Murka

Posted on Sunday, 2 January 2011 by Linda

As membership secretary for my am-dram group, I’m in charge of the email list. If anything needs to be sent out to the members, I get to see it first.

A few weeks ago, I received an email, and a request to distribute it, from an occasional member advertising an ‘everything must go’ sale of house contents. I didn’t exactly know the guy, I vaguely knew the name but wasn’t sure who he was. It was Thursday evening, and I forwarded the email and also asked if he’d got a hoover to get rid of. I got a reply first thing on Friday morning with a phone number saying to give him a call.

That was the Friday when my son was coming home for the weekend. I wasn’t at all sure whether I could be bothered to call the guy back or not. I replied to his email and said it would be late afternoon/evening before I could call. I had work in the morning, and then my daughter and granddaughter came round in the afternoon as usual for a Friday. After they’d gone, I did some work on the laptop, wondering when my son was planning to arrive. About half past six, I got a text from him saying he was just leaving Guildford and would be here in a couple of hours. I was slightly annoyed that he hadn’t left earlier, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

I remembered the guy with the hoover and decided to call him, though I didn’t really feel much like it. He sounded nice, and asked when I wanted to come over and look at it – ‘I’m in now, or we could make it first thing in the morning’.

‘I’ll come now, if that’s OK’ I heard myself saying, though I really didn’t feel like turning out. It was the week after the first snow, and the roads were fairly clear, but I was in hibernation mode. Still, might as well get it over with.

He gave me directions to his house, then said:

‘Would you prefer tea or coffee?’

‘Coffee please’ I said, slightly startled.

‘I’ll get the kettle on’.

On the way, I asked myself why I was doing this. It felt important, but I couldn’t for the life of me see why. I needed a hoover, but was it worth driving to the suburbs on a December Friday evening for? It all seemed surreal and weirdly significant, yet somewhat absurd and banal at the same time.

I found the place and knocked on the front door.

‘Come round the back’ I heard a voice. ‘The front door’s blocked’.

I found the side gate and went into the garden. He was standing at the open patio door.

I did recognise him. He was in the spring show last year, which I didn’t do, a friend of a member who was drafted in to fill a role for which no one suitable had come forward. I did front of house for that show, and I lusted after him mightily at the time, though, of course, never had the courage to speak.

The coffee was ready, we sat on the sofas, and talked. And talked, and talked, and talked. About him and why he was selling up and leaving the country in four days time. About me and my PhD and my business and how I ended up living alone in a flat over a closed down restaurant. About our kids, and grandkids (step-grandchild in his case), broken relationships, books, science, art, music. The usual stuff.

A tabby face appeared outside the patio door. He opened it and let her in.

‘What’s happening with the cats?’ I asked.

‘If I can’t find a home for them by Tuesday, they’ll have to go to a refuge’ he said.

‘I’m looking for a cat. I’d take them, but I have to have a house-cat, I’ve got nowhere to let them out’.

‘What would you do about the litter?’ he asked.

It seemed like a strange question.

‘I’d have a litter tray. That’s why I need a cat who’s used to being indoors, who’s trained to using one’.

‘There’s your cat’ he said.

To the right and behind me as I sat on the end of the sofa there was a door into the rest of the house. A small ginger cat walked through it, came round and sat in front of me and looked up at me.

I stared. She was beautiful, like a tiny lioness. She rubbed against my legs and purred.

‘She’d have to be an indoor cat’ I repeated. ‘I wouldn’t be able to let her out. There’s just nowhere’.

‘She hates going out. I have to physically throw her out to make her’.

‘But I couldn’t take the other one. Wouldn’t they miss each other?’

‘She hates the other one. Honestly, Lucy just bullies her all the time. She’s the bane of her life’.

He told me her story. Her first family had moved and left her behind. The people who moved into the house opened a breeding kennel for Rhodesian Ridgebacks in the back garden. She ended up in a refuge and was there for a year before he and his then girlfriend adopted her. He had had her for three years.

‘All she wants is somewhere where she can feel safe, with no small children, no other cats and dogs, someone who will give her lots of love and a quiet life’.

Everything seemed to fall into place.

