Waiting room

This morning I had a dental appointment – an emergency appointment as I’d chipped a tooth when I slipped on ice. This meant sitting in the waiting room until the dentist could see me.  The place was full: Hogmanay means that the place will shut early, and so all emergencies were crammed into the first half of the day.  I read some magazine and found an article about Michael Palin in which he mentioned that he began keeping a diary the day he stopped smoking and indicated that he starts each morning with a diary entry.  Good practice for a writer; good practice for a new non-smoker; and good  practice for someone practising to increase the speed and accuracy of their typing.  All of which means it would be good practice for me!  So here I am, although not exactly first thing as dentist and dog walk took precedence, and then domestic displacement activity took over.  But now the washing machine is churning away, floors are swept and mopped, carpets are vacuumed and cleaned, and I’ve washed up all available dishes. 

The problem with writing what are tantamount to morning pages is that either they are destined for no more than the draft box, or they will distract me for a long time. 

I ought to make additional plans for the year, this being 31 December.  I may. I’ll need a little longer to think about this though – more time in the waiting room!

At home

It’s the stillness, the silence, I cherish here.  The doorways and stairway between the desk and the front door mute even the flap of the letterbox.  One phone is switched off; the other unplugged, confining interruptions to a virtual world of voicemail.  I can hear only the rattle of my keyboard, a clock ticking, the quiet swish of the central heating, and an occasional sigh as the puppy adjusts her sprawl under the desk.  Sometimes I add the click of the kettle and  quiet grumbling as water comes to the boil. 

This morning, even the light is quiet.  Low creamy winter sun is creeping over the roof of the house behind, and falling across my shoulders to fall exactly on the top shelf of a bookcase. The gilt titles on one or two hardbacks gleam, but softly.

Soon it will be very different.  I’ll leave this home for another and plunge into the hurly burly of Christmas. 

Christmases to remember: a luau in Waimea under the shade of canopy with Father Christmas, hot and sticky  in beard, fur trimmed red jacket, long black boots and a green hula skirt delivering gifts to small-pigtailed children in spangled pink party frocks; walking alone through Sefton Park, deserted and snowy under a clear blue late afternoon sky; lost in thick mist on Dartmoor  after eleven courses at a small hotel;  a night walk across Plymouth Hoe, with my father and the dog, looking at the stars and watching the lights at Jennycliff; the first time I had champagne for breakfast.

You need time for Christmas – lots of time.  Time to meander through buying  and wrapping presents; to sit at the kitchen table with a plate of biscuits still warm from the oven, writing letters to slip into cards; time to tie up and boil a Christmas pudding, choose crackers, fill stockings, sing carols.  People don’t have this time any more.   Even buying vegetables and crackers for cheese has to be crammed into a half day taken as holiday from work.  Late night shopping, extended opening hours, miles of shelf space devoted to Christmas puddings and mince pies, gift wrapping services all bear testament to this.  Carol singers now gather in shopping malls not on front door steps, and the Salvation Army brass band sits in the doorway to a large supermarket; places where, if you can pause to listen, others cannot, and will grumble that you are blocking their way, holding them up.  Listening to Christmas carols has become another item on a long list, to be ticked off you speed along aisles, filling a shopping trolley.

I have time.  At this moment, I have time.  And I shall have time again afterwards, when I hope it won’t feel too late.  I’ll look at photographs and remember that I was there then, and hope I know what it was that was there.

 

 

A gift

And now that the semester has ended, and teaching and marking is over for the next few weeks, I am relishing the gift of time. Time which many I know will consider I squander but which for me is not so much squandering but rejuvenation – time for myself in the sense of time I can use unconstrained by timetables, schedules and deadlines.  Squandered, possibly in a scheme in which time is measured in terms of output,but not in terms of input – of which there seems to have been rather little lately.

 

So I walk with the puppy for an hour relishing the rhythm of my feet against the ground, and watching my dog as she hurtles across the snow, long legs flailing inelegantly, large feet dropping from the ends, celebrating being let off the lead to run harum scarum across an empty open field; or burrowing through a snowdrift giving herself hoary beard and eyebrows.  I half register the chimes of the town clock telling me it’s a quarter to, and am delighted when I realise that I have no idea what it is a quarter to to.

 

 

Immobile

Days of cold stillness then, in the space of the last 24 hours, thaw, rain, snow, sleet and a return to The Big Freeze.  I no longer choose where to walk with the dog; I walk where I can, following wavering foot-wide paths carved out by trails of grit, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, but dark and hardened, and finding myself at such prosaic destinations  as the local supermarket, a bus stop, and, once, a  primary school.   I have forgotten how to look around me when I walk. 

I’m reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Canongate 2008)– and, since freedom of movement and choice of destination has become restricted to indoor life, am reacting in unexpected ways.  Comments on climbing, such as:

… to the sober looker-on a man may seem to walk securely over dangerous places with the fey abandon that is said to be the mark of those who are doomed to death. (p. 5)

acquire relevance to what would usually be entirely inappropriate circumstances: posting a letter, buying a newspaper, visiting a neighbour.  But even without these weird connections between mountains and main roads, Shepherd’s observations strike the heart; probably  even of those who have  only ever seen mountains on postcards.  For example, describing the extraordinarily pellucid streams in the Cairngorm plateau, Shepherd writes:

Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to recreate its brightness.   This is one if the reasons why the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the corries, the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it.  The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away. (p. 3) 

And in that, there is a description of what it is about a work art that makes you want to keep returning to look at – its perpetual newness – that startles in being not just unexpected but as sheer as the flight of an arrow in its accuracy.  The mountain is living, not merely as an organism, but as a part of all life.

