Nights are a bit of a trial at the moment. Sleep comes in shifts, my body grumbling every few hours, forcing me to grab my crutches, prod my way upstairs, then poke my crutch-supported way back down to the bedroom while it recovers.
Despite the recent surgery, it isn’t pain that’s keeping me awake, but discomfort.
Sleeping on my back is usually my last-gasp gauntlet flung at sleeplessness.
After I’ve gone through the alphabet finding book titles, authors, or films to match each letter.
After I’ve consciously relaxed every muscle I can identify, one by one.
After I’ve dredged from my memory some dimly remembered techniques – that could loosely be called mindfulness – to try and sedate my brain. (Given I gleaned them from a free introductory pamphlet, it’s no surprise that this one rarely works.)
Lately I’ve been waking far too early for a natural owl’s metabolism. But today’s was a somewhat later, rude awakening.
Yanked home from the Land of Nod, when day had already dawned, a curtain noisily pushed back on the world robbed me of my sleep.
While my open eyes adjusted to the light my mind struggled.
Did I miss a spectacular storm in the night? Surely not, I was up four times, I would have noticed a howling wind and lashing rain.
Were my eyes blurred, some unknown side effect of who knows which of the drugs I’ve been taking?
Coming together at last, my vision and mind began to recognise the truth. The veil hanging between me and the morning was not a film of wind-borne salt on the windows, it was fog.
Fog upon the hill. Feeling very still. Better not quote much more or the remaining Beatles might sue me for plagiarism. But there were no Blue Jays out and about – and this fog was not the sinister kind. No, it felt cosy, comforting, kind.
I lay, for a little while longer, on my back. A cup of tea, I knew, was sitting on my bedside table, a biscuit in the saucer.
It could wait.
Relishing the feeling I slid back the years – because, after all, what was out there?
No day. No world.
No noise. No time.
Just now, just here, just me.
A cup of tea and a memory.
I could see the fabric of my new winter coat. The mohair that would have itched my neck if it weren’t for the soft, furry collar. My strapover shoes, brown as polished mahogany, worn for the first time with ivory knee-length socks. An Alice band holding back my hair.
It was cold in our car. It was an icy world, and foggy. The windscreen carefully defrosted by hand, we drove down the hill at the end of our avenue and joined the main road. Stopped. Defrosted the windscreen. Drove on. Stopped …
In the end the freezing fog won. We all turned home, my mother, my father, my sister and I. It would have been the last time I saw my cousin Anne until my mother’s funeral, thirty years later.
Beautiful and black-haired, she was the reason my Sindy doll was raven-haired not blonde. And it was her wedding day. Over the hills and far away.
But, for us, it was not to be.
The memory seeped away. Discomfort, like the freezing fog, had won. I manoeuvred my way up in bed and leant on a stack of pillows while I sipped my tea.
Not a needle of the pines, not a twig among the budding branches stirred. I felt as if a feather quilt had been wrapped around my little bit of the world – and the rest thrown away.
No need to bother about outside, it wasn’t there.
A plump wood pigeon docked on the garden fence. The only thing moving as it dipped its way through yet another attempt at a courtship with some potential mate beyond my field of vision.
As if we need any more of the things.
The transporter planes of the bird world, their lumbering, clumsy bodies lurch around on short legs and splayed toes. Squashing green shoots as they amble around picking up seeds and nuts dropped below the feeders carefully designed to elude their pecking.
A change came over the light – and the fog closed in. It could have been menacing, I suppose, but it wasn’t. It just felt as if the blanket of seclusion had been wrapped a little more tightly around us – and I could see no reason to move.
Why face a day that doesn’t exist?
But.
My long-suffering carer had to catch a train – and I had to shower before he went, to be on the safe side.
A bowl of porridge with golden syrup later I was settled in my chair with the newspaper – and the easy crossword. Engrossed in the clues, two still left partially filled, to my exasperation, I looked up towards the window and smiled to see the colourful posy of flowers in our old green vase. Sent by a friend from the other side of the country to cheer me. Which they did – and do.
Since Sunday three lots of flowers have arrived. Tulips and pale, scented narcissi. Stately roses in red and white and pink. Spring-fresh forsythia with jaunty vivid gerbera. All set off by evergreen foliage.
A new, colourful plant from our neighbours says ‘welcome’ in the hall.
How lucky am I? It feels like there are hugs everywhere I go, pretty, happy hugs.
But back to my morning’s armchair.
There, I lifted up mine eyes to the heavens.
