That was then, that was that, that is gone, that is what I wanted you to feel.

Today is my last day in Whitby. Official move is next... next week sometime, to be honest I am completely disorientated about such things and am merely doing what I'm told.

I am fine, somewhat tearful. No reason; we have nothing to lose. I think there are only a handful of things in life anyone can claim that they have actually lost. We have both had a great time in this place and nothing can ever take that away from us. Only it moves into the past tense and can only be revisited in the imagination. We never get to revisit the great times in any case; even if their locations have been frozen in time, we have not. And that's not a bad thing. There are other great times, new adventures to be had ahead of us, new places which will become special to us further along the road. There are friends out there who we don't even know yet, perhaps a few who are not yet born, let alone all those who exist who we are only going to get to know and love better with time.

Nobody has died; nothing to mourn.

But saying goodbye, even to a place, even when you know that it's time to go...

Things I will miss about Whitby #2

Thanks for all your congratulations yesterday - that was really very lovely indeed.

I have to have a go at this, although it is impossible not to reach for the words which have been reached for time and time again.

I will miss the river. It is never silent and never still. It rises and falls twice a day, sometimes so low you could wade across it, sometimes so high it swallows half the street. And it is flowing constantly, sometimes very smoothly, sometimes drunkenly towards the sea. Drunkenly? Sorry, you know, when it’s a bit choppy. Sloppy. Schloppy, perhaps. As opposed to when you might be mistaken in thinking that the water is really some glossy fabric or foil.

People add to the life of it. They add electric light to dance on it, add boats with their bobbing hulls and clanging rigging. There are river cruises (oh how I shall miss thee, Mini Endeavour, with your penetratingly loud yet incomprehensible running commentry!) and the Dregder that... dregdes and is always fun to watch.

The river carries souvenirs it has collected upstream. After bad weather, it will run brown with huge bigs the bits of tree and other organic debris as well bits of wooden fence, wire, sacking, a length of rope. And even on a calm day you can often spot a random object; a plastic football, a balloon, a hat. Everything travels in the same direction; some items turning and twisting as if resisting the inevitable, others surrendered to their fate, floating serenely towards the sea.

Then there is the wildlife. The seals, which have far more grace and beauty than I had ever imagined. The swans, all white but one, which is jet black. The many and varied breeds of gulls and all manner of other seabirds; shags and wagtails, divers and guillemots and all sorts of things I have conscientiously looked up the names for and promptly forgotten.

Yes, I think I will miss the river more than anything.



In blog news, The 7th Disability Blog Carnival is up over at Disability Studies, Temple U. Meanwhile, please will you go and read An Unreliable Witness and having concluded that it is a truly wonderful blog, go vote for it as the Best UK and Irish Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards. I will never ask you to vote for anything ever again.

No news is good news, I guess

Hooray for the Whitby Gazette! Sometimes life in North Yorkshire seems terribly unglamourous, but then you read news like this: A pint of bitter - shaken but not stirred. This is the gripping news that the new James Bond actor, Daniel Craig, visited these parts when he was in an episode of Heartbeat (retro police drama filmed in this area) - as recently as 1993! The conclusion of the article sums up the grand scale of this showbiz revelation:

But although at least two present Goathland residents were acting as extras in Heartbeat at that time they have no recollection of Mr Craig.
Whitby Gazette correspondent Monica Urquhart was an extra in Heartbeat stories from 1991 until about five years ago.
She doesn't remember the episode but among her recollections as an extra was one when they recorded a carol service in St Mary's Church.
And she agreed that it's probable Mr Craig will have also been in St Mary's for the filming of the episode he appeared in.
Resident Peter Wainwright has appeared in 191 Heartbeat episodes but he cannot recall the Daniel Craig one either.

In other words, this actor who is in one really big movie, once came to this part of the world and probably came to St Mary's Church in Whitby, but nobody remembers a thing about it.

Meanwhile, a hand-grenade was found at the Recycling Centre, but everything was okay. Phew!

If it keeps on raining, levee's going to break

The weather here is atrocious. The snow on Friday barely touched us – there’s so much salt in the air that it rarely settles in Whitby, although in the distance the moors were solid white. Since then the sky has been the colour of wet clay and we've had hail and sleat and lots and lots of rain. Yesterday some of the more interesting seabirds came up the river to escape the worst of the weather elsewhere. My favourite are the guillemots which look and act a bit like penguins. It’s fairly unusual to see them in the harbour at all, let alone this far up the river.

All this rain and Charles Dawson’s concern about things going wrong reminded me of an incident that happened this time last year. It was one evening, the phone rang and when I answered it, there was a recorded message saying, “This is the Environment Agency. The sea-defences are no longer effective and you are about to be flooded. Gather together warm clothes and prepare for evacuation. Carry your pets and elderly neighbours to higher ground. Keep calm and run for your life.”

