Category: diary

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blog diary

3 January, 2022

The Saturday before Christmas, my osteoarthritic knee started what is commonly known as flaring. Having been relatively pain free and mobile for over a year, with just the odd niggle, I woke up, put my foot on the floor, and struggled to walk. In the days that followed, the pain and stiffness increased.

Sometimes, I could temporaily reduce the pain by cycling for an hour or more. I would get a marginal reduction in stiffness.

Sometimes I got a few minutes relief after doing some long intense hamstring stretches.

Sometimes I got some comfort by having a hot bath, or putting a bag of peas on my knee, or a swapping the peas for a hot water bottle.

The reduction in my mobility was dramatic. I struggled to get down the stairs to the street. I struggled to get to the local shop. Even a few steps along the Promenade below my flat was too much. However, by walking slowly, I could manage. And I was managing to cycle most days, sometimes for a couple of hours. Until today.

Today, it is an effort to get from my bedroom to the toilet, from the kitchen to the hall, from my study to the living room. I have retrieved my crutch (unused for years) but that isn’t helping. The problem isn’t the weight-bearing but the forward swing of my knee when I take a step. The pain is unbearable. I cannot move through it.

I have tried magnesium sulphate poultices.

I have strapped my knee with expensive kinesiology tape. A welcome distraction but no impact yet.

I am doing the majority of the stretches and exercises I was given two weeks ago by the physiotherapist. They hurt.

I have been tempted by, but resisted, anti-inflammatories. I can not take them as they damage my stomach and it takes months to recover.

Flaring can last weeks or months. Or it may be permanent. I, and my physiotherapist, don’t know how this is going to turn out. I don’t know how to cope with this sudden loss of mobility, with no certainty over a recovery pathway. Stack this on top of a covid world when most of us are trying to meet outside, going for a walk, sitting on the Prom wall for a cafe, doing anything rather than ‘come round to mine’ and I’m skunnered.

The last time my knee was this bad I had a cortisone injection. I am only permitted two (damages cartilage apparently) and that was my second one. It worked.

I don’t know how to describe the catastrophic impact on my mental health.

I don’t know how to write about it but I’m struggling to write about anything else.

I don’t want to talk about it but I haven’t got any other conversation.

I am boring myself and everyone else.

Lying in bed crying doesn’t help.

I don’t want to be this person I have suddenly become again. Tired, distressed, immobile. Lacking in confidence and momentum. Negative and overly sensitive. Jealous of all of those on social media showing off their new year hill walks, their park runs, their innocent posts about nipping to the shops or running into the sea.

I am.

Defeated.

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blog diary

1 January, 2022

In the interests of trying to improve my own short story writing, I am reading two collections by women writers I revere. The first is Claire Keegan’s Antarctica (1999). A few months ago I read ‘Foster‘ on the recommendation of a writing friend. The story was originally published in the New Yorker, and Keegan, as I understand it, later developed it into a novella.

The story, written from the point of view of a young girl, is set in and around a farm in Wexford, Ireland. I loved the story because of what it left unsaid. The girl is staying with an unfamiliar aunt and uncle (the Kinsellas) to give her pregnant mother a rest. Initially the stay seems idyllic, but as time goes on, the prose illicits apprehension, concern, and the sense that all is not what it seems. We can only know what the little girl sees and hears. Is the little girl safe with the aunt and uncle?

I feared the worse. Why did they want to look after her? What were they going to do to her? That scene when she sits on her uncle’s knee? A moment of gentle kindliness and affection? Or something sinister? The shock of discovering the Kinsellas’ past, when it is finally revealed, was unexpected and horrifying. I, as many readers no doubt did, went back to reread the work looking for the foreshadowing, the subtle hints and gestures. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, deserving both of several reads and the accolades it’s received.

With this in mind, I started on Antarctica and the short story that gives the collection its name. The writing is spare and tight. I was pulled in straight away. A happily married woman wonders how it would feel to sleep with another man. She sets out to find a stranger to have sex with. She finds one, they have sex, and all is well. Until it isn’t. And he turns out to be a monster. He ties her up, imprisons her, and degrades her. I was disappointed and surprised.

We are now more than twenty years on since the story was published. But I wonder if Keegan would write it in the same way today. The story is beautifully crafted. The collection went on to win prizes. But for me, there’s already too much male violence against women where women are degraded and defiled without having to read about it (or watch it in tv series or movies where the violence is clearly gratuitous and misogynist). No matter how good the writing is, I cannot read this type of story for entertainment.

