Of Reluctant Realisation June 4, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Journal , 25 commentsAwake at the crack of dawn as usual, I lay in bed listening to the Jurassic squeaks of the baby swallows in their mud huts outside the window. 5am and my mind lurched into action: had I remembered to edit the photos for work? Did I have anything clean to wear? Had No 2 Son emptied his lunchbox? Should I do photography coursework, edit the novel or actually do some writing before I clamber into my parachute harness of a bra and go for a run?
Ok. I admit it. I’m really tired. I know, I know. When you’re really passionate about something, there’s always time to fit it into your day. But what happens when you’re passionate about everything?
I don’t want to go to work today. It’s not that I don’t like my job; the work is interesting, I’m never bored, I get on great with the four other people in the office. It’s good. Really.
But I don’t want that to be my life. I can feel all my creative impulses slowly being tap-tap-tapped out of my soul. I miss writing; I want to pack up a bag and head down to Bexhill and take stark black and white photos of the pavilion or flounce around Brighton, searching for inspiration amongst the oddly pierced people in the twisting lanes, writing in coffee shops as salt and vinegar drifts into the sea air. But I’m not doing anything of those things.
And now I’ve wasted an hour of my life just sitting here, thinking that I can’t, just can’t, do everything. I haven’t studied or written or edited because it just all seems so hopeless.
I think I might need to have a little cry now. Best to get it over with early, don’t you think?
Of Shambolic Shopping May 28, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Domestic Doings, Journal , 27 commentsI don’t even know why I thought it a good idea. Last time lovely bf and me ventured to Ikea, we didn’t speak for an entire week.
Now and again though, I get this urge. I think I’m bored with the chickens and fields and wellies. I think I want to be a bit metropolitan. Reader, I don’t know what came over me but yesterday I went to Bluewater. Gawd.
There are several reasons I should not go to such places:
1. I am very crap at driving on motorways. When I learnt to drive in Jersey, there was none of this multiple choice of lane. No lurching, heaving lorries to squish my scaredyness until squeaks pop out of my mouth. If you drive too far or too fast in Jersey, you drop off the edge. Infinitely preferable method of dying to motorways.
2. I don’t like shopping. I am no good at it. I get bored after 20 minutes and decide that I will do the shopping after a jolly good lunch and some fortification of the vino-related type.
3. I am quite easily swayed. Self-control, in my book, is something to do with choosing to wear concrete pants and steel bras.
But, I had a foolproof plan. Ikea first, for the compulsory purchase of bookshelves and shoe racks. Then Bluewater, where I would single-mindedly hunt down a new pair of glasses as my lenses have mysteriously become so scratched that I can barely see. And no, it’s not like when I picked my Clarks school shoes apart with a compass point because I’d wanted some from FreemanHardyWillis. I honestly don’t know how they became scraped just as I’d gone off them. No, really.
Lovely bf had somehow been persuaded that this would be tolerable, if not fun.
‘Maybe we should just go to Bluewater,’ I ventured en route. ‘We can order the furniture online.’
Lovely bf mumbled something at the hard shoulder. It sounded a bit like ‘oh, for fuck’s sake’ but he’d been instructed to wear his happy face and the words weren’t coming out clearly through his gritted teeth.
I’ll cut a long story short. I still can’t see; the joy of specs was shortlived. Lunch at Loch Fyne was good though. Somehow or other, I came home with a fruit bowl and an SLR camera, having become a little overexcited about an idea for a book: a photo and haiku to mark every day for a year. Lovely bf was a trifle disappointed with his purchase of some headache tablets.
Four hours of driving, four hundred quid and eight hours of my life later I was broke and still blind. Oh dear. Perhaps I need more practice?
Of Extraordinary Employment May 23, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Journal , 22 commentsI don’t talk about my job much, mainly due to having had my blog rumbled before I even started there. Trying to explain to your new potential boss via mobile phone through a mouth of egg sarnie in a Waitrose car park what you meant by describing him as ‘indecipherably posh’ is not a lunchtime pursuit I recommend.
But. How can I ignore it? It consumes a huge part of my day. It will also be consuming my Saturday.
While my usual working week usually contains a mix of old boys with farms and swathes of agricultural legal head-popping typing, there is the occasional glimmer of glamour. 70s rock stars, bullion dealers and llamas have featured briefly in the past week, amongst the chickens and silage. And tomorrow will be in a class of its own: I will largely be found making cups of tea on a Calor Gas stove aboard a double decker bus to which will be attached a marquee for our clients’ drinking pleasure. If it rains today, as forecast, I’ll be performing this clever routine in wellies.