I can’t remember the exact wording, but this was the gist of it. This was before December’s tsunami but from the message, you’d expect the town to be engulfed by a tidal wave at any moment. I suppose the tone was necessarily, as even with this scary-sounding warning I was thinking, “Yeah right; I’ll believe that when I see it.”

So I pulled the blinds up. And saw it.

There is a road between us and the river. At least there had been before. There was a bit of pavement but only right in front of our building; there was no pavement either side of us and we were completely cut off. It was however very very still and we still had all our power and everything so it wasn’t exactly frightening. I was kind of jittery because I just couldn’t understand what had happened and therefore what was going to happen. In fact the only thing I could think to do was to tidy up a bit so that our downstairs neighbours could take refuge here. I wanted them up here right away; neither of them are exactly agile and one in particular would need to take the stairs a step at a time. But [...] went to fetch them and they insisted that there was nothing to fuss about – even though the water was just a few feet away from their door.

After a while, a fire-engine turned up to try and put the river back, but by this time the tide was retreating and it did the job itself. At the next high tide, early the next morning, only part of the road was covered. And after that it got back to normal.

Today I am having fun choosing which great works of art I want on next year’s calendar. The National Gallery website have a Create Your Own section which includes the ability to have a tailor-made calendar. So I have things like The Umbrellas by Renoir for April, Seurat’s Bathers in July, the Wilton Diptych for December and so on. They don’t offer you the entire collection, obviously – I think there’s about sixty to chose from.

You got your Mother in a whirl; She's not sure if your a boy or a girl.

transvest, tranz-vest', v.t. and v.i. to dress onself in the clothes of another, esp. of the opposite sex.-adj. transvest'ic.-n. and adj. transvestite (-vest'-it), (one) given to this.-ns. transvest'ism; tranvest'itism. [Pfx.trans-, and L. vestis-vestire, vestitum, to dress; cf. travesty.]

So says my Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1974 edition). I know perhaps a writer ought to possess a dictionary published within her own lifetime, but I like to read words such Frisbee, econut and pneumothorax in the Supplement.

Of course, in a modern dictionary the word gender would presumably replace the word sex. Sex is now understood as a purely biological identity; what you have in your pants and your chromosomes, your maleness or femaleness.Gender is the societal construct of masculinity and feminity so dress comes firmly under this.

Even so, some people believe that nature plays a part in what we wear, that for example women are predetermined to be very much invested in their physical appearance whereas men have more important things to think about. Such speculation is made in the context of the last hundred and fifty years where the pinnacle of masculine fashion has been, quite literally, uniformity. Both my grandfathers, all four great grandfathers and indeed a few of my great great grandfathers were soldiers or sailors at some time in their lives. During peacetime, men began to wear a different sort of uniform; the suit and tie or the dinner jacket and bow tie. For millennia women have been complaining that all men are the same, but it is really only in the last two centuries that we have begun to dress them this way.

Before then and throughout much of history, men and women have been more or less equally concerned with self-ornamentation: clothes, jewellery, make-up and defoliation. And indeed there have been periods where modesty was such a highly valued virtue in women that we dressed very plainly and men were comparative peacocks. Such cultures arguably exist elsewhere in the world today.

Modern Western man, it seems, embraces the idea that evolution compels him to compete in all areas of life from the football pitch to the corridors of power, but conveniently ignores the fact that this competition is about sexual selection. Thus what a chap looks like, how he dresses and grooms himself, may be of far more importance to any potential mate than whether he can beat his mate Barry at darts. Yet many men pride themselves on a total and absolute disinterest in their appearance.

For heterosexual women, this must be a great tragedy because there is rarely anything nice to look at. Meanwhile, women feel that so much of their innate value is tied up in their attractiveness to men that many of us spend a great deal of energy and endure considerable discomfort in order to comply to an entirely artificial standard of beauty – something which has very little to do with sexual attraction. If it was all about sexual stimulus, far fewer of us would be on a diet and none of us would shave our armpits.

Men suffer a greater tragedy because they are allowed even less room for self-expression through dress. As a woman, I am allowed to wear clothes designed and manufactured for men. Men’s socks, for example, are a better wearing design for less expense and come in sedate colours rather than multicoloured stripes or infantile cartoons. Men’s boxer-shorts are superior to the thong if one wishing to avoid a visible panty-line. Men’s shirts, if bought several times too large, are far cheaper and more practical than ladies’ night-dresses. I can confess to such deviation without inviting any doubt over my femininity.

However when a man prefers texture, fit or even the sensation of constraint in ladies clothing, he is considered rather odd. Why? Women’s clothes are sold on texture, because we enjoy touching things which are silky, velvety, lacey, we enjoy colour, shininess and sparkle. However, this stuff has an appeal to all of us. Women like looking at it and touching it and men like looking at it and touching it. Why, then, are women the only ones allowed to wear it?

