Mental
I think this shows how assumptions are so often wrong .. and how difficult it really is to assess people accurately from their writing. A commenter somewhere else dismissed something I wrote about mental illness by saying that I obviously wouldn't know what I was talking about as I was English. And that the understanding of psychiatry etc. here and the willingness to use it are many, many years behind America ... especially if you are some random person like myself.

Funnily enough ... my father was a major figure in the mental health world and my childhood was populated by many famous and distinguished doctors and medical writers. I constantly heard the latest ideas discussed and talked to all sorts of people .. of various ages .. who had been treated in different ways. Even now the famous 'Television Psychiatrists' and 'A doctor writes' people are usually acquaintances of mine.

So I am really tempted to say something aggressive back .. but instead I will just write this here.
- posted by Iris @ 3/30/2006 03:18:00 PM (4) comments comment

 
New Worlds.
When I was about twelve I was on holiday with my parents and we had a slightly unusual evening. The next day my mother said 'That would make quite an amusing little story ... like the ones they read on W0men's H0ur'. (Then probably the most famous and popular daytime radio programme in Britain). She sat down .. wrote it .. posted it .. and some weeks later it was broadcast to hundreds of thousands of listeners. She had never written anything before and never did again. I remember to this day that it was called 'Saus@g3s for the Church' and was an account of our being taken by motorboat from our island hotel to a massive charity barbecue held on a remote mainland beach.

We had a totally ordinary evening and then waded out in the dark to the boat ... which wouldn't start. While the seaman repeatedly turned the engine over in an embarrassed, sweaty way .. every single person on the beach slowly walked off up the cliffs until when he finally said that we were f.cked ..we were all alone. We sat there, freezing, as the moon rose attractively and hadn't the faintest idea what to do. After an hour, literally, of pointless arguing about whether to try to walk several miles in the dark along the cliff top or to sit icily in the boat until dawn .. a little fishing boat drew near. And did something to the engine and it started instantly and we were back at the hotel in a trice.

So nothing really happened .. and why would she be inspired to write about it and especially have the mad confidence to think that this serious, important programme would even look at it? Perhaps it is the 'Beginners' Luck' thing .. because you don't understand the complexities you aren't so afraid. I won a recipe competition years ago when I could hardly cook at all. It was quite high level and had a decent prize of a fitted kitchen and your recipe printed on sliced bread wrappers for a whole month. (The recipe had to be bread based). My repertoire at that time only included about four dishes .. luckily one was made out of bread and apples .. with some secret ingredients which I will only reveal to my daughter on her wedding day. I typed it out in a moment of boredom and .. it won. I think I still have an old bread wrapper in a drawer somewhere .. it was one of the high points of my life .. and a grinning photograph of me featured in a glossy magazine. When we went to look at the fitted kitchen it was so hideous that we just left it in the shop. Still ....

Perhaps that is the answer .. to something or other .. Every so often to make an effort to succeed in a world that you know absolutely nothing about. Your lack of nerve and fascinatingly fresh approach might lead to fame and prizes beyond your wildest dreams. And if they don't .. no one cares .. because they won't know who you are.
- posted by Iris @ 3/12/2006 08:13:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Doomed.
So ......... all my comments have disappeared. When I try to look at them the box says that Internet Explorer can't find them. Maybe I will be alone HERE for ever now .. as well as in real life.

I was reading the April issue of V0gue and turned eagerly to the H0roscopes .. which said (roughly) .. 'By now you will understand why all your soul-searching of the past month was necessary. Mercury's two eclipses caused much disturbance and re-evaluation but the positive aspects of this should soon be in evidence'. How spooky is that? Hurry up April .. I am bored with being depressed.

Speaking of which .. I planted even more primroses yesterday. These are a combination of wild ones which I have moved from my own further away fields (there are millions but practically no one ever sees them) and bought (but very cheap) ones of a slightly different pale yellow. They are cheap because everybody else wants their primroses in weird garish shades of magenta or orange. I am recreating the wild look that would be there anyway if the previous farmer hadn't overstocked his fields so that every blade and leaf was eaten down to the hilt.

It is funny in a way that I have gone to so much trouble over these years to make this once anally neat place look romantically 'old fashioned'. Even buying wild plants and seeds to put back into the hedges and banks of the drives and planting ivy everywhere so that the barns and parts of the house now look like an agent's photograph with 'Suitable for Renovation' written underneath. On the rare occasions that I manage to foil my husband and get a builder near the house I have to hover about him saying 'Please, please don't touch the ivy ... Aaarrghh ... No ... could you lean your ladder over there instead .. Eeek ... that creeper is MEANT to be growing through the downpipe ... ' etc. They think I am a loony.

