Cowboy country

The nest is looking decidedly tatty I must say. Miss M is heading south west. Her solo adventure begins with a pre-dawn check in tomorrow and ends on June 2nd sometime after 8 in the evening……not entirely sure I am ready for this.

Have received honest and good counsel from the divine Miss D as well as others and yet there is this strange physiological tremor that no good sense can stabilise. I felt the same when Boy headed not-so-way-out west in January and the saddest part is that your body does adjust, even if at the time you think it never will. Mind schmind! It’s the body that feels the aches and pains, and for me the sudden realisation that you are holding your breath as it is so sore sometimes to breathe in.

The big, slow cartwheel that starts with that dreadful realisation that you will never really be alone again (oh how foolish we are) and seems to take forever to turn through twenty-four hours when you are suddenly stuck firmly at home, drained, bored and yet feeling desperately like you should be grateful for the joy of parenthood…. if you haven’t felt it you haven’t felt it – the pull between exhilaration and devastation, the whole experience of having your entire personality subsumed by the demands of someone you made out of sex! How does this work?

And the wheel turns and years pass and photographs remind you of events you would rather forget and of occasions you swore you never would and suddenly the wheel lurches out of a boggy patch and you missed part of the first year of school as you got busy with your own life for a minute and then the wheels seem a bit oiled and you start trundling down a slight incline and you run along beside, still laughing, but getting a bit worried as the cart is so terribly heavy…

Then something in your life, relationship or work takes precedence and you let go of the cart and realise that the pace is ok, you can stroll along next to it quite happily for a few years, probably because you started exercising again and aren’t a baby blob any more. Well, that’s where I’ve been for a while, content, in tandem, happy to leave the track and go off on missions into the countryside and confident the cart is there, occasionally even hopping on for a lift these days which is great.

But suddenly the cart feels motorised and I am firmly on horseback and will never keep up if I try to stay alongside……

Help me be the one who with the cool air of Clint Eastwood, stops, looks, then calmly turns my horse away from the beaten track and swings off across the veld to start enjoying the feel and smell of outdoors, cutting my own new path through the long, dry winter grass. Godspeed Miss M.

Tail spinning

Is everyone my age becoming more and more pensive and philosophical (for this read insane) or is it only us chosen few? I cannot stop living my life without a subtext of rather serious significance underlining all my decisions and actions. As I whiz out west (as is my wont these days) I find myself considering my choice of car music, in case I end up tortoise-like on the side of the N3 with paramedics in abundance, snappy little jaws of life at the ready - as I would hate my final moments to be spent bleary eyed, overhearing some dullard bitching about the classic country music rocking my soon to be - disappearing world. I bet you couldn’t imagine anyone using the words rock and country music in the same sentence…..hah, you live and learn, baby.

I have to check myself, “Myself” I say in my strictest tone, “you cannot base choice of music decisions on potential musical tastes (or lack thereof) of some imaginary-in-some-potential-future blokes in unflattering navy jumpsuits with green lapels – it doesn’t make sense”. What does? Perhaps it is the being exactly half of ninety that is doing it, I take a pain killer while thinking…perhaps the pain is trying to tell me something and I should wait and see what happens to it instead of killing it off at the off, if you know what I mean.

Before the accusatory cries of ‘inherited hypochondria’ fill the room, let me say that health and sickness, life and death are not the only cards in this peculiar hand I find myself holding. Love and hate, relationships both good and bad are also in the pack as well as chance, luck and a sense of eternal hope. The layers seem to be peeling back, like the cracked end of a piece of slate, everything has a sense of significance and import that makes even the shortest interactions quite tiring. While looking at someone during conversation I feel compelled to try and hold my eyes still, I am aware of how my gaze is slowly drifting sideways like those little, black floaters on the eye, and I have to work hard to look as interested as possible for what seems like an interminable length of time – while thinking, if I let my eyes draw breath here, they’ll think I am not interested and then they’ll dislike me and then x y or z will happen and I end up having a long counter-conversation inside myself and of course you know what happens next, you lose the thread of their monologue and then starts the ‘they can see the blank look behind my eyes…who the hell is Aunty Rissole?....what the hell should I reply?.....’. You get the picture. Amazingly this happens with even your dearest ones, it does not necessarily indicate a lacklustre compadre.

It is just the internal monologue on steroids, we all have that inner voice, usually a soft whisper and according to those far more evolved that I, this useful tool can help to keep balance and perspective in one’s life, but when the inner voice takes over as an integral part of one’s every waking moment, an hilarious sound track on occasion to this tedium that can be daily life, perhaps it’s time to head for the hills and kick back for a week or two – for less than this have woman throughout history been burnt at the stake!

Cycles

I feel it is important at this stage to ask all men to look away now, as enlightened and modern as you may be.......

Yes, this is a delicate one, I have (you may have noticed) been putting it off, but I feel as sensitive as this might be I need to raise the subject of the cyclical pattern of unfortunate events (sorry Lemony).