Of course modern masculinity is largely defined by being all that is not feminine, whereas femininity has always been slightly more pragmatic. I have never really understood the common use of the word ‘effeminate’ to refer to men who do not conform to the construct. 'Camp' men are nothing like women at all. Julian Clary or Graham Norton are not like any women I have ever met. Campness, male homosexuality and all associated eccentricities are an integral part of masculinity; gay men are not women with dingle-dangles. Yet the idea that they are, perpetuates straight male fears of losing his masculinity through the slighest frivolity.

The very idea that transvestism or a particular interest in clothes is indicative of homosexuality is ridiculous anyway. Many gay men I know have dabbled in drag, but in a very public way, as a joke, a play on expectations I suppose. I can’t imagine many gay man being turned-on by wearing women’s underwear for example, because he has probably spent a lifetime of almost total disinterest in women's underwear, unlike many of his straight counterparts.

I don’t mean to suggest that all straight men want to dress up in women’s clothing only that it would by no means be against nature if they did. It is certainly not against nature that many men wish to dress in an attractive way. My Mum actually threw out my Dad's cuban heels because she felt they made him look effeminate. [...] gets a lot of leg-pulling from my culturally conservative family because he likes to dress up full stop. Not in women’s clothes particularly, but just so he looks nice. Fortunately we live in Whitby where it is okay to dress up as a vampire or a pirate or whatever the heck you like without provoking comment.

During Goth weekend it is possible to play a game where you sit in a pub and guess the sex of each person who walks in. I must admit I did laugh inside once when talking to one beautiful lady Goth with a very deep voice in a Wakefield accent and an Adam’s apple. I asked her what she did for a living and she said “Tree Surgeon.” In my head I found myself singing He cuts down trees, he wears high-heels, suspenders and a bra…

And I must issue a word of caution. When a person has dressed according to the conventions of his gender for years and years and he begins to explore his full identity for the first time through dress, he is perhaps better off doing it behind closed doors as opposed to on the seafront at Brighton. I know that Adrian and indeed the people of Brighton would want me to post this picture here, if only as a warning to others. And anyway, he can’t complain too bitterly when it’s already on-line.

Anyway, I have now perhaps detracted from the sincere point I was trying to make, which was that we should all cast off conventions of dress and express ourselves fully as individuals, regardless of gender or sexuality. But I have kind of lost my thread now...

We raise our hats to the strange phenomena

I really think our culture would benefit from celebrating Halloween properly. Not all this plastic pumpkin crap but I mean a festival of darkness for the grown-ups like the Day of The Dead or the Venice Carnival, where we all get dressed up, preferably masked and explore the side of us we usually keep under the bed.

In Whitby we've just had Goth weekend. Currently the town is swarming with folk of all ages (about sixteen to sixty-five), some in full Victoriana, others in rubber, PVC and leather, most men and women wearing some sort of corset.

I do think it is notable that the Goth movement only really sustains itself in rather repressed teutonic cultures like our own, Germany and Scandinavia. Cultures where we actually have something we keep under the bed. I like the Goths a lot. I don't know any other subcultures that can take over a small Northen seaside resort for two weekends a year without such as a murmur of local opposition. Plus some of them are hot.

The people to whom Halloween or Samhain really belongs are folks like Marit over at Baba Yaga's Hut who has carved the most beautiful jack o' lantern I have ever beheld. She also offers advice on Scrying, whatever that is. Marit is a great artist you ought to check out.

As for myself, the only ‘supernatural’ phenomenon I am forced to entertain is the idea of some sort of psychic communication between us. There have been some rigorous experiments that seem to suggest that this exists – not in the sense that you and I could communicate through thought alone, but that sometimes it is possible to transmit information, particularly emotional information, between ourselves. I mean we are well aware about sorts of energy which we can’t see, hear or feel; radio waves, radiation etc. So despite my otherwise materialist worldview, I don’t think it is beyond the realms of possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Most people have many examples of when they happened to feel a sudden urge to contact someone at some random yet subsequently crucial moment. I have loads of such incidents, especially involving my family and closest friends. The most profound one within our family was when we were quite small and one weekend my Dad decided to visit my grandparents by himself. At this time, we saw a great deal of my grandparents and Andrew who was living with them at the time. We usually walked round there together, Dad never went by himself, but today he decided to do this and to go by car. He didn’t bother phoning before he went either, which my Mum thought very odd behaviour.

When he turned into their road, he was greeted with the sight of my granddad, his hair and shirt sticky with blood, standing in front of his car, my uncle Andrew behind the wheel. Andrew’s learning difficulties were so profound that it seems unlikely that he would have been able to make the car go forward, but if he had, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to stop it (if in this disturbed state it would actually occur to him to do so). My Dad managed to intervene, get Andrew out of the car somehow. I think this episode began one of Andrew’s periods under section. As I have explained before, the medication Andrew took for epilepsy and other medical conditions would send him rather loopy at times. He was no worse than a stroppy child, only he was the size of a man and as such became an unwitting danger to other people. My Granddad wasn’t badly hurt, only it was a scalp wound so had bled profusely. However, without my Dad turning up on this random visit, it could have been a lot worse.