Which leads me into my own writing. I noticed recently, when writing scraps and fragments from prompts, generally with friends in cafes, that I often write about coercive control. It doesn’t generally involve physical violence, but manipulation, humiliation, verbal abuse and gaslighting are regular themes. When I realised I was doing this I was spooked. What was I doing? And more importantly, why was I doing it?

I looked back at the work to check my representation of women. I threw some of the writing away. I rewrote other pieces. I empowered the female character, or switched the roles, or transferred the violence from the individual to a corporation or the state. But some of the work I left untouched. Is writing about coercive control any different to my discomfort around the story of a man locking a woman to a bed with handcuffs (in Keegan’s ‘Antarctica’).

Perhaps. Coercive control, now a criminal offence in the UK, is a relatively recent arrival in public conciousness. Literature and other media have a role in building both awareness and understanding of how this control manifests, particularly from women’s perspectives. For example, coercive control became a topic of national conversation around 2016/17 when the BBC ran it as a slow-burn story line in The Archers. So writing fiction about this abusive behaviour may be enlightening. It may speak to people caught up in these behaviours, or people who are yet to understand what it entails, or people who are simply looking for a different perspective.

If this is the case (and I’m not simply justifying my own hypocrisy here) it raises two questions:

  • Am I up to the task of crafting literature that people want to read around this difficult and sensitive theme?
  • Why do I find myself writing about it continually, irrespective of the original prompt?

Today is not the day to answer these questions. Today is a day to continue through the second slim volume of short stories I’m reading to improve my writing; Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka (2013). I am only four stories in, but my writing crush on Levy, developed after reading The Man Who Saw Everything, remains pure, loyal and wondrous.

The image (cropped) is taken from an article in the Toronto Star on 19 July, 2016.

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blog diary

30 December, 2021

Today I saw a seal. A black labrador’s head, I thought at first. And then it bobbed, and sank, and didn’t reappear. A man further down the beach was staring at the same spot, around fifteen metres out past the wooden groyne I was perched on. He saw the seal, too. Or he was just a man standing, staring at the rippling silver steel chill of the estuary. He gave up before I did. I couldn’t let that seal get away.

Now, I check the NatureScot website. I am sure it was a harbour seal, given the description of dog-like heads. Harbour seals are more commonly found on the west coast. Here on the east coast it’s a win to see one.

The last time I saw a seal as close to the shore in Edinburgh, I was standing in my kitchen up on the fourth floor of the tenement, watching the water with my binoculars. My friend Kristine was swimming, and the seal was directly behind her. She had no idea it was there. Kristine was swimming and smiling and I wanted to shout ‘behind you, behind you.’

Are you swimming with seals when you don’t know they’re there?

Kristine and I met at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the mid 1980s. We were nursing students. She was compassionate, bright, and dedicated. I was indifferent, nervous, and offended by the regiment-style hierarchy in the hospital. Kristine had transferred from Inverness to Edinburgh half way through her course. The pair of us stormed the community nursing module. She played Velvet Underground’s Heroin on a small cassette player. Or maybe it was Sunday Morning. Or Venus in Furs. Either way, the class was agog, aghast. Especially the Stornaways. The Stornaways were always agog, aghast.

I did an acetate presentation about the communities living in Wester Hailes. Handed grainy black and white photographs around the class. Broken lifts. Sopping carpets. Weary women. Children on trikes. Roads with no footpaths. Vast empty carparks. Wheelchairs with broken arms. A thriving community centre with lentil soup and art classes and thick Scottish buttered rolls. I’d developed the photographs myself.

I won a prize for the Westerhails project. It was the highlight of a below average three years for me. But really, Kristine should have won.

Later she said I was the only person in the class to welcome her. I struggle to imagine that was true. What was wrong with the rest of them?

Kristine was the only friend I had who owned a car. The only friend who lived in a flat that looked like a home. With dripping candles in brass candlesticks and fairy lights wrapped around mirrors and plump cream cotton cushions and dinner parties with three courses and matching cutlery and compassion that was biblical.

Kristine was there the night my partner took his own life. She kept me above water for months, years. She was there even when she wasn’t.

