Author: farleyrose59

Rushing to the End of Me

farleyrose59 5 Comments

I had a birthday last week—it wasn’t a big one with a zero at the end, or even a half-hearted five but it did nevertheless feel like a landmark. A couple of people hummed When I’m Sixty-Four to me during the course of the day, and it was tempting to think that this must be the beginning of old age. But I quickly dismissed these thoughts as Paul McCartney was only fourteen when he penned the first version of the song, and what could he have known about ageing then. There was, though, something else about my new age that did rattle me. It was the knowledge that I am now just one year away from joining that final group on typical questionnaires and online forms—the catch-all, end-game 65+ category. It’s a sharp reminder that life is time-limited. 

Recently, I read Joan Bakewell’s reflections on getting older—The Tick of Two Clocks—and was struck (unintended pun) by what she has to say about spending her life in a rush. Why am I always in such a hurry? she asks herself. What’s all the rush about? I’m rushing from one thing to another but all I’m doing is rushing to the end of me. 

I completely relate to that and like Dame Joan, I have to wonder why I’m so intent on rushing rushing rushing to the end of me. Here’s an easy answer—many things are boring; get them done as quick as possible. But that can’t be right because the truth is that I rush through the tedious stuff so I can get onto the more interesting things. And…as soon as I get to them they redefine themselves as tedious, and so I hurry along to get to the more interesting things. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t even argue that I have a lot to do and must go fast to get it all done. There were many years when I was genuinely busy keeping all the family balls in the air but those days are gone. My time is largely my own—there is no compelling reason to rush. 

I try another tack—I hurry because I like to get things done and squeeze in as much as possible; I enjoy being busy and being productive throws a rope bridge across what could be an empty void. Live deep and suck out all the marrow of life like Henry David Thoreau said. Ah…but I don’t remember him saying that you have to rush, retorts my rational side. 

There may be no reasonable justification for incessant rushing but the question remains of whether it matters. It’s a deeply-ingrained habit, for sure. But is it a bad one? 

It’s easiest to maintain the status quo but once I get started I can think of plenty of arguments against a hurry mindset. The first is that it makes me careless. Generally speaking this is not a good thing although there is one situation where it has its compensations. Mike complains that when I load the dishwasher it looks as though I’ve hurled things in from the other side of the kitchen, and they come out dirtier than when they went in. There’s an easy answer to that one—I just leave it to him. But the second drawback of rushing is that I squander the present moment. I forget to enjoy it because I’m always thinking about the next thing. 

Then there’s the problem that rushing causes stress and that’s not good for anyone’s health. In the 1950s two cardiologists noticed that many patients presenting with cardiovascular disease were in a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time. They called it hurry sickness. It’s probably no coincidence that I’m uncomfortably familiar with migraines, insomnia and gastric reflux, and that these hangers-on have recently been joined by a new companion—hypertension. Fourth comes the problem of multi-tasking. Doing several things at once feels like it should be super-efficient but since you can only concentrate on one at a time you’re constantly juggling which is exhausting and not very effective. Fifth, rushing produces a feeling of shortage rather than satisfaction. There’s nowhere to go with the feeling that there’s not enough time—when you constantly fill it up with things to do then you’ll never get it all done. And sixth, rushing creates impatience and that’s not good for relationships. 

There’s a seventh too—the impact on the next generation.  “I think I take after you, Mum…” said Molly recently. I had a brief glow of maternal pride and then she said, “…I’m very slapdash.” 

I’ve surprised myself with all these arguments against my rush, rush, rush mentality and I wonder whether you relate to this. But even if you’re of a calm, steady nature, I’m sure that you know people who hurry mindlessly. Because I’m definitely not alone—there’s a huge range of books, blogs, and podcasts all advocating the general principle of slowing down and being more intentional. I can see the benefits of serenity, and so I take the advice to focus on introducing just one change at a time. I try slow ironing…slow toothbrushing…slow walking…slow supermarket shopping…slow weeding…slow chatting…slow chewing…but none of it comes easily. They are all sabotaged by my insatiable itch to get onto the next thing. Then I discover something that is much more successful—slow showering. The warm water feels delicious, the soap smells fresh, and the shower tiles are rough under my feet like a Roman mosaic. I enlist an army of physical sensations to keep guard against the coming day as it tries to force its way in and at the end I pull the towel back and forth across my back. I think idly of a pig at a scratching post and finish by smoothing rose-scented body cream over my legs. It feels good to take care of myself and to remember to be grateful for this body that has served me well, producing four children, and carrying me around at top speed for decades with few complaints. My mind is quiet for a few minutes. I think this must be mindfulness. It’s a constant struggle, not squandering today by anticipating tomorrow. But it’s a start. 

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Something’s Changed

farleyrose59 6 Comments

I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve; that traditional moment for reflection. But this year I think that my internal software must have had an upgrade without me noticing because things feel different. Something significant has changed and I feel like a new version of myself.

In past years, I’ve been a dedicated fan of New Year resolutions; attracted like a moth to the glowing flames of optimism and by the allure of self-improvement. That may sound positive but the truth is that I singed my wings many times, setting out determinedly on 1st January with a clutch of wide-ranging commitments to myself, all carefully planned out—and all conveniently forgotten by 31st January. I was trying my best but sometimes the list stretched to eighteen items and I fear that I might have seemed comically earnest.  

It was almost inevitable that I would lapse as many studies have found that a very small percentage of people stick to their New Year resolutions. My start-of-year lists may have only ever had a brief gasp but I did once have a list that played an important and satisfying part in my life. I’m talking about the list I made when I was fifty-four and needing to reconnect with the world after a difficult patch—on it were sixty things that I wanted to do before I was sixty; some big and time-consuming, others small and simple. 

They filled in many gaps in my experience and were a way of pinning down things that I’d longed to do for years. I took horse riding lessons, read Middlemarch, went to Japan and St Petersburg, watched all of Hitchcock’s films, learned to identify birdsong, made a (rather awful) patchwork cushion, walked the North Downs Way, did a painting, went to the Glastonbury Festival, and much more besides. I’ve written about many of these things in 31 Treats And A Marriage but one that I’ve not yet shared is a trip that I made in 2018 to see New England in the Fall. There’s plenty of autumn colour in other parts of the USA but New England is a particularly good place to see it on account of the variety of deciduous trees and the natural beauty of the landscapes. We stayed in New Hampshire and while we were there we took a four-hour heritage Fall Foliage ride on the Winnipesaukee Scenic Railroad. As we chugged alongside the lake with the White Mountains in the distance, the colours were indeed spectacular. I groped for words to describe it all—peach, ginger, crimson, acid yellow, strawberry ice cream, lime, rust, gold, olive green, pumpkin, tomato red, sunshine, cherry, terracotta, auburn, mustard, apricot, chili red…it’s surprising how many were related to food. 

Half-way, the train stopped at Plymouth where lunch had been laid on in a converted wood mill. I sat with Mike on my left and to my right, a couple of American women who were deep in conversation throughout the first course. Then, part-way through the pudding, the one next to me put down her spoon and gave me her full, wide-eyed attention. “So what’s your total, then?” she asked. 

“It’s my first trip here,” I said. “I’m enjoying it very much. Wonderful foliage.” 

She looked blank. This was clearly not the right answer, and as she glanced purposefully towards Mike I wondered whether perhaps she was asking about husbands. “Two?” I said tentatively. 

She was not at all impressed. “Mine’s thirty eight,” she said proudly. Maybe she meant lovers. She did look as though she’d lived a bit. 

I wondered what to say next but she made it easy for me, ploughing onward and determined to make her point. “…our last trip, we did Switzerland and Germany, and before that it was Peru. My friend and I…” She gestured towards the woman on her right, “…we always travel together.” 