As for ghosts, well almost all ‘hauntings’ are supposed to be connected to fairly dramatic events. It occurs to me that if there is some form of transmittable emotional energy as I describe, then there is no reason why these things can’t leave their mark on a place – rather like radiation. Souls haven’t returned to haunt a place, only the place remains ‘charged’ with what happened there.

However my most vivid and inexplicable first-hand ‘ghostly’ incident doesn’t really comply with such a theory. It happened one Sunday morning when Mum and I were walking to my other grandparent’s house. We had just begun to worry about my Grandad Wellfare’s failing health. Both my mother and I were very close to Granddad.

The people who lived on the end of our road were Catholics and often had coffee mornings and other meetings round at their house, so there were often a number of cars parked near the end of the road. Today I noticed that there was a very old fashioned looking car parked really close to the corner of the road – dangerously so really. I don’t know much about old cars, but it was very much the shape of a black cab. And it was black, but it wasn’t a taxi. In the passenger seat there sat a woman in late middle age. She was dressed in black, but in a quite old-fashioned formal way with a hat, and a lacey white color. As we passed, she smiled very broadly and waved, which I didn’t think much of because my Mum was always bumping into people she knew and I didn’t. I smiled back and when we were round the corner and a little way up the road I asked, “So who was that?”

“You didn’t see her too?” Mum said in surprise.

“The lady in the car, right?”

“Oh. That was my Grandma Wellfare.”

I don’t need to tell you that my great Grandmother had been dead for some time at this point. I was then sworn to secrecy on the matter, which I guess she’d probably let me off by now. What followed was a very painful period for us all; my Granddad had pancreatic cancer which carried him away within the space of a few months (an extremely santitised version of events). Yeah, I know. Well it wouldn’t be a spooky story if I included the rational explanation.

Now for some real horror, today I have been revisiting The Kick Inside by Kate Bush and singing along. Ooh, let me grab it, let me gra-a-a-ab your soul away-ay-ay...

Folking Marvellous

I had quite a trip in my wheelchair yesterday as I went up to the hospital, the dispensary at the doctor’s surgery and the back through town. I was, once again, a little anxious about the crowds. This is Folk Week and we’re coming up to the Bank Holiday weekend. However, I can’t think I have had a smoother journey across town, especially not during the season.

[...] warns me to avoid the pelican crossings on the main roads because the cars won’t stop. I ignore this advice but wait until there’s no traffic or else there’s such a crowd of us on the pavement that the vertical types move out into the road, bring the traffic to a complete halt and allowing me to cross safely as well. Yesterday, at both main road pelican crossings, I merely approached the kerb and the traffic stopped in both directions. Similarly, people moved out of my way. I mean, not just a bit; they actually stopped in their tracks and stood back in order to allow me to pass. There was one exception in the form of a small boy who ran in front of my chair and before I could stop got hit in the leg with a footrest (which I imagine hurt a lot, and I felt pretty bad about it).

The Folk crowd are, I discovered, a decent crowd. They may have bells around their ankles and everyone of them sports a bushy white beard, but they’re a jolly good-natured lot.

I must admit didn’t think this last Sunday night, when they all got very drunk in the Middle Earth Tavern with which we are in close proximity. Early on in the evening, they sang well-known songs like All Around My Hat and Dirty Old Town (they have to be ones that everybody knows the words to). Then later on, their supply of popular folk ditties ran dry and they resorted to none other than The Banana Boat Song. Now, I have nothing against this song, even sung in muffled chorus at half past midnight, but it’s Folk Week - these are supposed to be self-respecting Morris Men!

I was going to publish some pictures on here, but the best one's belong to EFN (Essex Folk News) magazine, who stipulate that whilst non-commerical reproduction is permitted, this is on condition they are used to promote the traditional arts. While I am quite happy to testify to the folk crowd's good manners, I can't even look at these pictures without a bit of a giggle.

In other news my physio appointment was a bit of a disaster. It was my first attendance having had to cancel the first two appointments I was given due to my varying health. My physiotherapist is Asian and not entirely fluent in English. The language barrier would not be a problem if I had a straight-forward injury or the sort of complaint he is coming across all the time, but as it was I felt I was having to work very hard to make myself understood and in fact he wasn’t understanding very much of it at all. It was very disheartening and I’m going to have to work out what to do before I am next supposed to see him. It could be a total waste of time if he doesn’t understand (a) the nature of my condition and (b) what I am coming to him for. Never mind.

The Curious Incident of the Seagull In The Daytime

Or The Seagull Has Landed.

