Not Recovering From Anything

Not Recovering from Anything

According to some, the pandemic is over with. Done. Finished. History. Well, I’d say it’s certainly history. Living through such a disruptive and frightening period is certainly historic. I’m not going to go into statistics or figures here, because it’s a constantly changing picture so I cannot be exact. By the time anyone reads this it will have shifted. But in the UK, people are still getting very sick, being hospitalised and are dying of the virus. There’s an estimate that one in ten infections leads to Long Covid, and given how entirely poorly the similar condition of M.E (myalgic encephalomyelitis https://www.meaction.net/learn/what-is-me/) has been understood and those with it treated shockingly badly, there’s not much in terms of help or progress with research.

My first run-in with the virus was before we knew it was present in the population. There were notices about anyone coming back from the Wuhan province in China, but back in those innocent days, we just didn’t know. I’d been unwell but it was February 2020 and I thought it’d just been a ‘flu-like cold. So I did my usual February work trip to Austria. After a very early start and a rough flight (the last twitches of Hurricane Bernard) I was feeling awful. We had an early supper, adjourned to our rooms and that was when the crisis hit. I can’t actually remember much, other than being on the floor of my bathroom, feeling like I was dying. I found it hard to breathe, fever spiking, coughing, somewhat out of my head. I’d been hit by waves of terrible nausea, hence heading to the bathroom. Around 2 or 3am I somehow managed to get to my feet, boil my kettle, make a herb tea, fill my hot water bottle, take some pain killers then collapsed into bed. I remember regretting not taking my key out of the door, thinking they’d maybe have to break it down if I didn’t make it. The next morning, I woke, feeling as if I’d been put through a mangle repeatedly. I could not eat. But the crisis had passed. I dragged myself through the rest of the week; truly I don’t know how. It wasn’t until much later in the year when I had my first vaccination that I realised I’d already had the virus. Anecdotal evidence was that those who had already had the virus reacted strongly to the first vaccine. I ended up in bed for a week. The second jab made me feel fantastic – again, another confirmation of previous infection.

2020 came after the dreadful 2019 where family illnesses, crises and the passing of my father, had already knocked the stuffing out of me. I’d had shingles twice during the most stressful parts. So I put my lack of energy from February 2020 down to the effects of that on top of my existing M.E, and the other intractable health problems. In the first week of the initial UK lockdown, my mother died suddenly. If you have dealt with the aftermath of a loved one’s death, sudden or expected, that’s tough enough. But add on the confusion and sense of complete untethering of the normal run of life brought on by both pandemic and lockdown, the stress was catastrophic.

For the record, there were aspects of lockdown I appreciated. The quiet. Being able to sit in the garden and hear the cuckoo calling a few miles away. The lack of traffic. The increased bird song. The cleaner air. I miss those. As an introvert, I didn’t find the enforced isolation a problem, certainly not at first. Social media was already a source of fellowship. At home, it was just my husband and myself, our daughter being far away in Germany. Skype calls kept us close. We watched TV series we’d missed the first time (“The West Wing” had passed us by – I’d highly recommend it) and we rewatched dvd box sets of favourites. I spent part of many nights plagued by insomnia (grief does that) sitting rereading old favourites on the sofa.

When my gym reopened, with well-spaced out equipment, I returned. I realised I was probably not well. I’d walked every day I could, during the strict lockdown, and when it was finally allowed to drive somewhere for a walk, we went to the coast about 45 minutes away. In the wake of a storm, I found two pieces of amber within a few paces. But despite having tried to keep fit, I was not returning to pre-Covid levels.

That first summer of lockdown, I was finally moved up the queue for an autism assessment, and by the autumn I’d had my appointments by video link. I don’t think I will ever fully forgive the assessors. When I first put in my request, I had been asked if they might speak to a parent or someone who knew me as a child. At that stage my father was frail and my mother had dementia. I made it (I thought) very clear this wasn’t appropriate. When they contacted me again the autumn after my father died, I was asked this again. I was upset and angry. There can be no other health assessment that asks adults if they can talk to their parents. As the process went on, I was asked another SIX times. I became distressed each time and made it clear this was not possible. The two people I saw, one a clinical psychologist, the other a speech therapist, were nice, pleasant and seemed quite sensible. But even they kept on asking, even suggesting speaking to a sibling. I had agreed they could talk to my husband as he’s known me since we were 18. I imagine there was a supervisor behind the scenes demanding this. I hope that was what it was. I considered making a formal complaint but in the end, what’s the point? I had no energy and no stomach for a fight. When my statement arrived, I seethed. It made it quite obvious that there was no doubt, that I was clearly autistic. They didn’t need to speak to anyone else. They’d put me through such distress needlessly. If by chance either reads this, I’d say be ashamed of yourselves and do better; the system will only change if YOU change it. I can’t.

