H is for holiday

I am meant to be putting things into piles. It’s holiday season – school have shut, families are making plans.

I have decided to organise myself by…reading a large novel. This isn’t my usual approach. Normally holiday times come round and I’m prepared, a week in advance, even.

This time round, no. Call it late onset procrastination. Or maybe a seizing of the moment, to find a holiday in what is still an ordinary weekend.

Reading big books. That used to be one of the pleasures of time away. I can think back to us travelling across central Europe by train, the latest tome on my knee, or Dan reading and me looking out the window, taking snapshot after mental snapshot.

Reading big books seems to be part of a distant, pre-parenting past. That’s why I seem to read lots of short articles these days. Easier to stop at the latest call to involvement, whether it’s to admire a Lego building or assist with finding a missing glasses case.

For some reason, I’m not really sure why, I put the computer away and started reading instead. A big book. 900-odd pages. I began last night, and finished the book this evening, sneaking opportunities to hide and read, and read some more.

The found item here…is time. But I’ve used up T – and B that might be for book, and a host of other letters. But my found item today is a sense of holiday.

Permission to stop. Permission to rest, to do something I rarely do, and ignore other to dos for a day.

A day only, mind you. Tomorrow I need to be back to the usual run of the weekend. Catch up, clear the old stuff out of the fridge, work out how much more washing to get done before the start of a new week.

But tonight, I am still on holiday, even if the book is finished. My discovery is the ability to find rest even outside of ‘official’ rest time – no, not just finding rest but demanding it, blocking other things out, wallowing in it.

Just for a day. Sometimes, that’s really all it takes.

F is for freebie

Hanging out. It’s that fill-the-gap moment when mums wait for their child’s class to be over. Be it sport, be it dance, whatever – it’s what we do. Show up, wait, head home again.

I used to write shopping lists. Come up with more to do items, maybe even check a few off. But now it’s a Friday afternoon class, at the end of the week. Energy levels are lower.
A freebie will do just fine.

I can’t complain. The place where I wait has free magazines – the kind that are delivered there, weekly. There used to be one of those leaflet racks, too – specials at castles, places for day trips, that kind of thing.

I don’t necessarily choose to go and get one of these magazines. But it’s there, it’s free, I’m waiting, and I might as well. So goes marketing, so goes my attention span on a Friday.

I’m trying to recover from freebies. The thing is, they are so easy to come by, at least in cities. Easy to get taken up with what you might do at the weekend, in the summer; what will do as eye candy for the final 20 minutes of the class.

The thing with freebies is: there’s not really a good reason to say no. It’s easier to say yes. Yes to bringing the magazine home, yes to maybe keeping a few bits of (hopefully) useful information.

Thing is: today I even took my book along. I had something for me. And instead, I flicked through the magazine because it didn’t demand too much of me. At the end of the school week, that can be feel more appealing.

I think the thing about a found item is that, when you find it, you recognise some form of value to it. I do see the value to winding down before zooming home to cook tea, yes. But ‘because it’s there’ doesn’t feel so valuable.

But print freebies will float around you like an eddy of autumn leaves. On buses, through letter boxes, in sports centres. It is easy to let them cover the ground. It is easy to let them act as mulch, and go to sleep a little under the weight of them.

Maybe I’ll forgo them, next time I’m in, and see what happens. Maybe I will reach for the book instead. It would be a place to start.

10 Oct: I often forget…

…that I’ve already told you a story. Or a joke. Or an anecdote. So. Sorry about that.

But have you heard the one about picking brambles? Raking leaves? Buying more food than you need and struggling to fit it into the kitchen?

Oh. You have. I know, because I seem to have written about each of these things at least once.

I come from a family where, if the joke is good, it’s worth a repeat. It is one where a repeat phrase is an opening gambit, a provocation to complete the next part.

Rather a number of these are Goon Show quotations, and since I have come to realise that not everyone goes around saying these (Dan is a case in point here, though he’s learning),
I won’t inundate you with them.

It has taken time and distance from growing up to realise that all these phrases, and their repetitions, are a way of building a shared language. A hoard to break out when you need them. And a way, too, of showing love.

Blogging is often about sharing what we love – as well as what has worked for us, for our child, and so on. And I share some of these things in that same way – like wood smoke, these are things I love. I won’t presume that you’ll love them too, but I think you might.

And sometimes, these things I love come to the surface again – I write again – and then the repetition comes in.

Repeating yourself is seen as a sign of ageing. And, yes, it does come more with age. But it doesn’t just have to be a memory thing. It can be a ‘old, but new in the moment’ thing too. Especially where it’s seasonal.

Were we to forbid mentioning things more than once, or allow only one mention per person, a great number of pumpkins would take offence this month because their qualities and virtues are not being celebrated.

I say this, slightly tongue in cheek, because many of the blogs I follow are full of fall-this and pumpkin-that. And no one seems too concerned that they might have mentioned pumpkins before.

So, forgive me if you have had enough of me repeating myself. I am happy to be in a world where there are good things – and that, often, good things stay good on a second airing.

And you can always hover over those links to see if I am genuinely repeating myself, or sending you off in the direction of something new.

A little of both is a good mixture. So, off you go now, and try out some Goon Show scripts. Better still, listen to some. And if you feel like repeating some in the comments, that too would be welcome.

R is for rustling

Not that kind of rustling, pardner. The sound. It’s the wind in the trees and the leaves under my feet.

It’s the sound of autumn. The rushing in the leaves and branches as the not-yet-gales try out the trees for size. The snap and crunch of leaves around the benches at school where I wait for the doors to open.