Realising at last what she meant, I tried to do a quick tally of all the countries I’d visited but had to admit defeat.”I don’t know,” I said limply. She looked deeply disappointed, and turned away. Later, on the train ride back I added them all up but couldn’t equal her total—even by splitting the UK up into Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Not even by cheating a bit and including England where I’ve lived all my life. Nor by including the Channel Islands which are Crown Dependencies and their status is so confusing that I justified shoehorning them in. Then I stopped as the totals game seemed a bit silly. 

This was not the first time I’d been prompted to consider what my list meant to me but I knew already that it was not about totals and ticking things off. It wasn’t a to-do list threaded through with obligation and guilt but was instead a could-do list full of promise and things to look forward to. Each treat was a defined and memorable beacon; an event that sat outside the indistinguishable sludge of everyday life. I am so grateful to that list—it was the crutch that got me through a difficult time. It also gave me the material and motivation to write a book—something I’d always wanted to do. 

Unlike my New Year resolutions, I was fully committed to it, and by the time I got to my sixtieth birthday, I had experienced all the things I’d written on my list. By then, I couldn’t imagine life without a list and so I rewarded myself with a birthday present of a new one—seventy things to do before I was seventy. I gave this list a lot of thought, read it to my family, and settled down to enjoy the familiar anticipation. The first thing I did was to kayak along the Wye, and that was very enjoyable. I was glad to have done it. Then I went to the Sistine Chapel. Again, something I was pleased to have done. Then I went to Runnymede, the Royal Court Theatre, got to know two Sondheim musicals, and explored the Suffolk coast. But with the pandemic, something unexpected happened; doubts crept in. Did I really want to get to know three operas, learn some magic tricks, go segwaying, get wet in a monsoon, take a hot-air balloon trip, visit Vietnam, and learn the Charleston? Well, perhaps. But with the enforced hiatus I’d lost my motivation. I realised that I didn’t need a list anymore. Unlike the first list that provided a vital structure when I needed it, this one felt contrived. Instead of being a pleasure, I felt like I was going through the motions because I had a list, and so I took the paper version off the wall and quietly slipped it into a filing box. It’s there should I need it but it’s not an in-my-face, stuck-on-the-wall kind of list like its older sibling was. 

And so here we are at New Year and I have no list and no resolutions. I did consider choosing a theme for the coming year—I read a book recently that recommended themes rather than SMART goals. They’re more flexible, providing an expanse of space through which you can meander rather than having to stick to prescribed paths. I wondered what might be a suitable theme. Balance, maybe. Nuance? Trains? Making use of what I’ve got rather than looking for new and better?  Being kinder? The author suggested putting post-it notes on your computer screen, the bathroom mirror and the biscuit tin. I was briefly tempted by this approach but on reflection, even this feels too structured for the new me. 

 A friend emailed me this morning with New Year wishes and said, ‘ I hope all your dreams come true.” I thanked her but had to admit that I have no dreams. That risks sounding self-satisfied but that’s definitely not what I mean. There are things I am pleased to have done and there are many others that I could have done so much better or differently. The point is that many of those focused efforts are no longer relevant; the children run their own lives now and as I’m retired there are no longer any work-related aims. However alien it might feel not to have goals after all this time, I feel a need to accept things are as they are; I’m in a different phase of life. It’s comfortable but also uncomfortable as it begs the question that so many of us struggle with—what am I for? I don’t have an answer to that but I do know that I’m clearer about the things I enjoy doing and want to do more of those rather than exploring lots of new activities.  So for this year I just want to take things as they come and enjoy things for their own sake—being a wife, mum and friend; walking, reading, writing, practising French, cooking, and chatting. Anything extra like travel will be a bonus but there are definitely no totals. 

Wishing you a healthy and happy 2023 and if you’ve got any comments about resolutions, lists, totals or anything else, I’d love to hear. 

The Ghost of Esmerelda

farleyrose59 13 Comments

 

One of the disadvantages of being a late addition to my family is that I never met any of my grandparents. None of them survived  into old age and so they were all gone by the time I was born. They weren’t talked about much—in fact I don’t ever recall my father saying anything about his childhood—and as my parents had moved many miles from their roots, there was barely any connection to this earlier generation; just a few black and white photos. These were kept in a bureau drawer, jumbled in with all kinds of other things and I’d occasionally open it and see my mother’s parents. Her father, Ernest, beamed, almost bursting out of his waistcoat with bonhomie while her mother, Hilda, stared at the camera, neither friendly nor severe, giving nothing away. Their world of London pubs, the Blitz, and masonic dinners was a long way from mine and I looked on them as a curiosity from another age. 

It was only after I had my children that I wished for more connection to my family history. After all, if you grow up knowing your grandparents, there’s a reasonable chance they might tell you stories about their parents and even grandparents, scooping you up in a continuity going back several generations, and providing a sense of where you come from. There was none of that in my family. I didn’t even know where my grandparents were born. 

By the time I’d become curious about this, my parents were dead and like so many of us, I regretted not having asked questions while I had the chance. So I took out a subscription to Ancestry and began to excavate my family history, starting with my maternal grandmother, the inscrutable Hilda. I was by then a harassed mother of four and as I was always in a rush, I was amused to recall one of the few childhood stories my mother told. Hilda would make elaborate party dresses but she always ran out of time, and so my mother and her sister would have to be pinned into their new clothes at the last minute. Many a party was spoiled by silent torture from invisible pins. Fortunately for my children, I don’t sew but I’m definitely of a slapdash, last-minute persuasion. It may have been a tenuous connection to my grandmother but it was better than nothing and I treasured it. 

I searched online for birth, marriage and death certificates, as well as census entries and as I did so, I became increasingly perplexed by Hilda. Not only was she inscrutable but she was also proving to be extremely elusive.  It took a while to work out what was going on, but eventually I uncovered a trail of secrets and false information. I think my mother would have been surprised to discover that Hilda was really named Esmerelda and that she was quite a few years older than she claimed to be. On the other hand, maybe those things are not that unusual; people are often coy about their age, and it’s not uncommon to go by another name. But I do think my mother would have been amazed to find out that Hilda was already married when she met my grandfather. And I think she would have been absolutely astounded to discover that Hilda had four children from this first marriage. When she fled to London in 1919, newly-divorced and leaving no forwarding address, she took her youngest child Winifred with her but left a boy and girl behind in Brighton. There had been another little girl, Phyllis, but she had died several years before from gastroenteritis. By the time she ran away with Ernest, Hilda was already pregnant with my mother, and they later had two more boys. So although my mother went through her whole life thinking she was the second of four children she was in fact, the fifth of seven. I think she would also have been stunned by the news that her parents did not get married until 1943, by which time she was twenty-four. This was done in secret as presumably everyone assumed they’d been married all along, and I surmise that with bombs falling all around them, it seemed wise to put their relationship on a secure footing. 

When I felt I’d found out as much as I could, I wrote an account of the key events in Esmerelda’s life and distributed it around the family. More recently, when the 1921 Census was released online I checked it and saw that she’d stayed true to form. There in her entry—one simple line—were four false items of information; her first name, surname, age and marital status. Oh Esmeralda! I thought with a mixture of fondness honed by growing familiarity, and indulgent exasperation at her elastic attitude to the truth. 

