In the bleak mid-winter

Although the writing as languished for a bit I have been thinking about my new opus. I've jotted down some thoughts and have ideas of the experiences my hero will have to endure, but need to read more on early 17C life at sea to get all the sweaty details.

Aside from the lack of writing I've kept occupied with knitting; the first spell of knitting for months and I'm enjoying it. It'll feel like a slog again when my hands start hurting, I see there's a bit of swelling between the knuckles already, but for now it's good to do.


I feel cheerful and quite at peace with the world despite the rain and the cold, I'm counting my blessings. The dog conversely is getting to be a total grouch. He grumbles and sulks a LOT. I guess it's partly due to aching joints, which I believe aren't as painful as they are annoying to him, but more to do with the limited trips outside. We did venture out to one of his favourite places yesterday, but the ferocious wind and sleety rain made for a short trip. He can and does sleep much of the time. We don't have that in common at present, I seem to stay awake late every night then struggle to function in the afternoons. It's due to the lack of fresh air and insufficient exercise I'm sure.

Roll on SPRING!!

Metamorphosis????

I think I'm going through a phase.

I seem to have too much essential stuff to do, I want to be doing other stuff but can't seem to manage it and as a result I've spent a couple of weeks chasing my tail.

I need to organise myself more efficiently, but that in itself seems hard to do, just the effort required to think up a system of time management seems to be beyond me.
For years I've followed the Peg Bracken school of housekeeping; her philosophy was "If you have loads to do and you don't think you can finish everything by doing one thing at a time, you should make a start on each thing at the same time".
Her argument lies in you being compelled to finish all your tasks if for example: you've already sifted the flour into a bowl to make a cake AND you've got the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the floor AND you've already threaded up the sewing machine and put the material ready beside it. That system has stood me in good stead ever since a friend bought me her 'I Hate to House-keep' and 'I Hate to Cook' books as a wedding present nearly 50 years ago.
Now it fails me. I find I either just step around the unfinished tasks and stop seeing them or I cancel the whole day and go out because I don't give a damn.
So here I am surrounded by incomplete tasks that are driving me up the wall and I can't go out to escape because the weather is awful. Instead of knuckling down I start doing something irrelevant and unnecessary like on-line shopping.

In the past when everything has gotten on top of me I've usually ended up throwing heaps of stuff away, getting a new job or moving house. Most of those options are no longer available and it's only about 4 months since I had my last clear-out. Oh and 'clearing out' makes me uncomfortable because it creates empty space that I feel the need to fill as soon as possible with more stuff. I made the interesting discovery yesterday that I'd thrown away the power transformer for the volume control on my ultra basic hi-fi. It's just cost me £20 to replace it.

My hi-fi system is a joke; I have a cd player which ought to be part of a proper big set up; after buying it I discovered that I couldn't control the volume of the music without buying a separate little box with a volume control knob on it. How daft is that?????. Anyway I got one and instead of buying speakers, with all the fuss about which type and whether they should be wall-mounted or floor standing, I bought headphones that plug into the box and which I can also use with the tv and the pc. My late Beloved must be constantly amused by my ignorance of music playback technology after his efforts to educate me over long years.

Yesterday I started going through the collection looking for one particular cd. It took me nearly an hour to find it due to the sudden realisation about the power supply transformer; I've been playing music via my pc for several months and had unplugged everything else when I last re-arranged the furniture and threw out 'junk'.

So I hope I'm going through a phase rather than losing the remaining shreds of my intelligence; perhaps this is a transitional period and I may metamorphose into a new bright and shiny creature. One should never lose hope!

Addendum to Yesterday

In the afternoon of yesterday I was waiting for my grocery delivery and it was getting very close to end of the slot time. I was becoming irritable:
because they were verging on late,
because the dog was anxious to go out but had to wait,
because it'd had been a altogether frustrating day.
I hate it when I'm researching stuff, think I've found a great source, download it and skim through it only to find that it wasn't written from the angle I thought or that it only touched on my interest tangentially. I tend to make 'Grr' noises a lot when that happens and yesterday was a multi-Grr day.

