I begin this post with a quote: “I could not read, eat, sleep, write or do anything unless I drove myself to do it and then I felt as if I were trying to do it with somebody else’s hands or brain and couldn’t work very well with them. I feel lustreless, dowdy and uninviting – I even bore myself. I shall grow mossy in this existence!“
This was written by Emily, from a book in the Emily of New Moon series by LM Montgomery.
Never have words felt truer to my soul. I have moved across the globe, twice. I have lived under the perpetual dampness of a February chill, grey skies and a sun that was never to be seen save for a few snatched glorious cold steely moments where she deemed us worthy to sprinkle her rays weakly at us. I have lived in a torrid desert, every breath laden with the fine dust carried over the sand dunes. Artificial light, artificial skies, artificial wind…
And yes, this dowdy, lustreless feeling chases me wherever I go, ripping away my inspiration and making me bow before it.
Yet every day I wake up with new resolve. I am determined to find my nature. My joy. A way to smile and truly feel the happiness in the pit of my stomach.
Home is where the family is. Joy is in the heart, not the location, and peace and happiness come from within.
Lombardi poplar trees. There is a row of them in Nantwich, and they always decorate the skyline with a gorgeousness that aches the heart.
Does posting all my catch up posts in one day count as NanoPoblano? Is it lazy? I am at my mum’s house this week, and finally finding a moment to breathe. And that means a moment to sit down without a mountainous pile of stress and just write.
Aren’t parents a blessing, folks? My parents are. They give me everything I need, and I am so grateful for them.
I have to say, my November challenge has been really half-hearted. I have made as little effort as possible. It is simply the result of a very busy non-stop life. As the sole teacher and primary parent, I really don’t get any time to myself.
I wake up at 6am, get myself groggily to the gym where I workout with a coffee. Plain black coffee made with a bit of evaporated milk from a can. It’s delicious. By the second exercise my mind is fully awake and by the end of the workout I am sweaty and my heart is pumping hard. I listen to audiobooks during my workout – last week it was Jane Eyre, this week it’s A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It’s a little outdated now, but still mesmerising and fully captivating. The world is a wondrous vast place with a vast history, and Bryson looks at the historical (and present) world through a thorough scientific lens.
I get home at 7:30-8am, and my husband leaves for work, and it’s just me and the kids for the rest of the day. During which I fit in all their extra-curriculars, their regular schooling, their physical activity, the housework, sorting their meals out, my own work, and then whatever little time is left (usually none) something for myself. Usually it’s nothing. Sometimes it’s a chapter or a page of a regular book. Right now that is Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce. It’s such a lark of a story. Brilliantly written, unexpected and novel, and with some dry humour weaved into its structure.
But we’re approaching the halfway mark of NanoWrimo/NanoPoblano, and I would really like to write something tangible. Fictional. Real. So I will spend the next half of the month on that. What that will look like, I don’t know. I am just going to sit down and write, and whatever comes out of that will be that.
Pip, I have known you for approximately six years. And forty seven days. And three and a half hours (at the time of writing this).
We met the day I met with my fate. My fate was you, of course. Didn’t you know?
We were both looking at the same teapot. It was yellow and had blue spots on and I remember thinking you had to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of taste to like such a teapot because let me tell you, it was hideous.
But there was only one of them left and you said, ‘Oh, you have it.’
And I said, ‘Please, no, you have it.’ Because I didn’t even want it in the first place.
And you said, ‘Oh, no, I was only looking. You have it.’
And I said, ‘I wouldn’t be a gentleman if I took it when a young lady has her eye on it. It would be daylight robbery.’
And you snorted and said, ‘Well how about we halfsies it and then share it.’
‘What, like, monthly swaps?’ I asked, ‘or shall we cut it in half?’
‘Sure.’ You were nonchalant. Casual. You even shrugged and that is when I noticed the apple green jacket you are wearing. It was hideous also. (Please don’t hate me. We have discussed the ways colours are worn. And apple green blazers were out of the question. I even made a graph. Please see attached piece of paper for reference.)
‘Well,’ I said very carefully, ‘that then means, of course, that we shall have to swap details.’
‘Let’s buy this thing.’ You picked it up gently and as I reached into my pocket to take out my wallet my elbow jerked yours and it slipped out of your hands and fell down, down down onto the brightly polished John Lewis floors.
We both stared at it.
‘Ah well,’ you said, ‘I was only looking at it because I was curious about something so ugly. Good riddance, I say! I’m Pip. What’s your name?’
I stared at you in pleasant surprise and I felt my lips stretching out my face of their own accord.