Because I never met Esmerelda, it’s been easy while rummaging casually through her secrets, to think of her as nothing more than a fictional character. And I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about that and wondering if in exposing the basic facts, I’ve betrayed her because what I can’t do is to put flesh on the story and understand her life. I can come up with plenty of theories about why she left her children: she was ashamed at being named the guilty party in her divorce…she was scared of her first husband…she was emotionally frozen after the death of baby Phyllis…she was lonely while her husband was away in the war…she fell helplessly, crazily in love with Ernest… 

Any or all of these may be true and I’ve no way of knowing. But what I do know is that my own mother was full of fear and insecurity and often lacked empathy, and that this in turn impacted on me. Michelle Obama talked recently about her fearful mind. She says she’s always had it and calls it a life partner she didn’t choose. I’ve always had a fearful mind too and know I didn’t choose it. I’m sure that none of us do. In his book It Didn’t Start With You, Mark Wolynn argues that we all carry unresolved traumas from previous generations. We may not know where they come from but they live with us like ghosts and show up in our deepest fears. As St Augustine said, the dead are invisible; they are not absent. I’d never given this much thought before—after all, my family has not been directly affected by atrocities like the Holocaust or racial segregation which have quite rightly gained attention in relation to intergenerational trauma. My family’s upheavals have been more domestic in nature but these can still leave long-lasting scars. I suspect that Esmerelda was stressed, conflicted and secretive as a mother and that this contributed to my own mother’s problems. But then again Esmerelda herself didn’t get off to a good start as she was the youngest of ten and her father died six weeks before she was born. What kind of mothering did she get from an impoverished widow in poor health? There is currently a lot of research in epigenetics which is investigating how trauma might become biochemically encoded. Thinking like this reminds me that as humans we are all links in our own family chain and we involuntarily inherit all kinds of encumbrances. It makes me more empathic towards my parents, and at last I feel able to forgive some of the mistakes they undoubtedly made.

These days I spend a lot of time in my writing room and value having emotionally sustaining things around me. I’ve placed three photographs on the window ledge. The first one shows my mother—a dreamy bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding with Esmerelda standing behind in an awful hat and looking inscrutable as usual. The second is a photo of me on my fortieth birthday, and the third is of my two daughters, arm-in-arm. Four generations of women. I love to see these photos; our birthdates span a hundred and nine years and none of us knows all of the others but despite that and with all the uncertainties, the one thing I know for certain is that we are inextricably connected and always will be. 

Not Finding My Way

farleyrose59 10 Comments

Recently I spent five days in the Pennines on a writing course. The tuition and companionship of my fellow writers were exceptionally good, and on the one evening with no scheduled activities, a group of us set off to visit a local pub. I’d been to that area ten years previously and remembered a similar outing then. This time we took the scenic route through some overgrown woods, stumbling over roots and rabbit holes in the twilight and when we reached the cosy old pub it was good to find a quiet corner where we could sit and chat. At the end of the evening most people decided to take a taxi back to our accommodation but I was keen to walk and persuaded three of my new-found friends to keep me company. “It’s much more direct going back,” I said, “I’ve done this before. We just go along the main road; it will only take ten minutes.” Half an hour later as we held our sides, puffing and cursing to the top of the biggest hill I’ve ever seen, I had to confess that I’d got things wrong and there was still a way to go. Not only had I been under a misapprehension about which pub we’d spent the evening in, but I’d also thought we were in a completely different village. Taking the woodland route had thoroughly confused me. It was ironic that my course was called Writing Place and yet I clearly didn’t know which place I was in. But then again that’s nothing new—the tiresome truth is that I’ve spent my life in a state of perpetual disorientation. 

I’ve mostly kept this to myself as it makes me feel stupid and I’ve thought that no-one else could understand how I find it impossible to judge distance or direction, or to visualise where one place is in relation to another.  I like to think I’m reasonably intelligent but my brain goes blank and simply won’t cooperate on anything to do with navigation and direction. I’m fine once I’ve thoroughly learned a route but am quickly disoriented by detours, and I’ve learned that unrehearsed short cuts are a waste of time after countless misadventures. For my first couple of years of driving in London I used to go everywhere via Kew Bridge because it was a landmark that I could reliably recognise—even when it was miles out of my way. These days, I’m almost guaranteed to turn in the wrong direction when I come out of a door, and even though I’ve lived in Southampton for more than eight years I still have to take a deep breath before driving into the centre as I frequently get confused despite using sat nav. When I get myself lost it’s annoying and sometimes scary but at least I can sort it out on my own. The bigger problem comes when I get others embroiled in wrong directions or by massively underestimating when I tell them how long a journey will take. That’s awkward and embarrassing. For years I’ve passed it off jokingly as the consequence of living at the top of a hill when I was young; that does inevitably reduce your directional options. But it’s clearly not the answer and it’s been a relief recently to read a book that provides the key to understanding my disorientation. It also raises some important issues that have implications for us all.

Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way was published in 2020 and is by the award-winning science writer Michael Bond.  The front cover has quotes from The Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Statesman and Scotsman, each of which simply says ‘Fascinating.’ And I agree. In the early chapters he summarises what is known about the neuroscience of navigation and describes various kinds of brain cells that work in conjunction to help us know where we are and to plan where we’re going. Place cells, for example, allow us to recognise physical features in the environment whereas grid cells are dynamic and fire in particular patterns as we move. But what really made me sit up was the chapter on Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD). There in print was confirmation that I am neither alone nor stupid. It seems that lots of people share my profound inability to navigate but that most of us keep quiet because we’re baffled by it and embarrassed. Now though, we have reason to thank a neuroscientist named Giuseppe Iaria who is based at the University of British Columbia. He identified and named DTD, and  estimates that 1-2% of the population struggle with the infuriating problems that I recognise so well—being incapable of making a mental representation of our surroundings even in places we’ve known all their lives, struggling to find our way around buildings and even getting disoriented in our own home—all of this in people who have normal memory, perception and attention. Iaria’s research has found the majority of sufferers to be women but it’s not yet clear whether this is a robust finding or whether it’s simply that women are more willing to admit to it. He is currently pursuing the theory that people with DTD have unusually poor connections between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex; two regions of the brain that are involved in navigation—and this explanation certainly fits with my experience of being directionally derailed—it really does feel as though I have a broken wire. I’m delighted to have a physiological explanation even if it’s still tentative and now at last I can stop believing that I’m not trying hard enough. 

Despite the frustrations, I try to keep a sense of humour and discovered a forum for people with DTD. I was grateful that it was online as I could imagine the stress that might ensue if a group of DTD sufferers all had to get to a physical location in order to meet. Many of the posts made me laugh and groan in recognition. I particularly related to what one woman said—When people do the “you know where…..is?” I just agree and pretend I know what they’re talking about. Saves time and frustration. I do that. Then I nodded in solidarity with a man who said that he’s lived in the same town all his life but when asked for directions by a stranger it’s easiest to say that he doesn’t know because he’s a visitor himself. And I smiled when a woman mused ominously—I often wonder what happened to the people who asked me for directions… 

It’s worth bearing in mind that when you ask a stranger for directions then you stand a 1-2% chance of asking someone who is going to quite unintentionally get you lost. More seriously there are good reasons why we can all benefit from recent discoveries in the science of spatial navigation. After the age of sixty-five our spatial skills get progressively worse but it may well be that if we keep our brains engaged in navigational tasks then this can act as a defence against Alzheimer’s. There is no current consensus but it’s a field of research that’s exciting some neuroscientists. The argument is that the first areas of the brain to show signs of the disease are those where spatial navigation is driven and if you keep them in use then this might help to stop them shrinking. 