I’ve had Covid again, just before Christmas. It wasn’t as severe but it was horrible, alien-feeling as if someone not earthly was running through my nerves and veins. It took months and months after that to get back to what I’d been before. It varies day to day still. I’m still not able to go to the gym 2 or 3 times a week, and long walks are impossible. I get weird symptoms. I find taking an antihistamine (Loratidine is best) sorts many of those, which suggests that the after effects include mast cell activation issues. Mentally, I get very foggy. Writing is harder than it’s ever been. I’ve limped away at “On Hob Hill” sometimes managing a few thousand words a month, sometimes nothing at all. It’s now gone past the 90k words mark and is almost finished. Go, me. I get dreadfully low and depressed, and anxiety hits sometimes like a silent invisible tornado. Going among people is awful. I’ve realised that the human world is intolerably noisy and chaotic. Shops play awful music, traffic is like thunder. Human beings are driven more than before by a me-first mentality and the greater majority of them are anathema to me. I’d like to go and live in my cave in the mountains.

Last year I had shingles again for the third time. I also had to be treated for Lyme disease when a bull’s eye rash came up on my foot. There’s a plethora of ongoing health issues, none of which will kill me but all together make life less than delightful. Constant chronic pain feeds into low mood and anxiety. I’m not recovering from anything. I’m not bouncing back. And if I’m not, many, many others aren’t bouncing back too. People are pretending it’s all over. Government is trying ruthlessly to suppress evidence of a host of things, including the sheer numbers affected by Long Covid. I’ve written here in the past about the Just World Fallacy and it strikes me that a lot of people simply don’t want to believe that a previously normally healthy person can be struck down and not fully recover, because it could happen to them.

I’m aware this blog post might well sound a pity-me, poor-me, kind of affair. It’s not a bid for sympathy. In some ways it’s a bid to remind folks that for many the last 3 years are not going to be relegated to the dustbin of history, that many will be living with the after-effects of all kinds for a long time to come. There’s also a host of revelations that will emerge in the coming years that will show how very badly those in charge have treated the country (I can only speak of the UK) and I hope that one day, justice will be done.

A New Year Begins At Imbolc

A New Year Begins At Imbolc

Happy New Year!

You might think I am late but it depends when you decide a new year starts. The Celts started their new year at Samhain (our Halloween). The Romans chose their Saturnalia celebrations to mark one sort of new year. We’ve also recently celebrated Chinese new year (year of the black water rabbit, in case you weren’t sure) and now we have just celebrated Imbolc, Candlemas and St Bridget’s Day, all of which herald new beginnings. I stepped into the garden on the 1^st of Feb to hear a wren trilling his heart out and to find a clump of snowdrops at the end of the garden under some of the apple trees. There’s been sweet violets blooming shyly in the front garden for at least a couple of months, sheltered from the cold in a raised bed overshadowed by taller, denser plants. Winter is receding but knowing the British climate, we’ll have snow later this month. But the light is returning, several minutes every day and the bird song has changed from contact calls (“Are you there? Did you survive? Hey, I survived too!”) to the first of the spring songs.

I did some clearing of old files a few days ago, mostly to keep myself from thinking about the insoluble problems my country faces right now. There’s a big bag of paper to be disposed of securely; old bank statements, medical letters and the like. But among the paperwork I found a printed-out email from my friend Dr Jean Raffa, from Feb 2012, about a dream I’d had. It reminded me first how long I have been working on my inner life, and especially concentrating on dreams, and at first it made me feel disappointed in myself that I seem to have made so little progress. I have had now over ten years of almost unremitting depression. Deep, deep depression that might lift a tiny bit for a week or two, only to be plunged back in, either by outside circumstances or by absolutely nothing. That feeling of sliding inexorably into the black pit is possibly one of the worst feelings possible. In this time I’ve dealt with major illnesses, surgery, serious bereavements and the chaos that follows in their wake, and the acquisition of a handful of chronic conditions that all include constant pain, low mood and little hope, plus the diagnosis of being autistic (which has taken time to process – it really makes sense of so many other things). With all that is the grind of ordinary life – cooking, cleaning, shopping, rinse and repeat. I have been so tired it sometimes feels like I need to rest constantly yet at least one of my chronic conditions is worsened by inactivity. I’ve walked this tightrope between too much and too little, and I have fallen off repeatedly.