It means that gardening for me is an endless disappointment. I seem to be the only person in the world who revels in things trailing and winding and falling over the paths. Every gardener I have ever had has consistently ruined the 'look' that I fight to achieve. So that now I can't bring myself to employ anyone and the whole thing is really falling apart and in a messy rather than charming way. I gave up on 'help' when an actual friend who was desperate for money asked if he could work in the garden for a bit. Not only did I feel that we were close enough for me to be brutally frank about his NEVER using his own initiative but he also had perfect taste in clothes and interior decoration .. so I was safe.

There were a few slightly worrying moments when I would appear unexpectedly in the vegetable garden and find that he was pruning the raspberries without asking or had started a new compost heap but it WAS all useful. Until I went away for the weekend .. which did not include his working days ... and came back to find the entire vegetable garden 'tidied' with the attractive wild hedges clipped back and .. how COULD he? .. all the potted box bushes I had been nurturing before making into an insanely carefully arranged edging had been planted rather carelessly and not in quite the right place. And he was PROUD of how much he had achieved in such a short time. But every speck of it was stuff that I had firmly and even sternly told him that I didn't want done.

He was sad and low generally .. and this had made him happy for the first time in ages .. so I felt I couldn't say anything. But now having him there made ME totally miserable. Luckily he finally got a job and didn't have time to 'help' anymore .. but a whole Summer had been spoilt for me and the wrong edging is still an irritation after all these years. So I don't want a gardener ever again .. which drives my husband mad and that is fair enough in a way but he is another 'man' who never leaves the house without a pair of secateurs and snips casually at overhanging rose branches as he walks along. What is it with these f.ckers?

And it isn't just humans. Now the sh0oting season has ended the pheasants are free to wander confidently wherever they like and .. (why?) .. as they pass they pick off the heads of any emerging flower and just throw it on the ground. I hate them. Okay it is cold and pretty much everything you might eat is dead and you are stomping around in knee-high wet grass so you try to snack on something attractively coloured. And you don't like the taste. So why walk along and bite off every single one you pass and toss it aside? As I watched one doing this morning .. to the primroses I planted yesterday. Screaming and banging on the window fell on deaf ears and he pottered slowly away.

It is all so f.cking dispiriting. So bring on the 1 April .. as fast as you can.
- posted by Iris @ 3/12/2006 11:17:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Helpful.
I was walking across to the computer and thinking about this blog .. and there was Serena's comment which was almost exactly the same. My thought had been that I am actually quite good at cheering people up (I hear a faint gasp) and had once imagined that that would be my destiny .. with a newspaper column or something similar. And thinking that maybe I should start another blog which was more like the better moments of this one with amusing chatting and recipes and cute moments remembered of children and cats .. and people would look there specially when they were bored or low. It would be like work .. and possibly a useful exercise and not weirdo therapy as this one is turning out to be. Quite tiring to do though .. and I have this almost irresistible urge to be nasty suddenly when overwhelmed by sweetness.

Two things ... as well. The new one would obviously be different .. but with this one I don't really want very many readers. The number I have is plenty and I would be driven insane if I had commenters who said drippy things. From my site meter I can see that the same old (and very welcome) people pass by here regularly even if the more recent posts have been beyond feeble.

The other thing is that I may have been living this exact bit of life too long and the other night when Loneliness happened for the first time in .. possibly .. a couple of years ..was such a surprise that I quite wanted to see what I wrote in case a subconcious solution appeared. None of these last posts were what I had thought I was going to put when I sat down.

There is an old film from the forties which I was really struck by when I was a teenager and felt that I too might have been put here to help mankind in a similar way. Unfortunately I wasn't struck hard enough to actually remember the name of it still. I t was about a famous film director who .. I think .. dresses up as a hobo and goes down to the railroad tracks to do some in depth research for his new film. There is some kind of fight with real hobos and he is knocked out and comes to on a train in difficult circumstances where it looks as if he has killed someone .. and is arrested. And ..cliche .. no one in the middle of nowhere believes that he is the director and they refuse to check or let him ring anyone .. cliche .. and he is sentenced to years on a chain gang. AND .. it is all hell .. BUT .. the only thing that makes the men happy, ever, is the weekly movie which seems to be invariably M1ckey M0use or similar. And the director has this massive epiphany where he realises that all his gritty, depressing films were a pointless load of crap and if he ever gets out of there he will devote his life to making comedies so that people will feel good about themselves. Very soon after this he is finally tracked down and released instantly (one law for the rich) and becomes the new W@lt D1sney.