I walk to school, turning the last corner, and am greeted by the stance of trees along the side of the road. The wind is there before me. Sometimes I think it hurries me, at other times,
it welcomes me.

And while I may miss things around me in that head-down-walk-fast speed, at times, I don’t miss the wind. It lifts my head from the pavement view.  That’s good.

It’s not really properly autumn yet. Many of the trees are yet to change their colours. The wind is nipping at me, but I am resisting the point where I zip the extra lining into my coat, so it can’t quite be autumn yet.

The wind disagrees. It is already chasing leaves around the playground, already catching them up and dropping them, like a child with a toy, on repeat.

But I like this. For the times when I think that we’re just in the same cycle, school-homework-cook tea-bedtime, the rustling reminds me that the year is moving, that there is change, even if I only see it in the first hillocks of leaves around the bottom of the benches.

Wherever I am in my thoughts by the time I reach the school gate, the wind is niggling at me, reminding me of seasons and movement and right here right now.

Right here right now, I am just happy to take in the sounds. The wind in the trees and the leaves under my feet.

9 Oct: I was really scared when…

…the latest writing prompt came in. How real was I going to get?
I’d already bared my soul this week – aka tried to write a short biography – and now there was more to be done.

Here’s the thing. The things that are really scary to us are also hard to put down in print.
At least, to put down in print and share with others.

So then I tried to work out why:

1) Will people make fun of me if I say what has really scared me?

Don’t know. Haven’t seen evidence of that yet. Strike that off the list of objections.

2) Will the scary thing seem more real if I write about it?

Possible. At least, that’s what my imagination is concerned with. Having a rather over-active imagination, you see, I try to avoid feeding it too much at times. Being scared, thinking about it, writing about it – that’s an easy route to imagining more, and the fear becoming more real.

3) Third possibility. Move the scary thing out of my head, jettison it in cyberspace and run away. 

Sounds more promising. Admittedly, I’d have to read about it again if I came back to looking at this post in the future – and I do re-read them every now and then. But maybe it would be less scary by then. Possibly.

4) Give it a go?

I’m tapping away, and what comes to mind is that ending of a TV series. And maybe those library books that I shouldn’t have borrowed.

To be honest, I think I should be more scared by stuff in the real world – the things that we don’t want to be real, but are. The things like drugs cartels, and trafficking, and children dying of malnutrition.

But I’m going back to the influences on the imagination – because those are still messing with me, years on.

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Example 1: the ending of the TV series Twin Peaks

I was with the hip kids in the 90s, watching Twin Peaks. Sucked in, by the music, certainly. The permission to drink good coffee – along with having particularly fine cherry pie.

So, like a lot of others watching what is now seen as cult TV, I was all set for the final episode. Unfortunately for the girl with the over-active imagination, that came around the run-up to A Levels, as I recall. (Delayed note to self: avoid scaring self witless before final school exams.)

I remember reading somewhere that the director David Lynch filmed a few different versions of the ending. He kept his final decision unclear to the crew, right up to the end.

Let’s just say that it wasn’t a happy ending. At all. Set up your lead character, and subvert them right at the last moment. This is all understatement, you understand.

I know how much it hit me because I was writing about that ending a while ago, on this blog, in fact. I was trying to find an online link to opinion on the final episode – and it brought up a still from the very end of the show.

I was still terrified. So much so that I had to ask Dan to close the link to that site – I couldn’t bring myself to look at it again.

Why should it still be so bad? Because I think a particularly primal fear is that good things go wrong – and very good things, very good people, can go very wrong. It’s not a new premise – you’d lose half the plot twists in crime films without it.

But, you see, the episode set up the lead character to be happy – to get even happier – and then hit him with it. And the person in his life, a big reason for his happiness, has no idea that he’s gone wrong. Which seems even scarier.

So a nod to Mr Lynch for understanding how to go out on a bang. But no thanks for the ongoing memory.

Example 2: the ghost stories from the library

It’s not the first time that I’ve come across something fictional, and regretted it. There was the ghost story compilation from the library that I should have left on the shelf. But didn’t.

I tend not to go picking stuff that is deliberately and overtly scary. So no slasher movies, thanks, no deliberate horror. The pictures stay too easily in my memory – even the internal pictures if it’s in a book.

But sometimes you chance on something that you thought would be a bit scary but basically OK – and it really scares you. And half the problem is the surprise, and the fear in the moment, wanting to distance yourself from it, but still being gripped.

With the book, I remember putting it under my dresser so I couldn’t see it. It was a hardback, and I lined up the page bits into the corner of my room, under the dresser. I think I was trying to stop the words creeping out.

I just about managed to pull the book out again when it was time to take it back to the library. Avoided looking at the cover. And somehow, I think that mostly worked, because I don’t have a memory of the story that set things off.

But I do remember how I responded. Part of me knew that words couldn’t seep out of a book – and part of me was gripped by fear, and wanted to do something to control it.

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Deep breath. Written down. Done. Will it calm down the memories? I hope so.

Junior Reader has an active imagination too. I am trying to convey the idea that we have a choice about our imaginations – that we can turn off the tap, as it were, when we see something that would otherwise ‘flood the system’.

It’s good advice. I should stick to it myself. But for now, I think this is in the region of aversion therapy – consider the scary thing until it isn’t scary any more.

We can’t always tell what will be really scary. We know that people make TV and films and write books to scare people. We know that some people specialise in it – and we also know there are enough people that want to be scared, at least for a little bit.

So I know this. And I’ve been scared for more than a little bit. And now I’m going to walk away.