‘James.’ I said, and then, ‘let us look for more ugly teapots.’
Of course we had to pay for that ugly yellow polka dot tea pot. It was atrocious. And then for your birthday present a year later I got you a similar teapot which you use for your indoor geraniums. You killed yourself laughing at it and told me I was a money waster because there was no way you would use that for anybody. It could never grace your table.
I remember asking you all wounded, like, ‘What, not even for the reason that it was graced by my hands?’ I was also slightly flirting even though we were firm friends by then, but I could not resist. I can never resist you, Pip.
‘Nope.’ You were very firm.
I am writing to tell you that I want to marry you. I can’t say it to your face because you have beautiful eyes and I know exactly how they will look at me and I will not be able to help myself because I will kiss you and then I will be done for. I know you will be impatient with that and tell me that is nonsense and of course I can help myself but I will not want to. Help myself. At all.
Also I asked my aunt if she read those French books I gave her and she said yes, they were lovely books. You were right. She didn’t read them. Else she would have called me to lecture me horrendously about them. Lovely books indeed. She asks about you a lot and tells me I should marry you quicktimes before you grow too old to have kids.
So back to my fate. You are my fate either way. If you say yes then it will have been a good fate and if you say no I will be broken hearted forever and when I do eventually heal and marry somebody for realsies I will still remember you as the first ever woman who broke my heart. Truly, broke it.
You know love is a strange thing. So strange. I used to think I loved a woman before. I was seventeen. She wasn’t particularly beautiful but I was infatuated by her and loved her to pieces but she always treated me badly. And one day she went too far and I discovered she was sleeping with a right old tramp of a fellow {he was not, he was a respectable LAWYER, but to me in my hurt he was a tramp], but I forgave her. Well I told her I did but I don’t think I really did. Something inside of me snapped that day. She walked on me one too many times. And three miserable months of forced smiles and fake kisses later I met you and the day afterwards she wanted to see me and I called her and I said, ‘I can’t. I can’t do this anymore.’
And when I was with her I thought there could never be anyone else because she was my first love. But it was meagre and ridiculous and pathetic and also desperate. Compared to what I feel about you. I am crazy about you. I look at you and I see my future. And I want to spend all my time with you and walk home from work with you and call you every single day but I stop myself because I don’t want you to get sick of me. I also want to kiss your forehead. It is so gentle and smooth and beautiful.
But see, if we were married I could call you everyday and it wouldn’t be weird, right? I could also kiss your forehead and it would be comfortable.
So, what do you say, Pip?
Yours sincerely and faithfully and truly,
Jim
This image was generated for me by DALL.E 3 – the latest AI photo-generating software. Ahh me. We no longer need to whip out the watercolours to demonstrate the painted thoughts in our heads.
It is slow to react. An hour passes. Three. Five. Seven.
In time, it rises, bubbles, reaches the brim. The sharp smell of it pierces through my nostrils, and is swiftly followed by a soft sweetness.
I pour it into my metal whisking bowl – the bowl that doubles as a ‘space hat’ or a ‘ringing bell’ or a space ship for people who are two.
I add water, olive oil, salt. Whisk it. Little hands whisk too.
I pour in some strong bread flour.
Mix with my hands until it is a rough, misshapen ball of dough.
I cover with a damp cloth, allow it to sit for an hour. When I check on it, it has become stretchy. I shape it into a ball in fifteen seconds, cover it again, and forget it for a day.
When I check on it again, chubby arms hugging my legs, incessant chatter in my ears, clanging from the ‘ringing bell’ of another bowl reverberating through my skull, it has doubled in size. The dough, not my skull. It smells sour, sharp, sweet, plump.
I shape it again, and put it into a basket lined with a muslin cloth, shove it back into the oven (turned off), and forget about it for a night and half a morning.
At 9am, I pull it out. Again, it has doubled in size. I shape it, cut it, put it into my cast iron saucepan with lid that some people like to say is an oven in a European country, and put it in the now turned-on oven.
After forty minutes, halfway through that time I have taken the lid off and let the loaf brown…
After forty minutes I have a loaf of delicious sourdough bread.
I let it sit for an hour, then I slice into it.
It’s still hot and steamy, and when I put a slice of cold butter on it, it melts immediately.
I serve it to my children, and they eat it, oblivious to the fact that I fed the starter three days ago.
I think of that, though, when I see them eat it. It makes me smile.
This beautiful painting of sourdough bread is by Elena from RainbowMilkStudio. You can buy her gorgeous prints here!
This week, as is every week, was full of little moments.