And I decided that this would also be me .. but from a writing point of view. Because I have a naturally optimistic, jokey personality . Sadly and strangely .. practically never seen on these pages.

So I was thinking this just now ..Get that personality down off the shelf and put this dreary one back in the drawer. Or at least .. as Serena says .. let each personality have their own blog so that readers will know what to expect .. including myself.
- posted by Iris @ 3/09/2006 12:12:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Barn.
I am going to write about gardening in a dull way .. but it sums up what happens to me ALL THE TIME.

When we bought this house it was a working farm with no real garden but several small paddocks close around .. which we made into lawns and flower beds and a large vegetable enclosure. In this was a once pretty small stone barn which had been patched up cheaply and hideously with breeze blocks and iron sheeting. After many years of discussing and reminding and finally screaming (on my part) .. my husband eventually agreed to ask the local builder to replace the roof sheeting with clear plastic stuff and the block sides with windows ... so that it would turn into a charming greenhouse and we could actually use it for tomatoes etc. The vegetable garden is done in an ornamental way with large flower beds and a pond in front of this barn and so it would all suddenly look attractive and even 'normal'.

The only problem was that every Spring birds appeared and nested in various parts of the building and obviously had done back through the generations. Jackdaws in a collapsed chimney and swallows swooping through the holes in the walls to build inside. So I efficiently got this plan moving in January so that the incredibly simple work would be totally over before the birds turned up in late March. The chimney would be left alone and part of the window glass empty so we would all use the barn together.

I had stood in front of the barn with my husband pointing out that the iron sheeting could be ripped off and identical .. but clear plastic .. sheeting nailed back on .. in a couple of mini-seconds. But it was now March and NOTHING had changed .. and the birds were due shortly. 'Where the f.ck are they?' I said. My husband rang and 'spoke' to the leader of the builders. 'Hmm .. yes ... well it all turns out to be far more complicated than we thought and they will have to rebuild the roof entirely. The special plastic covering comes in completely different sizes to the present iron and needs more support or it will collapse under heavy snow. They haven't got time to fit all this extra work in .. so we will have to leave it till the Autumn'.

'What 'special' plastic .. every other shed in the county has corrugated stuff on the roof?'. 'Oh .. didn't I say? We chose a new kind which comes in larger thinner sections but it has a cutting edge 'coating' which evens out the temperature inside ... slightly'. 'OMG ... I am living in MAN WORLD.' (The one where every simple journey from A to B somehow has to include a detour round M and N). 'LISTEN .. I have a revolutionary plan here ... CANCEL this stupid f.cking stuff instantly. Instead ... order the original roofing, whose pieces are identical in size to the old so that NO new supports are necessary .. and it will take five minutes to replace. So they HAVE got time to do it now'. 'But .. won't it get really hot inside?' 'NO .. because we will also buy conservatory blinds which are everywhere and cost nothing and ... just DO it'. He did .. I am stunned to say.

That afternoon the builder rang and told me that he had ordered my kind of roofing .. it would arrive the next day and they would start and finish work within the week. Leaving a good fortnight or so before bird nesting is due to begin.

My entire life is an endless repetition of scenes like this. I don't have any money of my own so my husband has the final decision on any work on the house or large purchases of furniture etc. We have lived here for more than ten years but vast amounts still need to be done .. and he puts off EVERYTHING .. always because of some bizarre complication that he has discovered or the need to find some antique component which never turns up. He only occasionally gives in after I am reduced to hysterical screaming in frustration. People who work for him constantly go through the same kind of nightmarishness so it isn't our 'relationship'. His manageress rang me in tears of fury only a few weeks ago after the ceiling had fallen down in one of their main rooms .. a YEAR after she had started pointing out the loose plaster to him.

At Christmas I had a long discussion with my daughters about the ridiculous level of unnecessary crapness of here and the flat in London AND the workplace because he will NEVER make any decisions or agree to anything and yet always has the final say. At various points in this 'little talk' all three of us began to cry .. like his manageress .. out of fury and hopelessness. That is another of the reasons why I am here .. at least here I can make many small decisions that slip past him unnoticed. In London he sees all and notes all ...

Every conversation any of us have about this and 'him' leads inevitably to someone saying .. 'It's no good .. we just HAVE to win the L0ttery'. And somehow .. pathetically and insanely .. that seems to be the only answer.
- posted by Iris @ 3/07/2006 11:46:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Spring.
This desire for renewal has taken place on the first day of Spring .. a coincidence ... who knows? And my daughter rang this morning and said that she had been brooding about my 'situation' ever since Panc@k3 Day. As .. for the first time ever .. my husband had come home early to the flat and found my daughters and a couple of their friends having a panc@ke evening. And had sat down with them .. and as she looked round the table she had felt .. this is all wrong .. why are you here cosily eating panc@kes and laughing and Mummy is away in the middle of nowhere .. alone.