I have always wanted to be outstanding in my field. Tomorrow, I shall simply be out, standing in a field. Loitering within tent, as it were.
Fodder for the next novel? You really think so?
Of Bus-like Brainwaves May 20, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Journal , 16 comments‘I don’t think I’d write another novel,’ I said to lovely bf a while ago.
It’s hideously hard, pouring so much time and emotional energy into something that will almost certainly sink without trace. I could hardly remember how I managed to sit there last summer, trying to wrench out at least a hundred words so I wouldn’t have to lie when asked how I was getting on at the end of the day.
Never. Again.
But I had an idea last week. I don’t think it’s even a new idea – it’s just one that keeps bubbling up and getting stronger each time. A bit like the smell of a blocked drain really. The Idea came while I was driving to work and I dashed up the stairs to my office, scribbling frantically to get it down before it evaporated for another few months.
And. I had another idea this morning. Well, it was a dream actually which became An Idea when I woke up properly. Bursting bladders have a lot to answer for. It wasn’t even just The Idea for a story – it had the characters and lines of dialogue and everything, fizzling and sizzling and spitting hot fat at me. I had to get up, despite it being 5.20am, to write it all down before I made a mess. Hmm, great image there; my new story is clearly a sausage.
Now that my first cup of tea has gone down the hatch, the initial euphoria has worn off and I’m wondering whether I should knit the two Ideas together. Or whether they’re actually both crap and I should’ve stayed in bed. Sausages and blocked drains; perhaps that sums it up.
God. I hate writing.
***
On another note entirely, lovely bf has made an observation:
When Princess Diana was alive, she used to visit war-torn countries strewn with landmines. Fergie, God bless her, has been sent to Hull. The Royals aren’t what they were, are they?
Of Determined Doingness May 15, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Domestic Doings, Journal , 25 commentsI remember reading somewhere that ‘having it all’ means ‘doing it all’. It sounded tough, in a kamikaze 1980s shoulder pads sort of way. All of a sudden, though, I seem to have adopted this red-lipstick and high heels approach. I want it all and I want it now.
Hmmm. I think I’m having a mini-mid-life crisis. I don’t like being 39. I blame the ‘life begins at 40′ thing: I somehow feel that the next 355 days or so are the end of an era somehow. Not in a bad way; just life being marked. A defining thing.
I want it all. I really do. Predictably, I’m on yet another ‘get thin’ regime. I’ve been running nearly every day and lovely bf hasn’t sniggered even once while trying to winch me out of bed the following day when my muscles and joints are seizing up. Needless to say, he doesn’t quite get the mid-life thing. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair that he’s only just turned 32. Perhaps I should trade him in for a doddery old duffer and then I’d be all spritely by comparison?
I haven’t done even an eeny weeny bit of editing; when the new sofas for the conservatory come, that will be the place to edit. No, really. I mean it. Honest Guv.
Yes, dear reader, living in The Cul de Sac means that I now have a conservatory from which to watch my life hobble past. It’s a beast of a room and will be separated into two areas: a chill-out zone with huge great big sofas for sprawling editing and the other end containing a new dining table at which we will hold dinner parties in a most middle class sort of way. It’s getting to me, The Cul de Sac. I’ve even bought new clothes. From Boden. Shhhhhh… you see what I mean? It’s all creeping insidiously into me; I even conformed and put the recycling bins out in a co-ordinated fashion on Tuesday. I didn’t mean to. But every other house had their bins lined up like soldiers by their beds. I couldn’t help myself.
Good Lord. 7am now, time for a run before I wriggle into my flippy skirt or hotchpotch top. Bloody hell. How on earth am I supposed to be a writer when I carry on like that, eh?
Of Mundane Mumblings May 8, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Domestic Doings, Journal , 20 commentsDear Blog,
I’ve been neglecting you. You sat there, despondent, empty, waiting for my input and there was none. Zilch. Bugger all.
Soz.
I’ve been busy, Blog. I’ve cluttered up the new house with things I’ll never need and can’t find the essentials. My lady’s bathroom accoutrements are missing; I now go by the name of Olga and have been asked sweetly by lovely bf whether I will be taking up shot putting.
I have ripped brambles out of the garden with my bare hands and resemble a murder with cuts and bruises everywhere.
I have tried to catch up with my photography course. Mission, should you wish to accept it: Message in a Bottle.