You develop a complicated relationship to seagulls when you live on the coast. The seagulls in Whitby are a cause for great annoyance. They are most hated by the drivers and the goths. Anybody who has a car knows what it is like to get guano off the paintwork – our friend H’s car which we use was once brown but is currently a kind of mottled beige such is the amount of poop on the roof. The goths get it the worse perhaps; black velvet, daubed with white seagull plop - well, you can imagine. I guess the nuns up at the convent must have similar troubles but you never hear them swear about it.

And the gulls are cheeky. If you leave food anywhere that they can get to it, even if it means entering an open window, they will. If you leave leftovers of your Chinese meal from the Good Luck takeaway in a rubbish bag outside, they will eviscerate it, leaving a mess of noodles, like entrails, all over the yard.

However, they have their advantages. Like they attack the tourists.Bram Stoker,Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell (Dickens as well but Dickens visited everywhere). You have the philosophical/ historical set who come here because this is the birthplace of English literature (Caedmon, the first person to write poems in English), Roman Christianity in England and Lucky Ducks. Then you have the railway people and the Austrailians come to visit the home of Captain Cook. You have the people who are into Jet jewellery and early photography. There’s the goths for Whitby Gothic Weekend and then there’s the beardy sandal-wearers at Folk Week and the new Abbeygael Festival. All of these people are very welcome here.

But mostly you get the scally day-trippers from Teeside. Not everyone from Teeside or indeed every day-tripper is the same of course, but there is a certain type. This type keep their custom exclusive to those shops which they have branches of in their native towns, i.e Woolworths and the cheap shoe-shops, thus contributing little or no money to the local population. Their children seem at first undisciplined, but then you see them being subject to corporal punishment in public places.

And strangely enough it is always these people who get attacked by the gulls. We all get shat on, but these folks sit there eating their fish’n’chips and getting gradually drunk on some sickly fizzy concoction they have purchased in two litre bottles from the Co-op, teasing the gulls by pretending to throw their chips but then not letting go and bursting out into slack-jawed laughter. Then they complain to the local council when some great hefty herring gull swoops down and pinches their dinner.

Anyway, on the whole locals live side-by-side with the gulls and you don’t notice them anymore. When you’re on the phone, the landlubbers on the other end comment on the noise they make although you don't hear them. People staying over have their sleep disturbed by them but you wouldn't even know you were there.

Until someone tries to hurt them.

We went to York today and when we came back there was a seagull sat in our yard. Seagulls do venture into our yard, but there’s not a lot of space and they certainly don’t stay in our yard when there are people about. And they don’t then hide behind the dustbin as opposed to flying away when you approach them.

Our seagull could not fly away, but he wasn’t obviously injured and there were no feathers about. Suddenly we were filled with suspicion and rage. There are three possible explanations of how our (now beloved) seagull came to harm;

We keep finding BB gun pellets in the yard. Has someone been shooting at the seagulls? Almost certainly. Did they actually hit the seagull? Perhaps.

Our landlords use the flat above ours as a holiday flat, perhaps five weekends in the year. They have roses up there and they put slug pellets down on our steps this weekend. It just so happens that all the slugs live directly opposite our flat and today there were about two dozen shrivelled slugs outside our flat. Could poisoned slugs harm the birds that digest them?

Are the seagulls themselves being poisoned?It is hard to kill animals as big as seagulls with poison without endangering other animals. So they get sick. A few years ago a mass culling exercise resulted in 'drunken' seagulls flying headlong into buildings and people, causing a greater hazard and nuisance than they ever were before.

Whatever happened, the chances are that foul play was involved.

Most conflicts between man and nature are entirely man-made. The reason seagulls are pests is because people feed the seagulls or leave their kitchen windows wide open with plates of food on display. Reduce their food source and their numbers reduce. Simple.

On a positive note, we phoned the local RSPCA for advice, convinced that they would have no interest in a mere seagull but a lady did come out and rescue it (tiny woman picked this rotten great gull up in one hand and gave it her other hand to peck on). So hopefully our seagull will live happily ever after.

The Sunset and The Bonkers Goldfish

The Solstice Sunset, Whitby 2005

This picture is actually one that my friend Pete took. He was able to walk across the road to the edge of the cliff – all my photographs had lampposts in them which detracted from the view despite my best efforts to arrange them artfully.

Much happier at this end of the week. Trying to do some recording of my compositions today - trying being the operative word. I’m beginning to think that I’m just not that good a guitar player to play a four minute tune accurately, even if it is a tune I wrote.

My books moving on. It is very frustrating, this sense of being so near – beyond the point of no return – yet knowing there’s still a lot to do and notknowing just how much I have got to do, how much editing it’ll take, any major changes between here and the completed manuscript.

