuck one another over, whatever else we do. But perhaps more than anything we have to realise that our lives are our own; they are no more and no less than what we chose to do with the cards we have been dealt. If we spent as much time working on that and less time making nervous sideways glances and snide remarks about those around us, we might have much less to feel insecure about.
We have been reorganising the bedroom, which has necessitated sorting through clothes, shoes, cosmetics and jewellery which appear to belong to a far more glamorous and interesting person who happens to be at least one dress size smaller than me.
I didn’t realise I had a shoe problem. I have a shoe problem. I am not one of these women who buy shoes for fun or feel they need different shoes for different outfits. I possess no shoes in brown, beige or any shade of blue, unless you count turquoise beaded flip-flops. I do have red glittery ones though (white stilettos, corrupted on the advice of Agent Fang). I also have two purple pairs; one pair of Mary-Janes one pair of high-heeled knee-high snake-skin boots. I also have a pair of fuchsia pink high-heeled espadrilles.
I actually managed to sell my black and white cow-print ankle-boots on eBay. I fear several other pairs are heading in the same direction. I can however blame eBay and the charity shops of Whitby for most of the original purchases. Or my mother, who likes to buy me sensible shoes. Both my Granny and my sister also made their contributions.
Similarly I find myself with an array of cosmetic products which I hardly ever use. It was six months on Monday since R & A’s wedding which was the last occasion I saw fit to wear any make-up. Clothes, I’m not too bad with really. There are only a handful things which I am waiting to shrink back into and although I am quietly demoralised by my immobility-induced lumpiness at times, it really isn’t much to complain about. It is mostly my arse, which I used to worry about being flat and shapeless anyway. Now… well, Kenny Everett did a sketch…
I don’t suppose any of this matters at all. There aren’t many things I get sentimental about, and when I need to clear space I can clear it. I think the thing that is making me nervous is the fact that once we’ve done the bedroom, we move onto the Boiler Room, which is an odd room which isn’t much use as anything but a storage room.
This contains such wonders as my photographic and developing equipment and chemicals, a half-painted army of Orc soldiers, a box full of cloth for clothes-making and repairs, several folders full of psychology notes and essays, plus textbooks, CD-Roms, even videos of psychological experiments, three boxes of audio-cassettes, oil paints, watercolour paints, watercolour paper, canvas board, wood, clays of more than one variety, paper of every conceivable variety and enough books to furnish a mobile library.
We all have this a bit, don’t we? I mean, we all have projects we started but never finished for one reason or another. Unfortunately my daft mind immediately looks at each item and says, “Alas! I can’t do this any more because I’m not well enough. Oh woe is me!”
Which isn’t quite true. Watercolour painting, for example, you can do almost anywhere, in any circumstance. I do other sorts of painting from under the duvet. Only am I completely rubbish at watercolours; that’s why I don’t do much of it. Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have fewer books if I was much better than I am; there aren't enough hours in a lifetime to read all the books one could possibly want to read.
Other things, well yes, it is all to do with my health, but why do I have to make it more painful to face things I have neglected because of ill health than things I have neglected because I have been too lazy or too busy doing other things?
But I do. It is almost like I need this, I need to feel sorry for myself. And I am particularly cross when I feel sorry for myself about things, things that really don’t matter and would probably trouble me far less if they all vanished overnight.
Last time I was in the doctor’s waiting room I was eaves-dropping on a conversation between two young women, one of whom had a baby which, in their melodic Yorkshire accents, was referred to as t’ baybeh. One young lady, the one without t’ baybeh, was complaining about a mutual friend with an unhealthy obsession with work.
“I were going shopping in Scarborough, Friday last,” she said, “and Miss Goodie Two-Shoes refused to pull a sickie to go shopping with us.”
Before you rush to judgement, this poor young lady did have good reason to feel demoralised in her own work as she later stated,
“’Cause I’m still in trainin’ I only get seventy pound a week. And like, that’s a Friday night, i’n’t it?”
Now I’m still curious what she did with seventy pounds on a Friday night – I can only imagine she was an opera fan. Point is, this lady was illustrating an important truth: she could do whatever she liked with her time and money. There may be other important truths which will reveal themselves to her further down the line, but that is not our concern.
We all have such choices only some of us aren’t aware of them. I never played truant for a games lesson or lied about homework. If I am three minutes late for a doctor’s appointment because the swing bridge was open, I am embarrassed and apologise profusely to both receptionist and doctor. In my mind, any commitment made to another human being is as good as a promise and a promise is as good as… a compulsion.
This means I am a reliable and dutiful person in all things. However, the whole system depends on that other human being. Without them, I am about as organised and disciplined as a very disorganised and ill-disciplined person who has got themselves into a pickle and has done nothing all day. But since I had to complete my education at home on my own initiative and am now trying to work on a similar basis, I have had to get myself together a bit.