I never usually stop and really take them in, I think it’s an addiction to dopamine. Fast paced life. Although life seems a lot more slower, less stressful, now that my kids are out of nursery and my job has… vamoosed. Less money… more time. Ahh, life.
Here are some little moments.
My mother sending me a selflie. A mirror selfie. Not for any other reason than to show me a beautiful dress she got for my sister’s upcoming nuptials. Her hair – always something my curly-haired self deeply admired – black and thick and framing her face. The way she held her phone in her left hand, her right index pointing at the camera button, mid-click, her pinky out. The pose of a generation allowed to grow up in the freedom of a lack of surveillance. Not used to taking pictures of oneself. It moved me in a way I can’t describe. My sweet mother. I thought. I don’t think that often. I think, my hardworkingmother. I think, mother who I love.
Nettles. Long nettles as tall as my shoulder growing just beyond my back garden. Behind the trellis fences we put up because ivy had taken over the previous ones and rendered them a ruin. To keep the ivy away, we put trellises, so we can catch them the moment they start snaking up the fence posts. So now nettles have taken over, growing over and through the carpet of ivy at the back of the back neighbour’s garden, behind the huge trees they have covering their house. Well. it’s an old man’s house. He was taken ill and carted off to a nursing home last December. His garden a beautiful memory of 40 years of life and love and family. Ivy and conifers taller than the houses now, but which must have been small when he planted them with his wife – in a bygone era.
My moment was that I went into the back, pulled up all the nettles using a pair of rubber kitchen gloves under my usual gardening gloves. I picked each leaf off, while my kids watched from a safe distance. My boy ran inside to collect his scissors, and started snipping at other foliage, emulating me. My daughter pushed her babies around in a little pram, stopping by me every so often and putting a small chubby hand on my shoulder.
I picked all the nettles, we had nettle tea. A nettle rinse for our thin curls. Some nettle soup with toast.
Note: I write these daily Novembers to the background noise of my kids screaming. These days like to run around chasing each other and scream. It’s some kind of game. Their cries pierce right through my ears. They interrupt my thoughts and halt my words and make my brain feel like mush . I stop them sometimes, and other times I let them do it, because it seems like they enjoy it and they need to get it out of their system.
I am actually behind.
I am behind and I could panic about it but I won’t.
I won’t let the overwhelm overwhelm me.
Let this be my 25th post.
It has no substance.
My brain is mush.
But brains are mush. And it is within that mush that ideas grow.
My sister sent me a text when I was downstairs in my mother’s house, working at the dining table.
It was 7am. The house was silent. Everybody was fast asleep.
‘There’s a rainbow outside’ she wrote.
Immediately I jumped up, yanked open the curtains, and this is what I saw.
On one side, a gorgeous rainbow. Then behind me, opposite the rainbow, the prettiest sunrise!
Needless to say today I did not manage to sit to write a proper blog post. But I can’t miss a day, not when we are this close to the finish line. Every day in November a blog post! So here is my contribution from today. My eyes are stinging with exhaustion, I am about to collapse into bed, hoping my kids sleep through the night tonight! And I am happy I managed to get a post out before November 22 ends!
One of my biggest pet peeves is when young people write ‘wisdom’.
It annoys me on so many levels.
Level 1: They are way too young to have accumulated such an insane amount of wisdom (see: ’25 things I have learned in 25 years on this planet). Level 2: Wisdom is more impactful in smaller doses. Level 3: It’s irritating and assumes people will want to hear what a green, relatively inexperienced young person has got to say about life. Level 4: If you overlook all the previous levels and actually delve into what they have to say, you will more often than not discover that they have listed the most mundane, common sense things ever.
So it might appear ironic that I am here today to list some things that I have learnt from other people.
I don’t pretend to think that my things are of any value to anybody but myself. But I like that I have learned them, and wonder at what others might think of them.
Are they mundane?
Are they common sense?
Do they mean anything to anybody?
Who knows.
Thing One:My mother taught me through words and actions that people will like you much more if you don’t take yourself too seriously. You see, growing up, my sister and I were lemons. Oh, such lemons. It shames me to remember it. If we were at a gathering, even if the party was full of people we knew, we would just stand there and wait for people to socialise with us. We never thought to join a group and attend the party properly. My mother, a social butterfly, would become so impatient with us. She would flit from group to group leaving laughter in her wake. We felt awkward and shy and socially inept. Complaining to my mother about my inability to make friends or be happy socially, she told me it was because I took myself too seriously. Let loose. Laugh at yourself a little.
I am still trying to learn how to do that.