I am NOT moaning about this. I am remarking on the fact that something seems to have changed in my perception and now in hers.

The obvious answer is just to go to London more but when I am there I have nothing particular to do. I can always go out in the evenings to somewhere that we own which provides social life on tap but that means invariably drinking some vast amount and usually not having a wildly interesting time anyway. Spending hours in my flat is pretty boring and also .. as I once wrote .. the area has become filled with incredibly selfish, loud richer people who drive me mad with blasting music and endless parties and general 'noise nuisance'. I am not insane here .. I have recently been called in as a witness in a court case between two of my neighbours over noise. So reading or writing at home is interspersed with constant inner rantings about how I want to kill. As well as often lying awake into the early hours waiting for some f.ckers party to end.

I don't enjoy the theatre here that much. It seems to be rehashing of things that I saw years ago and don't want to see again or rather stupid musicals or worthy plays with some guilt-inducing simplistic message that I don't care about. Except ... a dot of pleasure on the horizon ... after a horrible experience of queuing in freezing wind ... my daughter managed to get tickets for us all for 'Sp@mal0t' AND at the time when Tim yrruC* will be in it. This isn't until next October so I have plenty of time to savour it. I will just repeat here that I love him and it is sad that his career never really took off in America. I first saw him a billion years ago when a friend of ours had a small part in a new play called 'The R0cky rorroH Sh0w' and begged us to come and see it as the (tiny) theatre was half empty. So I saw it in its first week .. and was struck by the huge talent and brilliant singing voice of T1m. Later he had the P1rate K1ng role in the 'P1r@tes of P3nzanc3' musical .. done in America by K3vin Kl1ne .. and was perfect again. Then it was all downhill .. in terms of ordinaryness.

The art world is a bit close to home and combines .. in my view .. very dreary collectors and (mostly) maddeningly mediocre artists who I often long to punch in the face. As I am meant to be revealing more of myself I will say here that if I could press a button so that Tr@cy Em1n would be wiped off the face of the earth .. then I would do it this minute.

Almost all my old friends have moved out of London now or spend huge amounts of time travelling abroad. Many of them are a bit irritating to me now anyway as our lives have diverged. Lunch once a year is plenty to keep a friendly vestige ticking over. My one constant pleasure is being with my children but when we are all in the flat .. they are not in the flat .. as they seem to be out all day working and then out all the evening socially. So they have to give up their own things to spend time with me and that is okay occasionally .. but not as a way of life.

Also .. London has changed horribly in the last ten years and it makes me really upset. 'My' part of it particularly which I have known since I was a teenager .. and is filled with a thousand memories .. has also filled with a thousand foreigners. I can't believe that anyone .. however liberal and 'inclusive' .. can actually welcome the fact that a place that they loved has been taken over by strangers and its old charming character totally ruined. I don't want to get on a full bus and be the only person speaking English .. to turn the corner out of my street and be surrounded by women in flowing robes and face masks .. to sit in the historic local park and then have to leave because of harrassment from endless slimy assh0les with impenetrable accents. .... So there you are.
- posted by Iris @ 3/02/2006 09:57:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Portrait.
I have just had a huge insight .. I couldn't understand why it is so difficult to write here when I pour out pages of e-mails every day without a thought. And why .. when I read back .. does it all seem so unlike me and really quite strange and alien and ... sort of annoying?

It is because .. not only is this the Ros3ncrantz and Gu1ldenstern of blogs .. it is also the equivalent of the Portrait in the Attic.

This is not me. This is just the side that I normally keep hidden and don't spend much time with even inside my own head. It is the self-pitying, pathetic part of my personality .. and it hardly ever even makes any jokes. How could I not notice this before? I am really, really not like this in true life ... I can make a stupid aside about ANYTHING however tasteless and unpromising .. and feel it is my duty to do so. Is the garbage receptacle aspect of this blog the reason for my appearing so much happier to the outside world? But that means all those dreary, weedy, mean little thoughts which once lurked in the sub-structure of my brain are now frolicking through cyber-space .. for ever .. While the cheerful, resilient (fairly), e-mail REAL ME has been deleted along with a pile of 'enlargement' spam.

