Weird dreams

I very seldom have full-on nightmares of the world-coming-to-an-end, monster-eating-my-leg variety.  But in the last few days I’ve had two absolutely miserable dreams; dreams that left me practically shaking with relief when I woke and realised they weren’t true.

The first was late last week; I dreamed I had to move house again, and I had just three days to do it in.  I had arranged to get all my belongings into storage and was frantically packing; but of course with only three days leeway I was so busy packing that I’d had no time to look for somewhere else to move to.  So I was about to decamp into a local hotel, at the truly painful cost of £120 per night, room only (meaning I would have spent more than my usual month’s rent in just five days).  No-one I spoke to saw anything wrong or odd about my situation, so that as well as being frantic with worry I was also constantly being struck by the fact that I must be a deeply pathetic person to get myself so worked up about minor matters like this.

The second bad dream was last night.  I was going on holiday and had arrived at the airport; there were 2 hours to go to my flight and I was standing at the queue to check-in when I suddenly realised I had left all my baggage at home.  So there I was in Gatwick, desperately trying to think whether there was any way, using the rather stupid selection of shops one finds in an airport, that I could buy myself a whole holiday wardrobe, plus toiletries, books, binoculars, sketchbook, camera, contact lenses and a replacement pair of specs, plus a bag to put them in, before the check-in closed, and still have a bit of spending money left for things like food while I was away.  To add to my state of nerves, my mother then turned up, having decided very sweetly to come and see me off; and she could not understand why I was so upset, or why I felt I had any kind of a problem.  So, again, I had the additional stress of thinking “What is wrong with me, that I am upset by this, when here’s Mum telling me it’s a really trivial matter?”

Talk about deep-seated insecurities!  When I have dreams like this I end up thinking I’d rather not remember them at all.  Not like the one a few months ago when I dreamed I was recently and happily married and busy renovating a house by a lake with my husband.  Now that was lovely!

I don’t know why I’m having such miserable, insecure dreams.  I didn’t think I was particularly miserable or insecure at the moment, indeed rather the opposite.  But the human mind is a mysterious thing, god wot.  Maybe being contented, busy and in good spirits is making my subconscious mind panic. 

I am contented.  Yes, I could have more in my life (a publishing deal, my own home, a garden, a gift-wrapped Jeremy Renner [preferably in my bed], etc etc) but my family are all in good health, I’m happy in my job, I’m comfortable where I live, I have friends, I can afford a holiday each year - plus  a few concerts, theatre tickets etc - my bladder is behaving itself again; and I have my writing, which has driven me mad and worn me out this summer but has also been a well-spring of joy and fulfillment like little else I’ve known.  So I am contented and I have a lot to be grateful for.  Blessed be!

Thinking about 2013

This week I spent a happy evening after work drafting a home-made calendar for next year.

I found when I moved in May that my wall calendar was one of the very few things I could not accommodate in any sensible (i.e. useable) way.  There are no hooks on the walls, or nails in the walls, no picture rail, and nowhere to put up a pin board; so, nowhere to hang my calendar. 

I bluetacked it to the wall, but it was too heavy, and kept dropping off with a crash at odd moments.  Including the inevitable middle-of-the-night crash.  Shriek, thrash about, sit up, bang head on cupboard.  Bah, that's not on.

So I disemboweled it, and have been sticking up individual 1-month sheets.  It works, in a rough and ready way, but when you've removed the staples and separated a calendar into individual sheets, sometimes the picture that comes with a month is rather unsuitable for that month (snowdrops in August and so forth).  They're still lovely pictures, but it looks stupid sometimes.

I was thinking rather crossly that maybe I would have to manage without one next year.  But then it hit me that I could make my own, and print it on light-weight paper that wouldn't crash to the floor.  Ah-ha!

It took about ten minutes to do the grids and fill them in.  And then I had a nice mooch in Google images, and one or two other places online, and made up a selection of pictures.  I'm going to be alternating Greek islands (and beaches I want to swim from) with food, plants and handsome men.  Since they're all loose-leaf pages, I can change the images around every week - even every day if I want. Or put up two or more at a time.  I can mix and match; Renner with cherries, McRae with scarlet buckeye leaves, Stepanek with Antipaxos...  Have Crete with the cherries.  Thassos with daffodils.  Renner with daffodils.  Heavens, the possibilities are endless.  Happy, silly Dent.

Luckily I don't have Photoshop, or the possibilities really would be endless.

If anyone would like to borrow the grids, and then make up their own image selection, let me know and I can copy them to you.  It's easy, cheap and can be custom-made to your personal tastes.  Maybe I should go into business? - the Dent patent loose-leaf customised pick-your-personal-porn calendar.  What do you think?