I said that at first it made me disappointed in my lack of progress in this essential soul work, but over the following few days, I found I felt more proud that I have persisted. I have a brooch my dear friend Gill gave me, that says, “Still I rise,” and I wear it often, usually without realising its truth that is embedded in my every day. I have persisted. I am still here, I still get up in the mornings and face the day. Sure, I sometimes go back to bed later but that’s understandable. I show up.

About twenty years ago, my husband went for an interview to be minister to some villages somewhere south of us. One of the factors that had interested us was the place had a holy well, a wellspring that had healing powers recorded for many hundreds of years. We both felt that renewing the connection between that spring and the church was something that we felt was important. But the job wasn’t right and that was that; we went somewhere else entirely. I kept that spring in my heart, tucked away in a quiet corner, wishing that it might one day be recognised and rejoiced in by more than occasional pilgrims, and for the connection between earth-based spirituality and the core of Christianity to be renewed in that place. The other day, in one of those random coincidences, I saw a series of photos from the village with the spring that gave me a real lift: the local ministers holding a beautiful service for Candlemas, including mentions of St Bridget, at the spring. Lots of smiling people in the sunshine, participating in a gentle rite that connected them with both the past and the present, rejoicing in the clear bright sparkling water. The things that are meant to happen (I hate that phrase) find their way. Life, uh, finds a way. We’d tapped into something deep and old in our resonance with that spring, but it wasn’t us who did it. But it’s happening and while it’s twenty years later, I must believe that it is in its own right time.

I must believe that my own soul work is in its own right time, that I am not slow or pathetic or stupid for being stuck working at what sometimes feels like the same old same old for more than a decade. About 18 months ago, I began to receive help on this journey (not something I want to explain further) and sometimes it has felt as if I am walking through that dark wood of Dante’s, but sometimes I get glimmers of hope that something, something very different to what I might have expected, is taking shape. The last few days it has felt like there is more happening, as if the first gleams of light at sunrise are turning the grey garden to brighter colours. I didn’t want to let my long silence here go on without writing something; I have felt often so lonely, so excluded from the vibrant conversations I sometimes witness my online friends participating in, because I have not had the energy to respond, to comment or to reach out to the many friends I have here in this non-physical sphere. Friends who have new books out, new projects, exciting discussions; I feel some mild guilt I have not been able to support them better or indeed, at all.

So I say again: happy new year. I hold a tender bud of hope; let not the frosts blight it.

Not Too Bad, All Things Considered – 2022 and all that it involved.

Not Too Bad, All Things Considered – 2022 and all that it involved.

There’s a profound difference how different nationalities respond to being asked how they are. The wonderful Bill Bailey evokes such differences in his sketch, “Not too bad all things considered.” (I’m not doing links to anything but this sketch is to be found on You Tube) I’d recommend watching it because it does encapsulate how most Brits are. Self-effacing and with a level of quiet pessimism, we’re often incapable of being enthusiastic about how things are going. Maybe there’s a fear the gods will hear us and think, “Ha ha, let’s see about that then!” and send us something truly awful. Maybe it’s the constitutional reluctance to boast about the good things (again, lest they be ripped away from us). Whatever it is we’re often to be found playing down both the good and the bad that life sends us. Well, I am, anyway, hence the title of this blog.

I’ve only blogged once this year till now. Given I began blogging in 2009 and sometimes blogged a number of times a week and even daily, that’s a huge change. Blogging itself is not the draw it used to be, either for readers or for bloggers. The instant-noodle appeal of such platforms as TikTok (avoid, avoid!) have taken over, though I hope that will change. I can’t cope with short form anything and I can’t watch TED talks, or listen to podcasts. It’s rare I can watch anything much; it grates on my nerves.

