Thick and bitter.

After a week of doing virtually nothing I thought I'd better  justify my existence on the planet so made some marmalade. Thick, dark, and bitter, just the way my ex likes it.

A few comments come to mind, but my hair wasn't always dark and I absolutely deny bitterness, so that's only one out of three.

I had to go quite a few miles inland and up hill to find some snow. Just a discreet, picturesque, smattering. A few tiny flakes were falling, like vibhuti out of an almost clear sky as I drove home.

What have I been doing with my life?

The Economist's obituary on Beate Gordon that I tried to pop in here didn't stick. Pity. I'm too lazy to summarise it properly but, very briefly, when she was 22 she wrote Article 24 for the Japanese constitution which revolutionised the rights of women in Japan, then went on to do even more amazing things until the day she died at 80+ which is why I say - what have I been doing with my life?

Look no snow!

We keep being threatened with it but so far so good. Just glorious sunshine to go with my mood.

‘Confusticate and bebother these doctors’ as Bilbo might have said. Today I have to waste an hour of my precious retirement time visiting a redheaded twelve year old who will undoubtedly tell me I need to take more tablets to propitiate the drug companies. I hate having to upset him but he has still to learn how stubborn and opinionated old ladies can be and how much they like to be respected.

   Later: He’s a god! I love him like a son. My tests showed almost normal sugar levels over the last three months; doctor all smiles and relief at not having to goad me on, and I’m let off both taking more medication and testing with one of those nasty jabby things. 

I went for a walk to celebrate then, less wisely, bought an almond croissant to eat with my coffee. I will do penance for that for a week.

Back to the original subject - time and how it is spent. Protecting mine has become a bit of an obsession. Which meant I could understand the heroine of Sue Townsend's latest, ‘The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year’ (but that didn’t mean I enjoyed the book). As the mother of twins the eponymous heroine suffered post natal sleep deprivation times two; then there came years of thankless domestic slog until her twins turned into brilliant but autistic, antisocial, cuckoos and finally left home. This was the signal for her to fulfil the promise she made herself during the aeons of exhaustion. I have a feeling I made the same promise to myself when, with three babes under three, I forgot what a whole night’s sleep was like for many years. As time went by the pressure of being responsible for the scene-shifting, driving, housework, providing food and comfort, in short playing the complex archetypal role of parent for them, crowded out my own identity. That’s how it felt at the time.

I promised myself I would get back to myself. Now I suspect there wasn’t a self to get back to. I was always just me. This is it. Get on with it. 

When I sit down to write each day, getting progressively more depressed with what comes out, I remember Agatha Christie who had to clear a corner of the kitchen table surrounded by family detritus, to write the novels that earned her a living. You just haven’t got what it takes Carol!

To rub this in I’ve started rereading Agatha again and am, as ever, impressed by the tightness of her plots; the speed of the action and the absence of anything extraneous. Good as modern crime writers are we have come to expect some side-tracking from the procedure, rambles into the ids, egos and Weltanschauung of the chief protagonist, and often the killer. The closest AC comes to giving us this is a dip into Miss Marple’s past to see the tragic loss of her lover in the Great War. Otherwise the plot and the characters driven by it stick closely to the storyline with only the most essential fleshing out of personality. Every word counts as a clue or a red herring. It’s what makes for such good TV. Virtually no piece of dialogue is without significance. She is admirable.

Since my ritual re-reading of Harry Potter over Christmas I can’t find attraction in any book. I tried reading the last of the Lewis Trilogy by Peter May which has just come out. I was annoyed by its frequent clumsiness of style (who am I to criticise? At least he has written something readable; chosen for publication.  But there, I do.) I think he wrote it in a hurry and forgot to go back over it to polish the rough edges.

After that I tried ‘The Woman who...’ I don’t think I like humorous books much. The deifying of the heroine was a predictable outcome which anyway has been done before.  (I wonder if Julian of Norwich wasn’t just trying to get a bit of peace and quiet.) Before the end I was cross with the woman for her selfishness and irritated by the whole thing. The only bit that made me smile was the Holy Chapati. 

Maybe I was in a grumpy mood. I tested myself by trying a book that has been sitting unopened on my shelves for a long time (I think someone gave it to me) Thorne Smith’s ‘Topper.’ Got five pages in and gave up. Hardly cracked the spine. No, I don’t like books that set out to be humorous. I wasn’t keen on Bertie Worcester and Blandings although that might have been because I read most of them when I had a temperature of 105 F (viral pneumonia).

I bought a new notebook/diary to start the new year and suffered for a week from the usual inhibition a brand new book of virgin pages brings.  Anything I put down has to be in my best handwriting and worthy of the space. No drivel. No mundane meanderings. Maybe just quotes and worthy thoughts from others more qualified than I? This has happened so many times and I find the notebooks a year later with two stilted entries then a wodge of blankness.

I’m over it. I can write stuff like the following:

Losing 4 inches round the area I laughingly call my waist is all well and good but has the inevitable dark side. To reach that goal I’ve had to eat so few calories that the surrounding fat has melted, leaving me scrawny and as bony as a toolkit. The fleshy bits above the diminishing mound, parts of me that were once firm, enticing, causes for pride, now look like the photos of native women in famine areas, and with less under them for them to rest on the sight is quite hideous. I need a trip to the local lingerie shop very urgently.

Sanders and I went to see The Hobbit yesterday, 3D version. Very enjoyable. The technology used for the 3D effect was less satisfactory than whatever Avatar was filmed in; occasionally the figures and surrounding set looked like cardboard cut-outs, but it didn’t bother me much, I was too happy with the great acting, the nice touches of  humour (far more than in the Lord of the Rings which gets a bit turgid), the excitement of the wargs and high action drama. Sandy enjoyed it, especially the trolls who he imitated all the way home.

I did understand why my daughter said she kept waiting for the well-remembered lines we listened to so often on car journeys when they were young. That was an abridged text read by Nicol Williamson, who cut all the ‘he said’ bits and relied on his voice changes to mark the characters. It’s the best production I have ever heard and I kick myself frequently for selling the tapes at a car boot sale long ago. I’ve been looking for them for years, only seeing them at exorbitant prices. Yesterday I found  CD versions on ebay. Hopefully they will be exactly the same...

I heard Melvyn Bragg quote Goethe yesterday: 'To act is easy; to think is hard.' I really liked this ( it seems like a justification for my life of lying around 'day dreaming ' and 'doing nothing') so in an attempt to find the rest of Herr Goethe's thoughts on thinking I Googled the quote. It was amusing to find how many people  triumphantly misquote it, reversed, (which is probably how they hear it, being incapable of conceiving the opposite) as a support for their own personal world view, discrediting mere thinking and extolling a life of action. 

I do enjoy a good quote.