Aaarrgghh! There is three years worth of writing here .. and about twenty percent of it isn't moaning. Think of the miles of e-mails and hours of phone conversations which I would rather have transcribed. All sparkling with amusing quips and filled with riveting gossip or little moments of my children's lives caught in amber. F.CK! It has been the terror of discovery which has ruined it all .. and the feeling that it was disloyal to write about my children in case I slanted it in a way that would hurt them if they ever arrived here. And the same goes for my friends. I was so angry with my husband at the beginning that I felt that nothing I could say would convey the hatefulness of his past behaviour so he wasn't off limits. But now even he is making an effort and a trickle of guilt has begun even there.

From reading this you know NOTHING about my life. Just some anecdotes from the distant past and odd musings about the weather .. and then pages and pages of self-examination. That is just weird. Do you see that I don't even talk about what I read .. when it isn't as much as a book a day but is roughly four books a week at least. Or what I listen to .. when I regularly buy CDs in huge manic bursts. Or what films I see or what TV I watch. You don't know any of my friends even by the most farcical of nicknames. Or what I do in London or my social life down here ... or even very much about the house .. or the garden .. I never say anything about politics or even the News.

Why? Is this peculiar or not? I am amazed now that there is anything to write down at all. Are my children or friends really ever likely to find this? Could I put in more about them in a way that they wouldn't mind .. or does that take away the whole point? I feel that something here has got to change .. enough with the introspection ... its time is over.
- posted by Iris @ 3/01/2006 09:45:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Bore.
Writing yesterday about a moment of loneliness ... well, a good night's sleep and that nonsense is in the past.

Today is the first day of Spring, apparently, and it is snowing with alarmist local weather reports about keeping a shovel in your car at all times. When it was warmer a couple of weeks ago I replanted a lot of primroses artistically on the banks of the two 'drives' down to the house. They are all flowering and budding and seem totally oblivious to the fact that they are straining to keep their heads above inches of ice. They aren't even meant to come out for another month .. how brave and cheerful they are .. what a lesson for us all. Or ... a lesson in how making a superhuman effort to do something not only beyond the call of duty but also completely unnecessary may well lead to your death. This is not unlike my own life philosophy.

After the evening of loneliness I spent a little time reflecting on what the f.ck I AM doing here. The thing is that I can't actually think of anything that I really want to do. I don't have to work for money .. and if I did would that be a salvation? How many people really enjoy their work? How many would stay on if they won the l0ttery? I don't want to be famous because I have finally realised that the only good thing about it would be the money and the rest ... chat shows, fans, mean newspaper articles etc.. would be torture. And I don't want to help animals in a hands-on way because I find that sort of sadness completely unbearable .. it has to be the long-distance cheque option.

And I don't want to help people because ... I don't care enough. Placed in a one-to-one 'I am so unhappy and desperate' scenario .. I am actually renowned for kindness and hours of listening and .. indeed .. offers of money. But there is always 'another me' standing in the room thinking 'For f.ck's sake. Stop being so self-indulgent and feeble. Where is your sense of humour ... get a grip'. I don't include coping with the deaths of family members or close friends here, obviously. Or cats. Once it moves outwards to hordes of unattractive strangers then that is it for me.

I have lived quite a varied life with many ups and downs of money and jobs and types of friends. This has taught me that most people are quite crappy ... and not 'nice' or heroic or even .. horrors .. totally honest. I am surprised that I can still be surprised at the depths to which humans can sink. I think that everyone is born selfish and has to be taught to be 'decent' .. and that seems to be happening less and less. In no way do I believe that there is 'good' in everyone.

Not only that but huge numbers of people are massively boring .. filled with unoriginal opinions and chunks of regurgitated media rubbish and excruciating sentimentality. Why is it so odd to prefer to read books and watch the better TV programmes than sit around enduring conversations that make you want to scream or you find you have tuned out? It was when I found that I needed a large number of strong drinks to get through all the social events that I was attending and the first thing I ever said to a visiting 'friend' was 'How about some whisky?' that the lateral thought of 'Not seeing them anymore' rose into my brain. You may be thinking 'Why doesn't she move into another circle .. find some cleverer and more amusing friends'. Err ... these WERE supposedly some of the most intelligent and amusing people in London. Journalists, writers, artists, actors ... I don't want to sound like an assh0le (too late, probably) but I was once considered an ornament to any dinner party and not the dreary, whiny old frump who appears on these pages.

Okay .. this may not be a life that suits many people but I can manage it .. for now. I DO often wonder if there is 'more' out there ... well there must be .. but I have such a strong core of cynicism (to me this is a virtue) that I really have no idea how to find the way forward.
- posted by Iris @ 3/01/2006 11:17:00 AM (0) comments comment