No idea where this will go. My teaching week has ended and tonight feels like the start of a weekend, so I’m just drifting over the keyboard.
Reading? Yes, The Book Thief?
Planning? Yes a work schedule for the rest of the year which promises to be gruelling - much too much reading, writing and marking to do plus proofreading and indexing. Planning, too, to make this schedule manageable with yoga; and scribbling - here and elsewhere.
creates a pinprick of peace and works it into a puddle, a pool, and then a lake deep enough to immerse yourself completely, and muffle life’s noise.
I lost yesterday to a good book and am planning the same for today. Tomorrow I begin a long drive south – ‘begin’ because I’m breaking the journey overnight so will arrive on Sunday. And as usual I’m crinkled with anticipatory guilt at leaving the dogs.
It seems odd to have the day before a journey, to myself. Usually I’m working and have to hare about trying to pack, collect the car, deliver dogs on the day I leave. Today, in theory I could pack. But I shan’t. I find I need the adrenaline which only comes with panic, for that task. I may write letters. I shall write notes and thoughts (just not here; this, I find, is a way of warming up to the more physical writing using pen and paper).
What a summer. It was not meant to be idle, but it was meant to be relaxed – and it’s been neither. Today I met the last of my postgrad students for the year. I have a pile of marking, but I can cope with that. I’ve had enough of meetings and talking and e-admin, though.
Now I’ll re-read Shakespeare’s Richard III over a pot of tea, walk the dogs through the teeming rain I love, and sleep.
When did my ideal holiday become so very unremarkable?
M.E. is biting deeper and deeper. After almost 15 years of containment, it’s fighting back, fighting hard and fighting dirty.
But is this the right way to think of it? As something 'other’ crashing in and taking my life over, taking me over?
No, it isn’t.
M.E. is a part of who I am. And it has been since I was a child – so why don’t I accept it? Or accommodate it? Or even acknowledge it?
I am fighting it at the moment, and not the most sensible way to calm things down. I try to work round it but not with it; I try to cram it into cracks and corners or my life; and this strategy won’t work either. I still can’t manage the ‘less than 100% of what I’m capable of’; when I feel well I act well with the emphasis on action. I’ve lived fast for two days; and now I’ve ground to a halt, despite needing to live in some way today – even if just very, very slowly.
So, once again it’s back to square one. I should be grateful it’s not zero, but I’m not. I’m furious.
Thus morning I found a chill mat for my laptop and this is the first time I’ve tried using the keyboard, which is now raised a little and slopes a little. I like the way the screen is slightly higher, but I’m not sure about the height of the keyboard. Perhaps this will help prevent the backs of my hands from aching when I spend long hours at the desk. I hope so.
Ah! But the screen height does make a difference.
Strange week. I was fine for half of it but struggled through the rest. Monday: archive work in the NLS, which was interesting; Tuesday: Cedar to the vet and work for the publishing students, whom I saw on Wednesday before a stroll round the town with R, collecting new sunglasses and Boots stuff and a long evening dogwalk in torrential rain in D forest; Thursday: work on a student’s submissions for a meeting on Friday; and a long dry cool walk with the dogs in the forest; yesterday: meeting with a CELT postgrad followed by one with a linguistics undergrad, then nothing very much despite good intentions until a long, wet walk with dogs in the forest. Too tired to do very much mostly – even to read a novel.
May’s disastrous general election took place on Thursday, of course. I woke early on Friday and was glued to the BBC election Twitter site so saw the last results come in, hazily doing arithmetic to ensure I didn’t miss the result that meant the Tories had lost their majority; and grinning at the number of seats the SNP had lost. Not that the resulting hung parliament is a comfortable result. May, despite the loud signals sent by the electorate, has decided to persevere and form a minority government, with the aid of the DUP, for heaven’s sake. Still, that will ensure a soft(er) Brexit, I suppose; and, providing the powers that be see sense, a change of PM over the summer; plus Nicola Sturgeon has perhaps finally begun to realise that many SNP votes are largely tactical – something you’d have thought she’d have taken on board when the support for the SNP during the Scottish parliamentary election was followed by a No result from the Indy Ref. But politicians in the main aren’t noted for anything other than narcissism these days – Corbyn aside.
I am, I find, being more honest about the ME. Not quite accurate – I have no option but to be more honest about it, as it’s becoming impossible to work around it. I’ve been trying to squirrel it away, to keep it private, for months, but now I hit a wall more often than not, so can’t do this any longer.