Writing update; last night I wiped out the Big Evil Bad Guy.  Oof, got there.  Now I only have a couple of scene to do, and I'm done.  Apart from the revisions.  And typing up.

It's been a fun ride, and to my amusement I can see sequel possibilities.  How daft is that?! 

First opera of the autumn season

I thought you might like a review of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, which I saw at the Coliseum on Monday night.  Basically, if you missed it, you didn’t miss much! 

That’s not really fair of me.  The cast was excellent, especially Roland Wood and Benedict Nelson, and they were all singing their hearts out.  The orchestra were playing their socks off.  The music was lovely, though it didn’t leave me with any particular moments that stay in my head musically, much less coming out humming the big tunes. It was just slow, lusciously melodic Vaughan Williams-y stuff; it rolled beautifully on, but never really got anywhere.

But there were some big buts; it was very long and terribly slow and the production was a bit confused.

The staging looked great; fabulous set design and lighting, with moving grey walls suddenly bathed in blazes of richly textured colour, and amazing puppetry for the giant figure of Apollyon, and the costumes for Vanity Fair were brilliant.  The whole thing looked as though it had been designed by a team of Mark Rothko and Anselm Kiefer for the sets and Georg Grosz for the costumes.  But the story had been re-imagined as a man dreaming about his last days on death row before going to the electric chair, and that just didn’t really work.

I gave it a chance; I gave it 3 hours’ worth of chance, but I still wasn’t convinced by the end.

I didn’t mind it going into modern dress, especially as it was pretty non-specific modern dress.  John Bunyan became a kind of generic political prisoner in a prison camp or gulag that could have been anywhere and anytime in the last century or so.  It could have been Siberia or Robben Island or Reading Gaol.  That seemed reasonable to me; after all, Amnesty International is dealing with the present-day equivalents of Bunyan, wherever they work.  But then it all got a bit confused. 

Initially all the other characters (except Apollyon, who was a marvellous fifteen foot tall rod puppet) were portrayed by the other prisoners quickly putting on white scarves or black gloves or something, to indicate they were now appearing as someone else.  The result was that at first it looked as though we were meant to imagine they were enacting the story for the lead character’s consolation as he faced his approaching execution.  But the Evangelist was a slightly comical-looking Lowry-type figure with a raincoat and umbrella, and as the evening went on other characters appeared who were properly costumed, not just wearing some small indicative touch over their grey uniform, so it wasn't consistent as a theme.  

Vanity Fair was dressed in brilliant colours and masses of spangles and glitter and balloons; it had cross-dressing, money raining from the flies, people dressed as devils, men wearing fake bare boobs with tassels on them...  It looked fabulous, both showy and horrible at once – exactly right, in fact. 

Most of the second half was dominated by the shape of the electric chair at the back of the stage, and all the references to the Delectable Mountains, the Celestial City, etc, were directed towards it.  This was weird and rather nasty to my mind.  The production scrupulously avoided any hint of Christian symbolism or iconography, substituting a rather chaotic mixture of symbols; some that seemed to have come from other religions and some that seemed to be saying all religion was empty and meaningless too. 

For example, the Herald who sends the Pilgrim on his way, part of the way into Act 1, was played as a visiting dictator or general, with all the prisoners in the gulag apparently lining up for inspection and the Pilgrim stepping forward and volunteering to set off, as if he’s been drilled to show what a good boy he’s become - thanks to being re-educated by the kindly government who care so much for all these foolish dissidents.  It really jarred.  At another point when it was obvious from the libretto that there should have been something fairly overtly Christian going on, the scene instead featured a circle of men doing tai chi for ages.

But the implicit criticism of religious faith wasn’t strong enough or carried through far enough to be really biting, and at the same time, all the time it was pulling against the obviously very sincere intentions of the original.  That grated badly; it was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring.  A clear critique might have been effective, if completely not what Vaughan Williams intended, but it wasn’t a clear critique, it was a muddly one.  I hate to sound like one of the religious Right (about as far from me as you can get!) but I did have a lurking feeling of "How many religions would you get away with this over?"  If one took a celebrated work of historical Jewish religious-polemic-cum-devotional literature, upended it and excised all overt Jewish signifiers to make it appear to be about something else entirely, wouldn't that be viewed as offensive and inappropriate?  Yet anyone going to see "The Pilgrim's Progress" who was hoping for a religiously-sensitive experience will have been disappointed; and anyone like my godparents, who are deeply devout and fairly High Church C of E, would have been horrified.

And it was all s.o. s.l.o.w...

First frost, more writing, & a diet idea

Yes, you did read that right.  A diet idea.  Stop press: Fat girl has diet idea. Well f*ck me for a blue strawberry.