Sat nav and GPS apps don’t help the situation and may even be actively damaging our health as these days we frequently arrive at places without any real idea of how we got there. Following the blue dot on our smartphone or the voice in our sat nav does not engage the place cells in our hippocampus or the decision-making circuitry of our prefrontal cortex—the technology makes people lazy about creating a cognitive map in the same way that the use of calculators has dulled our ability to do mental arithmetic. In Wayfinding Michael Bond has some advice about how to counter this. He suggests that we should put our smartphones away sometimes and try to orientate ourselves in the real world around us. Follow your curiosity, he says, and deliberately take a different route rather than just the ones you know. I’d certainly have trouble with that but think it’s worth trying provided I stick to days when I have plenty of time to get lost. But I do like another of the suggestions for what he calls attentive navigation. When you’re going somewhere new, he says, use GPS to get there and look out for landmarks on your way. Then switch it off for the journey back. I’ve already tried this a couple of times and although I’ve made a few wrong turns I can also report some success. I don’t think I’m ever going to know what it’s like to have a cognitive map but overall the exercise has boosted my confidence and I thoroughly recommend it. Do let me know if you have personal experience of DTD. I’d love to hear about it. 

Slightly Quiet

farleyrose59 9 Comments

You can say many things about me that won’t cause offence—impatient, slapdash, scruffy, clumsy, tone-deaf, illegible handwriting, directionally challenged…all of these slights feel unimportant. They will skim the surface and barely leave a mark. But there’s one personal comment that until recently cut really deep and I would have said—please, please, p-l-e-ase don’t ever call me quiet. It’s a simple word that is inoffensive when applied to a train carriage, a dog or a summer’s day and yet for many years I had an intensely uncomfortable relationship with it stretching right back to early childhood. We lived in a small town where everyone knew everyone else and when I went out with my mother she’d do a lot of chatting. I’d stand holding her hand in the butcher’s shop, in the street and in the queue at the Home & Colonial Stores thinking that the grown-ups were unbelievably boring and wondering if they were ever going to stop nattering. I was shy and thought I was being well-behaved but far from praising my resignation, when they did take notice of me these unthinking adults would often say, “Isn’t she quiet!” followed by a tinkly don’t mind me for making personal comments kind of laugh. That’s how I remember it but while that may have been what they said, we all know there is often a chasm between what people say and how we hear or interpret it. What I heard was she’s got nothing to say for herself and so by implication believed they were saying she’s not very interesting—what a funny little thing. I grew up feeling that being quiet was something to be ashamed of. 

With a dash of maturity and lots of practise, shyness gets easier to disguise but the fear of being exposed does not go away and even as an adult, if anyone calls me quiet or shy it lands with a painful thud. And so I was interested to read Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  She firmly challenges the misconception that introverts are always serious and aloof with nothing much to offer. Phew. I’m grateful for that and clearly many others are too, as the book has sold more than four million copies—no doubt to plenty of introverts since according to her estimate that applies to about one-third of us. 

Of course I already knew—you can’t get to your sixties without learning a thing or two about yourself—that I need a lot of time alone in order to feel well-balanced and happy, and that therefore I’m towards the introverted end of the scale. If I got my energy mostly from being with other people then I’d be towards the opposite end where the extroverts do their partying. But reading the calm, non-judgemental words in the book made me recognise how I’ve spent much of my life in denial about my natural social preferences—guiltily trying to squeeze in a bit of solitude here and there and feeling that I have to justify it rather than stating that I need it. And feeling that there’s something missing in me because I prefer one-to-one conversations rather than struggling to make myself heard in a large, confident group. Cain’s argument makes perfect sense to me—we develop these insecurities because Western society has a strong bias towards extroverts—admiring and idealising people who are gregarious and comfortable in the spotlight while underestimating the strengths that are often associated with introverts such as self-motivation, listening skills, empathy, and reflectiveness.

Perhaps that balance is changing, though, and if so then we have lockdown to thank. When Susan Cain wrote her book in 2010 she could not have imagined that within a decade we would all be participating in a huge natural experiment that had us confined to our homes for months with the perfect opportunity to reflect at length on our social preferences.  Like so many others, I found it was a great relief to step back from striving for the extrovert ideal, and suddenly the media spotlight swung round to illuminate the joys of being an introvert. There were countless articles that patiently explained how it’s not that introverts dislike being with other people—speaking for myself, there are lots and lots (and lots) of people whose company I LOVE—but rather that we reach the point of being socially satiated and overstimulated more quickly than extroverts and need to retreat to some solitude in order to recharge our batteries. And there were also many debates about the validity of these labels, and points made about us all being different. Not all introverts are shy, for example, and we all respond individually depending on the situation, our mood and the people we’re with. This attention is good as whether we are introverts, extroverts or classification sceptics, we have to deal with people of all types and the more we understand about one another the better. 

My impression is that the post-pandemic world has embraced some fundamental and positive social changes. Covid brought us into daily contact with mortality and this has certainly made me less inclined to squander my time on things I don’t want to do. I believe that many people feel similarly and are able to be more honest with themselves. Then too, there is the newly fashionable status of introversion and I have a hunch that this has made people more willing to admit their vulnerabilities and connect better. I was at a talk recently and got chatting in the break to a nice man who paused a few minutes into the conversation and said, “I’m shy’. He looked perfectly normal, even confident, and the admission didn’t seem at all inappropriate whereas once it might have seemed weird.  “I’m shy too,” I said and immediately felt released from the fear of social judgement. We had a lovely conversation. It was much more satisfying than small talk of the weather and where do you live variety that leaves little impression on either participant and means you have to start all over again next time you meet.  

Something similar happened this week adding further evidence to my hunch.  I received an email from a writing society that I’ve been on the point of joining for some time but have hesitated to pursue as they are a large group and hold their meetings in a lecture theatre. I’ve been put off by other experiences of sitting alone in the midst of an established group, making dreaded small talk and then going home feeling considerably more miserable than when I started. It’s back to that thing about being better in one-to-one situations or small groups. Anyway, the email said that the group was holding a coffee morning and the convener thoughtfully included the words Some people (like me) may be shy, so please try to include everyone. That was all the encouragement I needed so I went along. And I wasn’t disappointed—it was thoroughly enjoyable. I talked to some people as I was queuing for coffee and then sat down next to a friendly-looking woman. “This is my first time here and I’m a bit shy,” I volunteered. “Me too” she said enthusiastically. And we both smiled. 

Comments are always welcome whether you agree, disagree or are indifferent. Several people have said recently that they are unable to log into their WordPress account to leave a comment here. If you want to respond and can’t get into your account you can email comments to 60treatsandmore@gmail.com

I’ll Read That Again

farleyrose59 9 Comments

I recently had cause to think about my relationship with reading when surgery for recurrent corneal erosion left me unable to use my eyes for a couple of days. I was grateful to have the distraction of audiobooks but they were no substitute for the pleasure of holding a physical book and it reminded me how back in 2015 I wrote about a different variety of reading disorder. That one lasted for five years and its onset coincided with the end of my first marriage. Books had been my constant companions up to that point but the upset drove my pleasure in reading into deep hibernation and it would not be coaxed out. I knew I had lost something precious but that bit of me was broken and I had no idea how to fix it. The timing was perverse as it happened just when I would most have appreciated escape from the jagged wreckage of everyday life and meanwhile the pile of peevishly discarded books kept on growing. One thing that surprised me was how even when I was happy again it took several years to get back to normal. I’d never heard anyone talk about this before but since then other people have told me they’ve had a similar experience after illness, bereavement or divorce.

In the end, the thing that shifted my block was re-reading an old favourite, The Light Years which is the first volume of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. I adored these books in the nineties and as soon as I started re-reading I was drawn back into a world of engaging characters and delicious mid-twentieth century details, sprinkled with humour and suffused with the author’s exceptional ability to write from a child’s perspective. I read slowly and tentatively at first, and then with heady pleasure until five novels and two thousand pages later I reached the end of the series and sobbed because Elizabeth Jane is now dead and so there will be no more. That was when I knew I was cured. 

