I is for illness

It used to happen in the old world of office work. It happened to others too. Stop working, go on holiday, get ill. Wait weeks and months for that break…and see a portion of it disappear.

I didn’t have it so bad. Sometimes it would be a bad cold that would descend for the trip, but not get in the way too much. Others would be flat out with flu, or something else that threatened to reduce their holiday time to Lying Down And Possibly Sleeping.

Somehow or other, I now seem to have joined the ranks of going away and getting ill.
Or, more often, going away, sleeping badly (generally very badly) one night, and needing to duck out of plans for the next day.

It happened again this time. Two bad nights in a row. After the second, I was pretty much reduced to being able to stand up, and not speak, because I was so tired I thought I might burst into tears.

Yes, I know parenting is about sleep deprivation, and we have done that, though not by a long stretch as much as some. This trip did however include a) a bad nightmare, resulting in screaming at 2 am and b) a fall out of bed onto a wooden floor. Also at silly o’clock.

Neither of these tricks were performed by me, I tended to one and a half of them, and yes, I ended up finding it hard to get back to sleep afterwards.

I did perform the stomach ache that won’t go away routine all by myself. That was the second night. I think I got back to sleep before the fall out of bed moment. Afterwards…not so much.

I missed out on the Louvre.

It wasn’t so bad, I told myself. I had been to the Louvre before. I could try and go again. Dan was all prepped with exciting audio downloads, I’d already made a packed lunch. I could just let them go, and try and find myself some sleep.

I slept. Mercifully. For most of the day. It rained too – so that probably helped on the sleeping front. Order was restored, in time for the really big day out the following day.

(I didn’t miss that one. Nor the weather, when it suddenly went golden and autumnal.
So that was all right after all.)

Illness is an item we don’t want to find. Whatever our opinion of it, it surely finds us fast when it wants to. And when it blows in on a holiday, we humph and sigh, and feel we’re missing out.

But another part of us may think we’re getting the rest we needed in the first place. Because that is genuinely what we need on holiday. Cultural input notwithstanding.

Interlude 2: is inspiration a found item?

We long for it to be. We believe there is a pearl of great price, whatever other merchants have told us.

We hear the story of Harry Potter, walking fully fledged into the imagination of the author, and take our own train journeys, on the look out for a lone character thumbing a lift.

We remember how In Xanadu came to the poet as a dream – and remained unfinished because he was woken from the dream. (We make a mental note not to induce the dream in the same way, but maybe contemplate a less digestible evening snack to hasten things along.)

Here’s the thing. Inspiration is not at all guaranteed. But we want to find the tricks that will guarantee it. That will turn the item of sanitary ware into a work of art. For definite.

The more I read of authors writing about their craft, the more it seems that they are saying “Ignore the chase after inspiration. Write. Write. Write some more. Get better.”

I see their point. I’ve hung around and waited for blog 3.0 to reveal itself. The Big Idea.
The Next Step. And eventually, I decided to listen, and start writing again.

And yet. Ideas do come to us. It may be more about ideas combining, giving us something new to think about. One of those things that is becoming more highly prized in this age of abundant information – it’s not about the knowing so much as the putting together.

There is a certain feeling when we find something that causes us to put pen to paper – or flex the typing fingers. And it can feel rather like those found items – or even those Moments that I seem to be finding in more and more places.

Are they one and the same? I don’t know. The frisson, the excitement of finding them, that feels the same. Though the moments seem to be more about rooting ourselves in the here and now, while the inspiration is often about running for the hills, chasing a particularly magnificent stag.

We have no idea if we will catch it or not. And if we do, as stories often demand, the stag may turn out to be something else entirely.

But in those brief seconds, the light is glancing off the flanks of the stag, circling the antlers.
We are completely certain of what we are to be doing, and what we are pursuing, and the excitement of both.

I do know that we long to be interrupted from the everyday. Either to believe in the impossible, the magical, or to see elements of it, dotted through our regular patterns and surroundings.

Even better, when the inspiration or the moment captures our heart, we bring the spark of it into everyday life. We fan the flame a little brighter for a while.

And I would still rather warm my hands, even for a little while, than expect the fire to disappear, or worse, not realise its potential in the first place.

B is for bus ticket

This is on the edge of things that you hunt for, rather than things you encounter. But it’s an easy one – the city is littered with bus tickets, one way or another.

This time, I find the ticket on the seat of the bus next to me. I feel a bit furtive. I don’t know if it belongs to the person a bit to my left. But I also see it’s a single, so I know they can’t use it again.

I take it. In the way that I took bus tickets when I was abroad. And menus. And paper napkins with the trusty environmental mark on them.

When is it hoarding, and when is it collecting? When you are abroad for the first time
(at least, the first you properly remember), the world jumps out at you: the one you saw in textbooks. It’s really there.

And the tickets show a different currency. And the menus are in another language, just like the books promised. And the paper napkins are recycled stock, underscoring all those environmental values you now see in practice.

