Rain...

It rained today. A big fat gushy thunderstorm. I sat in the house and watched the drops coming down, little diamonds dripping from the tiles on the roof of the shed. I opened the window so I could hear the sounds better. The water rushing in the leaves of the trees that surround the house, and drumming on the roof.

I love rain. I love to lie in bed at night and listen to it roaring on the roof overhead in winter, hear it glugging in the downpipes. I snuggle down under the duvet with Pat next to me, listen to his steady breath, and then turn my mind, my whole concentration, to the sky. It doesn't lull me to sleep. It's too important for that. I always stop and listen when it rains, whatever I am doing, because to me it is the sound of being safe, warm, and loved.

I've thought a lot about why this is, and I think it comes down to one particular memory. My mother came to collect me from school one lunchtime because I was sick. I'd gone down with a migraine. Not a bad headache, the real thing, with the psychedelic tunnel vision, the numb arms and legs, the vomiting, and the dreadful pain as well. (Anybody who tells you they have a migraine and are still walking around, functioning, does not have a migraine, believe me!) My mother never drove me to or from school so this was a big occasion for me. She had to stop off on the way home for some reason, perhaps to get some painkillers for me. I lay on the back seat, head hurting too much to open my eyes, and listened to the rain pelting on the roof of the little fiesta. I knew I was going home. The sound of the rain soothed me. As I relaxed, the pain eased. I was warm and safe, and I had been rescued. I knew my mother would make me feel better. Even though I felt atrocious, it was a good moment.

This is the reason I like rain. It reminds me of a happy childhood memory. But lately, I've come to think of it another way. I look out at the brooding sky, watch those icy pellets smacking on the path, and think of all those poor souls who are not lucky like me, and have no where to go to escape the rain. I think of them more and more now, when I hear rain at night, huddling in doorways, under cardboard boxes, trying to stay dry, because once you get soaked its so hard to dry out. Unlike me, they have no one to rescue them.

St Martin's Housing Trust
Centrepoint
Shelter

Lets try to do something to help these people that is more than giving a few quid to the Sally Annes or Crisis at Christmas once a year. Lets stop and speak to them, and treat them as human beings. Human beings with crippling problems created by the society in which we live. We are all responsible. Lets make the rain a happier place to to be in.

Pants in the Post, or how to cheer yourself up

I woke up with the Black Dog this morning. The bastard canine creeps up on me occasionally with no warning. These days I get it comparatively lightly compared with how I used to. No long months staring at walls, unable to move, unable to think, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights by the overwhelming misery of knowing, really knowing, that my life is a waste of time, that I am a burden to everybody, and I'd be much better off dead. No, I am lucky. That time is over.

But it still comes to me sometimes. The leaden heart. The sense of wishing I could cry but not being able to. The physical pain of sheer, bottomless sadness.

However, after thirty years of dealing with it, I have some habits that help. Three pages of A4 paper written longhand (Julia Cameron's famous 'Morning Pages') help to leech the poison out. Listening to Monty Python songs (I can't help but smile when I listen to Michael Palin warbling 'Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I want to beeeeeee'). Singing. Very loudly. (This takes the place of screaming which, for psychological reasons, I am incapable of). Mozart's Magic Flute or Carmen is pretty good for this. And a bunch of other stuff.

Today, after scribbling in my morning pages book, I realised that what was really getting to me was this 40th birthday party we are going to on Saturday. I don't get to go out very often, and that means dressing up is important to me. But I've got no money to buy new clothes. That £55 Monsoon chiffon top would be perfect (except that I'd have to buy jeans to go with it), but its out of my league. I was so miserable about having nothing to wear. Then it occurred to me that we would probably only be there for a couple of hours, so why buy something new for that? What have I got in my wardrobe?

Cue trying-on session.

Out came old faithful, the black jersey dress. Okay, I never wear black these days because I feel like it makes me look about 100. Nevertheless, it makes me look very curvy and goes with everything.

Then, the master stroke. I remembered I had these shoes:



Now, you may say, how can a person forget she owns such a perfect pair of shoes. Exactly. Just look at them. Red satin. Aren't they just fantastic??? And believe me, they feel even better on! How could I look at these and feel gloomy?