As I staggered through my grief, I failed my final nursing module and had to repeat it. I was sent to work on a ward for terminally ill children. Kristine finished her training and went on to get her pelican badge (awarded to students who completed a year as a staff nurse at the Royal Infimary). I didn’t look for a post in the Infirmary and wasn’t offered one. I was scunnered.

I left nursing and went travelling. Moved to New Zealand. Went to university. Became a policy wonk at the Ministry for the Environment. Kristine wrote me neat letters with black ink on thin blue aerogrammes. One mentioned cancer. A melanoma behind her eye. I wasn’t to panic, she wrote. She’d had it removed in a specialist unit in Liverpool. Everything was fine. She kept studying. Kept training. Kept pushing herself. Community nursing. Midwifery. CPD. So much CPD.

I returned to the UK with £50 and started again. Kristine married Kenny. They settled in Pitlochry. Their home was warm and welcoming and full of friends and musicians and cases of wine and languid cheese and home-baking and bits and bobs I’d picked up round the world for her. Tibetan prayer flags. A bottle of Sikkim whisky. A brass singing bowl.

One night she texted. Do you want to see Leonard Cohen at Edinburgh Castle? I went online, she wrote, to buy a couple of tickets and thought I may as well buy eight. My treat, she said. I did and we went.

Hallelujah.

She did her Masters degree while she was working full time. She was tired. Exhausted even. She talked about leaving nursing. Aromatherapy, she said. And massage. I want to do something positive, she said. Something to make people feel good. But there were always reasons to delay the change in career.

We didn’t see each other often but when we did we hung out in book shops and bought each other treats and shouted about inequalities and how fucked up the world was. We drank bitter coffee and she chewed her thumb and she failed to give up smoking. I begged, bribed and threatened. To no avail. She went on to become the specialist palliative service manager at Cornhill Macmillan Centre in Perth. I was so proud to call her my friend.

The night she phoned me to tell me the cancer was back she was so off-hand that I thought she was talking about someone else. I had to call her back to check.

I couldn’t stop crying.

I pulled myself together and tried to give her the best of myself. Sent her soft expensive scarfs to wear during the long hours of her treatment. Stylish at all times, I wrote in the cards with the packages. I sent books that were easy to read. Poetry. And postcards from wherever I was in foreign parts. Of course the reality was that she was supporting all of us through her illness. I couldn’t imagine life without her.

She took me to Gleneagles for a spa. The staff there wouldn’t allow her to have a spa treatment because of her cancer. She didn’t argue. She just waited for me. We drank fizz and we talked about her life and her death and she was so damn pragmatic.

I visited her a few weeks before she died. Went up on the train from Edinburgh. It was a bright clear day in Pitlochry and we ate lunch outside. Salad with leaves from their garden. A glass vase of late spring flowers sat in the centre of the table. There was soup and home-made bread. She was wearing thin grey cotton shorts and a white short-sleeved blouse. She adored the sun. She was pale and puffy and smiley. We drank chilled white wine. She apologised for the cigarette, blowing her smoke away from the food. Now, she said, down to business. She had organised her memorial service (there’d be no funeral) and she gave me all my instructions. Would I speak on behalf of her friends? She’d give me the email addresses of everyone, but she didn’t want to know what they’d write. Yes, I said, of course.

Kristine died at home as she wanted on 1 July, 2014. She was fifty one. She managed every detail of her death, and every detail of the celebration of her life a week later at the Atholl Palace Hotel. I read out the tributes from her friends, and the John O’Donohue poem ‘For Friendship’ that she’d chosen.

And I read out Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth

I mostly held it together for my beloved friend.

The last text on my phone from Kristine was on 20 June, 2014. It says: Swim 🙂 – think out ‘tidal’ paths!?! Kxo

Are you swimming with seals when you don’t know they’re there?

Categories
diary found poetry

29 December, 2021

Today’s entry is a found poem harvested from a leaflet entitled ‘Help Yourself to Health – City of Edinburgh Book Prescription Booklist.’ I was given the information after I was run over by a lorry driver.

anger manual

for those

spoiling themselves

with flashes

of ill-judged regret

numb, shut off

weigh memories of

sanity and subsequently

overcome trauma

and light

sensible body fit

a healthy mind

stretch, strengthen

and sabotage

your tap

your power

chances are changes

mood is clinical

cognitive most effective

step by step

on prescription

or available

Categories
blog diary

28 December, 2021

The Scottish Government announces provisional positive Covid-19 tests for the Christmas period. They are now over 10k a day. Omicron is surging. We are being urged to take care, to be cautious, to wear our masks, to wash our hands, not to mix with others unless we have to. New rules are in place in many public settings. One metre distancing, maximum of three households meeting together, and major Hogmanay events have been cancelled.