This stage in the writing process is like a sort of psychosis; you have all these characters in your head who you know intimately - better than you know most of your friends and family. You kind of created them, but you feel like they must have always existed elsewhere and only moved into your head when you invited them in. They’ve highjacked a fairly simple creative idea you had and keep replaying it in your head like a vivid dream – not a film because that’s purely visual and only lasts a couple of hours – but a fully sensual dream which seems to span a period of about a month, which is the timeframe for events in the novel.

I know the story extremely well, but it remains ever so slightly dreamlike. Even the most vivid and orderly of dreams have slight inconsistencies, bendy bits, clues that what you are experiencing isn’t quite real. Sometimes I read over what I’ve written and realise that time has passed too quickly or slowly, somebody has obtained an item which should have been elsewhere, someone has expressed a knowledge of something which they are yet to learn. Also these characters, who have become an almost demonic presence in my life, keep adjusting it like prima-donna actors interrupting the rehearsal to suggest “What if I come in through the other door and use this line instead of the crappy one you wrote?” The bastards.

The only thing I can do to exorcise them is to get it all written down and share it with someone else. But I have to get it perfect; I really have to get it right so that someone else can fully understand exactly what happened. I don’t believe that I’ll get these people off my back otherwise. I decided to give up and work on something else this time last year but they continued to haunt me all summer.

The novel’s principle antagonist is the worst because he’s so damn narcissistic. Sometimes when I am doing other things, thinking about other things, like when I’m blogging or browsing eBay or whatever, I’ll hear his voice saying, “What the fuck are you doing, Deborah? You’re supposed to be writing a book about me.”. He always speaks quite quietly but pronounces the word ‘fuck’ with great emphasis, like he uses half the breath he took for the entire sentence on it. Conversely, when I am writing lots – especially about him - he’ll say really gentle complimentary things, even tells me to take it easy and not be so hard on myself. I don’t really trust this. Frankly, the guy scares me. I want him out of my head.

I have had to abandon plenty of other projects because of my health or timing or because I realise I’ve made a mistake but I don’t think I’ve got a chance with this. I have to get it done or else in ten or fifteen years time they’ll still be bothering me.

Goodness, that feels a great relief to have off my chest, but you can kind of understand why this is not something I can easily share...

In Memorium To A Muse

Jeff Muse drowned in Whitby harbour last night. He was a really nice friendly chap, early thirties. Byronesque looks, you know, very romantic looking and quite a romantic character all round; a little enigmatic, a little misunderstood. I always considered him very well suited to his surname. He was rarely fine and dandy when I asked, but then he was always fairly cheerful and concerned about me. He was one of these people who seemed genuinely interested in you.

The last time I saw him to speak to, I was going through a period where I had almost given up on my book and when he asked me about it, I felt embarrassed about the length of time it was taking. But he said something along the lines that it would be all the better for the time and effort and just what he said picked me up and got me going again.

He was a jet carver and a bit of a whizz. Our friend H thought he was talented, and Hal dose not give such praise lightly at all. H came round for dinner tonight but arrived with his news. I was in lots of pain, drunk too much and said all the wrong things.

Apparently his death was an accident, high spirits plus water. Jeff was a strong swimmer and was often in the river or in the sea. He lived on a boat for goodness sake, I saw him pretty much every day on the other side of the river. His health hadn’t been great lately though. I kind of hope that in the cold of the water his heart gave up or something like that such that it was quick. I am trying hard not to think about him drowning.

Here is the BBC News story such as it is just now.

I am afraid that [...] is going to take this very badly. He’s been kind of low lately and this is the last thing he needs. They weren’t close friends, but they saw and spoke very often. Jeff was involved in the sword-fighting and stuff. I told him he must go to the funeral without me, because then he can just go and not have to worry about transport and access and so on.

So this, the pain, having said the wrong thing to H (I don’t think he was terribly offended and I did say “Sorry, I said the wrong thing” but still) leaves me feeling pretty wretched just now.

This isn't someone I was close to, so I feel a bit of a fraud having a cry about it. But it is one of those shocks which you can't see any positive side to, except the guy having been here in the first place. Unless of course there is a heaven, in which case the guy is sorted.

Journalistic Stardom and More Co-ordinating Crips

I got an article published on the BBC Ouch! website today. This is very exciting – the first paid employment of my adult life no less. But also, they asked me to do it. The BBC actually approached me to write for them. This is not an incredibly big deal in the wider scheme of things, but for me and my secret belief that I’m useless at everything, this matters. A lot.

Did you know that Lewis Carroll was first published in our very own Whitby Gazzette? The title of my novel is from a Lewis Carroll poem. My novel is called To Fear The Light and it's from the poem Phantasmogoria. The relevant verse goes;

“And as to being in a fright
Allow me to remark,
That Ghosts have just as good a right
In every way to fear the light
As Men to fear the dark.”

So there you go.

