The end of another day in "Paradise" and I am in the nearest thing to Paradise that Bristol has to offer. My BED. It is an amazing cloud of colourful decadence and it has seen a lot of me this year. More of that later. I love my bed. It is large and comfortable and everything (?) that I need is within reach; my books, pens and pencils, legal pads, iPod, telephones, remote controls, e-book, eye drops, spare glasses, radio, ear-phones, small dictionary,big dictionary, French dictionary, dictaphone, laptop, water, reading lamp and loads of other things within reach. Much to the distress of my neighbours I do not have curtains. I have great big georgian shutters which, when I remember to close them, have the remarkable ability to cut out all light so that if I do not set my alarm I can awake and have no idea of what time it is. This can be disconcerting sometimes. From my bed I can see my walled garden which has not had much action this wet summer. From my supine position, when said shutters are open, I see some wonderful things. I see the passing of the seasons which, when not scaring me, fills me with great happiness. One of the many good things about living in the UK is that we do have four distinct seasons and I can watch the progress of them all from here. At the moment the leaves are well on their way to a full fall and the colours are glorious. I can see oaks and pines from here so I have some tree colour all year around. My acers are about to drop their leaves but the ferns and camellias will provide winter colour. Some of my gaudy summer annuals are giving their last bravura performance . The first frost will soon put paid to their showing off.
I can see my summer house which I painted with great care last summer. This is meant to be my summer study but so far it has been used as a studio by my daughter, a storage facility by a pal and an area of contemplation for myself. Not much work has been accomplished there yet but I have a theory that more than 90% of the creative process takes place in that space between the ears, before a single word sees the light of day. The seeds of ideas get planted there and with a little judicious watering and feeding, these seeds sometimes flower into wee plants which with a bit of care can grow into a fully formed sentence. And we know where sentences can lead. Everything I write by hand goes straight onto lined yellow legal
pads and everyone knows that no yellow lined paper is ever to be thrown away. I cannot buy these pads in the UK so have to buy them when in the US or have pals send them to me. I guess I could get them on the tinterweb but I haven't needed to yet.
I have many visitors in my garden, some more welcome than others. Urban foxes use the top of my wall as their personal thoroughfare and sometimes they just stop and stare. I guess they are looking for food. I also have squirrels, visiting cats and many birds. I don't feed the birds in Winter because I want to discourage other LOWER forms of life. If I feed the birds I encourage the mice and I have a true phobia of mice. Seriously, it is not just a mild dislike, it is a true phobia. Mice and their larger relatives scare the bejaysus out of me. When I travel in the UK I always take my electronic pest alarm with me. It plugs into the wall and is meant to emit a high frequency sounds that is said to deter them. I don't know if it works but hey ho, if I think it does, it does! When I am overseas I try not to think about the local vermin - of the four legged variety. I tend not to look towards the gutters after dusk. I do remember seeing a dead mouse on paving in Ubud once but just had to be brave. It was hard but I just could not go to pieces over a dead mouse in Bali where the bombings a few years earlier had seen the deaths of so many. Am I being ironic Reader or moronic? DO leave a comment.
Back to my room. The ceilings are very high with ornate cornicing. From this bed of mine I can also see a William and Mary bureau which has my father's old westminster chiming clock on it. I have disabled this clock because I find the sound of its ticking intrusive. I wonder if that because it is an ever present reminder of the passing of time and that once it is spent it can never be recaptured? Discuss. I have a tailor's dummy which is adorned, nay festooned, with a variety of scarves, beads, hats and stuff and nonsense. I cannot really see the surface of my dressing table because as yet I have no book shelves in here - or indeed anywhere in the flat - and the top is covered with orderly towers of books. Needless to say anything I need is always to be found behind a tower which makes retrieving things nigh on impossible without having an accident and having to pick up a rash of books. If I was more organised this would not happen, make-up would always be to hand, books on shelves, photos on walls or other surfaces. It would be true to say that I will often venture out of the house without make-up and a smile often has to suffice but I would NEVER leave the house without perfume.
I have become very, very well acquainted with this room in recent times. Earlier this year I had a massive spinal operation whereby a neurosurgeon rebuilt the lower part of my back, fusing four vertebrae with bolts, screws, pedicles and a fair bit of titanium rodding, securing two others with "scaffolding" and decompressing some nerves. I put it down to a mis-spent youth. Too many ski-ing accidents, a really horrible surfing accident about five years ago, numerous spills and thrills of varying degrees of severity, one sailing accident involving the genny and luff wire (you really don't need to know the details), a couple of car prangs and too many falls from grace by an over ambitious and under skilled rider. I had been putting it off for years and after a successful first op on my neck I opted to have the biggie done this year. Mistake number one. Recovery was slow, as anticipated, but complicated by multiple pulmonary embolisms (embolii, embolus) unanticipated. The rest is really history, as I nearly was! Not much fun! Put paid to most of this year and I won't be flying to far flung places for a while yet. Mistake number two was surgeon error. I was on blood thinning meds while in hospital, 10 days, and this should have been continued until six weeks post op It was not continued and in apparently classic fashion, six weeks after surgery, my PE's nearly put paid to a life that I was not yet finished with. I am totally unused to being unwell so it has been a tad tiresome. Give me a bit of good old fashioned pain of a mechanical kind and I can cope very well but I found that being let down by a body that I had carelessly taken for granted, really hard going at times. Needless to say, mud wrestling and rugby have had to be forsworn for a while although I do hope to be back on a bungee soon and also I fully anticipate beating Felix Baumgartner's free falling record. In your dreams, T, in your dreams.
2013 is going to be an excellent year for me. I will have to go to Oz to see the family and will take a side trip somewhere en route. Last year it was Ubud in Bali for some time out with my daughter which I combined with the eponymous Reader's and Writers Conference. Anna has never been to New York so we may go next Spring. Our plan was to back pack around India for three months, starting in Macleod Ganj and travelling south on trains and buses but I think that may be a little ambitious for me so soon. I am desperate to see Istanbul. It has been on my hit list for years but remains as yet unseen. I used to dream of swimming in the Bosphorus like Io, one of Zeus's lovers. Also Cappadocia is on my list. I am in the process of selling the apartment in Switzerland. It is in the Berner Oberland overlooking the Lake of Thun and looking up at The Jungfrau, The Monch and The Eiger. We have had it for ages. It is a modest two bedroom apartment which has been great as a base for winter sports and all year round walking but it was becoming fiscally irresponsible to hang on to it when we were just going over for a few weeks annually. My late husband was swiss and we used to spend a lot of time there but sadly tempus fugit and all that and life just gallops away. As much as I love Switzerland, it was becoming the anchor that stopped me from travelling to other places. I felt that I OUGHT to go and as I feel I OUGHT to visit the family as much as I can, the places I really wanted to see were stuck on he back burner. That sounds terrible. As long as my 91 year old Mother is alive, I want to go to Oz to see her but there is a big wide world out there and I still have adventures to plan. Confronting my fragile mortality earlier this year was a salutary lesson soberly digested.
Mummy, at 91, is a testament to enjoyable longevity. I know that some days are hard for her and that for every days she "parties" she spends two to three days recovering. I also know that at the moment she would still very much prefer to be alive than dead. Nearly every days she sees at least one of her many grand children and sometimes she even sees one or more of her three great grandchildren. Life is hard some days but she does battle on. Life is hard also for Claire my younger sister who is her main carer but as surely as the world keeps on turning that same world is a better place for having Mummy in it.
Well this turned into a bit of a missive didn't it? Have you tuned out yet? Don't really know what happened there so I had better scarper soon. A bit of sleep would not go amiss.