Since then I’ve read hungrily, grateful to have found what I’d lost for so long and I make much use of both the local city and county libraries. They are impressively stocked which is fortunate as every week brings new recommendations from friends, attention-grabbing reviews, and random discoveries online. A conservative estimate puts the number of new English language novels published every year at around one hundred thousand.  With such an intimidating deluge of potential entertainment it’s tempting to plough ever onwards soaking up novel novels but as I discovered in recovering from my reading block, re-reading can be rewarding and it’s a shame to completely neglect it in favour of new works. As children we read books over and over again—for me it was The 101 Dalmatians, Little Women and Five Go to Kirrin Island—but as adults we tend to prioritise exploration. 

My thoughts on re-reading were consolidated recently when a writing tutor recommended The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin. It’s an entertaining and informative read—the authors are bibliotherapists and suggest a range of novels for every imaginable situation including  guilt, exhaustion, existential angst, a lack of confidence, curing xenophobia, being a mother-in-law, constipation, moving house, and being in hospital. But the key thing I took away from it was the authors’ enthusiasm for re-reading. They recommend creating a shelf of ten favourite novels and re-reading them every five years or so. Put them all together on a designated shelf, they suggest, and they will trigger good feelings every time you go past.  

I like these ideas very much and so have given thought to the content of my own favourites shelf. There were six candidates that immediately jumped out and settled comfortably onto the shelf, secure in my long-held affection for them. Others had to contend with being compared, contrasted and gradually eliminated. It was a tricky task and I considered making the list longer—after all ten was just a number that had been suggested by someone else. But there was a discipline in having to stick to this number—it forced me to think about why I had included each one. Then there is the reality that if I am to stand any chance of re-reading these books once—twice—maybe three times or more, if I live long enough, then the shelf cannot bear too many volumes. Otherwise it will further complicate that original dilemma of whether to seek new works to admire, or to revisit old ones. 

One of the first contenders to be given serious consideration was John Lanchester’s Capital because it reminds me of my South London years. Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate is one of the few books that makes me laugh out loud, and both David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars and Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal hold poignant memories because they take me back to the precious hour after lunch when my three eldest children were at school and the youngest was in her cot having a nap. Then I would sit on my blue sofa and read in guilty, delicious escape from domesticity. And now that the youngest child is a thoughtful adult I recently cherished one of her recommendations—Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Either of Ian MacEwan’s Atonement or Graham Swift’s Last Orders could easily have made the leap onto the shelf based on the beauty and fluency of the writing, and in Notes From An Exhibition, Patrick Gale seduces his readers to Cornwall which I have grown to love in recent years while walking the South West Coast Path. A bang-up-to-the-minute contender was this year’s Booker winner, Damon Galgut’s The Promise which offers insight into South Africa where my husband grew up, and I have fond, raw, teenage memories of reading Far from the Madding Crowd at school. Then there was Agatha Christie’s 4.50 From Paddington which marked a juncture. At the age of eleven I spotted it on my big sister’s bookshelf and settled down to read, aware of this being the first time I had properly engaged with a book intended for adults. These are splendid books that I would recommend to anyone but in the end they were all rejected in favour of ten other books. These ten novels were each etched into my memory but several were no longer to be found on my bookshelves—either lost, loaned, or returned to their owner— and so I bought a copy of each of the missing ones and now all the members of my little blended print-family sit together on their own dedicated shelf. Until last week this space was occupied by boxes of Covid tests so the new arrangement feels like a considerable improvement.

I wanted my selection to be a true expression of books I love regardless of what anyone else might think, and so in making my choices I tried not to distort genuine preferences by seeking some kind of balance. I did my best to put genre, subject matter, classics vs modern, literary reputation, and author gender out of my mind when weighing up one book against another and so it was entirely unplanned that I ended up with an equal number of male and female writers. The settings are undeniably skewed towards the country where I have always lived but they do lead readers into the midst of London’s Chinese and Jamaican communities as well as transporting us to modern India and jazz-age America. There is, however, a complete absence of historical fiction, crime, Victorian classics, and science fiction which even though I’ve enjoyed books in each of those categories, does reveal something about my taste at its most fundamental. I’ve also ignored non-fiction or the choices would have been impossible. 

In the same way that I’ve heard people say, ‘These are my people’ when talking about friends, then these are my books. This blended print-family is in part an expression of identity and I love the fact that if you create a collection it will inevitably look quite different from mine. It’s a pleasing thought too, that like wine and friendships, the very best novels get better over the years.  But the collection is not set in stone and as I continue to read then some might get replaced. In fact I’m certain that’s something to aspire to. Who would want their enthusiasms to remain static for decades? Life is about growth and discovery and books give us the opportunity to meet people we’ve never met, see places we’ve never been, and explore new points of view. And one of the most interesting things about rereading is to see how treasured books stand the test of time. When first encountered you will inevitably have known less about life and have lived less of it. 

So here for what it’s worth are the titles to be found on my favourites shelf: 

The Light Years: Elizabeth Jane Howard

A Fine Balance: Rohinton Mistry

After You’d Gone: Maggie O’Farrell

The Hundred and One Dalmatians: Dodie Smith

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont: Elizabeth Taylor

The Remains of the Day: Kazuo Ishiguro

Small Island: Andrea Levy

Sour Sweet: Timothy Mo

The Great Gatsby: F Scott Fitzgerald

The Course of Love: Alain de Botton

I’d love to hear what you might put on your shelf, and why. As always you can leave a comment on the blog or if you’re having trouble posting you can email 60treatsandmore@gmail.com 

For now all that’s left is to wish you happy reading…and possibly…even happier re-reading. 

I Don’t Agree With Myself

farleyrose59 6 Comments

I want to start today’s post with a story. It is completely true but as I don’t come out of it very well I must ask in advance for forgiveness. 

It happened about ten years ago and at that time I used to take regular walks in the woods with a friend. She was completely obsessed with dogs and one day she told me about a local family that was having a hard time. The mother had died leaving three teenage daughters, and their father was struggling to cope.  But as a dog-lover, my friend was particularly concerned about the family’s two giant poodles as they weren’t getting much attention, and she’d drawn up a list of people who were willing to walk them. She was pleased when I offered to help and she gave me the family’s phone number and told me to get in touch when I was free. 

My daughter Molly was about fourteen and as we’d recently lost our own dogs she was excited to hear about the poodles and keen to meet them. It wasn’t long until a lovely summer evening presented us with an ideal opportunity. I rang the number I’d been given and one of the daughters answered. She seemed quite happy to hear from me. “Let yourself in at the back gate,” she said. “The poodles are in the utility room. You’ll find their leads and everything you need there.” About twenty minutes later we arrived and parked outside the house. It was surrounded by a high wooden fence and as we went through the gate into the garden the first thing we saw was a girl who was occupied in tipping earth from one plant pot to another and humming to herself. She had chin-length mousy hair and was probably about twelve.  As I strode towards her she stiffened and stopped humming. “Hello,” I said. “We’ve come to walk the poodles.” 

She stared wide-eyed at me, through her glasses. “We haven’t got any poodles,” she whispered nervously.  

“Yes you have,” I said impatiently deciding that she must have comprehension difficulties. “I spoke to your sister just now and she said it was alright. The poodles are waiting for us in the utility room.” 

“I haven’t got a sister,” she croaked, looking quietly desperate. I was just about to argue that of course she had a sister when I felt Molly tugging urgently at my dress. “Mum…it’s the wrong house,” she said. 

I often think back to the affair of the poodles as it’s a good reminder of how easily we can jump to the wrong conclusions. When faced with a set of facts that didn’t quite add up I did what people do all the time. I tried to make sense of it but unfortunately in doing that I fell prey to confirmation bias—I concocted a narrative that fitted my pre-existing beliefs. I’d set out purposefully at the end of a busy day, keen to do a good deed and unwilling to let anything stand in my way. The evidence I had was an unlocked gate, a garden, and a girl—just as I’d been led to expect. It therefore made perfect sense to me that the nervous-looking girl was simply unobservant. So unobservant in fact that she’d not even noticed that she shared her home with an older sister and two giant poodles. 

