December, 2022

Have not blogged in so long, everything is dislocated. My darling mother passed away eighteen months ago, it can still feel unreal. Am cheered up by a woodpecker and bullfinch in front garden and pigeons puffed up like balloons in the back. Writing sustains me, have recently gone back to my novella-in-progress. Just added ALPHONSO, a flash fiction, to blog sidebar that was published in From Glasgow to Saturn, Glasgow University's literary magazine, in 2021. I wrote it when we were in the grips of pandemic, all a bit stunned.

Chaffinch, 2021

Everything is shit but here is a chaffinch and an impossibly blue sky on New Year's Day.

Pandemic: foxes and sunsets and suicide

A couple of months ago, I saw a cat run across the garden with a pigeon in its mouth. I’ve never seen a domestic cat hunt such a big bird. The pigeon was upside down, white underneath. I did not see it being killed, just saw it being carried away.

I see foxes occasionally, once a year. One ran across the garden last week. It tarried for fifteen seconds or so on the wall, as if it were checking something. I was able to get a photo. It was huge - red and grey. Beautiful. I’ve seen it again since. Twice in a week.

I want it to come every day.

In between the pigeon being killed and the fox standing on the wall, uncommon events in this garden, the covid19 pandemic has impacted massively in the west. I recall watching reports from China in January, but of course did not think at all it involved ‘us’.

Now we are all affected.

Nothing feels real. 

Being chronically ill, I am used to spending long spells of time indoors, semi-isolated, but now the whole world is the same. It's getting a crash course in isolation and illness, in an alarming and dramatic way. The stuff of fiction.

Spring is happening, but it's dislocating. Daffodils have bloomed and withered, tulips are opening, the sun is warm if you shield yourself from the Scottish wind, but you cannot ever relax, the dread of this coronavirus is always there.

Six days into the lockdown, the weekend the clocks went forward, I heard my childhood friend had taken an overdose and was in intensive care. He has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The unfolding of the virus and the isolation it imposed was too much for him, he was simply overwhelmed. I had spoken to him four or five times the week before, which made the news of his overdose even more upsetting. Against all the odds, after six days in intensive care, he regained consciousness and after being treated for bacterial pneumonia was discharged to a surgical ward before being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where I hope they will be able to look after him for as long as is needed. 

I remembered that when the clocks went back last October, my friend had called me to say he had  put his clock back at 5pm, in case he forgot. Before  the lockdown he was doing a writing class and I told him I would love to see his writing, and asked him to send me some. He said he wanted  to write a book and I told him writing a book was hard. I might just write half a book then, he replied. His mother has since told me it is poetry he has been writing.

What struck me when my friend was in intensive care and we did not know the outcome was that his mother, a close friend of my own mother’s, had been a huge support in the early seventies when my consultant anaesthetist father had taken his own life, living in the same town my friend and his mother still live in.

My current writing project is a (slow) fictionalisation of aspects of my father’s life. There is an early scene in particular, with withered flowers - hydrangea -  in this friend's garden in the 1970s. The scene has been in my head for many years, real, but now re-imagined in the novella-in-progress (I was delighted to discover a couple of  years ago, this poem by Rilke, 'Blue Hydrangea'). More than ever I've been thinking of the importance of storytelling. I have also been thinking of anaesthetists  as they are suddenly very much in the media – the experts on ventilators, so much needed in this crisis. In a 1960s' Polaroid, my father looks like a poet with his Paisley pattern cravate, drinking beer in Amsterdam.

The backs of my hands are cracked, my knuckles slightly bleeding, I've been overdoing disinfecting, using too much bleach, just so very afraid of getting infected from groceries/deliveries coming in. With ME your immune system is already in disarray, and we simply do not know how people with ME would be affected by covid19. It's too frightening to contemplate, given how unpredictably and aggressively this novel virus is affecting youngish, healthy people with no pre-existing conditions. There is talk in the medical community of how some covid19 patients are bound to develop ME afterwards. (Suddenly ME is respectable, the devastating illness you can get after a virus.)

In normal times, I spend much time sitting at my bedroom window watching birds and squirrels and sunsets. It's restorative, a gorgeous way to meditate and contemplate when you cannot do aerobic exercise. This process of contemplation has become even more important. Everyone is commenting on how much louder the birds are, they can be heard everywhere, surely a tiny silver lining of the pandemic.

