Frydmania

Not been myself recently. There are days you can’t tell the difference, I’m sure…And on the writing whether or not you feel like it, not feeling well means you still have to write. But I am grateful that, for now at least, I’m feeling like I can concentrate a bit.

I find myself thinking of creatives who kept going despite illness, and am so impressed. I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of my life not ill, and not often ill either. The last couple of years have seen rather a spike in illness and injuries, minor and medium. So I am valuing my health more, which is good.

Some of the injuries meant I could think straight but not lift a full kettle of water. Annoying, limiting, but still able to function. Finding it hard to think straight, feeling dizzy, it’s much harder. You know that the cut on the hand will heal. You know that the break in the finger of the other hand will also heal, particularly if you keep going with your physio.

But dizziness that comes and goes is insidious. You don’t know how long it’ll last, and you don’t know whether to rest, or whether that will help or not. You don’t know whether or not to keep writing, or whether you’re overdoing it, and the dizziness will increase.

Lest I worry anyone reading this, I am trying again with the doctor tomorrow, and I am feeling a bit better tonight. But when writing depends in part on a clear head, finding the thread of the writing, sifting the words, it’s a whole heap harder when your head is like mince.

On the plus side, I am in the moment more. I am in the moments, long moments, of dizziness, praying for them to lift, and praying for strength to get through cooking the pasta, and then to be able to make conversation while we eat it.

I am also in the moments of looking at tiny details – light coming through the leaf etchings on a window, patterns in a woman’s coat on the bus – as a way to distract myself from physical symptoms.

Suddenly, when my head clears, the moments are less long – but they are less noticed too. So I’m grateful tonight for the words trotting on by themselves, while I walk behind them. Whatever tomorrow’s moments are, I want to see the little things that are out there to be seen, and if I’m lucky, to see them for their own sake.

So, a good couple of weeks after I decided on what I was going to write…I started. A cookbook for us seemed a good place to start, capturing the things I cook the most, so that, in time, others can cook them too.

Being something for us, it can have all my bad puns, as well as (hopefully) my bright ideas on the food front. It can celebrate where others have invented recipes, or names for dishes, as well as indicate the original source of recipes, and how they’ve been nudged in a different direction over time.

It pushes me to start thinking about quantities for things, oven temperatures and so on. How much indexing to do. (I love a well indexed cookbook. Sad but true. And indeed useful, of course.) Whether or not to go the food blogger route and take photos to accompany the dishes.

I do have another fledgling set of writings about food that I mapped out a few years back. A bit in the direction of Nigel Slater’s ‘Toast’, being food memories as much as anything else. It sits somewhere on the hard drive, being more a set of chapters rather than actually crafted prose. But it was where I had thought to begin.

Instead, begin with a task at hand. Write what is in front of you, right now. Write what seems to need to be written, right now.

At any rate, I’m enjoying tucking in.

On the days when there is little energy to write, write.

On the days when you are keeping going minute by minute, write.

On the days when you are unsure, write.

On the days where your main task is to observe another growing,

Glowing – in the moment,

Write.

Not a lot to say this morning. It’s day 21. I am certainly getting the experience of writing every day, and some of it’s good, some of it is more akin to pedalling. Every now and then a metaphor comes along, and I can free wheel for a while.

I’m not a huge rider of bikes. But I recognise something of that automatic skill in the writing process. I have enough experience with words to keep the bike upright, not wobble into walls or onto rose bushes.

At points I put my foot down and discover I’ve changed gear, and the bike moves faster, stronger. Other times, I seem to plough along in low gear before realising what’s happening, and give myself a break.

Off on the horizon are the Danny McAskills of the writing world, doing their tricks, but that’s OK. I know enough now to remember that there’s lots of practice of the tricks before they come to public attention.

For now, I am trying to keep pedalling, while thinking about what kind of cycling it is I want to do. What that looks like. Whether I will need to practise sprinting, or learn to use those gears better.

And all the while, the scenery around me keeps changing. Proof that I am going somewhere new, and that I am getting there myself.

From time to time I am asked, perfectly straight forwardly, what super power I would like to have. At this point, I would like the ability to see old footprints on pavements, charting where I’ve walked on familiar routes.

At certain stages of life, we seem to repeat the same journeys all the time. Home to school. Work to home. Home to the library, and so on. Evoking my superpower would be like being able to magically reveal fingerprints on an object, but show how we chart our course, day by day.

Will we find that we just keep to the same lines each time? Will we detour? Will the tracks look like we burned rubber, or be more like linear ripples, sometimes meeting the mark, sometimes coming unstuck?

Part of the intrigue, for me, is that we can’t tell. But I believe that there are stories bound up in the footsteps. Days that we hurried, days that we dawdled. Days that our prints showed bravado, others where we barely had the reserves to put one foot in front of the other.

Perhaps our stories are also like the steps themselves. Will beauty emerge from repetition? Will we find that the story flows when we step away from the familiar path? Dante confirms the latter. Various mom blogs suggest the former.

For now, our steps move from one familiar ground to home turf. Time to change pace – and time to listen out for the staccato of the footsteps as we walk out our routes, our stories, and the meanings between the two.