‘Yes, I really feel you’ve found your level in academia,’ smiles lovely bf as I stumble about madly, clutching camera and half-empty wine bottle.
I’ve also had another birthday and have that sinking feeling that, during this last year of my 30s, I should be achieve something in the next 360 days.
But still, the sun’s shining and the swallows are a-swooping. What better day to start my shot putting career. I’ve got the frowning and grunting part mastered so far…
Of Uppity Updates April 30, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Domestic Doings , 25 commentsHere I am, all polished and shiny as I settle into middle class suburbia. Gawd. I have been wearing my cross face rather a lot since Saturday, practising my range of swear words and generally being quite scary.
This morning, however, I woke up full of beans. Well, not actually ‘full of beans’, because I don’t really care for bean-related foodstuffs but you know what I mean.
I wandered down the stairs at 5.45, thinking about Extra-Strong Tetleys and perhaps a pre-work jaunt with the faithful canine. In the kitchen, a mountain of gross, greasy dishes peered lazily at me and I said a few more swear words. I said them quietly, of course. I live in a cul de sac now, you know.
So. Broken down dishwasher. Bugger. But things could be worse, I thought. Oh, hang on. I didn’t think it, I manifested it. Mwah ha ha ha, said the tap. I’ll run, run, as fast as I can. You can’t stop me, I’m the cul de sac tap. The water spurted and spattered. Then the dishes carefully unpacked and put away in the under-sink cupboard began to float away as H2o burst from every available pin prick of piping.
‘Gosh,’ I thought in a middle class sort of way. ‘How terribly inconvenient.’
I didn’t really think that. I thought something that rhymes with (bourgeois) frolics and begins with a ‘b’. I even said it out loud with my mouth. Quietly though, just in case.
I emailed Landlord. At 6am. When he called me back at 7 I grabbed at the biro to scribble down the emergency plumbing number. The biro I grabbed was having some sort of fit, oozing a tar-like substance all over my hands. No, I’ve no idea how I got it all over my face either. But the black and white minstrels look is still very popular in the more rural parts of Sussex so that’s good.
Yes, it’s all going swimmingly, thanks very much for asking.
Of Continuing Comical Karma April 19, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Domestic Doings, Journal , 37 commentsThey say, don’t they, that things happen for a reason. Eight weeks ago, we were told that our landlady had decided to sell the house we live in. No problemo, I thought jauntily, I now have a proper job earning a splendid number of Great British pounds. I shall procure a lifetime of debt in the form of a mortgage and purchase a humble hovel in which to house my offspring.
Apparently, however, due to apparent crunchiness of credit and my unwillingness to live in a chicken shed, this was something of a non-starter.
I pestered every letting agent in Sussex and could I find a house? Could I ‘eck. On Friday, however, our luck changed. And, um, all change is good. Isn’t it?
Of all the houses, in all the many countrified places within striking distance of the boys’ school, we have agreed to hand over the paltry sum of £1300 a month to live in a cul de sac. Gulp. Lovely bf has already been instructed to purchase some pastel-coloured sweaters and to get his sideburns trimmed. This is serious middle-class suburban stuff. We do not do that sort of thing. We stride about, mumbling madly, covered in mud and like to Not Really Talk to People.
It gets better. In The Novel, I have a character called Rajni. Rajni is based very heavily on someone I used to be very friendly with. In fact, she was very much my bestest friend when I came to live here. We shopped, lunched, drank, did playground gossip, dinner parties, the lot until she tore whole heaps of friendships apart with the winning cocktail of resentment, poison and Merlot coursing through her veins.
Reader, in my new teeny tiny suburban strangulation of residential ruin, the woman horrid enough to have inspired The Novel will live directly opposite me. I will be able to see into her living room and her into mine.
And I think the next door neighbours might be Christians.
And we have to move next week and haven’t yet booked any hairy, sweating removal men to transfer our dismal lives from our sprawling rural lair to this stamp-sized suburban sorrow.
So. Working full-time in brain-squishifying job. Moving house with one week to organise. Two children to look after. The Novel to edit. I shall be wearing my cross face quite a lot over the next ten days. I shall be saying swear words aplenty at work; I will not be able to shout at ‘home’ in the cul de sac. The neighbours will Think Things and give each other Knowing Looks.
And, inspired by Nez and Lucy, I’ve just signed up for a photography course with the Open University as part of my degree which also starts next week. To add to the jollification, I’m hormonal and have a great big spot on my snozzle.
I’m trying to be pleasant. I really am. But arses. Oh bugger. I hope the new neighbours can’t hear…
