Broken toes and broken hearts

I've got the angry stage in my grieving.  I was wondering if I ever would, I'm not an angry sort of person, don't get angry in circumstances where other people would, and tend to be the sort of person who tries to understand why other people behave as they do, rather than condemning them for it.  I'm not a saint, but I really think I don't have an angry sort of personality and I have always felt loved all my life, and that security helps.

This week I found a piece of music, Clouds by Solomon Gray.  It made me cry.

I was horseriding in Second Life, if you must know, and had the radio on for the sim I was traversing.  The horse would have had three broken legs and a broken neck in real life, as I kept falling off paths and crashing into trees, but Second Life is one of those places where horses are immortal, so I just continued on my way.

Suddenly this piece of music came on over the radio, and I was transfixed and then started crying.  I am a composer of music myself and listen to music a lot, but I have never had information conveyed so clearly by a piece of music.  It spoke of loss and love and very clearly to me expressed what I feel about losing Eelco.  I've been listening to it on repeat ever since - over headphones fortunately, so the neighbours are not being driven out of their minds.

It stirred up in me the loss that I feel, but also the frustration and resentment that I feel that I had no place in his life after death.  I wasn't his partner formally and we weren't married, and he didn't leave a will.  His pension was lost as he didn't nominate anyone to receive it.  None of it makes any difference, whatever happened he'd still be dead. I still have so many questions that will always be unanswered and I don't know what to do with them.  They are weighing me down and making me wonder if I really know what I had with Eelco.  I just have to give all that angry stuff to source and try to move on without him, without the answers, without all that future which we thought lay ahead, and didn't.

I have spent quite a lot of time in Second Life, horse riding, dancing at Marcel's, buying stuff.  It's my safe place at the moment, a place to forget and be entertained.  It seems a strange juxtaposition, spending time on things that are ostensibly so unimportant and trivial, while trying to deal with one of the biggest challenges that life throws at us, losing someone I loved dearly. I'm not sure whether it is helping or not.  I think the human connections I have in Second Life are helping, for sure.

I enjoyed riding around and finding picturesque places to ride.  I also went sailing in Second Life this week, staying until very late at Marcel's to join their weekly sailing trips.  I think a lot of the people who stay for the sailing are either in the US and therefore eight hours behind us, or in Spain and Portugal where a siesta in the afternoon allows them to stay up later.  Even so, it was very late by the time the cruise had finished.

I was amazed to find that sailing in Second Life is almost as complicated as sailing in real life, with the advantage that you don't get wet and won't get bonked on the head if you make a mistake with booms and sails.  The Captain was having to process waypoints for the route we were taking, information about wind speeds and direction as well as tacking and doing other nautical things with the boat. My routine hasn't quite caught up with that very late night, which is a pain, as Tizzy wants out early in the morning and so I am burning the candle at both ends as my grandmother used to say.

I started the Artist's Way a long time ago, it seems like years but is actually months.  I'm restarting where I left off and returning to writing my morning pages.  I feel I need to get some routine into my life, and start making my way back to the land of the living.  Maybe processing my anger will be a healthy thing to do.

A couple of days ago I pulled the shopping trolley (bag on wheels that old ladies have) into the house and then promptly walked into it and broke my little toe.  It hurt like buggery, but Kate buddy bandaged it for me and after a while the pain subsided.  I felt so stupid for doing such a ridiculous thing.  After all, I couldn't even blame someone else for putting it in a ridiculous place - I'd done it myself. My toe is black and blue but not as black and blue as I'd expected. 

Keeping out of the washroom

It's been some time since I posted on this blog.  I realised the other day that I tend to do most of my writing on Facebook nowadays, venting about the government, or about personal things to a limited audience of friends and online acquaintances.  There is a qualitative difference between blogging and posting to FB though.  With blogging, I have no expectation of anyone reading what I write, and no way of knowing who does, unless they comment.  With FB I know who I am writing for, and I tend to self-censor what I write.

I had a nasty experience a couple of days ago. I was going into my washroom with some food for the fridge. I should explain that my fridge and freezer are in the wash room along with my washing machine and tumble dryer and one hell of a lot of washing and cardboard boxes. To get to the washroom, I leave the kitchen by what was once the back door, turn into the lean-to conservatory which runs along the back of the house, to the door for the washroom.