Recommended listening (if a touch traumatic) is last week’s It’s My Story on Radio Four. You’ll have to click that link before the next episode on Thursday or else you’ll get something else. Anyway, it was about a journalist with a heritable impairment and her decisions around starting a family. This was quite interesting because the lady clearly hadn’t got her own disability completely sorted in her head (who has?) and some of the non-disabled people featured had a much more reasonable, less disabling perspective than she did. Anyway, I could say a lot more about this but have a listen.

Spotted another co-ordinating crip at the weekend; a fairly elderly woman being pushed in a wheelchair by (presumably) her daughter, both of them wearing very bright turquoise rain macks. I can’t imagine it was the older woman’s choice to look as much of a pillock as her daughter did.

I popped out on Saturday afternoon and got effectively forced into the road by the crowds on the pavement. This is no good. Other people were walking in the road, but of course when a car came along, they could all hop to safety; I had to trundle along until the next lowered curb. I don't think I was in any danger, but the place was busy and I was worried about getting shouted at by a moody driver, or someone trying to rescue me. So please everyone let those using a wheelchair, a crutch or stick take the inside of the pavement.

Anyway, it has been kind of fun looking after [...], who is mending. They’ve given him the same tablets I take and these made him much more comfortable. Being a total light-weight however, they have induced him to sleep pretty much all weekend – I’ve never known anything like it! But basically he’s all right and since I’m not so bad just now, we’ve not yet reached the stage of crisis with stuff like food and housework. The fact he appears to have caught my cough/cold thingy – over a week since I got ill with it – isn’t exactly helpful, but usually he works through colds, has no rest and thus makes them last for weeks on end. Forty-eight hours sleep might be enough to throw this into touch.

It's good not to feel useless. With me in charge we've eaten well all weekend and the house hasn't burnt down or become infested with rats yet. So that's great really.

The Yellow Blanket Brigade

I’ve been doing a lot of sitting (well, lying propped up) and looking out the window today. The car-park on the other side of the river is packed. It’s school half-term so town is very busy. But I noticed a convoy of five wheelchairs moving along the edge of the carpark towards the town. They were all manual chairs being pushed by assistants and although I couldn’t make out a while lot about the wheelchair-users such as their age or sex, all five of them had bright yellow blankets over their knees. Not fluorescent or reflective yellow, just bright sunshine yellow fabric, like the cloths you buy for dusting. This made me sad. Why? Because I don’t think five wheelchair-users would have chosen to each have the same bright yellow blankets placed over their knees on a sunny day in June.

I wonder if they came from that bus I saw parking a short while earlier. It had writing on which I could read clearly from this side of the river saying “Jesus lives and will return.” Of course it is a cheaper way of doing things; buying a day return to Whitby as opposed to paying separate fares here and back, so Jesus obviously has His head screwed on. And I’m glad to see the King of Kings setting a good example by His use of public transport.

Why is that I connect the bright yellow blanket brigade with the Jesus bus? Why is that you are also making this connection? I need to sleep.

Oh god, I'm talking about the weather!

Well, it's a lovely sunny weekend here after a week of truly gruesome weather; dark skies and rain. The river is full of detritus from upstream where apparently there's been flooding; bits of tree, fence posts and the like. Earlier in the week I watched a football float past. I thought there must be a good story in that. Not a very good story but still.

I have a complicated relationship with the weather. People often say, "Oh the nice weather will make you feel better." when in fact it often has the opposite effect. I don't suffer too badly with the heat like lots of crips do, but some of my darkest depressions have come in the late spring or summer when everything looks beautiful and I've been holed up inside on the sofa or in bed. However, this summer I have my electric wheelchair so I can trundle down to the beach if I so chose. We have a lovely, sloping sandy beach here in Whitby although it's at the bottom of cliffs so my chair will need lots of juice to get back up the cliff paths. We also have access to a car and thus the purple moors, plus we've got two trips planned down south; one to my folks' in just over a week's time and one to Rosie and Gingernuts' wedding.

So I am actually looking forward to summer for once and the weather has cheered me up, together with a higher dose of codeine which is neither knocking me out or stuffing me up or doing any of the things I was anxious it would do. Under my new tablets Other unwanted effects it lists "a feeling of extra well-being". So I'll have to look out for that one. If anyone notices me acting too chirpy they'll better confiscate my pills and call an ambulance.

Also after a week of frustrations my writing started flowing again yesterday. I wrote some really good dialogue between two characters who previously didn't seem to be able to express themselves in anything but a stilted, tactless way. Yesterday they got talking like real people with tension and subtlety.

My only real trouble at the moment is that I can't have a bath without falling asleep. Every blooming day this week, when I've got in the bath I have promptly fallen asleep, waking up cold and sniffling and generally miserable an hour or so later. But if that's all I've got to worry about life isn't too bad.