The first step in achieving this is to consider oneself a valid authority. The fact of the matter, illustrated by our lass int' waiting room, is that you have been the principle authority all along. When you go to work, you may consider your loyalty to your employer, your colleagues, your clients, patients or pupils but at the end of the day it wasn't them dragging you from your bed, shoveling breakfast into your mouth and frogmarching you to the busstop; that was you.
Possibly I am stating the obvious, but this is a point I have struggled with; that I always was and always will be the be the boss of me. This having been established, there is no magical transition between giving hard-work and co-operation to a project involving other people and giving hard-work and co-operation to some individual endeavour, like writing a book.
I should say a word about the benefits of ritual and having a special place to work separate from your sofa or bed etc, but this stuff depends on the luxury of being able to work regular hours, sat on an upright chair and having enough space to do this away from the places you usually rest and relax.
The next step is to establish limitations.
Most people have some limitations to work within and mine are fairly significant. However, there always lies the dilemma of where they stand at any given time on any given day. Am I struggling to work because I am tired or because I don’t really want to? Cognitive dysfunction and bone-idleness are not mutually exclusive and pain, like any other distraction, can be become very much more distracting when you are not motivated to ignore it. At the same time, working oneself into an early grave can be counter-productive.
The only way to find this stuff out is to test it, every day. I am a person who finds it very hard to sit and do nothing – I think most people are. So I sit in front of the open Word document or an open notebook and do nothing else for half an hour. I do not check my e-mail after fifteen minutes and I already brewed up before I started. If half an hour passes and I haven’t written a single sentence then I pack up and try again later.
Now one basic principle of working with a limited supply of energy is, rather like money, the more you spread out your expenditure, the further it goes. There is a temptation when you get your first clear window in days to make the most of it, press on and if it’s gone within half an hour, it’s gone. However, my experience suggests that if you stop after ten minutes, rest ten minutes, work ten minutes, rest ten minute, then you may as much as double the half an hour you would be limited to if you worked flat out.
That having been said, there are some timeframes within nothing can be usually achieved - three lots of half an hour is better than one lot of one hour, but twenty-four lots of five minutes, whilst increasing your total worktime, is pretty damn useless. A little bit of descretion must be used. However, it is necessarily to decide before you start each session when you’re going to stop and for how long.
Taking rests is as much part of self-discipline as anything else. Even the healthiest people must rest. But we must consider the hierarchy of rests and breaks.
Proper resting involves doing nothing at all; I either lie on the sofa staring at the sky or the fish tank or if I am really well behaved, lie in bed with the curtains drawn and my eyes shut. All this happens in silence.
Unfortunately, this is so boring! I know it is good for me because I feel much better very soon, but there is only so much of this that can be achieved - unless I am so ill I don't have a choice.
So if you have to do something, the trick is to consider which parts of your body and brain you use when working and what activities use entirely different parts of your body and brain. Writing e-mail is not an effective rest from writing novels – occasionally if one is stumped with a particular sentence, writing a whole load of other, completely different sentences can help loosen the muscle, as it were. Generally doing anything on the computer is not restful when your work time is spent staring at a computer screen.
Moving into a completely different physical position and listening to music provides a good contrast, so long as the music is conducive to a restful state. The following advice about music comes from the magnificent Better Recovery Form Viral Illness by Dr Darrel Ho-Yen (the emboldenment is his own);
“All activities do not use the same amount of energy. The golden rule is to ask yourself if you are bored with the activity. If you are not bored, you are interested and the activity is likely to use up a lot of energy. So, it is best to listen to music that you don't like, you will not be as involved and less energy will be used.. Classical, operatic or ethnic music is better than songs with words and emotion [sic.].”
Fortunately the author did not take quite the same approach when he goes on to recommend optimal sexual positions for people with my condition or else we all might have lost the will to live.
Point is that when you are resting with a view to resuming work, there is no point listening to Led Zeppelin IV at full blast. There is no point reading a chapter of a novel or watching part of a movie which you are going to become absorbed in; a bit of sewing or painting, a crossword or similar puzzle which you can pick up and happily put to one side at the end of your break is much better.
However most of all, you must be strict that if you are going to rest for half an hour, you break for the full half-hour.
The last point to make about self-discipline is that you must always leave time and energy to do other things. Because my condition varies so massively, it would be foolish for me to have a rule about not working on certain days of the week; when it comes, it comes and I must seize the day. However, a person can only work to the exclusion of everything else for a short time and when you are ill and experiencing the highly variable moods associated with chronic fatigue, this is a very short time indeed.
Energy used keeping in touch with other people, maintaining my blog etc is almost as important as the energy expended on my work because this stuff facilitates my sanity and sense of perspective, without which I would not be able to write.
Ooh, I’m back already. I thought I was going to be stranded off-line until at least Tuesday, by which time I imagine you might have missed me, but due to the miracle of modern technology and the excellence service provided by Royal Mail, my popped router has now be replaced within thirty-six hours of its going pop.