Blue door to the washroom

In winter we keep that door closed, as the fridge and freezer start to misbehave if the temperature gets too low and the temperature is very low in the lean-to during winter months. I have a low level heater which kicks in if the temperature reaches freezing, but I don't want it to be attempting to heat the lean-to conservatory too. In summer it tends to be left open... as it was on that afternoon.

As I walked up the lean-to towards the entrance to the washroom, a movement caught my eye, and I watched a snake slither across the floor. My children have all accused me of potentially seeing things, or mistaking a wire for net curtains or a coat hanger for a snake. Believe me, I could hardly believe my eyes either, but it was a snake - or possibly a slow worm which is just a weaselly name for something indistinguishable from a snake - which was slithering over the floor. I turned tail and ran, noisily, and slammed all doors between me and it.

My son was as keen to try to catch the thing as I was, and so I called for help on the local community conservation group, of which I happen to be a member, and two kind people came round and tried to unearth the thing in the washroom.  They couldn't find it, thus cementing the idea in my children's minds that I was seeing things.

What on earth they made of the mess in the Washroom of piles of clothes I can't imagine.  My daughter moved in a few weeks ago and brought a massive number of things with her, including a mountain of clothing. There have been things chucked in the wash room over the past few months that no one knows what to do with, which has propagated into a heap of miscellaneous stuff, plus boxes and boxes of things which were supposed to make it into the attic above the washroom.

I haven't been in the washroom since. It's going to be difficult to do the things I normally do without going into it, but I can't face it at the moment. Which is a shame.  Cleaning out the washroom has been on my list of things to do for months, and the weather is so bad at the moment that it would have been something to spend a wet Tuesday doing.  No chance.

Time to create

Last Tuesday I started a course at the wonderful Bricktree Gallery in Caistor, called "Create some "me Time".  The course is run by Sara Scott, who has set up the Facebook page and group the above link leads to.

Due to my recent bereavements, I haven't felt like creating much recently.  Everything seemed trivial and pointless, and whereas I normally feel inspired to take up some sort of creative tools, I wasn't feeling it at all.  Tuesday changed that.  I met some lovely people, did a creative visualization and decorated a journal, and enjoyed feeling connected again.

Sara mentioned the book and creative course The Artist's Way which is by Julia Cameron and has been around for the past 25 years.  She had a copy with her, and so I leafed through it and was impressed by the fact that it is a spiritual way, and also with the number of testimonials from people who felt the book and its suggestions had changed their lives.

Money is a bit of a problem at the moment, but sometimes you just know that what is right is right.  I found a copy of the book for £6.50 on Ebay and bought it.  It arrived this morning.

I'd actually already read the first couple of chapters of the book online and while looking at Sara's copy, and so I started straight away with the Week 1 chapter.  There are a number of exercises to do.  The first is "morning pages" which means stream of consciousness journalling first thing in the morning, three pages at least.  Well, I've already been doing that since last Wednesday, as it was one of the things suggested by Sara, to do in our newly-decorated journals.  The second is Artist's dates.  She suggests taking $5 to the nearest five and dime shop and buying an unfeasibly large list of art materials with it, as a suggestion for an artist's date.  Well I suppose the book is 25 years old.  Maybe you could buy such a long list in the 1990s!

I took £5 to the nearest charity shop as the next best thing to a five and dime, and found a pure new wool sweater in beautiful colours of green and blue.  Yesterday I was reading about a woman from Estonia who designs and makes the most beautiful coats, using felted knitted materials and crochet etc.  I had decided that I would give that a go - 3D felting doesn't seem to be my forte, although I lost a bit of heart doing that because the dog got hold of my felting work and chewed up my first creations.

The idea of creating 2D art with felting and felted materials does appeal to me.  It seems to me it might be very forgiving, like oil painting and pastel drawing, in that you can always go over anything which doesn't work properly.  I've always liked crafts where you can layer and play with materials, and so although I don't think I will be able to make a coat any time soon, I think I may play with some smaller projects as a start.