Even went as far yesterday (pantheist me!) of buying a rather gorgeous chunk of labradorite to wear around my rather chunky neck. Aye, therein lies part of the root of this story...... My life, like most womens', is ruled by cycles beyond my control, although I have read all the literature I can stomach (which is a LOT) on more soya, less sugar, more unrefined foods, less fat, more wine, more chocolate, more dumplings...... ok, so I didn't read enough - I think we are more pulled and pushed by the waters within us that I ever heretofore believed (that is a word apparently).

For example, at the ripe and cynical old age of 45, I begin to get prancy and flighty every 28 days or so, it is true, I start thinking of boys I have known, pulling my tummy in in a rather exaggerated way, conning myself that I still look good for my age and all that cobblers and feeling quite upbeat and yes, dare I say it, even saucy! Then of course, the brain kicks in and I realise, my god, I must be at that scary part of the cycle when one is (reputedly) ready for anything, 10 - 14 days after the onset of the previous period. How can this be that this many generations into evolution and we are just little creatures, ruled so strongly by moon and tide?

Then the inevitable resultant slide takes hold, and the other stuff in one's life that feels a bit difficult and stressful on a normal day, starts to feel overwhelming and intensely complicated, resulting in a few days of such a horrid feeling of all one's emotional worries becoming insurmountable. I also feel a strange furnace start burning in my centre, and have a few days of as few clothes as possible while everyone else is cool and calm - this is physiological as well as psychological, perhaps a precursor to a new phase. Everything is just a bit louder and a bit brighter but not in a good way, and I find that a cool breeze, being out of doors and a soft-focus, long-distance view over some trees or fields or the beach is the best way to diffuse this intesity. Town life with it's noise and dust and close-up work is very taxing, nay, trying, nay, immpossible.

And then the earth spins a few more times and then you feel 'normal' again, and unlike when you are young, the whole period lark is so neither here nor there and uncomplicated without all the attached embarrassment that it passes in a flash and you wake up one morning and think, I quite like being alive, why did I think I didn't? I can't remember why I ever felt so bad, did I ever really feel so low? And order, of a sort, comes into your brain again, and determination to eat more healthily and do more exercise and see that friend that you have meaning to see and deal with that admin you have meaning to deal with and suddenly, I am practical, capable me again! Hurrah!

And I presume that I am so buoyed by my own strength and confidence that 10 days later I become silly and dizzy and ever-so sexy again!

The critical thing is to accept the link, not just to think that one is mad, or strange or possessed. The kind thing is to realise that technology has outstripped biology and we live in an environment (I know I do) not conducive to calm and rest and perspective, we ARE the rats in the 1970s maze, watched by men in unflattering white coats and those matching black-rimmed glasses, with the chunky clipboards and biros! We have been dropped by an acceleration of technology into these things called towns and cities where strangers miles and miles away grow food to feed us for which we hand over meaningless representative material called money.

So, labradorite at the ready, I will attempt this month to remember that we, Homo sapiens, are only 150 000 years old, which is too young to expect my body, and yours, to have forgotten it's place on the planet that once was.

Trouble in Paradise

There is trouble in paradise and it is a good thing....

Paradise is labelled such by those who are getting their own way and having the best time, and before you think this is a feminist (dirty word!) tirade in the vein of 'I am either a nag or a doormat', well it is a bit but not wholly. My life is wonderful, well liveable, if things are going my way, I freely admit it. I prefer - as do we all - to be doing stuff we enjoy with people we like without the hassles and hiccups of other peoples' needs coming into the equation.

If Doris and Jimmy (I laughingly quote Big J here) are talking to Doris plus1 and Jimmy plus1 in separate places, and giving sides of some story on the domestic front, Doris plus 1 will always see Doris' side (or else Doris'll get a new plus 1) and Jimmy plus 1 will see Jimmy's view as the fair and balanced one. Could be gender, could be loyalty, could be fear! But were a panel of independent experts to judge a given situation you would see that generally, it seems that there are patterns. Good, kind and hard-working people get taken advantage of, those who will do anything for a quiet life also lose out on occasion. If you never stand up and say that you need stuff and you cannot cope with the situation as it is, it will continue to be assumed that all is well and you wouldn't be doing what you do if you didn't like it.

WRONG (dong) people do good and kind things because they want to and are moved to, but the cumulative effect of being taken for granted, or more accurately, the stuff you take on being taken for granted over and over builds up in a person and eventually, if you feel you can, you explode and have the mother of all tantrums and perhaps go to Montana USA to ride horses - and everybody thinks you are over reacting because a short trip to the shops (for e.g) is not the end of the world/too much to ask etc.

But there are those who don't go pop, and that is a worry - where does all that cortisol and adrenaline go?

Would that I could invent something along the lines of the "naughty chair" or the famed "time out" for such people (I know a few), a "paradise lost" sort of device so that those around you would take VERY seriously the emotional land you were hurtling towards in your brakeless modern mental machine.

