Almost home... but it’s Bank Holiday Weekend

Rod is recovering from his stem cell transplant. He’ll soon be discharged from hospital but not while he has a Hickman line in. It’s yet another source of infection and this is something he must avoid with his present low levels of resistance... but it’s Bank Holiday weekend which means that the lines can’t be taken out until Tuesday so they allowed him home for the afternoon as long as he was back by 8 pm, a bit like being a prisoner out on licence.

Rod’s resistance is so low that I’ve been given a long list of dos and don’ts regarding cleanliness and food hygiene. It’s scary but when I got up this morning I only had to disinfect the door handles and brush the dog to put the finishing touches to my newly super-clean house. All was going well until I stepped into the downstairs toilet. Water was dripping from the hand basin. I tried to phone the plumber... but it’s Bank Holiday weekend and there was no reply so I decided to tackle the leak myself. How hard can it be to tighten a nut under a tap? I found the nut. No problem. I turned it and... OK, so I turned it the wrong way and once the water started to pour it was impossible to get a grip on it with wet fingers. Thankfully a kind neighbour came round with his toolbox, fixed the leak and I was able to finish my cleaning and get to the hospital in time for Rod's 'day-release'.

Rod is very weak and has by no means recovered from the treatment but today he had two good meals, he sat in the conservatory and admired his garden (which fortunately is still surviving) and he was reunited with the dog. Josh-the-dog has a manic streak. When the kids come home to visit he does crazy circuits, the sort of circuits where back legs overtake front legs with hilarious consequences. It’s been almost four weeks since Rod went into hospital. When we arrived home we braced ourselves for a daft dog explosion but Josh didn’t move. He stood and stared and then he pressed his head against Rod’s legs. Rod sat on the stairs. Josh laid his head on Rod’s lap and there they sat. If dogs could cry Josh would have been shedding tears of relief. Dogs can’t cry but we can... and we did.

Bruges, Blakeney and Holiday Snaps

Do you remember when you had to wait at least two weeks for the holiday photographs to be ready and then when you went to collect them most of them were duds? Well mine were anyway. Now I can look at a photo instantly, take a whole stream of shots until I get it right, email that perfect picture round the family at the press of a button. It’s clever stuff.

Dad used to have his snaps developed onto slides. When guests arrived he would draw the curtains, set up the screen and get the projector out. Mum always complained. She wanted printed photographs to hold in her hand. She makes the same complaint now when I get my mobile out or sit her at my computer for a photo show. Some things never change... including the post-holiday blues.

It’s always difficult when you get back from holiday, washing to be done, food to be bought and you’ve even got to cook the stuff yourself, but this time we topped all the usual problems. We arrived home to hospital messages calling Rod in for extra tests before next week’s stem-cell transplant and, something we weren’t expecting, Josh-the-dog was rushed into the vet’s to have a lump removed from his thigh. We’re hoping it’s going to be ok. We’re hoping it’s from the fox bite he had a few months ago. It never really healed properly.

But this blog is meant to be about holidays not illnesses. 

Two weeks ago we went to Blakeney in Norfolk. I enthused at length about Blakeney here so I won’t bore you with repetition but it is my all time favourite holiday resort and this time we treated ourselves. We stayed at The Blakeney Hotel.

   
I could get used to living like that. We lounged in their lounges and Josh-the-dog walked all his favourite coastal-path walks. The restaurant overlooks the creek and we watched the tide rising and falling while lovely young waiters served up three-course meals every evening, followed by coffee (or mint tea in my case) and home-made chocolates.

Talking of chocolates, last week we visited beautiful Bruges. It’s a place where the sound of bicycle bells and horses’ hooves on cobbles merge with the aroma of artisan chocolate. Bruges has managed to retain its old-world look unlike any other place I’ve ever visited but I wouldn’t have been able to say exactly why until our tour guide pointed out that there are no aerials, no satellite dishes, or electricity wires. All the 21st century services, including internet connections, are ducted beneath the cobbled pavements...

...and there are very few ‘impossible to walk over’ cobbles. They’re mostly modern ones which are easy on both the feet and the eye. Why can’t our pavements look as good at that?

Bikes seem to be the favoured method of travel for the locals. For the tourists the horses are continually ‘doing the circuit’.