Thing Two: My father taught me about faith. Real, sincere faith. This thing is perhaps an incredulous thing to believe, if ye are of little faith. Or not religious at all. I am religious. Not fanatically, but respectably so.
My dad has such strong, unwavering faith. He always says to me in Arabic, ‘you will see wonders’ (If you have faith), and I always see goosebump wonders happening to him. Once his car got stolen. Somebody broke into our home, stole all the keys and phones, and took the car from the garage. We reported it to the police, nothing. It was a Chevrolet Suburban, and our first big car since the seven of us used to cram into my dad’s ’89 caprice. We loved it. I was in tears. My father, however, was stoic. You will see, he told us, it will come back. I have strong faith. It’s in God’s hands. God has never let me down. Two days later, my father received a phone call from an old man who said, Your car is outside my house. It was the strangest story. The old man had noticed this strange new car outside his house for two days, and on the second day went out to investigate. He said he found the car keys under the car, and when he got inside it he found some of my father’s work papers with his work number on and gave that a call. The car had cigarette butt stains on it and the seats were a little torn, but was otherwise in perfect condition. This is not the only story I have about my father’s faith, there are many more, but this one has stuck in my head for 12 years. You could call it luck, you could call it coincidence, but I have never seen anybody as sure as my father that he would get his car back. And he did.
Thing Three: My sister in law taught me to wash the dinner dishes, clean the counter and broom the floor in 15 minutes. Look at the clock, she would say, porcelain arms slipping into rubber gloves, in 15 minutes, I shall have finished everything and will be sipping my tea. Then she would daintily, yet efficiently wash everything up, wipe the counter with a furious deftness that was fascinating to watch, and then neatly broom the floor and empty the dirt into the bin with a little flourish. Gloves off, neatly and quickly draped over the tap, feet sliding out of slippers, cup of tea in hand, little tidy dance, arms out, hands elegantly swaying. It all looked so neat and tidy and efficient and deft and, dare I say, exciting. A challenge. So that is what I do now. And seeing a tidy kitchen in the morning makes me more likely to have a productive day. Also my sister in law is a little sparrow and makes me laugh, so it’s nice to remember her as I deftly and neatly scrub away at my kitchen counter.
I am challenging myself to write a post every single day in May, to kickstart my writing again. I will be following some prompt words that I ‘stole’ from somebody on instagram. Here is my ninth post.
When my brother and I were very small, our parents moved us away from rainy England to Dubai, where it barely ever rained and the sun shone down upon the barren desert with a beaming ferocity that unrivalled anything we had ever known.
You see, if I were to describe England to you using only the colour spectrum, I would say it was ramaadi (grey) and a thousand shades of green, with a few splotches of brick red thrown in for good measure. Clouds here are stunning, and seemingly perpetual. When it rains it does not rain as it does in Malaysia (there it POURS). It is a slow sort of rain, seemingly innocent and gentle, but viciously incessant, soaking you through in a matter of minutes all while apologising meekly and drizzling away.
The green is of all hues. Dark sultry evergreens, pale shoots, regular green of birches, the humdrum green of privet, cheery green of oak, green hills rolling away into the distance and grass that just grows and grows and grows. Green ivy creeping over beautiful homes and driveways fringed with neatly clipped grass. An abundance of green and all looking like it came out of a picture book – which I suppose it did, for Beatrix Potter did base her paintings on the Lake District!
When you fly above England it’s all neat little squares of varying shades of green. It’s similar in France I suppose but there is a foreign vibe to it there and lots of browns creep in.
When you fly above the United Arab Emirates the land is brown, a hundred shades of it, and you can see the winding marks on the earth where rivers and mountain ranges signify a land that barely changes. It’s always changing in England, for we have seasons. In Dubai there is summer and winter and a week or two of rain and that’s it.
So whenever we came back home to England for the summer holidays, my brother and I relished the rain and the greenery like a pair of mad children. We ate buttercups and yanked all the dandelion seeds off their stems, blowing until we were blue in the face. I naughtily picked the neighbour’s flowers because they were pretty and sobbed inconsolably when my mother gave me a good telling off about it.
My mum bought us two children’s umbrellas one summer, darling little things, coloured like a rainbow, and we would rush into the garden when it rained and stand out there like a pair of wallies under our umbrellas. The neighbours thought we were bonkers and their dog barked at us.
Those odd children standing out in the wet under umbrellas!
It was such a novelty, you see. The pattering of soft rain on the umbrellas, splish splash of water by our wellies, tap tap of heavy drops on wide tree leaves.
Ocean Bream 