Stasis

It’s not fully stasis.   This morning the pipes were frozen and now they aren’t, as testified just now, when suddenly, loud groans and much gurgling signalled the bath emptying.  But that aside, all is much as it was yesterday, and the day before.   It’s still extremely cold (which is wearing) but very quiet (which is not). 

I crave warming food; not just food that’s hot, but food that’s spicy.  (I drew the line at spiced parsnip soup for breakfast – but only just.)  A large pot of spiced tea has taken up permanent residence on the desk and the study is scented with cloves and cinnamon. 

Bitter

It is bitter, outside, today.  At first light,

it was minus degrees. Now, the bright, white sunshine makes slender icicles hanging in trees flash against a cloudless blue sky.

Still snowbound

It’s been snowing heavily in great fat flakes ever since I woke up.  Yesterday, the view from my window looked like this:

This morning it looks like this:

So I’m at home, reading.

Well, mostly reading.  I’ve also been playing with the camera.

 

 

The snow hadn’t been quite so  demanding in the last day or two as I haven’t had to be anywhere else at a given time.  I’ve also been able dress for the weather with impunity, and this is veritably liberating: outside, I’m rendered incognito by layers of wool and waterproofs topped with most unbecoming but extremely efficient hat. Despite anonymity, it’s rare to pass someone without exchanging a comment on the weather, or the treacherous conditions of the roads or pavements (or both).  People with sticks wave them in the air in greeting from the other side of the road (which is sometimes a little unnerving), and small children regally wave a mitten as they pass on sledges hauled by a parent.   It’s peaceful outside: no cars dare to negotiate my road and the snow muffles any noise form the little traffic on the main road.  There are no buses or trains.  The town has become an island – one of many in this ocean frozen weather.

Eat, Pray, Love

I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love this morning and am left with with two burning questions:

1)  Why did Elizabeth Gilbert write the book?

2)  Why did I plough on with it to the bitter end?

Hibernation

Snow is tiring.  I’ve started work later than normal, each day this week, and left work at least two hours earlier than usual, and so, arithmetically considered, have several hours in hand.  However, the week seems to have lasted for ever, and, now, although it’s only 7 pm, I’m sleepy enough to consider giving up on the rest of the day and going to bed.  Is this just because snow makes everything just that little bit more demanding? I wear more clothes and significantly heavier boots; then, when dressing to go outside don an extra layer of almost everything and as a result am hefting around a great weight of woollies.  Since the snow is deep, and crisp but uneven, I dance about to avoid slipping: dancing on snow in heavy (but oh so warm) boots is as good as a workout with ankle weights.  There’s more walking each day too  - driving isn’t pleasant - and, since being impunctual is perfectly acceptable, given the weather, I walk distances which aren’t really feasible even in the best of conditions. Then too, Millie needs longer walks because it’s dark early, so she doesn't get to run off the lead in the park in the evening.  So I walk as far as she does (i.e. twice as far as usual).  In short, life with snow is akin to a stint on a health farm. 

(Does anyone else refer to health farms, or does that put me in the same category as those who still listen to the Home Service on the wireless? (On which, sort of: I mentioned owing a portable typewriter recently and only later realised that  that was probably seen by my (young) colleagues in the same light as once owning an black and white television (which I haven’t), or a car with a hand crank (which I have had, and consequently never ever had to call out the AA for a flat battery during the cold weather, leaving me now wishing that hand cranks still came as part of the basic car package).)  

So tonight , after yet another tango across the snow on the end of the doglead, I shall turn into a tortoise; my flat will become a box of hay; and with luck, when I next wake up it’ll be the end of March.

Digging in

I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love tonight, bought some time ago after I read some interesting reviews, and which has, lain, unopened on the kitchen table ever since, buried under the general detritus that gathers with all speed on that table (in fact, on all flat surfaces in close proximity to me), sometimes surfacing briefly of its own accord, occasionally surfacing during a ‘tidy-up’.  Yesterday, it surfaced again, so I grabbed hold of a corner, to stop it diving back into the abyss, hauled it out and tucked it into  my bag.  The bag is only marginally safer than the table, but the book was still visible when I opened the bag this evening, having failed to burrow its way to the bottom during the night, and consequently is now open on my desk.   

I’m slightly irritated by the style – the tendency to implied superlative (I’m frankly exasperated by the Divorce (and as for ‘Divorce Internment Camp’! …  (p. 27))) and the rather chirpy dialogue are a little too Sunday supplement columnist for my palate; and the likening of the Indonesian medicine man to Yoda made me wince; but on the whole I’m surprised as I expected it to significantly less readable than it promises to be. I quite like some of the ideas, such as considering a prayer for God’s help as a petition that others might sign too, and am very taken with improving foreign language skills by reading a newspaper article in the language each day; but I’m annoyed by the misquotation from Louise Gluck’s ‘The Wild Iris’: it isn’t ‘From the center of my life, there came a great fountain …’ , but ‘from the center of my life / came a great fountain …’, and by Gilbert’s tendency to make (one of her superlative) points using overly long lists of names, questions … . But then, Gilbert is still eating, and maybe the style will change when she starts praying. 

Still, Eat, Pray, Love is the right kind of book for this night’s reading. It’s bitterly cold outside, with much snow underfoot and according to the forecast, the temperature will drop significantly and there’ll be much more snow.  I can think of no good reason to leave the hearth, dogwalks aside, and so here (dogwalks aside) is where I’ll stay.