A woodpecker just when I needed one

I rest a lot in my bedroom. I read there too and also watch garden birds, I have a chair at the window. It is my meditation, my way of being peaceful, my way of 'working out'. It's restorative, I lose myself, nothing else matters. I have had a dreadful few weeks with one thing and another. Last night, I woke up around three with a brutal sinus headache, I am very prone to them and can no longer use steroidal sprays because of ocular hypertension (discovered in 2009 when using steroid drops for uveitis), so I swallowed a handful of Sudafed and Ibuprofen. It's the kind of pain that can make you cry. I had a scan many years ago and have chronic inflammation, possibly from an over-zealous use of mothballs. I declined surgery. Today, I woke early with the pain still on the fringes but bearable. A few hours later, I saw a woodpecker - an adult male great spotted - I've never seen one before. I had on my old glasses and saw a flash of red at feeder, wondered why goldfinches were eating peanuts and when I held up my camera - always in my bedside drawer -  I realised it was a woodpecker. I managed to nab it before it flitted off. It felt auspicious. Today is also the anniversary of my father's death, he died in 1972, and although for many years it was not a date I ever thought about,  since I've  been writing about him, the date has much more resonance. A friend sent me this, the symbolism of a woodpecker. 

Birds are poets, they are jewels, they are philosophers

As a distraction from the rain, am posting some birds from last year, mostly in garden from window. Birds are poets, they are jewels, they are philosophers. Goldfinch, robin, blackbird, blue tit, mallards, baby blue tit, greenfinch, chaffinch, jackdaw, starling. (Update with a baby sparrow and autumn robin.)

Tiny joys

The world seems abominable at the moment, but I smiled this Easter weekend. I saw two rainbows yesterday, one in the afternoon, a portion, stubby and thick, and one in the evening, a thin huge arc. And today a goldfinch as high on a tree as you can be; starlings that could be female blackbirds until you get close, a chaffinch singing its heart out and two princely beautiful male eider ducks. The world seemed almost bearable again. By the way, a broken rainbow is called a watergaw in Scots.

A couple of good things, a couple of bad things

Yesterday, I returned the dreadful Hystories by Elaine Showalter to the library, what a relief to have that book out of my possession, her cavalier dismissal of neuroimmune illness is simply bizarre. I can't even be bothered to talk about it any more, I tweeted a few times about it last week. I also discovered that local libraries stock food recycling/compost bags, so was very happy as I have just used up the ones the council provided a few months ago up. I was hoping to take out Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, but I could not remember her name, I was furious with my stupid head - and it does feel like a kind of stupidity, this cognitive bleakness caused by ME - not the normal 'can't remember what I came in for', more like a database being erased from your head - spaces where facts should be: I was trying to remember her husband's name too, as a way back to her, I knew he was a critic - James Wood - and by the time I remembered, the library was closing... And not only can I now tell the difference between a herring gull and a lesser black-backed, I've learned there is such a thing as a red admiral butterfly *and* a small tortoiseshell. I thought tortoiseshells were only a kind of cat. You live and learn.

Joe Sacco, Margaret Atwood, Filippe Bologna - & the difference between gulls

I've had to spend half of the last week in bed so, it was lovely to get to the book festival - literally a hop and a skip from me by taxi - to see Joe Sacco, so charming and interesting. I was given Palestine as a gift ten years ago, I still dip into it. I opened it last night and a bookmark my nephew had made a few years ago fell out (that is the loveliness of a paper book). The festival has deckchairs in the garden with authors' quotes: I liked Margaret Atwood's from The Blind Assassin: 

 'The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.'

I've finished Filippo Bologna's The Parrots, a shortish book, harder to tell on Kindle, but I was stopping and starting in my usual way, so it took me a couple of weeks. A long time since a book has made me laugh out loud so much. And I feel like David Attenborough as I can now tell a herring gull (pink legs) from a lesser black-backed gull (slightly smaller, darker, yellow legs) from watching the birds in the garden.

Harry

At first, I hated the squirrel thieving from the birdfeeder, but now I love him  - he could be a she, but I call him Harry - and worry if I haven't seen him for a couple of days. Last week, he jumped into the magpies' nest and they chased him. Bizarrely, the magpies' nest has now shrunk to a few twigs, so I guess they have moved housed (I asked RSPB if magpies dismantle their nests and take them with them, but they said more likely other birds have been using bits of abandoned nest). The day before yesterday, Harry appeared with a geometric bald patch on his right shoulder, looked like he'd been shaved before surgery, I was horrified, but it didn't look like he'd been attacked or bitten. It seems squirrels molt in spring (and autumn),  and localised bald patches can appear. I hope this is the reason he looks like his fur has been ironed (also read fur loss can happen when mating). Saw a coal tit, looked like a tiny gorgeous badger from the back. And a wee jumpy brown bird with high legs (maybe a lady blackbird, I have no idea). And woodpigeons are just so greedy and bulky. They circle/amble/peck round the garden like buses in  a depot. I would like to ban them but that would be a kind of apartheid.