I read recently that people who have a seriously restricted calorie intake for two days in each week tend to lose a respectable amount of weight and decrease their chances of developing type 2 diabetes by around a third.  The rest of the time, they can eat and drink as normal, and that is why this strikes me as the perfect diet for me to try.  I eat fairly healthily, apart from my sweet tooth and penchant for alcohol (oh, and I do like my cheese).  I just eat too much (& have said penchants). 

So I am giving this plan a try.  Announcing it like this is intended to make it stick - now my sense of public shame will fuel the desire to eat bugger-all but salad two days a week.  Watch this space.  See if I last a month...

Meanwhile; I had a good weekend at my mum's - shopping, lunching out and gardening.  I'm now behind on my cleaning, clothes-washing and grocery-shopping, and it took me until this morning to get the dirt out from under my fingernails (good garden dirt, this is!), but I can handle that. 

I've now blown up another bit of the Droit Institute and injured one of the Evil Bad Guy's cohorts.  My heroine is reeling about in shock and the hero is still busy digging himself and his companion out of the rubble.  The dénouement has been slow coming, but it is coming, and I'm beginning to get excited about revisions.  This is an odd state of affairs, I have to say.  Normally I hate revision with a passion.  But this has come out like turning on a tap, and as it has flowed I've found it developed and changed shape, and I've seen things more clearly; so that now, approaching the end, I've got a list of points I need to wiggle in earlier.  Have a scene where x happens; have a scene where A discusses B with C so that we know more about C; make sure D mentions y and z in his talk to the students...   But I won't let myself write any of this until I've finished the main narrative.  It just doesn't feel right; also I don't want to stymie the flow when I don't yet have a completed story.

I've been lucky with this one.  It had an odd genesis.  I'd had a vague idea in my mind for ages, but with no plot to speak of.  I'd had two names - Anna Maple, Thorn Reynolds - and no idea who they were or what they would do, except that they would feature in this vague-idea-no-plot story.  The I went to the cinema, and came out with them sitting in my mind saying "Hey, here we are, this is what happens to us! Write it now, please!" and I sat on the bus scribbling on a bit of scrap paper and grinning like an idiot.  All jokes about lust and chestnut purée aside, I actually owe Jeremy Renner a debt, since it was seeing "The Avengers", and specifically discovering him, that set me off.  Thorn acquired a face.  Bizarrely, Anna immediately acquired a face too (& her face was a completely new one to me, which is odd).  And there they were; not two names, but two people.

The moment I can really see a character they start to come real; once they get a face I'm able to get going.  It's as if I get them inside me (ahem) - I can feel their muscles imprinted on mine, if you know what I mean.  That does sound kinky; sorry.  But that's how it is, that's how my creativity works for me.  I know where they grew up, what they eat, what their handwriting is like...  As soon as he had a face I knew Thorn was allergic to chocolate, that he was a good swimmer, that he was left-handed...  I knew how Anna would hide her amulet, and where she worked and lived, and what had happened to her brother...

It was the first frost last night, too.  Walking into work my feet were crunching on crisp white-edged leaves.  The sky was a clear, hard blue like an enamel glaze; all the autumn trees glowed golden and red around the Green.  It was beautiful - and decidedly cold.  But now it has clouded over and outside the window it just looks grey and muted, and dismally about-to-rain-ish.  Oh well, we can't have it all.  I've just been reminded by a friend who lives in southern California that she never gets any Fall to speak of at all, and that is a sad thought.  No scarlet autumn leaves to kick through, no bright frost, no cold blue skies; no sudden gales, no soft silent November rains...  So I will remind myself again to cherish what I have and appreciate all its beauties, even the muted grey ones.

Autumn beauty, and is it better to have loved and lost...

... or never to have loved at all?

It’s a glorious day, perfect autumn weather with a clear blue sky and a nip in the breeze.  I just had to walk across the Gardens to deliver something to one of the gates for someone to collect tomorrow.  I’ve come back to the office with my cheeks tingling from the crisp air and my eyes wide with colour.  By damn, I am a lucky woman to work in such a beautiful place.  

The two big liriodendrons at the south end of the Broadwalk are covered in glowing yellow; they look as though someone dipped them in gold coins from top to toe.  The taxodiums beside the lake are on the turn, half soft green and half the colour of Edward Watson’s hair (Mr Watson has ravishing hair).  The long salvia border is still full of little sparks of colour, and in the Rock Garden cyclamen and autumn crocuses, buttercup yellow Sternbergia lutea and sky blue lithodora are still flowering everywhere.  Squirrels hurry by, busy about their squirrelly business, or sit and scold in irritable little chirrups from the branches overhead.  A nuthatch called to me, duweep duweep duweep, and a flock of long-tailed tits flew by twittering in their ringing high pitched voices.

