cj

I seem to be having a bad week.

In the last two days I have fallen out with my father, my boss and my husband.  There has to be a point where you start to think that it can't all be their fault.  I have also had a short story rejected by a national women's magazine.  Ack.  I'd love to think that that *is* all their fault, and in truth their rejection letter would hint at this, being the worst-laid-out and most unprofessional-looking business letter I have ever seen.  It is very frustrating to be rejected by someone who can't even lay a word-processed letter out correctly, but on the other hand, they publish a magazine and I don't.  So I can be as superior as I like and it won't do me a scrap of good.  I remain unpublished.  I have to assume that this is deserved, but in order to save my sanity, I also have to assume that this is a temporary condition.

My father.  What is there to say?  it was his birthday and I should have known better than be drawn into a conversation on the topic of England being the best country in the world.  I loathe jigoism with every fibre.  I should have steered the topic into less troubled waters, but I didn't.  Don't know how this one is going to pan out.  The way I feel these days I may never see him again.

My boss.  I resigned a few weeks ago.  He rejected the resignation and opined that we could resolve the problems, and although I believed not, I went along with it because.... because I am 54 and have worked for the company for over fourteen years and have some good friends there, and it makes sense to work out our differences if it can be done.  I don't think it can, and it was because I was feeling as though I no longer had much to lose that I was able to speak my mind more freely than usual.  Apart from a feeling of liberation, it had no real positive effect.  The good news is that he will almost certainly not hold it against me.  The bad news is that I undoubtedly will.

My husband.  He has long suffered.  He is a good man who does not deserve the likes of me.

The magazine. Idiots.  It's a good story, I think.  Certainly better than I have read in their past issues.  It is targeted, which is to say that I would not write that sort of thing off my own bat, preferring as I do something more original with maybe a touch of the surreal.  But all the same, I did experience a tingle in the legs as I read the final version for the last time before posting,  which should count for something, right?

The world is looking a little bleak right now.

I've made a lot of new starts in life, many resolutions to change who I am, the way I live, my weight, my job, my outlook, my alcohol consumption.  This may just be another of them, I realise that.  But I'm hopeful - then again, I always am.

This weekend just gone I went on a short residential course at Dial House in Essex, "Ditch Your Day Job, a Permaculture Approach to Quitting the 9 - 5".  I've been to Dial House before, a few years ago, and loved it.  It is a fantastically beautiful place, and the people who live there are interesting and opinionated and very, very individual.  A whole other blog post really.  So I knew I wanted to go back there.  And the more time goes on, the more desperate I am to quit the day job.  And yesterday was my birthday, and of course I should be allowed to do anything I like on my birthday.  So I booked Husband and me (with his agreement) on the course, and we got back last night.

I'm not going to go into massive amounts of detail on exactly what the course comprised, because I don't think it would be particularly edifying.  And I wouldn't want to spoil the anticipation for anyone who may read this and decide to go on one themselves.  But I do want to get my thoughts into written words whilst it's still fresh in my mind.

The course was run by Graham Burnett, Permaculture guru, and Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler magazine amongst other enterprises.  I've met Graham before and like him immensely, but Tom was a new acquaintance and I was very surprised by how young he turned out to be.  It took me until my fifties to decide that the rat race is unendurable (although I've never liked it, I've never discerned any practical alternative, even though (looking back) it has been under my nose for a while now).  Tom picked up on this piece of wisdom in his twenties, and thanks to a fortuitous sacking, put his ideas into practice and has been gainfully "idling" ever since.  Spend a while googling him - it's worth it.

The course seems to have been designed to make the attendees think;  to focus on their current lives and talents and maybe project that into a path forwards, away from the dissatisfactions of life and towards a more fulfilling way of living and earning.  There was little if any of a hippyish flavour to any of this.  Don't mistake me, I'm all for a bit of hippydom and quite envious of anyone who's had the courage to follow that way of life.  But the atmosphere of the course was pretty pragmatic.  We can't do without money altogether, but maybe we can do with less.  Many of the things we buy, commonly, are to reward ourselves for doing our crap jobs.  If we don't have that aggravation in our lives, then quite possibly we don't need so many of these little rewards.  This habit is so common we've even coined a term for it over recent decades - Retail Therapy.  The simple act of buying something makes us feel better.  How grim that we are living lives that require such a panacea.