So I am going to wear these, and my black dress, and I am going to go out this afternoon and buy myself a big red silk rose to go in my hair. 'Simples'.

Which brings me to my point. When I am sad, I find something that I really, really like, to look at, to contemplate. Something that makes my heart sing. Like the shoes.

I take a leaf from my niece, Amelia's, book. Last year, when we were moving house, and I was having my 'mini-breakdown', I got a parcel from her, out of the blue. Inside there was a label, which said 'No one can be sad with pants in the post'. And when I opened the tissue paper enclosed, this is what I found:

How could you not laugh? Every time I feel blue now, I look at my 'Pants in the Post'. They please me. Right to the roots. Not just because of her thoughtfulness, but because they genuinely are fantastic things. What fun. Red frilly pants. And then life seems just a little bit easier.

Being Still

It's ages since I've contributed a post to this blog, but somehow daily life has been getting in the way. You know the stuff. The laundry. The gardening. The washing-up. The diary gets full and I wonder what is happening. Where did all this STUFF come from?

Well, I've reached a hiatus. It has come about as something of an accident. My counsellor was going to be away, and offered me a four week holiday from our usual appointments. It's a great chance for what we have been working on lately to bed in. And what we have been working on is, strangely appropriately, 'Being Still'.

Being still. Listening to my body. Listening to my life. Accepting where I am, every last detail of it. Even the bits that hurt. Being mindful. Just stopping and standing still occasionally to really smell, to really look, to really taste or hear. To imprint that single, unique moment on my brain, to really experience it, because I will never have it again.

For example, right now. The window is open. The study is full of cool air and the damp, mossy smell of the woods after rain. The cockerel is crowing round the corner. I can see light rippling on the pond below me, and the tail of a duckling bobbing up and down as it trawls through the mud. The warm softness of my cardigan sleeve on the skin of my arm. The stillness of the house around me.

Life at the moment seems to be a procession of perfect moments strung together with frenzied blur, periods so busy I don't have time to be aware. This came home to me the other day when we went up to Ditchingham Hall for the open gardens event in aid of the NSPCC Full Stop appeal, one of our favourite charities. The gardens are spectacular, as I hope the pictures in this blog testify. But I found I spent the whole afternoon rushing round taking photos in a frantic effort to capture the garden for later, instead of experiencing it in the moment. If I had only sat there and looked quietly at the rose gardens or the peonies, I would have seen them, really seen them. I came away feeling cheated, as if the afternoon had been wasted. I wanted to go back the next day to really look. But of course, I shall not have the opportunity to do that until next year now.

As I get older, I am becoming aware that time is finite. I have only so many of these moments left. Not that I am ancient, but you get the idea. The point of these few weeks is to try to be present, to be aware, to accept what is real, right now. Not to always be thinking about what has happened, or what the future might bring, or how it ought to be.

So I am busy Being Still. And it's okay.

Carry on Doc

We have just managed to get around to signing on with our local surgery, and this morning was my first doctor's appointment. It was not with the lady who is to be my usual doctor, but with a locum. As you can imagine, over the years I have collected some choice anecdotes about the 'pull yourself together' school of medicine, so I never hope for much when meeting a new quack. This one had a mobile which kept going off during our consultation, which does not auger well for a start, though I have had worse - the GP who kept asking me for advice on how to work his computer during my consultations with him for one. This one seemed very nice. He diagnosed several 'itis-es', then started questioning me off the cuff about my ME, as if it was the wrong diagnosis. Who made the diagnosis? Had I had any blood tests? What were my symptoms?

Now, this is a good one. Ask any ME patient, and they will tell you that in the midst of a relapse they can hardly remember their name, let alone a comprehensive list of all the myriad symptoms they suffer. Usually, if I expect to be questioned on this, I make sure Pat is with me, as his memory is better than mine and he has a far better idea of what I am capable of than I do. Unfortunately, he wasn't available, and I had to go on my own. If I'd only known... but never mind. In such cases, I always end up coming away with a sense of frustration and spend the next week thinking up all the useful things I should have said. (Hindsight is a regular companion of the ME patient.)

