The longest day

Today is the longest day and also Father's Day - the first one without my beloved stepdad. I can hear his lovely voice. I think of the hours I spent with him showing him pictures of Ilulissat on the iPad. He couldn't grasp how they got there, he thought I had done it, I'd explain, it's the internet and he'd say I didn't know the internet was interested in Greenland.

Since he left, I wear his Harris tweed jacket when I'm cold or missing him, it feels like he's hugging me. Today, I miss him and feel cold, it's freezing, June in Scotland usually is. So the Harris tweed is doubly needed, and I feel like a student in eighties again, when we'd wear  mansized - usually, our boyfriends' - clothes.

An orange poppy bloomed this morning, of course I see it is a sign that he's here.

And below some gorgeous wee pink wildflowers that I rescued before my mother, who was visiting, mowed away.

Five days after the morning after

It seems like months ago we voted to stay or go - I had a tear in the polling booth, it felt like destiny was weighing on you -  a real chance to make a fairer country - but not even a week has passed since the Scottish referendum. Last Thursday night, it felt like Hogmanay, but you didn't know when the bells would be, or if there would even be bells. I sat up 'til just after midnight but had to go to bed, woke up at six, so nervous, saw a FB message from a friend in Australia, saying, I don't understand all these Nos, my heart sank, and I turned on television to see that No had just won. Alex Salmond made a speech. I wept. My mother - I was staying with her for a few days while my stepdad was in respite care -  knew before me - she'd been up during the night. Friday was a day like no other I have experienced: a tangible grief being felt by 1.6 million people in Scotland, while 2 million others were celebrating, or, if they'd voted No out of fear, thanking their lucky stars. Worth noting, again, I think, that many of us who voted Yes - I think almost half - are not nationalists We simply want a better country, a better everything.

But there was  an 85% turnout, which is, in itself, a wonderful thing. Most of my family voted Yes, half of my friends voted No. There were interesting discussions to be had, certainly, but no one fell out.

Of course, the extra powers promised - aka the vow/bribe made to Scotland by a sleekit, panicked Westminster galloping up north when it thought Yes might just win - were instantly clipped onto wider constitutional reform - the question of only English MPs voting on English issues - when Cameron made his victory speech early on Friday morning. When - if at all - we will see those extra powers remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath. As Lesley Riddoch said, we've been put to the back of the constitutional queue.

I read so much before and after the 18th, it has all blurred into one, but I thought this was a good article by Jonathan Freedland, the day after.  Also enjoyed this yesterday, by Iain Macwhirter.  I am gutted we didn't get independence, but the referendum was a fascinating event to live through and I will keep my polling card forever. I do believe that politics in the UK will never be the same again. SNP membership has doubled since the result on Friday. The Greens and Scottish Socialist Party are enjoying increases too. Labour is standing in the corner in disgrace for its part in joining with Team Tory to scare the bejesus out of us if we voted Yes.

My stepdad came home from respite on Monday and my mother asked him what he thought of the referendum  results. He replied, What referendum?  Knocking his forehead with his knuckles, he said to me: My brain is mud. My intelligence is still here, but my memory is not. He had a postal vote, but has no recollection.  Later, as he poured himself a wee whisky, he shouted through from the kitchen, Where is Arran?

I've had a *horrible* few days of illness, classic ME, and was mostly in bed for three days (tweeting from my pillow). Thirty years on, this is beyond a fucking joke. Still, on Monday I had an hour in my parents' garden reading, an Indian summer indeed (though it's dark now by half seven).

The article in the photo is from The Sunday Herald - the only newspaper to back independence - well worth reading, by Paul Hutcheon. And I ordered 'Autobiography of an Unknown Indian' by  Nirad C Chaudhuri after reading Ian Jack's very interesting pre-Indyref article last week: Is This the End of Britishness?  Personally,  while I love some things about Britain - our precious NHS - increasingly under threat - is a gem of gems - I've never felt particularly British. I feel Scottish, emotionally and psychologically, though my outlook by default is international. My mother is Scottish, my late father was an Indian-born Pakistani (I'm slowly exploring my Pakistani side, such as it is, in my current writing project). My stepfather is Danish, my sister-in-law is German. My most meaningful longterm relationship has been with someone not from UK. Moreover, the referendum to me was not about Britishness or Scottishness, or anti-Englishness - the worst accusation slung around by media - it was about fairness and social justice. I knew we weren't going to wake up in Norway, but a Yes vote would have surely given us the template for a more equal society.

 *

I'm home now and desperately hoping the baby squirrels haven't been hurt by the ever-present, prowling gangster neighbourhood cats. And I just love the poem 'The Morning After' by Christine de Luca: here it is being recited by Scottish 16 and 17-year-olds, first-time voters. Indeed, 'there are dragons to slay whatever happens'.

And here are the results in full. But, as Jonathan Freedland above said, 'When close to half the population of a nation inside a union wants to break away, the state of that union is not strong. It is fragile'.

There are, for sure, interesting times ahead.

*Update And this by Gerry Hassan worth reading too.

Books, glorious books, and a moth that looks embroidered

In the last week, the postman has brought three classy books.

I won a copy of Maggie Gee's  Virginia Woolf in Manhattan on Twitter  (Saqi Books asked which woman writer we would most like to meet, I said Ismat Chughtai). Lovely to have this gorgeous hardback to add to my bookshelves. And I very much look forward to reading (though my TBR pile is simply scary).

My publisher, The Friday Project, sent me up Charles Lambert's wonderfully titled With a Zero at its Heart. It's getting great reviews. Though as I am in the fragile process of fictionalising childhood and fathers - at such a snail's place it feels like slow motion, but I will get there, fingers crossed -  that I may hold off on reading it. This meticulously constructed book of fragmented, themed memories is very different to my novella-in-progress - but you don't necessarily want another writer's (brilliant) words to be in your head when you are writing. Though I won't be able to resist and will dip in. It's a beautiful book to touch too.