So think how much of your spending actually supports your ability to do your 9 to five.  There are estimated figures available and Tom did quote them, but I didn't note them down and it doesn't really matter - the principle is what's important.  That's all money you don't need to earn if you're not being made unhappy by your work.

The course wasn't about austerity, at all, but there were sections on thrift which made a lot of sense.  I confess to a small amount of smugness that I was already following the majority of these suggestions.  Pay £2.50 for a coffee?  Never going to happen.  E-ver.

For me, the biggy, the one point that set off rockets in my head, was the concept of multiple income streams.  I have mulled for many, many  hours over recent years, ways in which I could earn money that would involve me in activities that I already enjoy rather than sitting at a computer from 8am to 5pm each day.  But none of them would provide a living wage, even a modest one.  So, hey, why not do several?  See what works, what doesn't, and whilst you're going through this learning period hopefully the things that don't work will become obvious quite quickly and the ones that do will prop up your optimism whilst you develop more ideas.  If you can accumulate a number of revenue streams then you will never be dependent upon just one which may collapse at any moment.  I've been made redundant once in my life and although it wasn't the tragedy for me that it is for a lot of people, it left me with no income and led me into a job that not only did I not enjoy, but which swallowed up 4 hours of each of my days in sitting either on a train or behind the wheel of a car.  Awful, awful.  I panicked, and took the first job I was offered.  I wish I'd had Tom's foresight then.

So, what can I do?  Well I can make simple jewellery and I have sold a few pieces of it.  I am good at spotting typos (in other peoples' work!), and I have a better than average grasp of grammar and spelling.  Not perfect, but better than average, so I'm enrolling on a proof-reading course with a view to seeking freelance work in that field.  I dabble in freeform knitting and crochet, and I have a number of ideas surrounding this particular subject, including making things for sale, maybe running short courses, and preparing kits with materials and an instruction booklet to give newcomers to the hobby a head start.  I have also cherished a desire to write for publication - mainly fiction although I'm open to suggestions - for many years.  Since my teens, really, and I was 53 yesterday (although that feels like a monstrous fiction in its own right).  I have had one timid effort at submitting a story for publication (rejected), but now I'm going to push at that door more firmly.  That is so scary.

Which brings me to the barriers, of which fear is of course the biggest.  Fear of personal failure that may diminish me, but also fear of letting Husband down and leaving him the sole breadwinner - I am BAD, I am LAZY, I am living off SOMEONE ELSE, I can hear the gremlins shrieking in my head, and I've not even started any of this yet.  The next worst barrier is a dreadfully unhealthy attitude towards money.  I'm fine with my employer putting a lump of credit into my bank account each month.  We don't talk about it at all, and usually each January it rises by the inflation percentage of the time - although not for the past 2 Januaries due to the credit crunch.  During a conversation with the MD one day I accidentally gave him the impression that I had money troubles, by a bit of bad phrasing.  He tried to follow that to find out what help I needed, and when I realised what he was thinking I nearly choked myself with the vehemence of my correction of his mistake. Nonono, I'm fine, I'm, not in debt, I earn enough, I'm not looking for a rise, I don't need a rise.  This all goes back to childhood and is unerasable, but I do need to soften it or work around it, or just plain get over it.  Going back to the freeform point, a couple of people at work saw what I was playing around with and each asked me to make a hat for them to give to a relative as a gift.  I was delighted and flattered and I spent many hours making those hats and each was well received.  When those people asked me how much I wanted to be paid, I went bright red and refused point blank to take anything.  It was an act of friendship, making those hats, and I could not have thought of taking money from a friend.  Which was all very nice, but it did mean that for one thing they'd never ask me to make any more for them, and for another, that I didn't get any concrete reward for my efforts.  That's fine all the time I still have the day job, but if I want to diversify then I have to get over the abject horror of taking money for my work.  It was the same when I did house cleaning for a friend when I was unemployed a few years ago.  I nearly died of embarrassment when he handed me those three five-pound notes. 

