Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Words On Storms And Hands On Heart Thursday 6th February 2020 I have found some new muscles to hurt, hurrah! Discovery due to the wheelbarrow being turned to rust lace, so I improvised with a rescued fish box, dragging it like a sled to spread compost around the garden. Have ordered a new barrow today; currently am sat in bed to write, and appease the aches. Washing blows on the line. Cold sunny day. The crows have chased a buzzard out of the alopecia pine. Monday 10th February 2020 Busy, Tae Kwon-Doing, social weekend. Stormy weather which inconvenienced others more than us. Sunday evening we came home to an electric outage: lit candles, lit woodburner, opened wine. Thankful for a quiet work day. Can’t even immerse myself in research as the weather seems to have stifled internet access. Several rounds of thunder and hail. Did some stretches, did some writing, including this. At home a new wheelbarrow is awaiting and somehow the washing has stayed pegged to the line. It w...

Words On Loving Yourself Plan was this: to go to the woods then come home and write. I had asked my clever brother to make a graphic for me, of a phrase I use and wished to share, because it is so nearly my 50th birthday it was making me feel beneficently wise. What happened was: I was watching the happy arse of my dog as she thundered towards the river when a bundle of words arrived with a ferocity equal to her velocity, as though she had tugged them into being. Writing was done awkwardly, immediately, balanced on a knee.  These words: 'Imagine a sheet of paper, imagine you have a spoonful of ink. You fling the ink at the paper; some of it will miss. You are like this ink. But you are not this ink. You can refling yourself over and over and in doing this create something more fluid, dynamic, astounding, authentic, than anything any of us can fix to paper. Please breathe and feel your breath.  Please love yourself. Whatever doubt ...

Through most of May of this year I was on a fabulous mission to appreciate, to drink life up, to be aware of every breath. This happiness is giddy, has a sense of intoxication. I didn’t have the budget for actual intoxication, there was only coffee and a genuine joy for life. This kind of pace is unsustainable, not necessarily a bad thing. As I am still reminding myself now, transition, and all of life is a transition, happens in oscillations; there is chaos, expansive and excitable, and there is anti-chaos, stabilising and reflective. I considered splitting this month into two posts, but that cuts off the cycle and it’s more useful to see it in one go, I think. I have bleeped the naughty word, rather than overdub and lose authenticity. Anyway, here I am, aged 24 and living in a less cramped shared house with a washing machine, which also accounts for some of my heady delight. ‘17 th May 1994 A morning in Wakefield watching people and patterns. If you sit for long enough they se...

Been a while since I checked the old diaries. There are lots of entries for 1994, despite how busy I was, I wrote everywhere, I was so excited by my discoveries. Although I do start with a bit of bitching… maybe if you could have heard the nonsense those poor desperate to impress boys were spouting, you would have thought ‘tongue scissors’ too. If I could revisit this scene I think I would just laugh, being older and generally more tolerant. The crap I refer to is their banter, not daughter’s charming dinosaur centric babble. ‘On the train. Oh dear. How many stories can you begin with ‘me and my mates, right’…. I’m sure they’re very nice, individually, but I wish I’d brought my tongue scissors. Daughter not stopped talking either but at least she’s not freezing my imagination with tales of how she fished for Yorkshire. To distract me from this crap I’ll think about yesterday’s walk on the beach. I went to talk to the sea about losing the train ti...

Just two relevant entries for this year, I was quite busy doing teaching practices and writing essays and reading one million books, or thereabouts. I was in the library a lot. Both of these diary notes were written at holiday points.  ‘January 1993 A sad New Year’s Day.  Great-grandfather died suddenly of heart failure. He was nearly 93, never had to suffer, lose his senses or be bedridden, so for him the lack of fuss would have been a great relief. I still miss him. Went to say goodbye at the Chapel of Rest: the body was there but he had gone, it was strange. At the funeral I didn’t want them to take his coffin away, it didn’t seem right, he was ours and we didn’t want him to leave. October 1993 Leaving behind Granny’s sheep to go to the abattoir. Feel like I’ve been in a different land all summer. I’ve swum in the Cornish sea, clung to warm granite, felt a kinetic happiness, a physically recollectable restoring of the soul. The very blood in my veins is transmuted ...