Creativity, pain & an owl hooting

In the current New Statesman, TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Julia Copus - who suffers from endometriosis - makes the point that there is more made of the connection between creativity and mental illness than creativity and physical illness. The link with the physical is just as significant, she says. She speaks specifically of the link between creativity and excruciating pain: 'But always after the pain comes the gradual, miraculous release from pain, and with it the sense that my stay in in that strange other realm to which illness transports us is by no means over'. Severe pain takes you to a place where you can think only of the pain and nothing else. From my own experience, the end of the pain would be the beginning of perfection: in my severe days, I used to make atheistic deals with God, please make me better,  I will never complain again about anything. I had almost constant brain tumour headaches/a fist of pain in my spine and when I walked across the kitchen floor I felt I was going uphill. Copus describes how Matisse came to painting from law after a bout of appendicitis. His mother brought him art supplies while he convalesced. He left law and became a painter.

There is also the being ill and observing, as I noted in my review of Kjersti A Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am - you may be too ill to physically write but you can still observe, and shelve the observations away. You have  an enforced stillness, an enforced witnessing, that you simply would not have were you not ill. Many of Helen Fleet's observations in The State of Me are my own,  from those days of  'exile' that longterm illness brings.

And I'm sure there's more fiction/drama where the central character is mentally ill rather than physically ill. As I said in a previous post (towards the end), perhaps mentally ill characters are seen as more colourful, they are more likely to behave 'badly'. If you are physically ill you are dull and boring, not taking part. Or you die.

There has been an owl hooting the last few nights, at first I thought it was a fox shrieking, but it is definitely twittwoo. I discovered that this is in fact two tawny owls, the female goes twit and the male replies twoo. I love this, I had no idea.

Tumbling & falling

Realised yesterday the Olympic flame will go right past my flat, just like the Pope. At least I'll be prepared this time, and not think I'm hallucinating. There are coal tits - they are tiny! - tumbling and falling in the tree in the garden, like they're having their own Jubilee party - without the excruciating, ingratiating behaviour displayed by BBC -  and you can hear squeaking from the wall where they are nesting. Brilliant essay by Malcolm Muggeridge from 1955 on the toadying by public and media towards the royal family.

Have been dipping into Simon Barnes' Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed. It's funny and informative, gorgeous, short chapters. I'm still hopeless at identifying birds by their song, but it's a joy to lie with your eyes closed and just listen.

 My 7-yr-old nephew is the more gallus of the two, though he can be painfully shy. Watching Springwatch last week, when the wee nesting warblers got eaten by a domestic cat,  he said: 'Cute cat'. How can you say that? I asked. He just smiled. Later, glimpsing David Cameron, he said: 'That man looks like a baby'.

My mother is improving - thankfully - though she's still not out of the woods. At times, I've been so exhausted, I've found myself walking around with my arms folded, holding them up, because they are so ragged. It reminded me of the darkest days of ME when  at one point I actually had a sling for my arms, they felt so ill. And I remembered not being able to stir soup.

Tagore & Virginia

One of my friends is big on Tagore and when I told him I'm into birds now he mentioned the tiny poems Stray Birds. I dipped in - really dipped in, just read fragments - but found it all a bit sentimental - almost like 326 spiritual greetings cards, the kind you find in New Age shops - though these are translations, so maybe something is lost.

This one's a gem though, number 2:

'O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.'

And I love this, from Virginia's essay 'On Being Ill':

'Comatose with headaches. Can't write (with a whole novel in my head too - it's damnable).'

That's from the introduction by Hermione Lee, I haven't read the essay yet.

Woken

I sometimes marvel that I used to actually understand calculus, I even got the Maths prize, my final year at school - and French  and Chemistry, I was such a swot - but now simple ratios and percentages hurt my head. The brain fog from ME is no joke. Your head really does feel full of holes. I do miss my academic self. I am in a very bad mood cos I was woken by the magpie that sounds like a manic toy train, though today it sounds wheezy like it has a cold. The other day, I bought a bag of seeds for the birds, a bargain for a pound,   but so far they have ignored what I scatter. If you haven't fed them before, how do  they know the seeds are there, how can you tell them?

Blue

Yesterday was the first day I wore my winter coat. At the eye hospital,  I sat next to a window, the sky more blue than it was in summer, and a perfect autumn tree full of tiny birds flitting  from branch to branch. It was hard to tell them apart from the falling leaves. Enchanting.

The cheek of magpies

There's a magpie that ignores me when I knock on the window, it flies away and dips right back, its chatter reminds me of an evil toy train, starting up and stopping, over and over and over. I think of chapter seven of my book, Helen Fleet:

*

Can’t sleep for the clenching pain in my spine and legs. The birds have started. They’re like electronic gadgets set on a timer. They start off one by one and you can’t switch them off: a pigeon, a woodpecker then the din of the crows. I hate them all. I can’t stop thinking about Valerie’s blue lips.

I think she will die soon.

*

Birds & an Ex-Prime Minister

There was one black bird and one white one - let's call them dreambirds - and I had to judge them in an international competition. They were playful like dogs and big and cheeky, rolling over to be tickled. We were all in a pen - the birds, me and the spectators. We linked up, hands on each others' shoulders, and Tony Blair was behind me, crying. I dream about birds a lot, but I don't recall ever having dreamt about Tony Blair.