Wish.
I see now that my blogging role may be that of the person who makes everyone else feel better about themselves. One glance here and you can move on smugly thinking, 'Well, things aren't going brilliantly at the moment but at least I'm not as dreary as HER'. Hmm .... not quite how I pictured my future on that sunny afternoon twenty years ago.

Keeping within my guidelines. I was having a row with my husband a couple of weeks ago about the escalating price of cat food and was screaming that I did not 'love' looking after four inside cats and eight outside 'barn' cats. But did it out of a sense of duty and kindness, (words which are obviously totally unfamiliar to him) and, in fact, would be incredibly happy and relieved if they all died and I didn't have to suffer the drudgery any longer. Any fule could see that I obviously meant the 'barn' cats and didn't even mean that - I was only trying to ram home a point to counteract the 'loving it' remark.

A week later my favourite inside cat died suddenly. Two days ago the insanely sweet, tiny 'barn' kitten died from one minute to the next. This morning one of my other inside cats has come in and lain down in the kitchen looking 'strange'. I think if she now dies for no reason I will go mad. I also said last week, 'This house really needs cheering up. I think we should have more animals'.

Don't bother to write any comments about being sorry ... it gets so repetitive. Maybe when I write something cheerful eventually a comment like 'Good!' would be nice.

- posted by Iris @ 8/27/2004 11:25:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Change.
'For most of August Mercury will be in retrograde motion, causing much upset and change'. Yet again the Heavens have been proved right. Although very wary of the movements of Saturn, (always the signal for something crap to happen), I have ignored Mercury - no longer.

My older daughter has finally broken up with her long-term boyfriend (a secret and muted 'Yay!') and has no job and no idea what do do next in any way.

My second daughter's job finished and she has no work lined up and is taking many short holidays.

My son was finally confirmed as accepted at university and so is not having a second year off after all and is in a state of panic and depression.

My husband has suddenly announced that he is bored with the same old routine and will combine being abroad more with setting up a huge rebuilding programme on this house. (Discussed vaguely for years).

And ... I am writing this fast as I am so upset ... my cat died. For three years she has been the reason that I am here alone. Her illness and the fact that she hated everyone in the world except me meant that I had to be around to feed her or she would just starve - quite apart from pining hysterically when I was away. In three years I have had two short holidays and otherwise never spent more than about four days away from here at a time. Marred by regular ringing of cat feeder to check on cat state of mind and feelings of constant worry. She was closer to me than my own children and I still can't take in that I am alone .... and free.

Free ... to do what?


- posted by Iris @ 8/24/2004 09:13:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Also.
Now I remember why I was writing the last post. A YEAR ago, roughly, I was looking through my school's entries on the 'sdneirF* Re - un1ted' site and found a soul-mate-like message from a girl in my year who I didn't know at all while I was there. Amongst the endless dreary heads of academic departments with two children, she sprang out as having been so traumatised by the awfulness of the school that she needed years of therapy afterwards. AND she was a fascinating, world travelling photo-j0urnalist who lived in Paris.

My school was very, very academic and dry. Frivolities like art or even music were frowned on and getting into Oxbr1dge was our only goal. An 'A' was the the only mark recognised - any other was counted as a failure.

Her message was long and heart-rending and, although I have never re-contacted anyone from school before, I wrote her a rambling supportive reply and suggested we meet in Paris for a drink in the next few months. (How cool am I?). She did not answer. 'Typical', I thought, 'F-cking school. I hate it and especially her and I really wish I hadn't written. B1tch'. I have thought about it quite often since and imagined her reading my words with a contemptuous sneer and then deleting them. Worse, to cheer her up I had repeated some mean scandalous gossip about a mutual old class mate. Who I now decided was probably someone she really liked and kept in touch with. Bugger.