If this locum had had access to my medical records, which of course had not yet come through from our old practice, he would have had a better chance of understanding my case. If he'd had time to read them, which seems unlikely seeing as it is such a huge practice. He certainly did not understand that this was my first visit, and he was supposed to be taking a detailed medical history as a matter of course. And, how could I, sitting there like a startled rabbit in a car's headlights, explain my situation to him in ten minutes?

The problem with the way the medical establishment sees disease, and mine in particular, is as a series of isolated 'itis-es' that are stuck together with glue. They are scientists who are trained to break problems down. It seems they struggle to conceive of the human body is a complex system of systems, a complex, holistic ecosystem of interdependencies. ME is a collapse of that interdependent system. It is a whole bunch of things that break down. Hence the long list of symptoms. And if you treat only one thing, you fail to understand the knock-on effect it has on other systems. You fail to understand the collapse of the whole.

You can observe the failings of this method in pretty much every British person over seventy. They have tablets for their arthritis, which have the side effect of upsetting their stomach, so they have tablets to control that. These knock out their blood pressure or make them depressed, so they have more tablets for those problems. Maybe they have trouble sleeping so they have more tablets for that. Which creates ever more side effects, and so on and so on. When I see how many medications my mother-in-law is on, for instance, though she has very poor health, I can't help feeling that the medicine is half the problem. She practically rattles! I certainly know from my own experience that taking a painkiller will upset my guts, which upsets my eating, my teeth, my sleeping, and which requires me to take something else, and on and on in ever decreasing circles.

Hello? It doesn't take a genius to work this out!

Human beings are such complex creatures and there are so many factors that need to be considered in a diagnosis. What a person is eating, whether they are drinking enough water, how much stress they are under, whether they are exposed to certain agricultural or industrial chemicals, how they have been effected by past medical treatments which may have caused more damage than they healed, and so on - all of these factors need to be considered and more. So how can you tell me that a complete stranger without any medical history of me can tell me that I only have ME if I have been diagnosed as such by a consultant?

Now I face a new series of tests and medical corridors and strangers prodding and poking me and diagnosing me without looking into my face like I am human being instead of a monkey. Oh, joy. I just love the medical establishment. Almost as much as I love the Tory party....

Politics (Sorry I couldn't resist)

I've said before that I don't normally make political statements, especially since it's sometimes got me into trouble, but the current climate is worrying me a lot.

Thursday was polling day. We always vote. I feel very strongly that many thousands died so that I could participate in a democracy, and I don't intend to let them down. But this time round, for the first time, I felt I could understand the people who said they had decided not to vote, not because they were apathetic but because they couldn't see any difference between the parties. They are all as bad as each other, they said. Pat and I went off to vote after a great deal of thought, and a complete nightmare trying to find our polling cards ( that's another story which will make another blog post on its own!). I stood there in the voting booth and looked at the acres-long ballot paper, and thought, 'hell, what do I do?'

Let me tell you that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Labour voter. I voted for Neil Kinnock's Labour in 1992, absolutely certain that we would get in. I even had my photo taken with my polling card on the doorstep as I went out to vote (above), utterly certain that my world was going to change. The disappointment was bitter.


For local elections I vote Liberal, simply because I think they are the best party at local level. They listen to local people and they have moral integrity. I would vote for them in a national election if they had any chance of getting in, but with our crap, first-past-the-post system, they haven't a chance of making a difference, especially since I always seem to have lived in staunch Tory areas.

I voted for Tony Blair, even though I though I had concerns about some of his policies, but I figured at least he had a heart. I still think that he did what he really believed in, what he thought was best for the country, despite the Iraq war.

But now we are facing a new Tory government. I remember what it was like the last time round. I remember the heartlessness of Mrs Thatcher, the sheer cruelty of her regime. I remember the horrors of the miners strike, and the misery her years in power left carved in the hearts of many British citizens. It has taken a long time to exorcise those ghosts, and frankly many still remain. While I agree that the Unions needed reining in, and I didn't agree with Arthur Scargill one bit, she still created a society of callousness, and I dread its return. The thought of Cameron, no matter how 'caring' he pretends to be, getting in, is a horror to me.