So I have some big hurdles to haul myself over if I am ever to make the break with employment.  But my mood post-course is positive and warm inside, which is a big improvement on my average mood of the last few years.  I am so sick of whingeing.  I don't what to moan - I want to idle.  I hope that I have the courage.

As usual I can't remember what I've posted here and what I've not, so I'm going to assume that I've not and tell you briefly about our semi-resident hedgehog.

Our garden does not have a good record with hedgehogs.  We don't use any of the things that frequently see the poor little things off, such as netting, slug pellets (should be banned outright IMHO), bonfires, ponds without steps or reckless strimming, and yet over the years we have encountered a distressing number of small corpses, one on occasion a whole litter including mum, with nary a mark on them, so clearly not an attack by badger or fox.

This is a great shame as I am (and we are) - you will probably have gathered - rather keen on animals.  The only thing I'd change about hedgehogs if I could is their fondness for eating slow-worms, whom I also like a great deal, and which we are lucky enough to encounter in our garden from time to time.  But that's nature, and dislike it as I might, I have to accept it because I cannot change it.

So, late last year - about Octoberish at a guess (although if I have told about it here you may find that is wildly inaccurate, and poor old soul that I am, I really can't remember!) I was sitting in the living room fairly late one evening when I heard a loud crunching of cat biscuits from the hall where our two boy cats' dishes are kept.  I took no notice at first.  With three cats in the house, all wont to steal each other's food, loud crunching noises are not a novelty.  It went on for quite a long time, which is more unusual.  Husband, whose chair is behind the door and who consequently (as well as being an old deafy) hears less of what's going on than I, was oblivious.

Without even thinking, I did an automatic head-count of cats.  Three.  All present and (loosely speaking) correct.  I leapt from my chair at a single bound and prepared to do battle with the feline interloper who was stealing my babies' food.  Which is to say that I picked up the tea-towel I'd previously being using as a table-mat, and prepared to throw it.  I may love cats, but I do get heartily sick of un-neutered males coming in, eating our food, terrorising my female (spayed) and pissing up the walls.  My walls.  Which I paid to have papered.  So this sucker was going to eat my tea-towel.

Except when I poked my nose around the door-frame it wasn't a cat at all.  You'd guessed, hadn't you?  It was a hedgehog.  He was standing with his front half in the bowl and stuffing his little hoggy face with Go-Cat's finest.

Our cat-flap stands ever-open, because our disabled cat can’t get through otherwise.  So to a canny wild beast scenting the cat food readily available 24 hours a day, it’s a clear invitation to the feast.  An invitation that did not need to be extended twice to this particular hedgepig.

I'll cut out a section of the story because it's very repetitive.  For the next several weeks he came in most evenings, and most evenings I picked him up in an old towel and ejected him.  He always pretended to be scared of me, although he did stop bothering to roll up after a while, so he can't have been that frightened.  Also, if I was such a big, scary monster, why did he keep coming back?

He even lived in the hall for a short while.  I discovered this when I found all his little (and in some cases, not so little) poos under the dresser one evening when I hauled him out to put him in the garden.  This did not endear him to Husband, who is not quite so enchanted by fauna as I, and who takes a dim view of excrement in his living space.  No poetry of soul, some people.

I took advice and weighed hedgehog.  He was well over the minimum bodyweight required to survive the winter without hypothermia.  I took further advice.  Apparently cat biscuits are good for them because they help to keep their teeth and gums healthy, a diet of worms and slugs and a life free of toothbrushes and fluoride not being ideal for a Pepsodent smile.