All you need is distance. Distance gives you a little more exclusivity. And time gives you even more. Suddenly those items, really just daily objects, discarded ones often, take on their own significance.

When I was six or so, my mum got me to keep a diary for the summer holiday. I wrote a sentence or two a day. We stuck in tickets for a few things, a theatre programme or two. Every now and then, I revisit it.

These days, the tickets aren’t really tickets any more. They are an indication of how prices have inflated. They are a marker of print styles from thirty odd years ago.

And they are a physical reminder that, once, you stood in that place. You were on that little ferry, the one that charged you 60p for the privilege. You were in that theatre show, the one where brown swirls seemed a good way to go for the programmes.

We saw an episode of The Young Montalbano recently, where one character was determinedly keeping EVERYTHING in his life. Every bus ticket. Every top off a beer bottle. And so on.

I think this is quite hard to countenance, in some ways. We don’t always want to be ruled by the past as an inventory of our lives. While we can, we also like the notion of stepping forwards into the future, unfettered by all those bus tickets and bottle tops and empty cereal packets.

That bus ticket I picked up. It’s still in my pocket. I’m less sure about keeping it, really – there are many more to replace it, if I need. And I have a bus pass, too, so I know that it wasn’t my ticket, just one I picked up for the purpose of writing about it.

Let’s consider the blog post a way to remember it. That should do fine.

 

E is for energy

Somewhere along the line, I put my energy down for a bit, and forgot to pick it up again. I think that was it. Maybe I put it down and someone else thought it was theirs, and made off with it.

Maybe I forgot to renew my energy, and now there are fines due. I don’t get any more energy until they’re paid. That could be the answer. Energy costs more these days, as the suppliers have happily informed us – again.

It could be that my energy was really just a permit, like a car tax disc. Somehow I missed the reminder. Clearly I am online, and we know that it’s quick to update a car tax disc online, so it must be possible to top up my energy online? Right? I thought that was one of the reasons I was blogging.

Imagery aside, energy has not been much in evidence of late. I think it was all the activity early on in the year. I used up my annual supply of energy and am now on energy-saving mode.

It may of course be linked to the shortening days, but I think it is connected to that scenario I’ve seen before. I. Wore. Myself. Out.

What changed? Some sadly obvious stuff – getting a bit more sleep, a couple of nights in a row. Shutting myself off yesterday and doing stuff for me, rather than spending all weekend on catch up.

Sometimes a found item is simply the thing you used to have, that had gone missing for too long. And when it turns up again, even a bit, you notice.

I’m not talking swinging from the tree tops energy. (There’s a storm outside. Could get slippy.) Nor even turn the house upside down spring cleaning kind of energy. (Though that could help.)

Just enough energy to get through the have tos, the really have tos, and some of the shoulds. Along with some sit downs in between.

That kind of energy is enough that I notice it. And with schools on holiday now, I have plans to seize some more of it, if I can.

12 Oct: a room in your childhood home

Which home? Which room? There’ve been a few. I think I need to describe my own room – that’s probably easiest to remember, and remember how I felt there too.

We moved, you see. We moved quite a bit. Only in the UK, mind, but always long distance, enough that we were starting afresh each time.

By the time secondary school came round, we managed to stay put. Seven years – in fact, I was the one to leave, rather than the family moving again.

Moving quite a few times has different effects on people. I used to work with a couple of people who’d also moved a lot – both had also moved countries quite a bit. Moving itself doesn’t do one things for you – it’s how you respond to it.

So I’ll tell you that my room in that house, where I spend my secondary school years, was all about continuity. Not moving things. Amassing things, yes, and keeping them all.

A collection of boxes on the dressing table. A series of posters and pictures, fixing the places that meant something to me, including Edinburgh, where I would later to choose to live.

Postcards stuck to wardrobe doors. To a unit that held my record player (yes! ah, the distant past). Flowery curtains – there were pretty much always flowery curtains, and green carpet, you see. How Mum liked to do things.

I wrote from my bed. I had a desk, yes, but it was more comfortable to prop myself up, with a book on my knee, and write from my bed. Easier to spread things out. (Still my preferred option, really.)

What else? The room had a lock. I don’t know that I was particularly worried about people bursting in, but there was a Need To Be Alone, as I think teenagers tend to have.

Two windows. A corner room, in a way. A flat roof outside one of the windows.

A sink. That was good. I discovered contact lenses in my teens. Having a sink to do the daily lens cleaning was very helpful. Apart from the time that the lens stuck to the side of the sink and broke when I tried to move it.

A view. That was really the most important part. It’s what I value today. Writing from my bed, looking out at the sky, at trees. Those days, I would see the run of hills that dominated the town, and at one end, a windbent tree. It felt very Wuthering Heights.

So I would sit there, look at the tree, look at the sky, write some more. I didn’t know then that laptops would make it possible to do the same, some time in the future.

How do you say all of the many things about your childhood? You can’t. You can begin with where you felt safe. Where was a good place to write. Perhaps that is a good place to begin.