With a little bit of ’91 back story in which I definitely underplay how stressed I was, not so much lying to myself as determined to make it all okay. The effort is a bit too much, and after a year I do get miserable, and then I dislike my miserable self, and I dislike the self-loathing too. But it’s a learning curve, and it helps me understand the pile up of negative feelings that other people suffer. All the best artists have empathy. ‘November 1991 Daughter very ill with virus all week, so I am sitting in the college launderette cleaning sheets and missing lectures. My girl is more important. I did also spend a whole afternoon in Leeds looking for a Christmas Ball outfit. Depressed at myself for wasting time. January 1992 The virus has turned into a lactose intolerance so my daughter is on a special diet and putting some weight back on but we have to go for more tests (sweat on Tuesday, apparently.) I’m behind in my work and feel I’ve got a mou...

The cardboard spider was splendid indeed. Halloween and Christmas are the two festivals that promote decorating the house, so maybe that’s why they are my favourites. The sparkles, lights in trees and candles in pumpkins, caught my imagination early. Actually, as children, we were given turnips to carve, pumpkins were too exotic for our household. For safety, we carved with spoons not knives. Carving a turnip with a blunt spoon is not easy, but the end result was proportionately satisfying.  ‘Halloween 1991 Put our decs up and partied. I made a black and orange spider, out of cardboard, to match our streamers. Flat looks funky. Inflatable flashing spook is a big success. Daughter extroverted as ever, chasing guests with an egg box dragon. She decided to wear a green hat, rose patterned gypsy dress and a fluorescent beach bag. Went to bed happily too. I think parties are natural environments for her. Lots of people around, lots of drink to go round and I made...

In which my fortunes progress from Pauper’s Allowance to a student grant, and maybe some loans. I had started a degree previously, but interrupted my education to concentrate on the baffling business of how to be a mum. It was the general consensus of opinion that this would be the ruin of my life, and I would not be able to do anything with my life subsequently other than drop out several more illegitimate progeny and drink too much cider. They were kind of right about the cider. ‘February 1991 I’m on Employment Training now, learning to help people with literacy. Facilitating, they call it. I should have a City & Guilds certificate by September and then I should be off to do my B.Ed [degree.] Life seems to be taking a more definite shape, the direction definitely forwards, shame it’s not a more gold paved path. March 1991 Great Grandfather’s ninety-first birthday. Daughter drew him a picture and we bought two bags of Devon toffees. He loves toffee, whiskey, ...

Ah, the poverty idyll! This is the next snapshot from my diary. Life is simple, I’m grateful for the assistance with rent and food, there’s a beach and being tired is almost irrelevant. And I still have my dream. Of course I’m not worried about the plates! ‘September 1990 The house. We’ve got a house now. We’ve got Housing Benefit and Pauper’s Allowance. I don’t care what they call it, it feeds us, I’m grateful. I stay at home with my daughter and every time the sun shines I take her to the beach. The house is out of town so I do a lot of walking and pram pushing and carrying the shopping and the washing. We’re getting a replacement washing machine soon. I overloaded the old one but it shouldn’t have blown up like that. I’m still a sleepless mother. I’m twenty years old but too tired to feel anything about it. I get to daydream though, I still think about that big family home I want. To get in the spirit we’ve invited some of the family round for Christmas this year; just ...

I was born of average cheerfulness, and have trawled through some troughs and peaks since birth. Some lives are terrible, some lives are wonderful and most lives, like mine, pitch a bit in between. Somewhere in this process I have picked up the habit of being more than averagely happy. I practise at it, by appreciating stuff. I don’t really recall when or how I started this practice, but if I could be more specific then I could share the process, and a world full of deeply happy people is worth aiming for. Deep happiness means you come to terms with bad things- my definition of cure is ‘making better’ not ‘taking away.’ We need challenges and experiences to grow. Enough digression. So, now I want to track back and check how I got here. I don’t much care for dwelling in the past, but this is more like map making, more of an expedition. I have been keeping a diary on and off for some years, in bits of notebooks, which I am slowly transcribing. Already clear that mistakes have b...