So how has the year been? Another curate’s egg, I fear: excellent in parts. I published “A Voice From The Cave”, which did very nicely for a few days, being a mover and shaker in Hot New Releases, and was a bestseller for a few small categories on Amazon. I have doggedly continued to chip away at one work in progress “On Hob Hill” and it stands at 85k words, and almost finished. The hardest bit by far is to come: to complete it, tying up all loose ends in a neat and entertaining bow. I need a couple of weeks without any sort of crisis, chaos or difficulty. Other works in progress await me getting back to them.

There has been too much of ongoing health challenges, both mental and physical, to find energy for much more than surviving. Every time I think I might have carved out some time for me, for writing or for exploration, something else comes along. Given that my cousin died shortly before Christmas, I am reminded that life is uncertain and one needs to carpe diem (seize the day) but I’d rather just watch the carp instead.

Day job, I had a single assignment this year which I enjoyed immensely, working with a primary school group, and visiting the beautiful and historic city of York for a couple of days in May. There was an incident in the hotel we stayed in that may one day be woven into a ghost story but I won’t spoil that by explaining further. Keep your powder dry (so to speak) is good advice for writers.

I’ve read a fair bit; my notebook tells me I’ve finished reading 57 books, but it may be higher as I kept forgetting to write them down after I finished them. Highlights include, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, “Maus” by Art Spieglman. “A Closed and Common Orbit” by Becky Chambers, “Precious Bane” by Mary Webb, “Transforming Depression” by David Rosen, “Bone” and “The Maiden King” by Marion Woodman, “Gathering Moss” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Beauty Myth” by Naomi Wolf and “The Mystery of the Coniunctio” by Edward Edinger. I was less than impressed by “The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman but given the propensity of celebs/celeb writers scouring the web for criticism, I’m being cautious in my comments. I will say that I won’t be bothering with the rest; were the author not already a celebrity I would not have felt that was a sufficiently impressive debut to justify to continuing series. There are many superb writers whose series got cancelled because their first book didn’t do well enough. Publishing is almost entirely about money, something I still find difficult to accept.

I’d like to thank anyone who has bought, read or reviewed any of mine this year. You don’t know how much that has meant to me. I feel ever more invisible and without value or worth, and that makes it even harder to keep writing and publishing to a largely indifferent market. I keep telling myself it’s not about the numbers but it’s hard not to feel useless.

As 2022 ticks (not toks!) to its conclusion, I would wish all my readers (long-standing and new) the very best. I saw a meme recently that talked about how instead of hoping for good things to come to oneself in the coming year but rather resolving to BRING good things to it, and to others, and that is what my own resolve is. To bring good into the world in whatever ways I can manage.

May 2023 bring you blessings, though. We all like those.

Love,

Viv xx

Voice from the Cave – a new book

Voice from the Cave – a new book

I’ve not written a blog since November last year. Six months of silence. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say. I have. I kept thinking of all the things I want to say, and the words just drained away like spilled water down a sink. Depression has bitten deep and held on hard. I look at the various news stories, UK and worldwide, and sink further. That carrion comfort, as Hopkins called it, despair, has been my companion. Outwardly I have functioned. I’ve talked with people, done things, smiled, laughed, and inside, there’s still that aching, resonant, black void of everything.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

There are many good things in my life, without a doubt, things that I am grateful for, but I feel almost nothing. Anger is my go-to emotion, closely followed by resignation and withdrawal. The causes of all this are clear but there is nothing I can do but keep on keeping on. So I have.

Long time readers of this blog will have seen the various posts over ten years, where I have written about a cave, a mythic, mystical location. I have had requests for them to be collected into book form, and with what I can only describe as a gargantuan effort disproportionate to the task as perceived from outside, I have now done so. One of the hardest parts was writing a blurb. Every writer I know loathes doing this. How do you sum something up in a few hundred words? I came across a couple of paragraphs in a book that inspired me and helped find the right words.

“According to the Sufis, there is a human world, and a world of pure spirit and an intermediate world of the imagination in which those two worlds can interact.” Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination p 141

“…there is the normal human world of ordinary reality and there is the divine world that transcends reality as we know it. Between these worlds is the world of the imagination, in which spirits and the divinity Itself may personify themselves as imaginal figures. Since relating to the image is the same as relating to the entity itself, it is through imaginative experiences that the divinity may be known and transformed.” Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination p 144.