Had a very odd ‘phone conversation yesterday evening while cooking supper.  It seemed funny at the time (& gave me some moments of very enjoyable fantasy!).  But I am now a bit troubled, as with the benefit of hindsight I am wondering why the question was being asked in the first place.

J: What would you do if you could have the man of your dreams, but for only one night?

Me: (thinks, mmm, the man of my dreams for just one night, plus a can of chestnut purée, mmm) Why, is it his last night on earth?

J: No, no, you can just only have one night together.

Me: (still thinking mmm, the man of my dreams has such amazing hands) I hate one-night-stands.

J: No, but seriously, what would you do?

Me: (thinks, mmm, chestnut purée on that lovely long thumb, oh, oh, oh... ah, better not mention this to J., she thinks I’m a Wise Older Woman, not a Dirty Old Woman) I’d cook him a good meal and pour him some decent wine and then make love to him all night; I’m only human!  Why do you ask?

J: Oh, no reason...  How about if you could be with him for just one weekend?

Me: (thinks, at least two cans of chestnut purée, then) Cook him several good meals, take him to Kew for a romantic walk in the autumn leaves, take him for a nice crazy afternoon helping TCI with her DIY, have an evening at the Magpie and Crown; and then make love to him all night.  Why do you ask – are you having a Major Dilemma Moment?

J: Oh no, (slightly stagey laugh) nothing like that...  How about if you could have him for just one holiday?

Me: Have you been reading “Possession”?

J: I don’t like horror stories.

Me: ??  Er... 

J: Would you have that one holiday with him, if you could never see him again afterwards?

Me: Yes, of course I would.  And I’d try to make it as happy and memorable as possible. 

J: Oh...

I don’t know if she’d had the answer she was hoping for, but I can’t get rid of a worrying feeling that I was meant to say something else.  She just didn’t sound too happy.  

Have I just encouraged a friend to do something that will break her heart in little pieces?  Should I have been puritanical and advocated a life of virtue and self-denial, touch-these-soft-lips-and-part, what-the-eye-don’t-see, the-heart-don’t-grieve-after?   Supposing she is having a Major Dilemma Moment? 

I am not a good person to ask for advice, methinks (apart from anything else, I am easily distracted by the thought of the amazingly gorgeous hands of the man of my dreams...).

Not having any idea of the context, I simply gave honest answers.  I’ve loved and lost, and had my heart broken, and I wouldn’t undo a moment of it – no, not the ecstasy, not the agony, not even the real disasters.  And so, if I could have the man of my dreams for just one night, just one weekend, or just one holiday, then yes, I would do everything in my power to enjoy it, and to make sure he enjoyed it too.  

And unless he turned out to be allergic to chestnuts, I’d start by opening a tin of the world’s best chestnut purée, Clement Faugier brand“Crème de marrons de L’Ardeche”...

Samhain poem

Burial song

It is turning
It is changing
We are laying out the Harvest King.

I cross the river; the tide is high.

Lazy waters lick and cling

At the dark stone piers

And I think of you; you as you were

In the brief sunlight

In your bright days

In your life.

I have never loved

As I loved

When I loved

With each molecule alight

When your eyes touched me

And your hands beheld my skin.

I have never loved

As I loved you,

Star of my rising river,

Bright archer of sunlight,

Summer’s Harvest King.

You were the dancer at the maypole,

You were the Midsummer’s flames,

You were the corn, the silk and the honey,

The bee stings of Lughnasadh,

The autumn rains.

And there was none fairer in all the worlds,

None so brave, none so bright.

No arm stronger, no eye sweeter,

None more exciting in all the worlds of life.

It is turning

It is changing

Leaves stream from the sky.

Maple and thorn, buckeye and southern beech,

All fall and mingle in the dark day.

Black branches reach out and pray.

The bold geese flocked and ate

All summer, and swung

Calling through the air over our heads;

Now they walk soft, quiet

As mourners, slow as solemnity,

Grey upon grey, on the sand bank by the bridge

Where the river goes ceaselessly.

We are laying out the Harvest King,

And the silent geese are his cortege,

And the autumn leaves are his shining robe,

And yours are his beauty and his strength.

Lying still, gone to rest,

Drifting on the rising tide,

Sweet on the sweet earth’s breast.

The door stands open and welcomes you

To sleep.  You will renew.

It is turning, it is changing.

The night river rising.

And I have never loved

As I loved you.

You will renew.

Sleep in the winter’s embrace

And be made new.