As I said - a year has passed - and today there is an e-mail from her. Charming, over the toply friendly, she can't believe that she never answered when she was so touched by my kindly gesture. But she was in the middle of moving from Franc3 to LA (!) and just forgot and now was clearing out her computer and there it was and will contact me the minute she is ever in L0ndon or P@ris ... etc., etc., gush, waffle ...

So .... assumptions .... hmmm. But why do they always seem to choose the down side of all the possibilities?

- posted by Iris @ 8/15/2004 11:57:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Assumptions.
I had an argument with my husband yesterday. Well, I shouted at him in a stream of conciousness way and he stood there looking puzzled. I was trying to explain that one of the reasons that we find him difficult is that he makes silent snap judgements about so many things without ever actually asking for details of what is going on. There used to be an advertisement for something which showed a black man dashing along a crowded street, with a white man running after him shouting, 'Stop thief'. So you made the obvious assumption. Then the film rewound for an extra few seconds and you saw a white youth run out of a shop, followed by the black shopkeeper and then a white customer. In the first clip the youth had already disappeared round a corner.

Perhaps it is because I read so many detect1ve stories but I think about this a lot, pointlessly. About the way your brain will try to make sense of even the most surreal things but is only able to draw from the stores of information that it has. In fact, that is what dreaming is supposed to be, isn't it? So a large amount of the time our assumptions are going to be completely wrong.

My argument was sparked by my husband saying two annoying things in quick succession. That my son 'always' went to bed at six o'clock in the morning and that I ate really unhealthily as I 'always' had a boiled egg and brown toast for breakfast. (He is STILL on the maddening yaH* diet). After a few minutes of raised voice (mine) I was able to make him admit that these assumptions were based on his having twice in the last month got up insanely early and met my son on his way to bed. For the other twenty nine days he had not seen him and had no idea when he had gone to sleep. The egg thing was - apart from not being unhealthy in the least - also based on a few random sightings. As I usually have no breakfast at all or just a banana. Only a couple of months ago he shouted at me because he had noticed that I sneakily ate a fried breakfast every day up in my bedroom. I was, in fact, taking my son's 'brunch' up to him as he was doing the sniktA* d1et secretly so that his sisters didn't tease him.

I screamed, 'Why can't you just ASK more?', but I don't know. Obviously it's something we all do and I suppose the trouble is that, as your brain has explained the situation to you in a perfectly satisfactory way, you don't realise that any questioning is necessary. So, wait a minute - was that boy in 18th century clothes that I passed on the staircase really one of the children's friends on their way to a fancy dress party?


- posted by Iris @ 8/15/2004 10:49:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Quick.
I am not not writing on purpose - I am past all that nonsense thanks to some brisk straight talking on your part - but the house is never empty and the computer never free. It is only various combinations of family but there is a swirl of chaos and disturbance which is not normally seen here. It was my birthday a day or so ago - the 7th - which I have always been very pleased with. How cool is it to not only be Leo but have 7, mystical and lucky, as well? Not that I take any notice of birthdays now. From the time I was thirty I have let them slip past as if they had never been ... well, near enough. Mothers Day and Christmas are another matter, obviously. For the last few years I have bought most of my own presents too. The standard has risen immeasurably. This year my children 'gave' me some detective stories that I had really wanted; a strange metal science lab. arrangement that turns whole untouched apples into apple juice through a fascinating tube; some Indian s1lk trousers with a matching shawl-like thing; some purple suede Arab slippers; a teeny exercise tr@mpoline and several exotic shades of nail varnish. Perfecto. AND my daughter whipped my husband into shape and made him go and buy some earrings I had already picked out. Life can be so simple.