And aah! I have a big henna stain on my arm! Yes, I have been making my hair red again. It's become a habit now. I like having red hair, but you know in the six weeks it's been red, only one person has commented on it. Only one. I know when I visit my folks they'll notice and thoroughly disapprove.

Weird weather and feeling better

Well after I wrote that I had a rest and then I played my guitar for a bit and began to get excited about one of my positives; I'm going to get a program called Adobe Audition so I can record and edit my compositions into the computer. I can play more than one guitar part and do some wailing over the top of it and stuff. It is a very expensive program, even on eBay although it is readily available via P2P - I'm a good girl and follow the rules as far as I possibly can. And frankly I had the trial version of Audition and it is a lovely piece of software - I wouldn't want to cheat the guys who put that together, even if they don't get the bulk of the money. I can also use it for the RNIB volunteering thingy I mentioned, which I intend to do as soon as my decks are a little clearer.

Meanwhile, this sunny April day got windy and snowed. It snowed. Horizontal snow. The flakes must have started falling in Sweden given the angles at which they were passing our windows in Whitby. It hasn't been very cold - I'm down to one layer much of the time and we've had the windows open earlier in the week. Now the snow has gone, the water in the river has calmed and the sun is so bright I have had to pull down the blind so I can see the screen. Weird weather.

Now I'm drinking funny coffee. It is funny coffee because it is decaffeinated, with skimmed UHT milk and fruit sugar - i.e sugar which is about a fifth of the calorific value of normal sugar. It is even funnier because I don't drink coffee and every now and then I have one of these and really really enjoy it despite it's complete lack of anything which might give you a buzz.

So now I feel better. Thanks for your patience.

Spring has sprung - dwoiing!

Here is a very silly poem [...] likes to recite at this time of year;

The spring has sprung, the grass has riss'
I wonder where the birdies iss'
The birdies is on the wing!!
but that's absurd,
the wing is on the bird.

I have no idea who it is by - I did attempt to find out but I failed.

I think spring must have sprung. It's really warm and sunny and I'm thinking about going out without my trenchcoat. I only have to persuade myself to go out at all, which is taking some effort. I want to go out but at the same time I'm dopey and I don't really have anywhere to go. I think I will wait until [...] leaves the house then follow him about at a healthy distance.

There's an awful lot of sexual activity going on in our fishtank. The place is littered with roe (literally; the floor is covered with it, the glass is covered with it - there are even eggs above the surface of the water). The snails are also covered with the stuff, but they are getting up to their own shenanigans, especially the largest snail who seems to be either mating or laying eggs every time I look up. The first time we saw it mate it picked on the very smallest snail and we considered that the large snail might actually be attempting to eat the little one since it was squishing it about and sucking upon it. But then it let the little one go, trundled across the tank and laid a great long trail of eggs (about 50 x 8 millimetres - most of the snails only lay 8 x 8 millimetre blobs).

Some of the fry, the baby fish, seem to be surviving and growing without getting eaten, but I'm not sure if realistically they have any chance. Similarly, both the snails and the fish appear to like the taste of snail eggs. I don't suppose any of them have read any Doctor Spock.

I really want to get on with painting my wargaming figures and try to have a battle on Wednesday. Everybody else fights with half painted figures but I can't do this, they have to be perfect before they can be fielded. This is why I haven't had a battle despite having had these models since Christmas.

I also want to get on with my book, but I think I need to get some fresh air without the exercise before I can concentrate on anything. Easter is coming and Whitby may get pretty crowded with tourists - I hope it does for all my friends' sake whose livelihoods hinge on this stuff, but it does mean it gets rather uncomfortable in town.

By the way, dwoiing! is the sound of spring springing.

What did happen on Easter Saturday?

Despite the fact that yesterday seemed to me like the coldest day this year, spring is almost upon us. We are planning a trip to my folks in sunny Suffolk at the May Day bank holiday weekend and that’s only seven weeks away. Wowza.

My friend Vic and I were arranging to talk on Easter Saturday and we were trying to work out what it was that happened on the first Easter Saturday. We decided that they all sat around saying “You know, I keep looking up at that cave half expecting to him strolling out, bold as brass.” and of course they would have had the will-reading. Items we decided would be in Jesus’ will included;

• Carpenter tools, various, mostly only light use
  
• Seven loin cloths, freshly laundered (one size)
• One pair of sandals, used, some water damage
• Those “special” demijohns
• Recipe book; How to Feed 5000 on a Student Budget

That was about as far as we got. Any more (non-offensive) suggestions?

I asked my sister, a practising Christian, what happened on Easter Sunday and she suggested that they all went shopping for Easter Eggs, although naturally they didn't eat any until Jesus had risen...

Of course Whitby, the town where I live is not very famous for being the place that the date of Easter was decided in 664. The Synod of Whitby was mostly about the British (such as we were) adopting the Roman customs of worship as opposed to the Celtic version, but a universally agreed date for Easter was a by-product. So there you go.