In a parallel version of my life, perhaps, I spent two hours making wild love with this fascinating younger man before he left my life for ever. In yet another, perhaps I followed him to Egypt and found a new life.

But in this reality, he drove over to the flat on Sunday morning. I met him in the car park, her face peering out from inside his jacket.

I showed them both round the flat.

‘I truly think that with you she has found the home she’s been looking for all her life. I’ve always been too boisterous for her’.

All cats have their stories. Ask any cat owner, and they will tell you.

We are a pair of kindred spirits. Self sufficient, but comfortable in each other’s company. She has her private place in the bottom of the wardrobe, where she goes when I have visitors, or just when she feels the need. At bedtime, she curls up against me and purrs me to sleep. Her name is Murka, to rhyme with ‘burkha’, a pig for Anglophones to pronounce, it is Russian for ‘purrer’, apparently, and a common diminutive cat’s name in Russia.

The weekend before she came, I was telling a friend that I was thinking of getting a cat. I texted him to tell him the news.

‘You were talking about it. You put the message out for her!’ he replied.

‘In a way, I think it’s the other way around, she put the message out for me and I came to her.’

I emailed her former owner to let him know she was settling in and to wish him bon voyage.

‘She sounds more yours than mine already; this pleases me deeply. I love that cat and I think that she is genuinely going to have the happiest episode of her life now with you’.

I have a memory of him from that evening when Murka and I first met, standing outside his patio doors smoking a cigarette in the freezing cold and talking about the strangeness of the Universe and the extreme improbability of existence, the fact that a gathering of star dust can ever have sentience and self knowledge.

We are all stardust, after all, and the most significant things that happen in our lives are the ones that come out of nowhere but were always meant to be.

Posted in cats, friendship, life | Leave a comment

Joy to the World

Posted on Monday, 20 December 2010 by Linda

Yesterday I went to church and sang carols. This morning I meditated. Tomorrow I will decorate my home with evergreens and light candles to honour the Solstice.
I worry that this spiritual pick-and-mix makes me a New Age airhead. Or rather, I worry that other people might think that of me. Which is not the same at all, is it? And really, why should I care what other people think? Good point. But thinking of how to justify this eclectic syncretism makes me question and clarify my beliefs. Which is a Good Thing, I’d say.
First, the carol service. Christianity is the tradition of my childhood, of primary school prayers and Away in a Manger. And I like singing carols. So when a friend invited me to join her at a candle-lit Nine Lessons and Carols, five minutes walk from my flat, it seemed like a good idea. Earlier in the day, I’d been carol-singing at the pub, and transferring it to church fits in with a long line of good old English tradition, very Hardyesque.
That word ‘tradition’ is the key, and although I know that many of the ‘traditions’ we observe are actually very recent in origin, still the roots they plant in our own personal subconscious make us aware of connections with something deeper and older. Although I don’t have much truck with monotheism or organised religion, there are some aspects of Christianity (even if they are observed mostly in the breach) which are very appealing. And of course, the whole festival of ‘Christmas’ is an example of Christianity doing just what I’m talking about, latching onto older traditions and combining them with its own agenda to create something so tangled and syncretic that no one can tell which bits come from where.
All successful religions have this grab-bag quality, they adapt to survive, while attempting to keep the balance (and the faith) with those older and deeper aspects. In the process they may evolve and split into multitudinous forms, even leading to horrors such as the Inquisition and suicide bombers. They are cultural artefacts after all, created by human beings for their own ends, our way of trying to express something beyond ourselves.
I have described myself as ‘either a pantheist or an atheist, on the grounds that if divinity exists, it is in everything’. At this time of year, the need for belief is greatest, for faith, hope and charity, for compassion and loving-kindness and the knowledge that the sun will return and darkness does not last forever.
So tomorrow, when the moon is at its fullest and the sun is at its furthest, I will light my candles, inhale the scent of pine and rosemary among the green and red of branches and berries in my small flat, and meditate on my connection with the universe and all living things.
Joy to the world, and to you all, in this bleak midwinter.