I bought a purpose-built hedgehog box from my local wildlife hospital, on the assurance that he’d not be interested in coming inside if he had such a luxury abode outside.  This proved to be utter nonsense, as I could have predicted.

Then suddenly, after one particularly firm ejection, when I had first to prise him out from under our cooker (a process that he did not seem to enjoy, but which I’m certain cannot have hurt him), he disappeared.  The hedgehog house stayed empty all through the winter, and the cat’s bowls went sadly unmolested.  I felt pretty bad about this.  Would it have killed me to let him stay half-way under the cooker until he was ready to leave? 

Weeks then months went by.  It was spring, the night was coming later each day, the garden was turning into a jungle, slugs were everywhere (mainly in our vegetable patch).  We could really have used a hedgehog.

And, miraculously, after all hope had gone, one evening when I heard crunching from the hall, there were three cats in the living room.  I scooped hog up into the old towel that had been waiting for him all winter and took him in to show Husband.  Husband was mildly pleased (although not as excited as I), hog was firmly rolled up and only relented far enough to open one resentful eye and fix it on us.  I tucked him under my arm, grabbed the box of Go-cat and took him out to his box.  He went into one side, a big heap of biscuits into the other, and I left him to it, pleased as anything that he was back.

He doesn’t come into the house very often these days.  Why would he, with all those juicy invertebrates out there ripe for the feasting?  He does sleep in his box several times a week, but he clearly has other abodes because he’s not always there.  I’m fairly sure he’s a male because he’s a good size and there’s been no sign of a litter of babies, which is a shame really because I’d have loved that.

The day before yesterday I dropped a small pile of biscuits into his ante-chamber, as a treat and a thank you for not coming in and pooing in my hall (or worse – kitchen, which was his favourite spot for a while.  That tested even my affection a bit).  Then last night I checked on him, and the biscuits were untouched.  Oh lord – was he not well?  I could clearly see him embedded in the straw of his sleeping compartment.  I jiggled the box slightly and he twitched, but not much.  So I prodded him a bit – carefully so as not to hurt him or allow him to spine me.  He had a good wriggle about at that, and turned a watery, baleful eye on me before snuggling further down under the covers.

He’s fine.  He’s just not greedy is the conclusion I have reached.  Having sated himself on his natural diet, he’s too much of a gentleman to carry on eating just because food is handed to him.  A lesson I would do well to emulate.  So if he does resume his forays into the human house, I’ll know that he needs the food otherwise he’d not be there and I’ll let him have his fill.

Bless him.  I just wish he wasn’t such a total flea-bag.

As well as a trip to the zoo (which was lovely, but almost certainly of no interest to anyone but me), my birthday brought me a Wii console and WiiFit balance board.  Now I was initially torn over this - I mean who wouldn't like to have a go on a Wii?  And to be bought something as special as this by a loved one is quite moving.  But on the other hand I have recently resolved to live more simply and this does not involve more electronic gadgets, rather the opposite.

But when faced with this fait accompli, I shrugged off the "less gadgets" reaction and went with the "oooh, I've got a Wii" one.

And I have to say that so far it's been a joy.  I should also mention at this point that I also (asked for and) received a book by an American doctor and nutritional expert by the name of Neal Barnard - "Breaking the Food Seduction".  I read it in two days flat and it is only the second book about diet ("diet" as in food intake, rather than being on a reducing diet) that I've finished and taken on board.  Usually I lose patience with them, but this one makes huge amounts of sense to me.  I doubt I'll be using the recipes, which are quite American in their measures and ingredients, but the explanations about food cravings and why I have them (and especially the parts about how I am not after all a loathsome sloth with the willpower of a teenage sex maniac) are such a relief, you can't imagine.

The book advocates a low-fat vegan diet, so I guess that if anyone actually reads this blog entry they will likely stop here, but as I am already vegan, the switch across to low-fat is as much of an effort as I am required to make.