The finished blurb is as follows:

“I found the cave high in the mountains by accident, if such things exist, wandering through tunnels of ancient rock, in pitch darkness, feeling my way for miles…”

This is a work that hovers between fiction and non-fiction, in that imaginal space that is both and neither. That imaginal world, known to the Sufi mystics, is where the human world of ordinary reality and the world of pure spirit and imagination, meet and interact. Outside of the limitations of linear time and space, I have explored a small segment of my own imaginal world; in it I have met with guides and with challenges that have pushed me to my limits and then beyond.  Each fragment is from one of those festivals during which we mark the growing and the waning of the solar year and the passing of the moon cycles within those. Time does not pass as you think it should and nothing is quite as simple as it seems. 
(This is a shorter work of around 8,500 words)

The cover art was done by my friend Bethan Christopher http://www.bethanchristopher.com/  who did the cover for “Ice Cream for Breakfast” and the graphic design by my friend Karl from We Lack Discipline https://welackdiscipline.com/ 

The book is available through all Amazon channels, in paperback and in kindle form. It’s only a short thing, but the effort of getting all my metaphorical (and metaphysical) ducks in a row was exhausting. I’d strongly urge you to consider reviewing it after reading, because reviews help visibility. I have a small (and I do mean small) stock of my own copies and within the UK I can potentially do signed copies, though if you have a problem with buying anything from the mighty ‘Zon, then be aware my copies are directly from them so I am merely acting as your sin-eater so to speak. I have no other way of getting books out there than using this means. 

I am proud of this little book, because it is good (putting it simply) but it is also an oddity. It doesn’t fit neatly into any big genre or category. When I got the paperback out, it charted in the category Gaia and in shamanism. I’d love to see it hit number 1 in one or both of those if possible. 

Anyway, here’s the link to the UK page, and for all others, change the UK part of the URL to whichever store you buy from, or put the title and my name into the search facility. 

Thank you for reading. I am hoping it won’t be another six months before I write anything here! 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B14RT5F8/ 

Nine Perfect Strangers versus Six Imperfect Pilgrims

Nine Perfect Strangers versus Six Imperfect Pilgrims

I’ve been a subscriber to New Scientist magazine for many years; indeed, I’ve had a couple of letters published and I even won “The Last Word” once. We moved to digital only and I stopped reading it, largely because I don’t find reading on screen pleasant. The irony of writing that on a blog is not lost on me. A few months back, we started getting the paper magazine again; it means I can pass on copies when we have read them and I can stuff a couple into a bag if I am going somewhere where I am likely to be waiting around. Experience has shown me that sitting reading a copy of this magazine while waiting for a medical consultation improves my outcome of being listened to; following a botched (ish surgery) around 10 years ago, the same (admittedly exhausted) doctor responded very differently to me the morning after the surgery when he and the ward sister found me reading a copy (and a couple of novels in French laid on my side table too) from the night before when my belongings were still in my bag. We had an actual proper conversation; their opinion of me shifted in the light of my reading material. Sad but true.

Anyway, a copy from a couple of weeks ago caught my eye today because my daughter had mentioned something key from it the day before. She’d been checking out a mini series on Amazon prime called “Nine Perfect Strangers”, because the premise of it seemed at first glance to bear some resemblance to my novel “Strangers and Pilgrims”. The concept of troubled, damaged people seeking healing by going on a retreat somewhere remote and beautiful but with some sort of mystery at the heart of it, is not (thankfully) trademarked, and on reading the review of the series that appeared in New Scientist, I relaxed. The nine perfect strangers of the mini series could not be more different in circumstances than the six imperfect pilgrims in my novel. The nine are damaged and hurt people for sure, but their lives are otherwise ones of privilege and plenty. The wellness retreat of the series is plush, expensive and extremely well-ordered; visitors give regular blood samples to ensure their tailor made smoothies are perfect for them. The cottage, known as the House of the Wellspring (in “Strangers and Pilgrims”) is a tiny place, comfortable but not luxurious, and the food is plentiful but the pilgrims must work together to prepare, serve and wash up after eating. They choose classic, timeless comfort foods, of stews and crumbles and cheesy bakes, and the making and the baking is a part of their healing process. To spend time with others, cooking, eating, clearing away, serving each other, is a very elemental part of being human; to be waited on by servants is part of a form of elitism that is pernicious when it becomes something we see as our right rather than as an occasional treat or holiday.

