He'll huff and he'll puff...

My house is built on unsteady ground; I can go through every room sorting out the stuff I no longer need, making everything look neater and seem more organised but where does that stuff I no longer need go when I throw it away? There are things in boxes I haven't even looked at for years but still I carry them around (with me or as protection?) feeling they are important to me in some way and that I will regret it if I discard them. I store these possessions in my outhouse and promise myself that one day I will sort it all out and use the room for something productive such as art or meditation but I moved in here two years ago and I still haven't made a start on it. I spend time making the other rooms look nice and feel homely – I am rather house-proud. Things break every now and then and it always takes me a while to bother sorting them out, take the shower hose for example – it has been damaged for weeks and weeks now but because it still seems to be working all right I haven't felt any urgency in getting it sorted, what is likely to happen is that I won't do anything about it until it is no longer possible for me to have a shower. Does it really matter if my shower works properly or not when my house is at risk of subsidence anyway? It seems like only a matter of time before the foundations give way and my home crumbles and is engulfed by earth and water. Now is the time for me to gather my things together: all the essentials I need to start again and not forgetting those valuable trinkets I am undeniably attached to that show something of my character. This house needs to be emptied and raised to the ground, I need to find myself a new steadier plot of land and with added support from new materials I will salvage the good bits from the old house and build myself a stronger more unshakable house that the big bad wolf can never blow down.   

The magic banana.

I found an exercise book from when I was 9-10, this story was in it.

The magic banana.

One day there was a bowl of fruit that had just been bought at the shop by Polly and her mum.  They had bought some grapes, an apple, an orange, a lemon and last of all a plum.  The fruit was very sad and it was sad because it was sure it would never be eaten, it thought that it would be left to go bad and then be thrown out.  Suddenly there was a flash of yellow and a magic banana flew through the window.  It landed on the table then part of the banana skin flew open then lots of little bananas walked out of the opening.  The little bananas said "We have come to make you happy we know you think you shall be thrown out and forgotten but tomorrow you shall be eaten and you will end up in the happy world where we went when a certain magic banana made us happy."  "Sorry but we have to go now there are others like you out there."  The little bananas got inside the opening.  The opening closed up and the banana flew off into the night.

Up and down and up and down and up and up and down and up...

as if butter wouldn't melt... who'd have thought these two between them would urinate on the sofa cusions, two rugs, their own beds and in one of my shoes.  I can never stay mad for long though and the shoe incident was pretty funny. 

Back in March I joined a site called www.moodscope.com, I had been going through a bit of a tough time and decided to take responsibility for myself and do everything I could to make myself feel better and being aware of my mood and all the things that impact on it seemed to me like a good idea.  The site requires you to test your mood - ideally every day at roughly the same time - by looking at 20 playing cards with different states of mind on them and flipping and rotating each one to select the level you are experiencing the feeling at that time.  After you have done all of the cards moodscope calculates your mood percentage for that day and adds the score to a graph, you also have the option of adding a comment to the score; I found this useful to describe how I felt, what I thought may have influenced my mood including activities, what I had been eating, thoughts and whether or not I had been drinking the previous night.  As soon as you have recorded a few days worth of scores, moodscope begins regularly updating your lowest, highest and average mood scores and this along with the graph can help to show any patterns or changes which occur over time.  I decided to look back through the graph for every month since I started using the tool and can see a definite lift in my mood had taken place and although the line goes up and down rather a lot, it generally doesn't go as low as regularly as it had been doing back in March.  I am lucky to have a supportive group of friends around me, family, cats and lots of enjoyable pastimes.  Making the most of time is both a a distraction and a solution.  I would recommend anyone try moodscope out though, oh and I forgot there is another aspect to it that involves inviting a friend to join too and it encourages you to support each other through times of low mood as you can invite them to be your 'moodscope buddy' and check each other's scores.   http://www.moodscope.com/about.php

This is a collage I used as part of my presentation about social inclusion last week

Changes, work, keeping busy with music

It's been a fair few weeks since my last post and I suppose for the past few months I had been making sure I was keeping busy as much as possible and not really doing much relaxing - I've been moved into my new home now for about three and a half months and still haven't really had an evening where I've just cabbaged on the sofa watching TV.  I guess I'm still adjusting to all the changes I have gone through this year and being a tad sensitive it takes me a long time to get used to things.  