I used to be quite careful to avoid fat and stick to whole versions of foods such as bread and pasta, but my focus has always been on slimming rather than health, and to be honest as the pounds mounted up whatever I did, the good intentions have slipped and my diet has been rather too indulgent for some time now.  Having read the book (and had my blood pressure taken a few months ago - eek) my motivation has shifted from wanting to be slimmer so I can waddle down the street without feeling like an eyesore, to wanting to be slimmer so I don't have a stroke next week, or give the doctor one the next time she sees my BP.  I want to be healthier.  I want to live a long, and above all healthy life, preferably with my Husband who is currently aiming for death by chocolate in the not too distant future (he's 56 in a couple of weeks and diabetic).

I won't bang on about the book and what it says, because you probably don't want to hear.  But I have been following its advice since Monday (it's now Thursday morning) and I've lost between 2 and 3lbs.  This is of course water and glycogen and cannot be counted, but whatever it consists of, to see the pounds disappear from the scales, and to know that I have done this without reducing the quality of my life or further endangering my health is very uplifting.

The Wii has helped in this enormously.  I've had people tell me (mainly Mike, as it happens) that exercise is self-absorbing; whatever time you spend on it, it repays by making you capable of performing day to day tasks with greater efficiency, thus creating precious time rather than draining it.  I believed him, I really did, I just wasn't convinced that I was capable of achieving this effect, being as I neither enjoy nor am very good at physical exertion.  Even at age 12 I was incapable of running (jogging, really) half a mile without collapsing in a heaving, wheezing pile of tomato-cheeked exhaustion.  Not good.

But the Wii has (so far) changed all this.  The most modest achievement is celebrated (although not nauseatingly so) and it would seem that I do after all have a talent - I'm good at jogging on the spot, apparently.  I can't see any way of making my fortune at that, sadly, but I've not given up hope yet.  I did a Wii "round the island" jog this morning, which took 13 minutes and was something of a challenge.  I imagine that it's a mile, given that the best time I've ever managed to jog/walk a mile in real life is indeed 13 minutes.  I felt very pround of myself when I'd finished, also very hot and sticky, but you definitely don't need to know that.

I'm not going to bang on about the Wii here either, because you've either got one or can look it up if you're interested.  For me the best part is that it starts you off slow, congratulates you when you've achieved something, and provides an authoritative voice as to what you should be working towards and concentrating on.  It's nothing short of inspiring.

So between the book and the Wii, I'm feeling more optimistic about my health than I have in ages.  

I expect I'll be hit by a bus any minute now.

It is my birthday today.

I am going to the Isle of Wight, for a day at the zoo and I am excited.

I am 52 today.

I know I said I was going to be posting here more frequently, but even I didn't really believe me when I wrote it.  I'm inconsistent, I have no routine, and I'm sure I should have been born in one of those countries where manana is the order of the day.  I *always* put things off until tomorrow, and I never learn from the scrapes in which this often lands me.  I think at my age I just have to accept that this is the way I am and try to turn it to my advantage in some way.  Not sure how at present.

I've not long returned from France, a trip that I did not want to make for a number of reasons, but which of course I enjoyed when it actually came to it.  Not the journeys, which seem to be getting harder (although by a near-miraculous and certainly unique fortune of timing, we managed to be coming out of a Carrefour supermarket just as a convoy of irritated French farmers with several trailers full of cow shit were going in), but the week itself.  We even had a sunny day at the beginning, almost another first, but Normandy lived up to its usual weather standard by throwing a massive storm at us the next night and it never really dried out properly until the day we came home. 