None of us is immune to confirmation bias and a few years ago the comedian Andy Hamilton made me laugh with a routine about people who recognise him but can’t place where he’s from—apparently a common hazard of being on TV.  He recounted that one day he was on the Tube and noticed that the man sitting opposite was staring intently. After a while the man leaned forward and said, “I know who you are…you’re that bloke from the kennels where I take my dog.” 

“No I’m not,” replied the famous radio and TV personality. 

“Yes you are,” said the man with absolute confidence. 

John Maynard Keynes is often credited with saying, “When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do?” It’s fortunate that Molly was nimbler than me in drawing a sensible conclusion about the evidence in the garden, and so it was that driven by her acute embarrassment I reassured the girl and apologised profusely as we made a quick getaway. The poodle palaver was easily resolved but it did make me wonder about other times when I’ve been convinced that I’m right.  And I’ve revisited these unsettling thoughts in the past few weeks while reading Daniel Kahneman’s latest book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement. The Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist is best known for the influential Thinking, Fast and Slow but in his new book he examines the many ways in which humans make unreliable judgements. We like to think of ourselves as deliberative and independent-minded but we’re unconsciously swayed by a number of common errors in thinking. 

It’s no surprise that people hold diverse points of view and have different thresholds for making decisions but what is perhaps more disturbing is how inconsistent we are within ourselves. Whatever area you think about, if the judgements are made by humans then they’re prone to inconsistency—politics, law, medicine, business and forensics, for example. Kahneman cites a review of 207,000 immigration court decisions in the US which found that judges were significantly less likely to grant asylum when the weather was hot. Another study found that criminal court judges were more likely to grant parole after lunch. If you should find yourself in any kind of court I recommend that you choose pleasant weather conditions and a contented, post-prandial judge rather than a grumpy, hungry one.  You might also want to find one whose sports team has recently performed well, and don’t forget to check that they don’t have backache. We are all affected to some extent by our emotions and environment. Further data comes from the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues at the University of Virginia who asked research subjects to judge written accounts of people displaying morally dubious behaviour. Those who were placed next to a messy desk or a smelly toilet made harsher judgements than those who were placed in a more salubrious environment. 

Another way to study reliability is to get people to rate the same thing on different occasions. Kahneman cites multiple studies that have done this including some where fingerprint experts changed their decisions in as many as 10% of cases. In a major wine competition, experts scored only 18% of the wines the same on the second rating, and these were usually the worst ones and therefore presumably the easiest to agree on. And I know that I’m not as steady and reliable as I might wish to believe. I only have to think about how I’ve reacted to various films. The first time I saw Vertigo, for example, I was indifferent to it. I was tired and fell asleep half way through. But a few years later, I watched it in a different frame of mind and couldn’t understand how I’d been so impervious to such a masterpiece. There have been many similar situations, all of which shifting makes me wonder who I am and what I believe. Can I ever trust my own judgement? 

Each of us can only exist in our own highly individual version of reality—affected by our environment, our emotions, the tendency to jump to conclusions, the information available to us, and much more besides. Kahneman hits the nail on the head—Put quite simply, it is hard to agree with reality if you can’t agree with yourself. We can improve things to some extent by being aware that it’s a problem, by challenging ourselves and others, by looking for more evidence, and by following the wise advice to sleep on it when you have an important decision to make. There’s one thing I can be sure about—if you’re anything like me there’s a good chance that by the morning you’ll have changed your mind.

Photos: Mike Poppleton 

Comments are always welcome whether you agree, disagree or are indifferent. Several people have said recently that they are unable to log into their WordPress account to leave a comment here. If you want to respond and can’t get into your account you can email comments to 60treatsandmore@gmail.com. 

The Joy of Insignificance

farleyrose59 4 Comments

Last time I wrote about walking the South West Coast Path. It never fails to move me and on a recent trip I was struck by my utter insignificance. My head may have been filled with ideas, emotions and memories that are important to me but they seemed so trivial when I watched the waves homing on the beach. Earth Day this week came with a reminder that our planet is 4.5 billion years old and so the sea has been doing what it does with regularity and reliability for an awfully long time. We need the sea for our survival but it is completely indifferent to us and will continue to crash into eternity long after you and me and the whole human race are gone. It doesn’t care about the pandemic. It doesn’t care whether I have vertigo, how I dress or what I write about. That made me feel very small and to my surprise it was quite a relief. 

This thought chimes with a book I read recently—4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. This got a lot of coverage in the press as the basic premise is intriguing. If we live to the age of eighty then we have around four thousand weeks on Earth and Burkeman poses the question of how to make best use of this time. If you haven’t read 4000 Weeks then I recommend it. It’s full of thought-provoking ideas and refreshingly it runs counter to the avalanche of predictable self-help guides that advise us how to live more positively and make the most of every minute—in fact his previous book was called The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

I’m still trying to make my mind up about some of the ideas in the book but I do relate to what the author calls cosmic insignificance therapy. It’s hard to come up with something that’s completely original—this one has its feet firmly planted in Buddhism—but he presents it in a new way. It’s basically the idea that I saw played out in the waves—that in the scheme of things our day to day worries are extremely insignificant. When weighed down by stress I’ve often tried to get a sense of perspective by reminding myself that in ten years time this won’t matter.  Cosmic insignificance therapy just takes that thought and gives it an infinitely bigger perspective. 

It would be easy to interpret this as nihilism. But Burkeman is not saying that nothing matters. He acknowledges that we need to feed the baby, and go to work to earn money to pay the rent or mortgage. What he is saying is that we don’t need to do something extraordinary in order to live a good life. 

The positive thinking movement tells us that we can be whatever we want. It instructs us to delete the word impossible from our vocabulary. But that can lead to measuring our worth by how we seem to others and consequently to bad decisions. Make a nice lemon drizzle cake and someone will suggest you apply to The Great British Bake-Off. Become self-employed and suddenly the sky’s the limit—your efforts could blossom into a trillion-dollar global phenomenon. If you like to play around with words then maybe you’ll win the Booker. At the very least you should be aiming to write a bestseller. There’s nothing wrong with any of these aspirations if they really are what you want but theYou Can Be Whatever You Want mindset implies a duty to do something extraordinary in order to have meaning. Burkeman says that can lead to feeling overwhelmed and argues that we should not underestimate the importance of the ordinary, achievable things we do. Take pleasure in sharing your lemon drizzle cake with friends, in bringing good values to your work, in writing something that a handful of people get something from, or in offering your shoulder for a friend to cry on. 

The notion of cosmic insignificance can be liberating and empowering because it brings a sense of perspective but it doesn’t address the human desire to make a difference. The wish to leave something behind by which we can be remembered is one of the forces that drive creativity. It’s a way to cheat the finality of death. With cosmic insignificance Burkeman argues that ultimately we will all be forgotten. Steve Jobs wanted to ‘put a dent in the universe’ but who will remember the iPhone in a thousand years time? 

Another book I’ve read recently puts a different angle on this. Every Family Has A Story: How We Inherit Love and Loss is written by the psychotherapist Julia Samuel. Rather than emphasising our insignificance she shows through case studies of families she has worked with, how interconnected we are. We each have our own story but we are part of many other stories too—our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, even those we never knew. Patterns get handed down unconsciously and unchallenged because we do not recognise that things could be any other way. Samuel says that when she works with people who are stuck and hurting she wants to shout at them It didn’t start with you or even your parents. Look at the untold stories, unprocessed injuries and losses that have been handed to you by ghosts of the past and find a way to deal with them now so you don’t hand them down to the next generation. This focuses on the problems we hand on but there are of course many gifts we can pass on, not least by finding a way to deal with problems from the past. 