- posted by Iris @ 8/09/2004 09:00:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Sad.
Obviously this is a really depressing thing to write about but it is what happened today. I told part of this to Badger last week. The son of some friends of ours in the next village, the same age as my older daughter, committed su1c1de a week ago by driving to one of the lonely l-ndmarks on the m00r and sh00ting himself. One of the main reasons for the total shock that everyone felt was that they were an almost joke ideal family. The kind who make you think, 'God, I really must pull myself together and get out into the community and do something for others for a change and I could be a bit pleasanter around the house while I'm about it'. The parents still in love after thirty years and all the grown up children still living at home (a beautiful old manor house) and helping with their father's business. The father a local magistrate and reading lessons in church while the mother runs the parish magazine and organises endless charity events. They even walked across the harahaS* for h0meless ch1ldren or something.

So as soon as this happens you can't help thinking that obviously nothing can be quite as it seems. What strangeness was swirling beneath that admirable, charming facade? Was there no need for me to be envious of them after all? Was it drugs or secret mental illness or parental neglect or even parental cruelty? Or the crippling boredom of contemplating a life to be spent on the moor?

It is surprising to find that you are prepared to envisage the possibility of almost any kind of nastiness in a family who you counted as medium level friends. And it turned out to be none of these things .. as I so definitely should have known. He had no problems of any kind and was totally happy with his family and his life. He had recently come back from some time in Afr1ca and had been taking airalam* tablets which had affected his brain and caused strong ladicius* thoughts, which he had only mentioned, passingly, to one friend. The one brand which was notorious for that has been withdrawn but apparently any kind can affect some few people totally randomly.

So how sad is that?

(You will notice that I am now efficiently marking backwards words with * in case they are not obvious but just weird).


- posted by Iris @ 8/05/2004 11:30:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Back-ish.
Hmm. To prove that I wasn't bound by random deadlines I chose to not start again on 1 August. But - just as before when I had a break - I have returned to find Blogger has yet another totally different and annoying format. Am I the only person in the world who liked the the simple, creaky original layout? Now you have to choose from 5 different type sizes and Normal comes up as HUGE while you are writing and is not in typewriter letters but some sans serif or something so it looks like an old book - why oh why? I will soon see how it looks after 'publish' but I SO DO NOT NEED THIS CR@P.

And now CR@P has come up blue with underlining because perhaps it is not a normal American word. I don't need your annoying foreign help with spelling, particularly as you spell large numbers of words stupidly. Grey. Centre. So? Why haven't you turned those blue? I so wish I hadn't come back.

One of the reasons that I didn't want to do this anymore was because I don't understand how to improve this site. I don't know how to do anything and I don't know where to find out. I have various books, including ziB enotS, but each time I set out to make a blogroll or put in a picture I reach an impasse within about two minutes. And I have wasted hours like this and it drives me mad. And I can't get rid of the ancient adware virus which everyone says has such an 'easy' solution. Suppose you were following computer instructions in Russian and you only had a basic phrasebook for tourists to help you - that is what it is like. There is always one crucial word that you can't work out.

The other reason is that I realised that I had stopped finding the writing a release and a sharing of my problems and instead it had started to feel like work. I would find myself worrying that I hadn't written anything that day - but there seemed to be nothing interesting to say. Not surprising as I live here alone in the middle of nowhere. It had become something that I was putting off all the time, like an essay, and I would pass the silent computer with averted eyes. I think this may be the final proof that I am not a natural writer.

The words of B. St0n3 hung over me. Something like - 'Don't start a blog unless you are prepared to make a commitment. You will have a duty to wards your regular readers'. One of my big gifts is that of lateral thinking. Get rid of the regular readers then and the duty and commitment will no longer exist ... da, daa!

Weirdly - since I stopped writing the number of people visiting my blog has stayed almost exactly the same but they are random searches. Far more than when I am updating.

The other thing was that it was taking up a lot of time. When I wrote some not particularly long piece about the past or something, in a quick stream of conciousness way, it would have taken more than an hour. And although I do feel much happier than I did a year or so ago, it is because of reading other people's blogs and not from writing my own.

Oh well... I will press whatever new and scary button they have come up with and I expect this will all disappear.
- posted by Iris @ 8/03/2004 09:26:00 AM (0) comments comment