At last the food arrived about 10 minutes past the appointed slot and I prepared to make a sarcastic attack on the delivery guy. I looked out the window, saw he wasn't in the first flush of youth (to be kind) and decided to be nice instead. I'm glad I was pleasant because when he'd brought in the last load of supplies he handed me a bottle of champagne and said that was a New Year's gift from the supermarket for shopping with them in 2013. I went suddenly all 'Aaawww'.


Later in the evening I was reading news articles online and came across the phrase 'Polar Vortex' for the first time. I get curious about all sorts of things so I started reading scientific articles on Arctic oscillation etc etc.
My interest was peaked because I made a start on a post-apocalyptic SF novel several years ago and the trigger for that plot was a sudden onset Ice-Age. I abandoned it reluctantly when the scientific community en-masse went into Warming mode.
Most of the articles I read last night were explaining the current big freeze in the USA as part of the standard Global Warming scenario for our future, but there were one or two who made tentative reference to a possible sudden onset Mega-freeze.

So today I've dug out that old plot and I'm seriously thinking this could be a good one to develop again.

Mostly dithering

I'm experiencing familiar feelings....confusion, mild anxiety, moderate excitement and so on. I haven't yet knuckled down to a writing routine yet this year so I flit from one small task to another, stray thoughts bounce around in my head and if I don't write them down instantly they disappear really fast. I am not able to concentrate on anything.
I had a message today that's made me happy, something good happened somewhere because I (and lots of others) gave a little money so I feel good too.

Thinking about God.

Thinking about God I've wondered recently if you get what you ask for rather than what you deserve.

I don't mean Christian reward and punishment. I mean if you choose not to believe in the existence of God then there will be Nothing after death , but if you want God in your life and after it you have to make an effort to bring Him in. I've thought for some time that if there is nothing at all after death then it doesn't matter what you believe, but if you believe God is real then it certainly does.

When Tony died I ranted at God and felt let down by Him; it was as if I'd made some kind of deal in my own head that I'd consent to believe in God because He was treating me well and I was happy. I used to get up in the mornings and walk the dogs up the mountain and I'd always thank God, although I called him Zeus because that seemed more appropriate. I was really at peace with God for the first time in my life and so content and happy to have it all.

I rejected God afterwards.I don't remember blaming God I just accused Him of not saving Tony; for years after I couldn't talk to God or even think about Him. He was cruel and guilty of not noticing or caring about me, but I kept getting the strongest feeling that Tony still existed somewhere.... so I talked to him. The Moon became a symbol of this new relationship we had. There were long periods I couldn't feel Tony around and those were times when I was at my lowest, overloaded with grief and a long way down the deepest hole. The times when I felt close to Tony were days when I felt I could cope, that I could wait for us to be together again no matter how far off that time might be. Seeing the Moon acted like a tonic on my spirits; the Moon is often invisible here because we get a lot of cloudy skies, so to see the Moon at night and especially to see it in the early morning was a great boost and it still is a wonder to me.

I began to envisage my next meeting with Tony as happening in some kind of virtual reality. I'd die and then I'd open my eyes to find myself on a sandy beach at night with stars everywhere, and moonlight of course. I'd be standing on the edge of a calm, dark sea with little ripples of foam moving along the beach. Then I'd see Tony and he'd come to me and I'd bury my face in his chest as he held me tight.
That's a vision that brings me immense comfort and I long for it to be real. If it's a only a dream I pray there's some degree of truth in it.

At first the vision stopped at the point of meeting Tony because my emotions took over, my imagination broke down trying to think what could follow on from that and I didn't want anything more anyway. I'd be happy to stand there in Tony's arms for the rest of eternity.

Then I thought of us walking into the sea together and disappearing into the life force that was the only way I could think of God.

It's taken several more years to think of God in a personal way.
I was brought up to the judaeo-christian idea of God as a just but stern father figure. A God you could worship and obey and fear.
I couldn't love a God like that,but I did manage some love for Jesus but never really grasped or liked the idea of the Trinity.