At the heart of the “Nine Perfect Strangers” retreat is a guru; a mysterious, ethereal figure played by Nicole Kidman. At the heart of “Strangers and Pilgrims” is a mystery, yes, for each retreat member has come because they reached out, in their lowest ebb, to a shadowy but compelling figure, the Warden of the Wellspring. This person, in a series of emails, has shown both love and understanding to those who contacted the House of the Wellspring, and has offered the chance to visit and to drink the healing waters, that will heal their unbearable hurts. Each yearns to meet this Warden, to pour out their sorrow and rest in the quiet of understanding and of unconditional love. And so, they make their way there, trusting and hoping for healing.

I don’t have any streaming services for TV, so I haven’t seen “Nine Perfect Strangers”. I’m always late to the party; I’ve probably not missed much by not having any streaming. We watch only a very small amount of TV and these days I quite enjoy binge-watching a series I missed years ago, now that the hype is forgotten and the painful pressure of FOMO is gone. When it does come on ordinary free-view TV, I may well watch because it may be good drama. You may already have seen it. As I say, I’m always late to these kind of things. “Strangers and Pilgrims” was first published over ten years ago now, and it’s garnered some wonderful reviews. It’s also got one or two excoriating ones, because you can’t please everybody. It’s in need of a new cover, because things have moved on (and yes, I hope to do this at some point but I have zero energy and mojo), but the core of the book is what it was ten years ago, and if you didn’t read it then, perhaps now is the time to give it a try. The evenings will be drawing in and it’s a perfect autumn or winter read, especially around the time of All Hallows, during which the main part of the story is set.

“My heart is broken and I am dying inside.”

Six unconnected strangers type these words into an internet search engine and start the journey of a lifetime. Directed to The House of the Wellspring website, each begins a conversation with the mysterious warden, to discover whether the waters of the Wellspring, a source of powerful healing, can heal their unbearable hurts.

A journey of self discovery and healing awaits them, but will the Warden grant them their wish? Invited to spend some days at the House of the Wellspring each of the strangers comes with the hope of coming away whole again.

But where is the Warden they all longed to meet and where is the Wellspring they all came to find?

Ice Cream For Breakfast

The last two years have been possibly the hardest consecutive years of my life. They’ve been packed with bereavement, sadness, illness (shingles twice, for heaven’s sake) worry, exhaustion, sleepless nights and endless pain. It’s coming up to the first anniversary of my mum’s passing, and today marks the first anniversary of the Covid 19 lockdown in the UK. The last year in particular has been something none of us alive today has ever experienced. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 devastated the entire world in the wake of the first world war, and one of the things I’ve noticed is there’s very little reference to it in literature dating from the time. The war, yes. There’s a whole tranche of novels, poetry and so on, that deals with WW1 in great depth. But the Spanish flu? Not so much. If anyone has information on novels and poetry of that era that goes into any detail, do let me know as I am curious. But honestly, I’d probably avoid (like the plague?) novels that heavily feature our current pandemic. It’s just too close.

During the last two years, my creativity has taken a massive nose dive. I’ve often felt that creativity is the cream of life, the rich stuff floating up out of an excess of plenty. It’s not something that can be sustained when trauma and illness are ripping through your life. Creativity, for me at least, is about having spare capacity to take the elements around me and weave them into something new. With the last two years, there have been days where just getting through and still be upright at the end of the day was more than I expected when I got out of bed that morning. I’ve been channelling the occasional burst of creative juices into a work-in-progress called “On Hob Hill” which I hope to complete this year. It’s also gone into occasional poetry.

I stopped sharing my poetry on this blog for a number of reasons. One of those is theft. From time to time I notice search terms that suggest a school or college somewhere have asked their students to produce poetry. I’m not happy with plagiarism (who is?) and it worries me that so many seem to be unconcerned about passing the work of another off as their own. It’s rife, apparently. The other reason is that it’s satisfying to my inner needs to collect together every few years my poetry into a collection. There’s three published already, all with slightly different themes. The work of the last six months has been to gather together a new collection and publish it.

