Tuesday afternoon.

Everyone at work wants to know why I’m moving; after all, I suppose when I first moved into this office I was hymning the praises of where I’m living at present, so it must seem a bit odd.

When I first moved there, about eighteen months ago, it felt like a real haven at what was a very stressful time in my life. But over the last six months or so my landlady Sandra has been getting more and more stressed, moody and generally volatile. I’ve been worried for her, but I was hoping that her upcoming holiday (to New Zealand for four and a half weeks) would give her the chance to relax and get her head together. She went away a week ago; a couple of days later I was remaking my bed and decided to turn my mattress, which I do about every six months. Underneath the mattress I found a large chunk of rose quartz crystal, which certainly was not there last time I turned the mattress and certainly was not put there by me; Sandra is the only person in the house who would have put it there.

For those who aren’t into alternative medicine, energy healing, etc, I’d better explain. Rose quartz is supposed to have a healing, heart-opening energy, highly beneficial to the fourth (heart) chakra. Wearing it or putting it in your pocket or under your pillow is meant to help in your relationships and make you a more loving and happy person. I don’t have any problem with the idea of being a more loving and happy person, and I’m pretty open-minded about alternative stuff generally – after all, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”. But to put crystals under someone’s bed without telling them is, in alternative therapy terms, the equivalent of giving someone psychotropic drugs in their food without telling them. It is absolutely unethical and you just don’t do it. Ever. Full stop.

Adding this to the other problems and issues, like the fact that Sandra thinks it is okay to sleep in her lodgers’ room when they’re away (I find this totally unacceptable, but she thinks it’s totally normal), I suddenly thought “No more. I need to move on now.” And that is all there was to it.

Not that I’m enjoying looking for digs. I’ve already had several email-cons in reply to my adverts, which is really depressing… And the kind of place I can afford is not great. I'm off to look at somewhere tonight; keeping my fingers crossed. When I get home, whether or not it has been any good, at least I can get back to my writing for the rest of the evening.

It’s odd; when I first set up this blog, six months ago, I imagined (correctly) that I'd ramble a good deal about my life in general, but that the main creative thing I’d write about would be painting and drawing, my visual art work. Yet in fact at present I seem to be chronicling an extended and energetic phase of writing, and an increasing feeling of happiness with the fact that I am writing. I know I have my moods, just as I have phases in the kind of music I listen to, but I am feeling more and more that this is more than a mood; that it's a real rebirth. To be a writer was my earliest childhood dream (before even the dream of being a ballerina), and I cannot deny that it feels euphorically good to be reconnecting with it.