Scrolling through Twitter I see people I know testing positive. Christmas plans were upended, trains have been cancelled, and many of us who can are retreating to the safety of our homes.

This Christmas I wear Airpop masks. Last Chrismas I wore handmade cloth masks.

This Christmas I use surgical spirits to clean my masks. Last Christmas I used soap.

What is there to write about Covid-19 that hasn’t been written already, over and over?  I have nothing of value to add.

I am reading Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies. I am puzzled by the novel, mainly because of the first-person point of view, and that the work is part fiction, part memoir, part historic account. Did the narrator’s father really treat Trump for an irregular heartbeat back in the day? Does it matter that he did or not? It shouldn’t, but I want to know. How much of the father son relationship reflects the author’s own experience? All of it? Just some of it? I comb the most engaging scenes for clues, but I am helpless. And anyway, this is a distraction. I tell myself off.

It is a testament to the writing that I don’t search the novel for adverbs and similes. I am gripped by the clear story-telling, the engaging anecdotes, and the ability to get up close to characters who have chosen or otherwise to live in foreign lands that are or become oppressive and discriminatory.  

This notion of outsider insider has stalked me on and off much of my life. As a little girl I had the wrong accent having moved countries in primary school, the wrong glasses (why do fathers do that to their daughers?) and, in some family situations, the wrong amount of money (not enough). There was a pivotal incident involving an aunt and uncle, a grandparent, and the wrong kind of ice-cream. Granny had sent my brother and I round to the aunt and uncle with ice-cream that didn’t meet their exacting standards. I was shamed and ashamed. I was around nine years old. We laugh about it now. I wasn’t laughing then.

Being an outsider, not normal, different, not ‘like us’ emboldened bullies in our Scottish Highland village and further afield. The bullying was verbal and physical, and relentless. In my first week at high school, I was belted by Mr Buchanan, the chemistry teacher, for defending myself from two boy bullies on the school bus. I don’t recall whether I cried. I do recall the blistering pain. And the searing ignomy. Ten minutes after the assault I got lines from my French teacher for being late to her class. (I failed my French O Level the first time round. Make of that what you will.)

For the few years that this went on I was confused, angry and isolated. I developed coping mechanisms that would result in my own challenging behaviours as an adult. I became overly defensive, aggressive in new situations with new people, and ridiculously independent. I now see that these types of behaviour often become cyclical. New place, new start, aggressive behaviour, and the barriers to positive human relationships go up instead of down. It took me decades to recognise this, and I’m working hard to resist the urges to say no instead of yes, to frown instead of smile, to be mean instead of generous.

Homeland Elegies is about a Pakistani immigrant family’s experience of the American dream in the context of 9/11.  My own small story is nothing like it. But in sitting down to write today’s diary I am struck by what immigration can do to us immigrants and how influential the receiving communities can be on the rest of our lives.

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blog diary memoir

27 December, 2021

Write your diary as a writer, he said. I read the extract from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. Much of it contains her analysis of Ulysses. She doesn’t think much of it, although she promises to read it again. I wish I had her fortitude.

Sept 6th ‘I finished Ulysses and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water.’

I have never finished Ulysses. Every five years or so I pick it up and try again. It’s a book that I imagine other people imagine I have read. I have it my hands now. It’s a paperback edition, a Penguin Modern Classic. It smells of fade and stain and heavy use. The smell is a lie. I’m sure I bought it new. According to the publishing details, it must have been around 1985 in Edinburgh. I was a student, but I was not studying literature. I was a heavy reader. With no television and no sporting skills and no Internet, that’s what I did. We read and we drank and we played records and we went to gigs and we shouted Can’t Pay Won’t Pay on anti-poll tax marches.

I have packed up and carried that book to three flats in Edinburgh in the 1980s. To four houses in New Zealand in the 1990s. To five flats this century in the UK. In each of those moves I decided to keep that book. My fingers would have danced around the cover. I would have opened a random page while I stood in front of several half-filled cardboard boxes. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float.