Our guide was keen to impress upon us how well these horses are cared for, never working more than one day on and one day off, and having numerous rests and meal breaks.

The canals contain very little traffic as only the local tour boats are allowed to navigate them...

...along with the swans which, our guide assured us, are almost as well looked after as the horses.

And so we move on to next week and all the hospital treatments but we have these lovely memories, not to mention megabytes of photos, to remind us... and I don’t even have to warm the projector up to view them.

An Unlikely Travel Writer

Traveller? Me? I don't think so!

I can’t ride a bike. I tip over sideways. I think it’s got something to do with my centre of gravity.

Flying scares me so much that I’d really rather stay at home.

And I don’t do walking. I’m the one who’s always trailing at the back of a group of walkers thereby allowing them time to sit and rest while they wait for me to catch up... and then when I’ve caught up they start walking again... until I trail behind and they sit and rest and so it goes on until I end up in tears, have to be escorted home and vow never ever to go walking again.

I don’t much like car travel either. It’s not that I get car-sick. It’s more of a ‘car-ache’. Two hours is about the limit of my endurance which means that most of our holidays, until recently, have been spent in North Norfolk in a small village called Blakeney.

The first time we ever saw Blakeney it was getting dark, the tide was out, we had nowhere to stay and The Blakeney Hotel overlooking mudflats was as good a place as any. In the morning I drew back the bedroom curtains and was overwhelmed by the glittering scene. Yachts and dinghies dotted the sea. Gulls swooped across waving salt marsh grasses. Children sat on the quayside, legs dangling, nets scooping unsuspecting gilly crabs from the creek. A row of boards advertised boat trips to Blakeney Point to see the seals. People were sitting at an open-fronted caravan drinking mugs of tea and eating freshly prepared breakfast baps. I couldn’t wait to get out there.

Pedlars Way stretches along most of the North Norfolk coastline. It crosses the quay at Blakeney where it becomes a raised pathway leading out to Blakeney Point. I know I said I don’t do walking but Blakeney is exceptional. In Blakeney I walk. The path passes between the car park and the duck pond and I don’t just mean any old duck pond. This duck pond is home to wigeons, shovelers, teals, pintails, mallards and what’s more they sound exactly like laughing Donald Ducks. The car park soon becomes a boat park. Duck laughter is replaced with clinking masts and the screeches and calls from the gulls, terns and avocets. One winter we even saw a flock of Brent geese from Siberia swooping over our heads. Those big birds are impressive but personally I prefer the tiny reed buntings that hop and twitter around the marshes, hiding in the masses of samphire, known locally as ‘poor man’s asparagus’.

As for accommodation, The Kings Arms is the most dog-friendly pub I know. It’s a Grade II listed inn and Josh-the-dog has spent many happy holidays with us there. They cook a mean fish and chip supper, larger than any plate can ever contain. They serve locally smoked fish and there’s even a dog biscuit box behind the bar. The pub sits just off the quay within minutes of salt marshes and shingle walks, nature reserves and bird hides. What more could a travel-phobe like myself ask for?

...until we discovered Eurostar but that’s another blog-story.

Positive pictures in my mind

Last week I talked in my blog about creating positive pictures for the filing cabinet in our minds. I’ve decided that I need to create lots of positive images in my mind right now so I’ve made a collection of them. While these pictures, in the montage on the left, create wonderful, positive images in my mind, they possibly won’t in yours because each photograph comes with an internal dialogue of a good time that I’ve had. These pictures mean to me:

Josh about to jump onto the settee even though he knows it’s against the rules

The view we shared with a pigeon at our breakfast table in fabulous Venice

Our favourite view of Blakeney Quay in Norfolk

I love the wild East Coast sea

Josh enjoying his garden

As a writer I’m interested in collecting positive pictures without pictures, pictures painted with words alone. I love the way that Marge Piercy in The Art of Blessing the Day describes a ripe peach,

...this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun...

And I can feel her first garden tomato in my hand with her words,

...How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,

warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.

You are the savour of summer in a thin red skin...

I thought it would be easy to find lots of extracts of writing that painted positive pictures but I’ve trawled through my poetry books and most of my favourite poems are depressing. I’ve flicked through my novels but the pieces of writing that come alive for me are again the sad pieces. [You can see why I need to collect positive images.]