I remember the day Maggie Thatcher was elected, how I sat at my desk at school and wept. Somehow, even at 9 years old, I sensed what was coming. All I can do now is hope that the dark shadow of fear creeping up on me each time I watch another Gordon Brown disaster on the news is just an old reflex, and not a harbinger of divisions and and heartlessness to come....

Milestone

I decided today that since I was feeling so dreadful, too dreadful to do anything much, I would indulge myself and spend the afternoon painting. Lately I have been experimenting with colour mixing in different media, trying out techniques with acrylics, watercolours, oil pastels and watercolour pencils. I found I was very rusty, which depressed me greatly. But then its 23 years since my art 'A' level - I don't know what I was expecting, but since I wasn't Van Gogh to start with, its been slow progress. Today I produced the picture above, of Leepe Beach, on the tip of the New Forest. Its a view I saw almost daily until I was in my twenties, so I drew it from memory. It's the first thing I have produced that I am really proud of, that really lives up to my expectations of myself. I may hate it tomorrow, but today I feel proud of it, proud enough to think its worth sharing. I may even frame it and hang it on the wall. Maybe very small and monotone or very limited palette is the way for me to go. In any case, it's a huge step, and I intend to celebrate, so I am playing Tom Jones music and wishing I could boogie!

The Garnet Dress

Yesterday I went girlie shopping with my gorgeous niece, Amelia. (Actually, it should be pointed out that I have two gorgeous nieces, Amelia and Phoebe, living nearby, as well as several others. They are all gorgeous). It was an unplanned trip, spur of the moment. Suffice it so say that I had been feeling fat, frumpy and forty for several weeks and I decided that I needed to break out of the rut with some advice from a kind but fashionable third party to stand between me and my inner critic. So off we went to town, with the brief to try on lots of clothes, regardless of price, to explore styles and colours and shapes, to challenge what I would normally choose for myself, i.e. the same old stuff.

I tried on this dress. Anything from Coast is usually a winner for me, its all so fabulous, but this was something else. Normally I would never dream of wearing anything with ruffles, especially around the neck. Too flouncy. Makes my boobs look enormous, and they are big enough already. Makes me look like Barbara Windsor. Etc. You know the routine.

This dress was different. Have you ever had the experience of putting something on and realising it makes you look exactly the way you'd always dreamed and hoped you might look in the best of all possible worlds? That's what this dress did for me. In that changing room, I experienced a kind of Annunciation - a 'This is who you really are' moment. It was, to quote Big, 'unbe-fucking-lieveable'.

There is a school of thought in psychology called Gestalt. It is very complicated and I don't understand most of it, but one of the ideas it posits is that we have inside us everything we need, that we are already whole, all we have to do is to get our 'stuff' out of the way, and access that wholeness. My counsellor always reminds me that I keep on about how everything will be better when I have more money/better clothes/the right haircut/get well/publish my novel/come to terms with my childhood/etc etc etc. You know the drill. Everything will always be alright when I am something else than I am right now.

The dress showed me what my counsellor was trying to say. It is a message from the Universe that says, 'you are already all those things you want to be. And you are beautiful.'

All I have to do is try to shout down my inner critic and hold onto that thought.

If you are wondering about the title of this post, it refers to a spell from a fascinating book, 'Embracing the Moon, a Witch's Guide to Ritual Spellcraft and Shadow Work' by Yasmine Galenorn. It uses the visualisation of a gown made of garnets to make one feel beautiful, and therefore to enhance self-esteem. It's a lovely idea. Next time you are feeling fat and frumpy, imagine yourself in a sparkling gown made of precious gems and see how you feel. Or maybe you will be lucky enough to find your garnet gown hanging on a hanger in House of Fraser, and, even if, like me, you can't afford it to buy it, you may have the wonderful realisation that what you are right now is enough.