Work: I am still thoroughly enjoying my job and feel I have been actually making a difference to some of my clients lives recently, it is good to know that perseverance and dedication do sometimes achieve results, on another note relating to work my team found out not long ago that we are all going to have to go through an interview for our own jobs due to the fact that cuts are being made and there is no longer enough funding to keep all of us in post.  Each of us has to do a 5-10 minute presentation on social inclusion, I have a few ideas about what to do for it but am obviously nervous and worried about what I will do if I am not one of the lucky ones.

Busy bee:

I instigated a new musical project back in June working as a two piece with a guy I've worked with several times throughout the past five or six years.  We began trying out covers of decent popular songs we both liked and have recently been working on our own material which is somewhat more satisfying although playing covers of songs I have loved for years is enjoyable in a different way.  We have about sixteen possible covers we are just about ready to perform publicly and have a gig through in Brampton at 'Off the wall' confirmed for December :-)  I have been busy using my networking skills to  secure more gigs, hopefully sometime in November as December seems an awful long way away. 

Below is a rough slightly tipsy performance of one of our original songs:

A couple of poems inspired by a sunny garden day

This one is not by me, but by none other than Mr Crongus F Shaw:

Once upon a frog day

tadpolly toodling

I saw a fat bumble bee

busily tumbling

one this fine summer day

just past Wimbledon

A miniature river plays

on the gardeny pond

Through many bushes

A birdy birdy chirps

the garden is alive

with chirruping sparrows

The swifts stream past

Screaming arrows

All around us

The bushes tangle

Out of sight

Lies a decrepit mangle

And now my effort:

The greenery spreads

all wild and chaotic

no order apparent

without close inspection

like the beard and mane

of the man who observes

his surroundings

with a keen eye for detail

the garden his mirror

on this July day

if the trees could retort

what would they have to say? 

But like the Murphy's I'm not bitter?

There were good times and there were bad times

confusion and delusions

at first perfectly flawed

signs were shown from the beginning

but I refused to give up

full of hope and ideals

drunk on the idea of a unique love

tragically tainted

still I wouldn’t give up

all the battle scars worn for attack and defence

the truth fluctuated

both sides came and went

the well isn’t empty

it was never quite found

between the walls of our senses

tumbling down

open to start with

confessing our sin

but we poisoned each other

and reframed everything

the truth was mistaken and treated as lies

now we stand in this desert

all covered in flies

Standing in the winds of loneliness

This so called depressive realism I battle with has always given me a clarity of thought that is so much more potent than pretty people and pretty pictures can ever be, perhaps it is because although it is forever changing I know it will continue to exist in some sense.  I tend to return to this place when periods of distraction end and the colours that first caught my eye fade into the background, no longer burning brightly through the dark of the night.  I used to think the answer to the question my being embodies existed inside another whose particular hue matched my own, I realise now I have been deluding myself and like I read (and was not ready to accept) a few years ago in 'Women who love too much' I am facing up to being alone in the world, as each of us always has been.  We may kid ourselves for seasons at a time that those artifacts and relics can make us complete when we finally find the missing piece or the perfect partner, sooner or later though we are bound to be forced into seeing the illusion for what it is (the first part of the word even hints at this).  We are complete and whole as we are made and though the perceived void each person houses varies from one to an other, it cannot be filled with anything outside of ourselves.  Only you can answer your own question as I can mine and I think I'm on the right path.  With every illusion comes distraction and there is often fun and happy times so let's get drunk and dance with abandon!