I was sure that there were lots of writers out there who could tell me about beautiful, positive pieces of descriptive writing so I put out a plea on Twitter and below are two extracts that paint pictures in other people’s minds.

Karen Thorne. who runs the Hopton House Bed & Breakfast, sent me this extract from W. B. Yeats’ The Wind Among the Reeds,

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet,

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

And

Claire Marriott who you can find at http://buckswriter.blogspot.com/ sent an extract from Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. She said that the words stuck in her mind the first time she heard them and they’ve stayed there ever since.

‘It is just a beautiful way of saying it’s good to be different,’ she told me.

“I wish that you were my sister. I'd teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They're common as - weeds, -but - you - well, you're - Blue Roses!”

“But blue is wrong for - roses...”

“It's right for you !”

A great big thank you to both of my Twitter friends.

Does anyone else have a positive, descriptive piece of writing to share? Please post it below and feel free to include your blog address as well.

I’m looking forward to reading them and creating some more of those much-needed, positive images in my mind.

Being a Nosy Adam...

...why should Parker have the monopoly on nosiness?

I was taking Josh the dog to the park the other morning when I noticed a red ribbon on a neighbour’s hedge. It made me think about Joanne Harris and her red ribbons in Blackberry Wine. I wondered if it could be some sort of a sign, a talisman. This gave me an idea for a story so I scribbled it into my notebook.

Further down our road there was a small group of people pointing at something out of my line of vision. No self-respecting Nosy Adam could have walked on by, so we made a detour to watch a large digger turn a perfectly good house into a pile of bricks. This was to make way for a road and houses in the backlands but what fascinated me were gardens that I had never seen before. There were bushes, trees, an old fashioned garden shed... or was it a Wendy House where generations of children had played or maybe it was a bolthole for Dad with a radio and cans of beer or better still for Mum with a mug of coffee and her mobile phone. Another idea and I was scribbling in my notebook again.

Josh was pulling at his lead. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be going to the park?’ he said. (OK, so he didn’t actually say it.) We resumed our walk. A cat who was watching Josh from the top of a fence, didn’t know that dogs can’t climb. She panicked. She lost her balance. A pair of claws grappled and disappeared down the back of the fence, followed by a clatter, a hiss, a meow. The Nosy Adam in me wanted to go and investigate but I knew that it would only make things worse so I jotted it down in my notebook.

The red ribbon was still caught on the hedge when we returned from the park. I knew that red ribbons have something to do with charity. The Internet said that it is the symbol of the World Aids Campaign. They are calling for nominations for the 2010 Red Ribbon Award and the closing date is 28th February. Well there’s a coincidence, I thought, bearing in mind last week’s blog post and I began to type this post...

But when I looked up the link for the Red Ribbon Award I was surprised to see that there is a Burgundy Ribbon for Amyloidosis Awareness... come to think of it that ribbon on the hedge was kind of a burgundy red and I have a husband who suffers from Amyloidosis. So it’s not a coincidence. It’s synchronicity. I started out writing about how being nosy gives you ideas for creative writing and now I’m reading a website about raising awareness of Amyloidosis as early diagnosis can save lives, I’m planning how I can get involved and I’m right back with my last week’s blog post about coincidence versus synchronicity. Isn’t life strange?

Help! I have a newly retired husband?

Suggestions in the comments box below, please.

Cups of tea appear beside my laptop at regular intervals, with a biscuit balanced on the saucer and his 'next new project' to be discussed. My husband has retired from work. It's not that he doesn't support my writing, it's just that he's there... all the time. I used to be able to stare at the window for an hour or more if an idea needed thinking through, or sit at the computer all day if the ideas were flowing. Now we have lunch at lunch time, a set routine to the day and he's trying out things in the kitchen. A few weeks ago it was the making of pastry. Every afternoon my cups of tea arrived with tarts of varying texture and colour placed on the saucer. By the end of the week he was moderately satisfied with his dough technique but issued threats that trials would begin again just as soon as I'd bought more flour. He's a determined man. This week he cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. Yes, yes, I can hear you all slapping your cheeks in envy and amazement but, no, it's not as wonderful as it sounds. I can't find a thing.