The jumper was marked £3 and I ummed and ahed about the price of something I was really intending to destroy.  Eventually I decided to go with and told myself my art was worth it.  Arrived at the counter to find that all clothing is 50p today, and so it only cost me 50p.  a bargain!

I came home and put it straight into the washing machine on a high heat, and then once the machine had started, realized I was supposed to put it in a mesh bag to avoid clogging my machine with wool which has come off the jumper.  I stopped the machine, found a cushion cover that zips up and put the jumper in there, and then set the machine going again.

Tizzy and I went for a lovely walk.  About ten minutes walk away there is a dog walking field, which she loves.  It was beautifully sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky when we left, but once we reached the field the clouds were rolling in.  Being on the edge of the wolds, it is sometimes possible to see the edge of weather fronts, as they hit the edge of the wolds, which are rolling hills just outside Market Rasen.  There were a lot of seagulls wheeling around the field, making a lot of noise.  Often the arrival of  a lot of seagulls indicates rough weather is on the way, as they come inland from the coast to shelter.  We have had some very windy weather over the past few days, so maybe they've been sheltering from that.

I decorated my journal with a sunset over the sea, and as I walked I thought that maybe the colours and design of the jumper would lend itself to a similar design.  I think what I may start with are a number of square panels, and make patches, with a view to one day turning them into something bigger.

I love the sea.  I find it energizing and inspiring.  My sister has invited me to go and stay with her in Torquay which is a coastal town, and I am looking forward to that when I can.  for now I'm off to see what a hot wash at 90 degrees has done to a pure new wool jumper!

Hands off my books: Tidying up with Marie Kondo

As a dedicated clutterer of houses, I've got a bit of a love-hate relationship with programmes which deal with housework.  I watch programmes about hoarding and feel generally positive about myself.  You don't have to tunnel your way to the sofa in my house, yay!  I watch programmes like Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and feel a guilty pleasure in knowing I'll never put her theories into practice in my house, while still hanging on her every word.

I've read about the Konmari method of tidying of course.  Various hilarious articles by fellow clutterers decrying the method with "I found none of my clothes or any of the vegetables sparked joy and so I threw them out and hid the credit card bill for the replacements from my husband in a lovely little box" etc. 

I was impressed by how much presence a tiny woman can have, and how connected she seemed to the houses, but not so much their occupants.  She advises people to deal with their clutter in several stages, starting with clothes.  Then you move onto books, then papers, then miscellaneous, then sentimental items. 

The problem is that the method ignores the fact that people live together and may not enjoy the things the others enjoy.  In the programme this didn't become a problem for any of them, as we didn't have one partner ranting about having to live with 500 milk bottles or 200 Barbie dolls, and everything seemed to suggest that the Konmari method was helping relationships by dealing with areas of dispute.  But it would be very interesting to see how the method works with a collector of things their partner hates.

I have to say that some of the people in the series have more current clothes piled on their beds than I have owned in my whole lifetime.  I'm down with the clothes sorting - I don't have that many.  Although I did understand one client who complained that although the item of clothing did not spark joy, it did fit, and that's more than most items did.  Like many women who have had a baby, she was waiting to be able to fit into her pre-pregnancy clothes, and kept her maternity clothes too, so she could have another baby.  Three wardrobes don't really fit into the spark-joy method of clothes sorting.

It is in the area of books and papers that I would have the most problems.  Marie Kondo advises keeping no more than 30 books, ideally.  I have hundreds, and I like my books.  As for papers, I love some and hate others, but I don't think the tax authorities will accept "It just doesn't spark joy for me" as an excuse for not doing my tax return.

I enjoyed the programme, mainly because I like people, and seeing into people's homes and lifestyles is always interesting for me. On the whole, the method does appear to work for the people featured in the programme, but then they've all asked for help.  I'd call for help if I saw her approaching down the garden path.  My clutter sparks joy for me, and I'm keeping it.

Sex education, American style

Having had a heavy cold, and not feeling like doing anything too intellectual, I decided to take my sneezes to the sofa and watch something on Netflix.  I chose Sex Education, which is a Netflix Original written and directed by an irritating collection of writers and two directors, with a creator credit to Laurie Nunn. 