Posted in life | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Change Curve

Posted on Saturday, 6 November 2010 by Linda

Change was the subject of Sue Parsons’ ten minute 4sight talk at the Cambridge 4n meeting on Wednesday. She focussed on the change curve, with its four quadrants: denial; anger and depression; resignation/acceptance and moving on.

I thought about all the changes I have gone through over the last couple of years. Sue’s talk, and the model originally developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, was all about how people deal with externally imposed change. I’ve seen the model before, but thought it didn’t apply to me because I made the radical changes in my life voluntarily. Far from denial, my first stage was characterised by euphoria, excitement that I had finally done something I had fantasised about for years but never believed I could really do – leave my husband and strike out on my own. That excitement carried me through the first few months, a honeymoon period of building a new relationship with myself, a satisfaction with life that I don’t remember ever feeling before. Even when I lost my job, that positive feeling didn’t desert me, because I was so sure I was on the right path. I wasn’t immune to loneliness or fear, but I thought the dark days were behind me for good.

Silly me.

Earlier this year, the depression came back with a vengeance, a great wave of ‘here we go again’. The euphoria evaporated, and with a sense of inevitability I slid back into the familiar darkness. I’d done all that, disrupted my life, my ex’s, but children’s, even my cats’ lives, and for what? I was just as unhappy as ever. Should have known better. Should have known I was incapable of finding happiness, real, lasting, genuine happiness. That’s just not me. That’s not how it works.

You keep going. You keep trying. You put one foot in front of the other, one word after the next. Or something. Slowly the clouds clear a little and the sun comes through, then the next day they close over it again. The moon disappears, but the next evening there’s a bright new sliver in the sky. Leaves fall, but the potential remains, curled up inside the twigs, to push its way out again when the world is ready.

The future opens like a flower, ripens into fruit, drops its seed and puts down roots again. Even through rot and decay, it creates the compost for the next cycle.

Posted in 4networking, life, networking | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

On blocks, blogs and beginning again

Posted on Thursday, 4 November 2010 by Linda

I have been here before.

In 2007, I hardly blogged at all, although I was writing a daily journal. For 2008, I made a New Year resolution to blog every day, and I stuck with that until about six months ago. Then, for various reasons, I stopped.

Starting something new is hard, but what about restarting something that you’ve let go of?

When you start something new, there’s a sense of excitement and enthusiasm, the challenge of seeing if you can do it at all. Motivation. Determination. When you continue doing something you’re already doing, there’s a certain momentum, habit, inertia.

But once you’ve stopped, there’s that consciousness of having stopped, of the reasons why you stopped, the interruption of the flow, the rhythm. Life moves on. Other things flow in to fill the gap. It’s hard to pick up the pieces again.

Lots of thoughts have drifted through my head this week, the kind that once I would have blogged about. Pushing an empty wheelchair up the road under a strange, grey Monday sky. Walking past a woman on her own who suddenly says: ‘This is the last time I go anywhere with you!’ apparently to no one, until I turned and saw her husband fifty yards ahead of her. Yellow ginkgo leaves, on the tree and on the pavement. Driving through the countryside bathed in sunshine and knowing the exhilaration of being alive. Watching dry leaves dance and scuttle across the road in front, teasingly, like small, unpredictable animals.

The first time I went to a Cambridge 4networking at the Menzies Hotel in Bar Hill, I got stuck in traffic on the A428, cut across country to get to the A14, got stuck again and arrived so ridiculously late that I turned around and came home again. In fact I spent the morning driving around and never actually getting anywhere, even trying to get home was a slog. I found myself thinking that sometimes life is just frustrating, sometimes there is no bright side, no lesson to be learned, and you just have to accept what is.

Ever since, though, I’ve gone the same way to get there. There’s a point on the A428, just before the Caxton Gibbett roundabout, where the traffic comes to a halt, and there is such a tempting side road that takes you round the back of Papworth and across to the A14. I know, because I used to work in Papworth. And so, instead of joining the stationary queue, I sneak off to my left, put my foot down and go.

But I was talking to someone at the last meeting who comes along that road, and it occurred to me that just after the roundabout, the road becomes dual carriageway. So although the queue might look daunting, if you just stick with it, suddenly everything starts moving again, and you can cut across further along the road.