It was the right time for Rod to retire. He struggled through last year trying to get into work while he was on the Valcade chemotherapy treatment. When he was not well enough for work he lay around feeling guilty. Even he agrees that he's earned a well-deserved rest. At the moment he's halfway through a course of Melphalan taken at home in pill form. As I commented in an earlier post, thankfully he's tolerating it quite well. He's been out walking Josh the dog most days and that's my benchmark for his fitness level.

Which brings me to another problem linked with his retirement. I hardly ever walk the dog anymore. I'm becoming increasingly unfit and I've put on weight. I could go with him but this way I get a full hour's concentrated writing time. I do miss the people. Dog walking is good for writers. There are so many fascinating characters on the park. If you have a dog they always want to stop and chat and there's often a whole pageful of incidents and observations to jot down in my notebook when I get home.

Of course I still walk Josh when Rod is having a bad chemo day but as I no longer walk him regularly I'm out of the routine. It's a real ordeal to have to pull on all those layers of clothing and go out, especially on a cold winter's morning. Josh is a big dog. He pulls me along on the ice and he always prefers to walk across the muddiest fields on the park. But as soon as I'm out there on my favourite field, surrounded by frost covered trees and birdsong, I feel totally exhilerated... Yes, you're right. Tomorrow I'll go with him. The writing will just have to wait.

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Waiting

Waiting rooms and people watching... or just waiting my life away

This has been a week of waiting around. The other day I had to sit next to Father Christmas in the hospital waiting room. It was the only seat left. He wasn’t real. I could tell that by the way his foot fell off when I shifted his knee away from mine, but it made everyone smile, even though we knew we’d be waiting there for the best part of the morning. My husband, Rod, is on chemotherapy again for his Amyloidosis and so we have to go each month for them to check him over and write out the next month’s prescription. There’s always a buzzing atmosphere in the clinic’s waiting room: friendships forged on the oncology day ward, people chatting, comparing side effects, number of courses this time, what to get the Grandkids for Christmas.

Waiting rooms are excellent places for gathering ideas for new characters. This week it was the grown-up daughter who was trying a little too hard to keep up the spirits of her anxious mother, buying her packets of crisps, taking photographs of her with her mobile phone, giggling a little too much. I slipped my writer’s notebook out of my bag and jotted it all down. You never know when she might want to appear in one of my stories.

From the clinic we went straight to Pharmacy. The sign said ‘one hour’s wait’ and we knew that meant ‘at least one hour’ so we resigned ourselves to more waiting in the WRVS cafe. The cafe is good for a different kind of people watching: nurses, doctors and assorted members of staff rushing in, grabbing a sugar fix and rushing out again. The care assistant with the glitter on her cheeks, reindeer antlers on her head and a miserable look on her face was a great character to capture in the pages of my notebook, so too was the volunteer working behind the counter. He had a Santa hat on his head and was singing Christmas Carols and joking with us all as he provided us with mugs of coffee and mince pies.

The next day I took my mother to the dentist. Another chance to people watch, or so I thought, and I went fully prepared as usual with my writer’s notebook and pen, but what a difference from the atmosphere in the hospital clinic. Everybody was sitting in silence, looking down at their feet, glancing up each time the nurse came in with an expression of gloom and the end of the world on their faces. I think we need to get things into perspective here.

Even the dog’s waiting

(a shameless excuse for sharing with you a picture of Josh the dog)

This week saw more waiting with the promised delivery of two flat-pack wardrobes. Why is my address always the last call of the day and why couldn’t they tell me first thing in the morning instead of making me wait? It’s the same when we need a plumber or electrician. Who are these people who have the first call of the day? I could now start complaining about waiting for buses and the way that they always sail past our turning just as I get to the corner but that would make me sound like a grumpy old woman and that would never do.

Waiting does seem to take up a large part of my life. I am forever waiting to hear from a publisher, and it’s a lovely phone call that I mean, not a rejection letter. For some people waiting is how they pass their entire lives: waiting to grow up, waiting for the right partner, waiting until they can afford to have children, waiting for their summer holiday, waiting for Christmas, waiting for retirement. Let’s stop all the waiting and do a bit of living instead otherwise before we know it we’ll be waiting to die – the end.