Both of these books are interesting and while their ideas are not entirely incompatible they do throw up some conundrums. One makes me feel insignificant and liberated from other people’s opinions. The other burdens me with the weight of responsibility to do my best for the people I love and have an impact on. But perhaps those things are not so incompatible after all. The reminders to be true to ourselves, to value the ordinary and to be glad that we might have an impact that lasts through a few generations are all ways to live life well. The thing is that we will never know what our legacy will be, and one thing for sure is that the waves won’t care. I’m off to make a lemon drizzle cake, play with some words and have a chat with my daughter. That’s enough for today. I’m happy to be insignificant. 

Photos: Mike Poppleton

More Than A Walk

farleyrose59 6 Comments

I’m on an open-top bus. It’s Monday morning and as we swing and sway round twisty Cornish lanes we look down at huge fields of daffodils. New green leaves emerge from winter twigs and in the distance the sea flashes diamond signals from Porthcurno, our destination. “We’re lucky with the weather,” we say to one another and to strangers at the bus stop. 

We’re on our way to start a day of walking from Porthcurno back to Newlyn where we’re staying. It’s five years since we started on the South West Coast Path, taking a couple of trips away each year and making gradual progress along the edge of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Last year we reached the half-way point at Porthallow. That’s just beyond Falmouth and 315 miles from where we started. I’m torn between wanting to devour the experience and yet not wanting it to end. Never before have I felt passionate about a sport or outdoor activity but this haunts my daydreams and pulls me back for more. And it’s so much more than a walk—it’s like an immensely absorbing book. The sea is the protagonist and every mile introduces themes and characters into the plot. At the end of each section I put my metaphorical bookmark on the current page and long for the day when I can pick it up again. The best books are enjoyable, gripping and memorable. They change us and this one is no exception. 

Through Dorset and East Devon, the Path was enchanting and I was infatuated though it was often tough with crazy rollercoaster dips and dives. By the end of those days I’d have aching legs and stinging feet, and I’d hate it. But by the next morning I was always forgiving and ready for more. I wittered on about how I loved it to anyone who would listen. Then, in the wilds of the South Devon cliffs somewhere between Prawle Point and Salcombe I saw another side of the walk—and of myself. 

All had been going well that day. We’d set out from Slapton Sands and after passing the ghostly remains of Hallsands village we reached Start Point lighthouse where we stopped for elevenses. But as we unpacked the flask and banana cake, my stomach lurched. The drop was precipitous and the rocks below looked particularly treacherous. I felt extremely uneasy so while Mike sat happily in the autumn sunshine drinking coffee and enjoying the view, I retreated until it was out of sight. I didn’t mention my discomfort as I felt foolish but as we walked on towards Prawle Point things got steadily worse. The path was alarmingly narrow and seemed extremely high. Up until this point on our walks I’d not been bothered by height as there had always been a barrier—either a stone wall, a wire fence or nature’s own tangled defence of gorse and brambles. Here there was nothing and the exposure made fear fizz inside me like soda. I tried to stay calm, plodding on using my walking poles and searching for positive thoughts—it wasn’t a wet day, my boots have grippy tread, and thousands of people walk this stretch every year. But it was no good. As I scrambled over huge irregular boulders and slid down onto yet more of the spindly path I was acutely attuned to every gust of wind, bump in the path and minor slip. Eventually my final filament of logic drifted off in the breeze and I crouched down next to a stone and sobbed. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t go forward. I decided that this was where I would have to spend the rest of my days. 

At this point, Mike retraced his steps and was astonished to find me there. It took a while to explain my predicament as I couldn’t point or wave my hands about—I had to stay very very still. And while this was going on there was further humiliation when a young woman came JOGGING past, as relaxed and happy as it was possible to be. Thirty seconds later along came another one—equally cheerful and fast but quite a bit older. I guessed that it was her mother. 

I didn’t know and was in no mood for analysis, but what I was suffering was an attack of acrophobia or what mountain rescue teams call cragfast. It’s not unreasonable to have a fear of heights in such an exposed area but most people can control it. That day I discovered that I’m not one of them and I learned later that I probably have a processing deficit. We all rely on a combination of information from the balance-sensing organ of the inner ear and visual information from our eyes, but in a situation like this where there’s a big empty space below with no landmarks to provide orientation, most people shift to relying more on the information that comes from their inner ear, as well as feedback from the rest of their body about its position. People with acrophobia don’t do that and continue to rely on visual information, becoming confused and cognitively overloaded.  One helpful climbing website describes it as being captured by the empty space.

There’s lots of advice online about how to overcome an attack of acrophobia but Mike didn’t have access to that and he did remarkably well with no resources other than kindness and patience. I held onto his hand and edged along, complaining ungratefully until eventually after what seemed a very long time, it was over. As we walked through woodland towards East Portlemouth the firm ground had never been more welcome. 

After that day, I lost my confidence and was unsure whether I could continue on the great walking project. I stopped wittering on about how wonderful it is. But like childbirth, the intensity of the memory faded, and by the following Spring I was ready to try again. A couple of days into the trip we rounded a headland and with the familiar fizz of fear I saw that the path on the opposite side of the cove was both high and narrow. “I can’t do it,” I said to Mike, already starting to hyperventilate. “I’ll walk up to the main road and avoid it.” 

“If you really want to,” he said, “but I think you’ll regret it and it will only make it worse next time you get to another section like this.” I struggled between reason and panic but I knew he was right, and at last decided to do it but without looking up or down. It took all the concentration I could muster, to keep my eyes focused on my feet and not to glance to the right where I could hear the sea crashing on the rocks. For five maybe ten minutes, I just put one foot in front of the other until the path widened out and dipped down again. And it was OK. I was so glad that I’d done it. 

The fear still lurks there though, quick to wake up with the slightest prod and today on this Monday morning as I sit on the bus approaching Porthcurno I can feel it rumbling about. The guidebook has told us that this section is strenuous and rugged and the trouble is that it’s almost impossible to predict what will trigger the vertigo. It takes a particular set of circumstances with height, slope, mud, buffeting winds, and exposure all playing a role in the mix. You cannot judge those in advance from maps and guidebooks. 

We start out across the dunes and up across the cliffs. It’s easy and exhilarating to be out on the path again for the first time this year.  “Strenuous?” we say after a couple of hours and agree that the book has got it wrong this time. We stop for tea and a superior chocolate chip cookie looking down over a golden beach that is deserted apart from a woman whose footprints create an A-shape of modern art in the sand, and a man who appears to be naked.

We set off again and I catch the raw juicy scent of wild garlic. On my way down a rough set of steps I see a thin tangle of light-brown rope which rapidly uncoils and does a disappearing trick into the bank. Its colour and markings tell me that it’s a young female adder. Headland follows headland and all is going well. Then I fall over in a boggy patch and shortly afterwards the rock clambering starts. We’re high up and it’s unsettling. “Don’t look down,” I say. It seems to go on for miles although from time to time it relents into wooded sections where I enjoy the view down to the waves. At one high, narrow point I pass a man and he says, ‘My wife doesn’t like this. She gets vertigo.” And I spot her edging along, bending inland like a windswept sapling. I guess I must look like that too. I stop to wait for her at a wider section by a large steady boulder and we share experiences. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. One foot in front of the other. 

Eventually the drama recedes and we descend into the pretty harbour village of Mousehole. A chaffinch poses in a bush and sings its heart out. All feels right with the world. 