So that’s what I tried yesterday. And suddenly the journey was so much easier.

So, that was my thought for the day. Two thoughts, actually. That you can keep on doing something a certain way because you tried it once, even though, really it’s not the best approach. And, more subtly, sometimes you reach a blockage and give up when in fact, if you stick with it for just a little longer, the way may become so much clearer.

Posted in blogging, life | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Fingers crossed?

Posted on Thursday, 7 October 2010 by Linda

A ripple of feigned (or was it?) horror went round the usual raucous and friendly crowd at the 4networking meeting in Cambridge yesterday when Mark Hofstetler demonstrated his latest Recognition Express product, a branded umbrella, INSIDE the meeting room. ‘You can’t put that up in here, it’s bad luck!’ was the common verdict. And although it was said with a lot of laughter, it made me think of something that has struck me before, since I started attending networking meetings and hanging around with small business owners.

Entrepreneurs can be a superstitious (for which read ‘irrational’) bunch. No doubt most of them would deny it – not that I’ve actually tested the waters by asking them – maybe you can tell me what you think? But one thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is the prevalence of advice such as: ‘when you’re on the right path, you’ll find you start meeting the right people’ and ‘if you believe in yourself you can do it’ and ‘if you can dream it, you can do it’.

Now, I know this positive thinking philosophy is very fashionable, and backed up by all sorts of evidential and psychological claims, but to me, at heart, it is a form of magical or wishful thinking. When looked at with the cold light of reason, can we really expect that the universe will reward us just because we want something enough? So why do so many otherwise rational and clear-sighted people shrug and say: ‘I can’t explain it, it just works’.

Maybe it’s something to do with risk preferences. It’s an observed fact that people in particularly risky professions – sailors, say, or actors – are more superstitious than the usual run of the mill. When you’re facing uncertainties beyond your control on a daily basis, it’s wisest not to think too closely about what can go wrong, but to trust to some extent in luck, fate, whatever gives you the confidence to keep going.

And that’s the key, I think. Shit happens, it happens every day. Let’s be honest, no rational person would go into business, especially not at the moment. There are all sorts of horror stories about things people have been through, from bankruptcies to marriage breakdowns to repossessions. Chat for long enough to any group of business people and you’ll hear a few.

But the ones who keep going are the ones who keep going. And maybe it doesn’t matter so much what it is that motivates you to do that, whether it’s a belief in the value of your product, or a benevolent universe, or your own brilliance, or the lucky talisman you rub every day, or the vision you imagine when you wake up. You do it because you do it, and if it doesn’t work out you try something else, but you don’t give up.

So is there hope for a cynical old rationalist like myself? Who knows? But I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Posted in 4networking, business, life | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Learning the rules

Posted on Monday, 4 October 2010 by Linda

I am constrained by the thought of my audience. I can’t write spontaneously any more.

Too many thoughts assault me in the mornings – often not very good ones. Scrub ‘good’, too judgemental. ‘Positive’? Hmmm, that’s a bit judgemental as well. Ok, how about ‘constructive’?

You see, I CAN write spontaneously. But will anybody read it? And if nobody reads it, what does it matter what I say, anyway?

Good point.

To Cambridge yesterday, for a friend’s birthday party. It was planned as a picnic on Jesus Green, but sadly the weather put paid to that, so we crammed into the house. Mary is a member of the community around the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, and shares a house opposite the Centre with three other women.

Someone on Twittter yesterday said that the words ‘Buddhist’ and ‘party’ don’t seem to go together, but most of the Buddhists I know are very fun-loving – certainly Mary is, and there was lots of laughter and friendship. Maybe it depends on your definition of ‘fun’. Admittedly, there wasn’t much wine in evidence, but is that compulsory? There’s no reason why a religion based on compassion and self-awareness should necessarily be dour.

The emphasis, I guess, is on choice, and tolerance. When I was young, I thought the world was full of rules, that there was a ‘right’ way to do everything, and life was about learning that way and getting on with it. I was paralysed in many social situations because I was trying to second guess what I ‘should’ be doing, what people expected of me – still am, to some extent. It was as though there were some kind of secret knowledge that others could tap into and that I was completely clueless about. I still get it sometimes, that horrible feeling that you’ve just committed some awful faux pas, that you are standing exposed before all these people, that you have forfeited their respect forever.