Our coming homes days are nearly always marked by glorious weather of some sort.  The only decent snow we've seen there was on a coming home day.  The heavens opened and threw down great piles of massive flakes, instantly further beautifying the already stunning landscape, and totally obscuring the valley from view.  It felt as though we were the only people in the world as we trudged through ankle-deep snow between increasingly-damp car and increasingly-muddy cottage.  How we rejoiced.  Well I did at first, because it was indescribably beautiful, but Husband did not, because it was indescribably irritating.  Had it been a staying day, we'd have lit the woodburner, broken out the vegetable soup and taken a hundred photographs before opening a good bottle of red.  As it was not, we got wet and a bit annoyed, Husband because it was cold and damp and the windscreen kept fogging up, me because I love snow and was being dragged away from it.  This time's coming home day was glorious with sun, and again I was annoyed because I was being dragged away from it.  I wish coming home days could just be decently overcast and boring, so that Normandy is not so hard to leave.

I did manage to get some writing done though.  I was determined that I should.  I set up a small table in front of an upstairs window and placed the laptop and keybpoard on it.  I can't type on a laptop keyboard, it's no good.  I find that my typing skills are not improving with age, and that any deviation from the normal desktop keyboard renders me almost incapable of typing any words that actually exist in the English language.  I also, for some reason even I cannot explain, took with me a small joss-stick holder in the shape of a dwarf in a nightshirt which usually sits on the windowsill beside my home computer.  Inexplicably, I felt it important that I should have some link between my temporary office and my office at home, where I do most of my writing (such as it is, these days).

I also took "Bird by Bird" with me, for inspiration and a bit of an arse-kicking.  There's no-one quite like Anne Lamott for making me feel that a) I *can* write (whether I can write well is another matter entirely, but for now that is unimportant) and b) I *should*, indeed *must* write.  So I *did* write.  I didn't worry about subject matter, I simply wrote, much as I have been writing this blog entry, letting it unfold as it will.  The word count is not huge, and I only managed two sessions in the week, but believe me that is a vast improvement of what I've been achieving at home.  Unfortunately, the view from the window was not as inspirational as I'd remembered, because basically all I could see was a row of damson and hazel trees twelve feet away, so basically just a bunch of leaves at this time of year.   But it was prettier than I have from my office window at home, so I should not complain.  And I've left my dwarf behind, which is a shame because I rather miss the little fellow. But I did write, and I could write, and even if I say so myself, I quite like some of it.  It's not earth-shattering, and it's not fiction (which is ideally what I'd like to aim at), but it's progress of a sort.  And best of all, I keep getting ideas of what to put in it next, which is very encouraging and almost unheard of for me.  Normally I've not a clue what I'm going to write, and even if I have I usually find that I'm wrong and that I write something else entirely when it actually comes to putting finger to keyboard.  So, overall I'm rather glad I went to France, even if the journey each way was completely knackering.

There was definitely something else I was going to say here, before I started rambling on - oh yes, a complete change of subject.  Battlestar Galactica - wow, what a series.  I have a sporadic passion for science fiction, but for some reason this programme passed me by when it aired.  I'm really glad that it did, because now I can work my way through the dvds at my own pace - I am far too impatient to wait from one week to the next to see what happens.

We've had a couple of false starts watching it, because Husband is not as enamoured of BG as I, so I started back at the beginning on my own with the miniseries and have just got to the second disk of series two.  My gods, but it's gripping.  I am not a critic and I'm not keen on analysing works of fiction so I'm not going to try to comment on it in any detail, but if you are at all sf-inclined and you are yet to encounter Battlestar Galactica, I can thoroughly recommend it for its originality (odd, considering that it's sort-of a remake), it's power to grip, and the quality of just about everything to do with it, from scripting to acting to special effects.  Although with a tip of my hat to Mike, they do make one fundametal error of physics about which he wrote beautifully in a blog post which I believe has since been lost to us.  Nothing makes a noise in the vacuum of space.  But I can certainly forgive this small case of poetic license for a series that makes me feel so brave and adventurous and as though I could take on the world or the cylons or anything.  That's what's so great about BG - it draws you in and makes you *feel* rather than just spectate.  And an added bonus (one which is actually quite important for me) it kind of makes me feel as though mankind is a species worth fighting to preserve.  Only kind of, but that is a start of sorts.