But of course all is not right with the world. Summer may be about the reds, the pinks and the oranges but here in the Spring I see blue and yellow everywhere. The path is sunny with prickly gorse, shiny celandines, clumps of wild daffodils and pale shady primroses accompanied by dabs of sapphire speedwell and even some early bluebells. The blue and yellow is in so many hearts and heads. It’s in the Ukrainian flag hoisted high on a church tower, and in the harbour at Porthleven. In a quiet cove I see a sign that reads Please Believe These Days Will Pass. I don’t know what the writer intended but my thoughts turn immediately to the war and the people under siege in Mariupol. Last week like tens of thousands of others we applied to host a Ukrainian family. We don’t yet know when or if that will happen but right now we have space in our house, and spare time. So much is unknown and I feel afraid. What will they be like? What traumas will they have experienced? Am I up to the challenge? But I have to remind myself that this is not fear. What they are suffering is fear. And it’s a good time to invoke the lesson that helped me on the coast path. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Put one foot in front of the other and just do it. 

Photos: Mike Poppleton and Lynn Farley-Rose

Blue and Yellow

farleyrose59 10 Comments

“How are things with you?” asked my friend as we chatted recently. “Oh you know…OK…” I said. “But I’m finding it ever so difficult to write my blog. I’d really like to do one for February but the truth is I’m stuck.”

“Why don’t you write a blog about it being hard to write a blog?” she said. That bit of encouragement got me thinking. I played with ideas ranging from boredom to persimmons, and from a self-help treatment for insomnia to a curious conversation overheard on a cliff. But I couldn’t make any of it work. It’s hard to engage with the small topics when the news is full of weighty issues like global warming, the fall-out from the pandemic, Government incompetence, and the energy crisis. And then this week a nightmare was unleashed with Putin’s attack on Ukraine—war in Europe on a scale we have not seen for 75 years and hoped never to see again. 

My son has lived in Latvia for the past nine years and through him our family has been reminded often of how much the current Russian leadership is feared in the former Soviet Bloc states. In the past few days we’ve kept in close touch via our WhatsApp family group and he is profoundly angry. “Make no mistake,” he says, “Ukraine may not be a perfect state but this is an entirely unprovoked attack. Ukraine is fighting for the civilised world.” He is full of admiration for the bravery currently being shown in Ukraine. Yesterday morning he shared a video of the President, Prime Minister and other cabinet members staring earnestly in what looked like an amateur recording, telling their people from a city under bombardment that they were still there and would continue to fight for freedom. The direct gaze of these men facing out such horrific events brought me and no doubt millions of others to tears. Tears for their commitment and for what they and others will suffer. 

We’re only just starting to come out of a pandemic that has rocked the world and while this has been a time of turmoil and suffering, this week’s bad news stories are completely different. Covid was—give or take the important arguments about it arising from mankind’s encroachment into the animal world—an unplanned phenomenon. The invasion of Ukraine is a calculated act of human evil. There were things that we could do to feel useful in the pandemic and precautions we could take—maybe you have memories from the early days of offering help to neighbours through the many hastily-assembled community groups and of wiping supermarket delivery items with disinfectant and putting the mail into isolation for several days. With the Ukrainian violations, ordinary people can only watch as events unfold. It’s awful to feel so angry and yet so helpless. 

As it happened, we were in London yesterday following a birthday theatre trip with my younger daughter on Thursday, and a day of DIY and hall painting with my elder daughter on Friday. It was easy to get a number 88 bus from Clapham Common to Downing Street and so that’s what we did. We joined the demonstration in support of Ukraine taking place under the penetrating gaze of General Montgomery’s statue in Whitehall. 

The crowd grew rapidly from noon onwards with great splashes of blue and yellow. People wrapped themselves in Ukrainian flags and many had cheeks daubed with face paint. The colours of the Ukrainian flag represent blue skies above the yellow fields of grain, a reminder of two essentials of a good life—freedom and bread. There was no raised podium and I heard snatches of impromptu speeches in English but couldn’t make out much of what was being said. And I heard other speeches in what I assume was Ukrainian. I  understood none of the words. But the sentiments were clear. We were all there for one reason. There was sadness, outrage, desperation. 

“Save Ukraine,” shouted a man we could not see, and the crowd volleyed it back in a rally of support, over and over again. There was also plenty of “Putin Out Putin Out” and  “Cancel SWIFT Cancel SWIFT.” A police officer told me that Johnson was at work in Downing Street, just a matter of yards away. 

I saw a young woman carrying a placard that read, “I’m Russian. I’m against the war.’ She looked drawn and tense. “May I take your photo?” I asked. “Of course,” she said, standing still to pose. “I am so sorry,” she said sadly. “So sorry about Russia.”

We have to hope that Putin has miscalculated. And we have to hope that the protests of Russians at home will gather momentum. My elder daughter went on from Whitehall to see a play at the Bridge Theatre and reported that at the end, after the cast took their bow, they made an announcement, sharing the statement made by the director of the Moscow State Theatre who has resigned her post saying she can no longer take a salary from a murderer. She’s a courageous woman who will probably lose her career and possibly much more. Anyone who protests in Russia is very brave. They risk being beaten by the police to the point of brain damage or death. Many Russians of all ages are innocent victims as Keir Starmer said this week. Young conscripts are fighting. They have been lied to and if they knew the truth their reaction would be horror and bafflement. Countless young people say that their generation does not want this war. They know it is immoral and that it will ultimately harm their own country—quite simply they are not in tune with Putin’s ambitions to turn the clock back. Media organisations are being silenced but on the positive side, it is near impossible to stop social media and Putin who is famously technophobic may well have underestimated the potential that it has to undermine propaganda and promote cohesion. 

Whitehall was busy yesterday with the usual parade of buses passing through, mostly in regular London-red. But I looked up just as a couple of non-conformist buses went past. One was white with adverts all over for GoPuff which offers home deliveries of thousands of items including food, medicines, cleaning materials, electronics and baby essentials, in as little as fifteen minutes. The next bus was blue, and advertising a different company offering much the same service. We’ve become used to getting what we want, more and more quickly. We love to feel that we are in control of our lives. But one thing we cannot summon up with a phone app is peace and rational leaders. This week’s monstrous events have brought a powerful and terrifying reminder of that. 

At the demonstration Mike and I stood close to a sturdy middle-aged man who was holding a guitar. He strummed it vigorously for about five seconds, then stopped only for the Ukrainian national anthem to take over, blaring from a hidden speaker in his clothing, distorted and crackly. It was followed by We’ll Meet Again. Although the significance of the Ukrainian anthem was obvious I wasn’t so sure about Vera Lynn. But as the words boomed out, familiar and clear despite the crackling, I changed my mind. It’s about people being separated from those they love by events outside their control. Just what so many of the Ukrainian families I was standing alongside must be experiencing. Fundamentally it’s about the important things—family, love, people, hope and justice. For months now I’ve had a hand scribbled note pinned above my desk—Choose to be kind. Needless to say that’s a work in progress but now more than ever when so much else feels out of control it seems worth striving towards in all kinds of day-to-day small-scale situations. 

Being at the demonstration of support did a little to assuage my total feeling of helplessness, even though it was infinitesimally infinitesimal. It was good to stand with others, like-minded on this issue, and to remember that most people are good. Also to know that my son was in a similar demonstration hundreds of miles away outside the Russian Embassy in Riga—family, love, people, hope, justice.

This post has been outside my comfort zone. I’m much more used to writing about the boredom, persimmons, insomnia, overheard conversation kinds of things that I mentioned in the first paragraph. But I can’t ignore this and hope I’ve struck the right tone. Much more importantly, with demonstrations taking place in cities around the world I hope that news of the deluge of support reaches the Ukrainian people. They need to know they are not alone.* They need to know that we know they are fighting for the civilised world. 

*Donations are a solid way to offer support. Until this week I never expected to be donating money to an army but this website has reliable suggestions.