Then I found Rumi. He showed me a different God; a friend, a lover and helper, a God you could feel very, very close to.
I'd stumbled on Rumi shortly after Tony died and took his love poetry as being about love between man and woman and that was wonderful enough. Intellectually I was aware that Rumi also talked about divine love using analogies but I didn't see how he could use terms of intimacy and affection and be talking about God. I can't say that the penny dropped quickly, but I've read a lot of Rumi and now I get it, well I get a large chunk of it. Some of Rumi's metaphors are too Islamic to be clear to me. I don't have the cultural background to understand all the references surrounding a medieaval persian Sufi mind. But Rumi has helped me learn to love God. I don't have the ecstasy but I understand the warmth and I feel some of the desire. I now think of Tony as now being in God and of my love for Tony being love in the direction of God because God is Love and His love is often given to us through human love like Tony's love for me. I can't get that better phrased as yet.

To come back to the beginning I know that I want to improve my relationship with God. I doubt that I can reach the levels of love that Rumi
did, I have no Shams and I'm still too ensnared by old awe and too much analysing but I want God. Maybe I'll get what I want eventually.

Currents at sea and in plots

Trying to give some new structure to the WW2 effort. I'm definitely dropping one of the MCs; I never really related to her. I think I want to write more about the childhood of the two remaining girls, it's fraught with interesting Potential for an unhappy childhood. I want them to have something to fight against so they'll really want to change their lives and the war will be the agent that enables them to do that.
So I need to re-do the outline , then write the new material then see how it works with the old stuff. It may be that I have to scratch a lot , but never mind eh?

As for my piratical effort I think I need to start the story close to the end of it. I'll introduce Farid as the successful man and then go back to explore how he got there. Then I can return to his present day and put in the stuff that will destroy his happy world. I don't think it will have a happy ending but we'll see.
It may be daft to work on two stories at the same time, but that method has worked for me with other kinds of project; the theory being that as I bog down with one I can flip over to the other, after all they're very different stories.

I read some really good stuff yesterday about winds, birds at sea and so forth. I got hold of this book published in the 1940's about how to survive at sea and find your way back if you're lost. It was aimed at crews who'd been shipwrecked during the war but has stacks of useful stuff about 'primitive' navigation,happily the author recognised the sophisticated thinking of early seafarers and saw that such techniques were still helpful.

More storms ahead

The weather forecast is bad again and it's disconcerting how smug I feel living on top of a windy hill and not on a flood plain as so many of my fellow citizens do. Another failure for my resolve to care about humanity at large.

Since WW2 that we've embarked on massive building schemes on land that was always unsuitable in the past. Collectively we have no sense of history, only in 1953 a huge storm and tidal surge ravaged the East coast and I think we've built on every square foot of that land since with no consideration of it happening again.
There seems to be a disconnect between us and our environment too, is it because most people live in towns and cities that individuals go paddling on New Year's Eve while a storm rages on the beach they've gone to visit? A man died, swept off the beach, rescuers put themselves in harms way for two days trying to find him and nobody comments on the foolishness of the revellers.
People buy dogs and then think the animals can be treated like toys, alternately ignored then pulled about by small children. A child gets bitten and dies and so does the dog ...........none of it makes sense to me.

I want to be granted a New Year Wish and that is one for everyone to use common sense in their actions to avoid harm as well as consideration for others. Unfortunately I don't think the Wish Fairy is available right now.

MY New Year resolutions are already in jeopardy.

I've not read all the books I promised myself I would, partly because I've been so heavily into Rumi of late but also because I do most of my reading in bed. Reading in a warm comfy bed is a good idea if you go to bed early, I don't. I take the dog out last thing so stay in my day clothes all evening, thus by the time I do get to bed I can only manage a page or two before sleep wins. This can't be the only reason I'm behind with my reading, but it sounds like a passable excuse.
If I had the attention span of a gnat I'd be reading right now but I'm shattered today because the local firework guerrillas were still going strong at 0130 this morning. I live in a quiet suburb of moderately good housing; there are no children rampaging the streets and few joyriders, but at the slightest excuse local morons fire off salvos of loud ordnance for hours at a stretch.

Why do they do it? You need lots of cash to buy fireworks and complete hearing loss to be close to the things when they go off. The star bursts and enormous bangers seem to emanate from a gated community down by the water; last night two of the explosions were loud enough to rattle the windows at a distance of half a mile.

I am trying to be loving and NICE to everyone this year, but if someone gave me a couple of hand grenades right now I'd promptly go down there and repay their kind consideration.........