And yet the people I respect most are those who can go out and be themselves, find their own path, break other people’s rules. Or, to put it another way, they make their own judgements and, on careful consideration, and for good and sufficient reasons, gently but firmly decline to go along with what’s expected of them. Provided, of course, that they do so with kindness and tolerance.

Not a bad thought to start the week with. And maybe, reading back over what I’ve written (including the start), the answer to my dilemma is just to say it anyway.

Posted in friendship, life | Leave a comment

Stamping my feet

Posted on Monday, 4 October 2010 by Linda

At four o’clock on Thursday morning I lay awake and wondered why it is that I haven’t committed suicide before, and what stops me from doing it now. Like Hamlet, there are times when I find the thought of oblivion very attractive. My standard reply to ‘why not?’ is always ‘because I couldn’t do that to my kids’, but is that all there is to it? ‘Is that all there is, my friends?’

By the time I had to get up and go to work, I wasn’t feeling a whole lot better. And I weighed myself when I got out of the shower, which didn’t help.

At work, new Sue said:

‘You should try flamenco dancing. That’s what I’m doing’.

‘What night’s that, then?’ As I’m currently out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, I had a perfect excuse to hand.

‘Friday’.

‘How long have you been going?’

‘I haven’t yet. First class tomorrow’.

‘What level is it?’

‘Beginners. I’ll get the number for you’.

‘How much is it?’

‘Thirty quid for six lessons’.

I texted Hilda.

‘R u up 4 flamenco dancing 2mro?’

‘Tell me more. I saw it at the Corn Exchange once’.

She thought it was to watch a show. I put her right. We met at lunchtime and egged each other on.

Sue kept reminding me to ring the number. In the end, I did.

‘Do you have to have special shoes?’ I asked, thinking that I could stretch to the lessons, but not if I had to pay an extra fifty quid or so for shoes.

‘No, you just need some with a 1-2 inch heel, solid, not stilettos. And no trainers’.

On Thursday the sun was shining. By Friday it was pouring with rain. I went to the wrong venue, called Hilda for directions, turned up late, in a church hall with eight other women. And afterwards, Hilda said:

‘Fancy going for a drink?’

We sat in the pub over our red wine, and she said:

‘The last time I asked if you wanted to go dancing you were dead set against it’.

‘Well, that was how I felt then. I don’t feel the same all the time’.

I fill my life with stuff to do. I try too hard and I burn myself out. I can be this, I can be that. I try things and I struggle and I fail and I get angry. And sometimes I think – why try one more thing to humiliate myself with? And sometimes I think – stuff that, another day, another challenge.

I lie awake at four o’clock and think about suicide.

I get up and the sun shines and I watch the pigeons and I meet someone and have a joke and laugh and smile.

‘You’re not a happy bunny at the moment, are you?’ asked Sue (old Sue, not new Sue).

I shrugged.

‘I never am really, not deep down. But sometimes I’m OK. The only way to get by is to remember that it doesn’t last forever’.

Some people find a passion, in a person, or an activity. My passions never last for long. That’s why I’ve had so many of them down the years. That’s why I’m always looking for a new one.

Flamenco dancing won’t transform my life.

But I will hold my head high and stamp my feet anyway.