The first thing to know about the series, is that it is played with an English accent in some sort of parallel world where all the worst things about American education appear to have been transported to England.  The place and even the time of the series is left undecided, with a very American house, American school, and American high school values and problems transported to an English cast with English accents.  It jarred with me, very much, tripping me up with the inconsistencies which really would not be typical of any English setting.

There's a certain Stepford Wives vibe about the high school too - one of the main characters wears black and looks a bit gothy, but the rest of the school's rentacrowd seems to have been put through a advert-style superwash, they're clean and tidy and very much not the sort of crowd one sees pouring out of colleges and schools in the UK.  

There are all sorts of things which make you go "WTF?" For example: one of the girls in the group which are part of the main story, lives in what seems to be essentially a stately home.  Is it likely that one of the people at this state high school would be living there, in England?  No, she'd be at the private school around the corner or some public school or at finishing school.  It's almost a trope of the US coming-of-age film that there should be a poor girl and a rich girl made to rub along together.  It's not one in English film making on the whole because it's untrue.  We've had a lot longer to delineate the sides of the tracks. If it had been set a couple of years later with a university crowd, the mixing of high income and low income families would have been more believable. 

However, I'm a Quaker, and we are asked to find new light wherever we may come across it.  The meaning of that has always seemed to be that no matter how wrong something may be generally, there may be a nugget of truth in it.  And so I kept watching to see if the nugget of truth might be there.  

It's had universally good reviews as far as I can see, and that relates to the performances of the main actors, and the fact that it seems Americans can recognize truths in the situations dealt within the series very readily.  But that makes me wonder why they didn't go the whole hog and set the thing in the USA?  Maybe the disconnect and annoyance I felt when watching was deliberately caused.  I'm not sure what the English setting added to the programme. 

I got over the constant tripping up over these things, but it meant for me that it could never seem truthful, because it's in this fantasy place where US-style education  has taken over England.  Even the house where Gillian Anderson lives looked American.  It may be that it tells a truth for some US people about their teenage years.  It can't be a universal truth, because it doesn't resonate with me at all, and I was a teenager, once! It doesn't seem to tell the truth about anything contemporary... all the people with sexual problems would be googling for dear life, not paying good money to sit in an abandoned toilet with a virgin teenager, no matter how talented.

I'm assuming it can only be good for another series, as English schools do not allow people to stay in high school indefinitely, and the actors are likely to grow up inconveniently and stop looking like teenagers.  Although most of them don't look like any teenagers I ever met, anyway.

New year, new start

I have not blogged for a long time on my personal blog.  2018 was a truly awful year for me, in which my estranged husband had a stroke and needed help, my mother fell ill and needed nursing and then died at the end of June, and my partner Eelco died at the end of November.  I wrote an obituary for him on my Caliandris Pendragon blog here.

It feels like I was never able to take the time to adjust to the previous shock before another came along.  The death of Eelco so suddenly and so young (he was 47) was so shocking I barely felt it for about a month, emotionally.  I've heard people say that they were numb after a death before; I never really knew what it meant.  I do now.

The impact of his death has come in the last couple of weeks, and I have begun to miss him dreadfully.  Although we spent a lot of time apart, I talked to him in the mornings, we texted during the day and then talked all evening, and so I probably spent more time "with" him than a lot of people who live together.  

Speaking to someone recently, I realized that I was thinking of my future as one enormous blank, because all my plans had involved him.  We planned to live together permanently once he was able to.  His father has been seriously ill for a long time, and had deteriorated recently, and so Eelco had been helping his parents at weekends, and was unable to visit and stay with me as often. 

It dawned on me during that conversation that I needed to sort out my future for myself, and not wait for the universe to sort it out for me.  I have allowed my blogs to fester for about a year, since I wasn't able to blog while looking after my husband (we'd been separated since 2010) and then my mother.  Since her death I hadn't really felt like it, and since Eelco's I haven't really felt like doing anything at all.  

I've had a cold the last couple of days and so I've been watching a lot of Netflix.  So I thought I'd start my reblogging with a couple of reviews of the shows I've been watching.