The words said nothing to me then and they don’t now. I didn’t care about Buck Mulligan or Stephen Dedalus. Sometimes I prefer my literature spare, at other times resplendent. But whatever the style, I scorn the lavish use of adverbs and similes. You may smart at my use of lavish. Give him a break you may say. At least James Joyce finished and published the damned book. A masterpiece, one of the most famous and celebrated works in modern literature. Look in your draft folder. Ah, but I respond. Check it out yourself. The following adverbs appear on the first page: solemnly, coldly, smartly, sternly, briskly, gravely, and quietly.

I can’t believe I have just gone through Joyce’s most famous work looking for adverbs. I am beyond petty. I am also cold and I need to go outside and oil my wretched knee with an hour’s cycle.

Why haven’t I taken Ulysses to a charity shop? The same reason I still have shoes and boots I could wear before I was run over by a truck eleven years ago. I am waiting for the new improved me. The person that reads the classics and enjoys them. The person that finishes writing the dozen or so half-arsed short stories sitting in her draft file. The person who has a life plan and delivers it. There is nothing to suggest this new me will ever materialise. My writing flits between fragments and oddments and remnants and lost buttons and broken zips. It conjures wisps but never consummates.

I’ll put Ulysses back on the glass shelf in my bedroom. Later I’ll pick up Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. It’s a perfect day for the fact that.

Categories
blog diary memoir

26 December, 2021

Derek Jarman writes about the weather. And famous people. Being gay. And suicides. And the colour of the sky. Everyone he knows is smiling in slow motion. I put my panniers down in the hall and flick on Radio 6 Music. I am home from Christmas. Joan Armatrading lights up the dial. One line, I hear, one line and I’m crying. Not weeping, more a thickening, a welling, the blunting of a sharpening stone. An unexpected unwelcome internal lament.

I am twenty-one and he is alive, and we are dancing on a square of blue carpet on a groundfloor flat in Stockbridge. The same blue as the postage stamp square he later paints in the lower right-hand corner of White on White. To remember, he says. By October that year he is dead. I’ll be your fire side, Joan sings now. Your willow, oh willow. I wait for the name of the song. Willow. I don’t recall ever knowing the name, or even the words. It’s her voice, damn it. The impregnable tone, the elegiacal modulation.

The presenter announces Janice Long is dead. A short illness. She announces Janice before Desmond Tutu. She was one of them, the BBC. Desmond was bigger than all of them. Janice made it to sixty-six. Desmond to ninety. The dancing man had less than half the life of Janice. Of length, not of value. I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion. Love and Affection, fourth on her set list at the Hammersmith Odeon in March that year. Me, Myself I, the opening track. I imagine the crowd surging, fists in the air. I sit here by myself and I know you love it.

We’d had that talk. I’m going on my own, I told him. I’ll be back, I said. I didn’t care what he thought. I went interrailing. He sent me a postcard to one of the hotels I planned to stay in. The receptionist handed it to me with a smile. He must love you, she said in a language I wasn’t familiar with. She didn’t know that he’d left me a chocolate Rollo taped to my bike handlebars outside the old Royal Infirmary just weeks before.

Thunder, don’t go under the sheets. Boxing day. The Promenade is crawling ant black with coats and winter knits and pure wool pompoms and dogs in sweaty quilted jackets. Women with neoprene gloves and gilt-stained skins stand around waist deep in the sea. I push through the crowds on my bike. My knee throbs. Arthritis is a stiff tin badge I wear with neither honour nor pride. I have not yet heard Joan’s guitar or that shush brush over the skin of the drum.

The cat is a soft mound under the Colombian blanket at the end of the bed. I remember the man, the maker of the blanket. Reaching to the top shelf of the shop that sweated lanolin with his loose knees and his finger tremors. His own sheep, he said, he had six that lived in a scrap of field outside his house. His own work, he said as he sat down hard on the low wooden stool, the blanket warm grey ivory over his lap. It’s not women’s work, he continued. His Spanish was slow and certain. It was his second language. Maybe his third. His fingers were doing better than his teeth.

I still find burrs in the blanket. I pull them out and roll the rough sharp of them in my fingers. It is disrespectful to throw them away. There’s a pile of them somewhere. I can’t remember where. Is it tomorrow yet? I’ve got to look my best.  

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