Posted in flamenco, friendship, life | Leave a comment

One foot in front of the other

Posted on Monday, 4 October 2010 by Linda

We can break habits – and start new ones – from choice. It can be done. But it can take a huge amount of effort.
There is comfort in familiarity, in structure and in regular patterns. We may find ourselves doing things for no other reason than that we do them, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As with everything in life, it’s a question of finding the right balance.
When I first left my husband, there were some habits that I clung to like a life raft, my daily blog being one of them. In other ways, I changed, became a new and different person, almost without noticing it.
How much can we really change who we are? Patterns repeat themselves, come back, take us back into the same places. Sometimes, I lie awake at four o’clock in the morning wondering what is the point of my life, why I haven’t ended it by now. The usual answer I come up with is ‘because I couldn’t do that to my children’. But the thought of oblivion is a very tempting one to a chronic insomniac. Hamlet’s dilemma, revisited over and over again in the darkness of the early hours.
Yet I keep going, I get up, sometimes I meditate, I make coffee, I switch on the computer, I check my emails, I mess around for a while, drink the first cup of coffee, then at a certain time I get in the shower, come back and have breakfast, etc etc . Routine.
I walk sometimes. I leave the flat and I walk, almost always in the same direction, down towards the river, but I vary the ways I go to get there. Sometimes I go to London at the weekend, and I walk. Last Saturday I walked for miles, I have no way of knowing how far. Sometimes I stopped at a coffee shop or a park bench, read for a while or had a drink, then I got up and walked some more.
One foot in front of the other. Sometimes, that’s the only reason you need.

Posted in life, walking | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The sensible thing

Posted on Thursday, 23 September 2010 by Linda

I used to write a blog every day. When I sat down at the keyboard, something happened. I would go inside and pull it all out: hope, fear, frustration, joy, pain (all the really big clichés).
And then I stopped. Why? It was never a conscious decision. For lots of reasons, the habit was broken. Life closed over the gap and filled it with other stuff, almost without me noticing.
Will I start again? Should I start again? I don’t know. Life is fluid. Once I used to wonder what I would write about. But there’s always something to write about, as long as you can shake off the idea that it’s only worth writing what someone else wants to read.
Now, that sounds like the height of arrogance, I know. Give the punters what they want, not what you want to give them. In business, that’s a great principle to stick to. But then, so is: ‘to thine own self be true’. Honesty will always bring its own rewards – maybe not financial, maybe not even in terms of popularity, but if nothing else it makes it a damn sight easier to keep the story straight.
So, here I am, back again, perched on my bar stool in my dressing gown, tapping away on the kitchen counter with the coffee machine fizzing away at my left elbow, the traffic sliding through the damp morning street below and the clouds starting to break up over the park. Autumn’s here, we’re entering the dark half of the year, and maybe now’s a good time for a bit of reflection.
Someone said to me yesterday: ‘It’s the ones who keep going even when the sensible thing is to give up who make it in the end’. Or maybe she didn’t put it quite like that, maybe that’s just how I’ve chosen to interpret it – but then that’s true of any kind of communication. And communication is still communication, even if it’s only about communicating with yourself.
And anyway, I’ve never been that good at doing ‘the sensible thing’.

Posted in blogging, life | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

On the journey

Posted on Monday, 13 September 2010 by Linda

Life throws you these strange curve balls, and you end up in places where you never expected to be. Do I have a plan? Ah, well. The seagulls cruise overhead, and I watch and listen to them, not knowing what to write next. Waiting for inspiration to strike.
One thing I know is that this is a time of transition, but then, so is any other time. We are all on a journey, of course, that much is a cliché. Life is a process and not an end-state. Some of us think we know where we’re going; others know better. We never know where we’re going till we get there; in fact, maybe not even then. We can only hope for clarity when we look back and see where we’ve been.
I’ve struggled over the last few months with defining goals for myself, for my business, for my life. Sometimes when you achieve something that you never thought you would do, it throws you into a turmoil. Because you have been focussed on that one thing for so long, when you come through to the other side you are thrown completely off keel: euphoric, despairing, disoriented. When you know where you’re trying to go (or believe you do), even if you never seriously think you’ll get there, everything can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which it moves you towards that destination. And so achieving it pulls the rug out from under your feet. And underneath that rug may be a concrete floor, a feather bed, a swamp, a trampoline, a maelstrom, an elephant trap…
Looking back over Cause and Effect can throw up some unexpected insights. If I hadn’t done that (which I really didn’t want to do), I would never have met her, and done this, which led to me meeting them, which… and so on, and so forth.
I’ve read recently (and I can’t for the life of me think where), the following quote from Einstein (allegedly): ‘Time is what stops everything from happening at once’.
Indeed. To everything there is a season.

Posted in life | Tagged , , | Leave a comment