Wear loose clothing, use drugs if necessary and chill the f out - try and let the world turn without you tonight (gotta love ALW) Ok, so it's Andrew Lloyd Webber....

Sea Shanties

Sunday night and all the talk is of moving across the seas to other lands. QB arrived back from Shropshire/New York/Shropshire (that well-known tourist route) full of talk of blowing this rice paddy and heading out to the old country where she will be better looked after in her dotage by the State than here. This could be true but I feel if she could have arrived back in the Rural Idyll without the horrific news of increased plant fascist action - she would have thought twice and not just the once.

Miss M and J think she is mad and are not happy at all about the suggestion but we'll have to wait and see. Also Square J. sent me an email detailing up-coming departure, he just wants to get out, which all in all leads me to feel somewhat unsettled as these are sane people, not mad, reactionary ones....godammit these are MY people!

I gave the tree statistic (again - God love you Elsa Pooley) in my rationale for never leaving, you know, the 'there are 780+ species of tree in this province alone and 78 in the whole of Europe including the UK' enough to make a grown woman cry with either delight or desperation if you were imminently climbing on a plane with a one-way ticket tucked up your jumper......

So there it is, the week starts in a sombre mood - but the moon is thin and neat, the winter air is balmy and I saw so many interesting creatures this weekend....including E whose birthday it was on Saturday! Happy Birthday you completely mad woman. Looking for signs and significance in everything, on the way home from a last-minute frantic provisions grab, decided I wish I believed enough in something to feel slightly more secure - said out loud on spotting said thin moon - I think I'll be a pantheist, and promptly almost ran over a rat! Dear me, challenges abound. xx

Procrastination is the thief of domesticity

Well, we were given due warning about the water being turned off from 18.00 until 04.00 so I roared into action (for the second time in 2 weeks as we were given the same warning the other day which was then cancelled) and this time I impressed even myself.

Directly to shops on the way home, no spinning of wheels but defintely speedier than usual. Provisions bought, I headed home with imminent threat of drought hanging over me like the sword of Damocles.

No collapsing in a heap and bargaining for tea with Miss M, but directly into kitchen, kettle filled (to the brim), apron on, vegetables prepared, dog food defrosted, small bath run in my bathroom for eventualities like the water not coming on in the morning and faces to be washed etc.

Meal pre-prepared and left uber-hausfrau-like on stove top with clean dishtowel over it to preserve image of domestic efficiency rather than keep off insects. Then I filled 2 large jugs with clean water (more checked dishtowels in situ) and preprepared water bottles for school and work the next day. Then fed the dogs (including antibiotics inserted into deepthroated geriatric dog to keep nasty long-term infection at bay) after which I could still scrub hands obsessively for at least 2 minutes........time was ticking by, could the Municipality be relied on to stick to the agreed time.

Miss M. off to bath with strict instructions to leave water in for flushing of lavatory and other thrilling grey water necessities and sitting room tidied for no reason other than that I had all this time on my hands - where had it come from? Then, kitchen immaculate, so much so that as I was going to put the oven on for cauliflower and broccoli cheese, I whipped up (yes, I whipped) a rice pudding which I haven't made in years. Why rice pudding, you may ask, well I think it was a combination of all this time available and all the dishtowels.... Right, off to shower and wash hair and cut toe nails and oil body and moisurise face and ...hell, what other future torment can I prepare for?

By 17.30 Miss M. was enquiring about supper so by 18.00 we were eating. You see the pattern? For a serial procrastinator, nay, a pathological procrastionator - all this planning gave me an entirely new take on the short hours between hometime and bedtime (usually about 23.00). By 20.39 I was in my basket and completely exhausted from all the unusual activity at an accelerated speed.

Think I need to ask the powers that be for some of those scary lamp post posters that threaten lights off or water off or nuclear war or whatever - just to kick me into gear and help me realise my full potential as a domestic goddess.

Chronicle Ironical

To those of you who commute and travel more or less the same route every day, have any of you got those regulars along your route like I have? There is the man in his 60s who walks against traffic on part of my route (Along Manning Rd which I can't offhand remember the new name of - into Che Guevara which was Moore Rd to go and get bread and the morning paper) and he wears the smartest little toupe you can imagine. It is a sort of russet brown, slightly more chestnut than I believe his own head of hair ever was but no matter.

He is dapper and brisk and I look forward to the weather eventually breaking into winter so that I can see him ditch the rug for a rather rugged flat cap. Don't think he balances the cap on the rug, just one layer at a time.

He hasn't ever seen me I am sure and I have been checking him out for over 7 years on and off. Was a stage when I didn't see him and he started to slip from my mind and then 2 weeks ago, there he was and I always say "You look so great, mate!" when I see him coz I am sure he thinks he looks good.

So the hamster wheel turns and we feel a bit flat, but there is comfort in routine. Mr X would love me for saying it as he is a great believer in routine and I mock him for it but there it is, a concession, they don't come along every day!