And I ordered the second edition of Dr Melvin Ramsay's 1986 book on ME: Postviral Fatigue Syndrome: The saga of Royal Free Disease from the ME Association. My original copy from the mid-80s is worn out so I wanted to update. This is such an important, informative and honest text - I just wish more doctors and health editors and journalists would read it and educate themselves. And the references to Professor Behan and Coxsackie virus in west of Scotland in 80s, obviously resonate for me.

And last but not least, I love this moth, it looks embroidered.

Being nudged over by Nelson, gently

When I woke up on Thursday morning the shed had been blown over on its side like a Monopoly piece. I'd been awake for a few hours before I actually noticed, and it was utterly dislocating to see. I felt powerless. When I went to bed on Thursday night Nelson Mandela had just died.  I  lit candles - these rituals we have because we don't know what else to do - and shed a fair few tears at some of the television footage. I was due to have a short story in the Scotsman this weekend but it has been postponed because they needed space for  tributes. It's something  of an honour to have been nudged over by Nelson. The shed is happily fixed (thanks to neighbours and joiners), and I'm now brimming with Mandela memories. So much to link to but I will just link to these: Nadine Gordimer  in The New Yorker; Marina Hyde in The Guardian; Teju Cole in The New Inquiry; this by Musa Okwonga; and  Jon Snow's blog .

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.

Foxes, snails & beautiful Italian men

At the weekend I saw a fox, I couldn't sleep and opened the curtains at 4am and there it was, slinking into the darkness, I wanted it to come back but it had vanished into the ferns. There's a snail making its way across the landscape of the shed, I usually hate/fear them, the bastards eat holes in everything but this one is beautiful with a blue-patterned shell. I watched most of Spain/Italy, my nephews had helpfully informed me that Italy are rubbish, they are Barcelona supporters, and must be delighted at outcome. Watching Italy is just not the same since the days of Totti and Maldini, though Pirlo and Buffon are quite beautiful (as is Balotelli though I am, of course, old enough to be his mother). I was curious about the word pundit and discovered it comes from Sanskrit 'pandita' which means 'learned' (although the opposite of learned is what you feel listening to some of the commentary). It's the 2nd of July and 14 degrees, fucking appalling weather, I will need more than foxes and snails to cheer me up (though An Exploding Case of Mangoes is making me laugh out loud). ME has not been good, whenever I try and do any tasks/errands I get that creeping/clammy/adrenaline feeling, I used to get this a lot, it means things are not quite right. Still coughing like Steptoe, but not so frequently or violently.

High

There are magpies nesting in the next garden, so skrekky and gallus - and so high up! I know magpies nest high, it's in my book. The sky is blue today - no sleet - and I can see their tails dipping between the branches, flashes of blue and black and white.

Seems

It truly seems like a hallucination - daffodils and tulips and bluebells behind the sleet. I'm not sure whether I'm hallucinating the flowers, or the sleet. I fear for the tulips, they are almost horizontal.

Just lovely

Greenwords told me her wonderful news just before Christmas, I was overjoyed for her and her husband. She has now blogged her news and I was in tears reading what I already knew. Could not be happening to a lovelier person. She is a fine  writer too.

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?

A review from USA , & an Israeli novel

Thanks to Janis in USA for this interesting review of TSoM. I like her inclusion of other works that deal with illness. It really is lovely to still be getting reviews 30 months after book came out. I don't tend to write my worst days here, but I have been unable to do much today at all. I went outside for five minutes, it was freezing and the daffodils have been battered by the gales. I kept going back to bed, but I hate the feelings in my muscles, so I got up again. I went to the sofa and tried to read but my arms hurt holding the stupid book - no, not true, it's not a stupid book, it's a rather good novel called CrocAttack! by Israeli writer Assaf Gavron. Then I tried to 'meditate' - ie lie with eyes closed, but I can never empty my mind, NEVER - with some crappy New Age music - a CD I got in San Francisco in nineties - I feel like a parody when I listen to it, but it is undeniably relaxing all that cheesy tinkling of water.

Light

I love the evening light, I went into the garden the other night, just to look. In a corner, some beautiful wee blue flowers are pushing through, my neighbour gave me the seeds some time ago. They grew into a gorgeous carpet last year. I'm so pleased to see them coming back. This night I stared, I'd forgotten completely their name. I crouched down (my back stabbed me, which I did not like one bit) and touched them and wondered: what the hell are you called? This is what is meant by cognitive difficulties and M.E, it's not normal absent mindedness, it's like part of a database has been erased. There's a hole where the word should be. I can be in a roomful of people and suddenly not know the name of someone I've known for years. Anemones. They are called anemones.

Leaves & kids

I just watched four leaves fall and spin to the ground, one after the other. I wondered how they 'know' when to leave the tree, what is their precise moment. My cousin's nine-year-old was here last weekend and asked if she could rake. (I can't rake and always get others to do the leaves.) The feisty wee girl that she is got two piles of leaves. Her four-year-old brother 'helped'. It was warm enough to sit out with coats and my cousin and I had coffee in plastic cups and Hula Hoops while the kids worked. Then they started to argue over whose pile was whose and the rakes went back in the shed. After dinner, I was telling my cousin about the Pope and her girl drew this in five minutes. She is a wee talent.

Snowdrops

Got these from the garden, I've learned that you identify snowdrops by their green markings, which I'd never noticed before. I just thought they were wee white flowers, but there's so much more going on when you look close up. I think these are galanthus nivalis, the common ones. I was drained/upset yesterday after the ME post, all that reading and linking, the words - of others - tread round my head. The snowdrops soothed me.