Ah.
Here comes the sun, sang the Beatles, in my head. And as they sang, I thought – it’s all right.
The world was back. And it was beautiful.
MEMOIRS OF A HUSK 
No comment.
Something happened this week that makes blogging seem totally trivial. Bad news from a friend. I won’t share it, there’s enough bad news in the world without me foisting my small part of it on you.
But I’m feeling rather strange. Uncomfortable, even.
Despite a sadness that’s settled into my heart, my blog – this site – has been lurking just past the corner of my eye. Floating in the ether, saying, ‘feed me’. And feed it I must.
Or must I?
Why?
And why today, of all days?
The answer’s hard for me to fathom.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading about the effects of social media, online sharing and mobile phone usage on attention spans and behaviour. Stuff everyone seems to be particularly antsy about at the moment. Including me.
I even read a whole book: ‘The End of Absence. Reclaiming what we’ve lost in a world of constant connection.’ (Author, Michael Harris.)
Blogging is (ostensibly) about connecting – and over the last two years eight months, the process of blogging and following others has made me reassess what it means to know someone. To relate to other human beings.
Does it matter that it’s intangible? After all, when I was young we had penfriends – it just took longer to send and receive the messages.
But I do feel, somehow, it’s different. And it’s been perplexing me.
I’ve been asking myself, why do bloggers blog – and why do readers read?
Do ‘real’ relationships develop (I think they do, see my post about Tess Ross) – and what are they, those relationships?
Are they mostly between bloggers and non-blogging readers – like newspapers and commuters, say? Or are they mostly between member of the ‘community’ of bloggers, souls reaching out, in some individual way, to others?
I suspect that many readers – whether bloggers themselves or not – read out of simple curiosity, learning about new places, people, cultures and so on. I do.
Some have an especially serious reason for following a blog about a shared illness, or other challenge they are facing.
And then there are the ones who know the blogger in real life.
I don’t know if I’m a rarity, but I feel a tad uncomfortable following people I know in the flesh. And some people I know in ‘real’ life are the ‘followers’ who puzzle me the most.
The ones who follow, but don’t ‘follow’.
Who read but never ‘comment’.
Who don’t ever click the ‘like’ button.
People who tell me, ‘I do read your blogs, you know. I enjoy seeing what you’re up to, even if I don’t comment.’
Are they just inquisitive, plain and simple, but afraid of that great, identity-stealing, bogey-person in the ether?
Afraid of committing to a view in the full glare of – me? Other readers?
Afraid of the thought police?
The latter I’d understand. I’ve been visiting some ‘interesting’ websites lately by way of research – in fact, maybe you’d better stop reading right now if you’re paranoid.
(Thought police, if you’re reading, I’m only trying to write fiction.)
A young academic of my acquaintance has an interesting take on this type of behaviour, this anonymous blog ogling. [Bloggling?]
So much is free online, he posits, that some people feel no need to square the circle.
The content’s there for them to enjoy or not, they feel no need to pay in any way. And that dispensation from making any kind of ‘payment’ includes any acknowledgement they have read it, liked it or – just for the sake of argument – disagreed with it.
I’m glad they do read it, don’t misunderstand me – it’s reassuring that friends I don’t see very often (you know who you are) keep up with my antics – and phobias – and rants – this way. Don’t stop!
But that absence of payment is also interesting if you come at it from my perspective.
I was a journalist of sorts, on and off. Paid for writing things that people then read, in order to be better informed, or (I can’t really lump telecommunications in with snooping round glamorous houses) just amused.
Over the last couple of months there have been several occasions when I’ve written one of my thought or rant pieces only to find a ‘real’ writer saying much the same thing in a national newspaper a week or two later.
I mentioned one such to the new Brit in the house, gratified that my argument had been published by a real hack in a national newspaper.
‘See,’ I chirped, ‘that’s just what I was saying last week. So I am doing something useful.’ (Even I can see the flaw in that statement.)
Anyway, the point is, we’ve had many discussions about the usefulness or otherwise of my blogging. Other than some things being better out than in, as far as my psyche’s concerned, I mean, which is patently useful.
‘But,’ he says, ‘you don’t get paid for it.’
I restrain my innate instinct for the confessional, which wants me to say, ‘No – and on top of that, I pay for my site so that it has a proper address and doesn’t have ads. So, in effect, I’m paying people to read what I write.’
Is it worth it? Is it useful? Why do I do it?
No comment.
A recent frost, for no particular reason
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