This is my longest collection to date. The title poem, “Ice Cream For Breakfast” was written the morning after my father died. The blurb for the new collection is as follows: “So much of life is about contrasts and polarities; a kernel of joy within sorrow, and a hint of sadness within happiness. It’s about finding a tiny taste of sweetness amidst the bitterness of bereavement. These are poems for the liminal times of grieving and trying to make sense of difficult experiences. These are poems about the wonders of nature, of the pleasures of living and of the absurdities and humour inherent in life.”

The amazing art of the cover is by Bethan Christopher, whose book “Grow Your Own Gorgeousness” I reviewed some years ago. She has a new book due out very soon, Rebel Beauty for Teens. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rebel-Beauty-Teens-Unleash-Gorgeousness/dp/1789562252/ and it looks amazing.

The new collection can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08YQR65KM/ and if you are buying from other Amazon stores, please replace in the URL whichever store (dot com, dot de and so on). It’s only going to be in paperback. This helps reduce the chance of piracy, and other things like content ripping. I have a small number of stock copies, so I can supply signed editions in the UK only, if should this appeal.

I’m very proud of this collection, coming as it has in the wake of such a difficult couple of years. It’s taken a ridiculous amount of energy to get it thus far. One of the things I’ve had to overcome is a form of pernicious inertia: the whole, who cares, what’s the point, sort of inertia. I believe that poetry matters, that is says things nothing else can in ways that can reach directly into the soul and touch it deeply.

One more thing. If you are kind enough to buy a copy, please please PLEASE leave a review. It’s not about massaging my ego (nice though that may be) but rather the fact that the number of reviews, and the continuing additions of reviews on older books too for that matter, affect the algorithms and how a book is then added to things like “suggested books like this one” and so on. Thank you so much.

Of Violets and of Moss

Of Violets and of Moss

There are violets that grow in my garden; there’s a patch of them at the end of the drive which is expanding steadily, year on year, and because the garden there is a raised area, the flowers are almost at eye level. You just need to bend over to be able to smell the tiny purple blooms. These are sweet violets, I should add, to distinguish them from dog violets which have no scent.

Speaking of the scent of violets, people often wince, and refer to the Parma violets sweets or to Devon violets perfume which was often the standby perfume gift for young girls in the 70s and 80s. During my childhood, while I liked Devon violets perfume (sometimes also April violets was the name) I was forbidden to use it as the pathology lab and morgue my father had worked at as a young man had used a violet- scented disinfectant and the smell reminded him so powerfully of death and decay he would become quite ill if he smelled it.

It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that actual sweet violets don’t smell much like the perfume at all. In a big shopping centre in Nottingham, a flower seller was offering bunches of sweet violets for a quid. I bought some and I took them home, enchanted and enlightened. That pungent, sickly fragrance from the cheap perfume has only the very faintest of resemblances to real violets. Some years after that, living in very rural Norfolk, I happened upon an entire bank of them, glowing in the spring sunshine and filling the air with a totally heavenly aroma. You could almost imagine the passing of angelic wings giving off this scent as they passed. In Mrs Grieve’s A Modern Herbal, she cites the use of violet leaves as a successful nostrum for cancer, giving the case history of a nurseryman with advanced colon cancer being cured by a preparation of the herb (though the quantities used are vast!). I do not know whether any modern research has been done on the herb (the Modern Herbal was published in the 1930s) but I do wonder whether the properties need another look-at. I use a tea made with a mix of violet leaves and other herbs to encourage good dreams at night.

One of the curious aspects of the scent of sweet violets is that when you smell them, a few moments later, you can no longer smell them at all. The molecules have a sort of anaesthetic effect on your sense of smell; you go nose blind. So if you are walking through an area where lots of the flowers are in bloom, the fragrance will seem to come and go.

Much of the time, though, because violets are often regarded as invasive weeds, you tend not to find them in gardens at all. So letting ours spread means we are finally getting patches of glory. At this time of year you still need to bend over, get close to the earth to be able to partake of this glory. The accepted wisdom of why flowers have a scent is to attract pollinators but with violets, relatively few of the pretty blossoms actually ever produce any seeds. I don’t know why this is so but violets have more than one trick up their silken sleeves. Violets have developed numerous ways to spread. Violets spread by underground rhizomes and may form vegetative colonies. They also spread by a different seeding method. Flowers near the soil surface that never really open, called cleistogamous or non-opening, self-pollinating, shoot seeds out to establish a new colony away from the parent. For more info on this fascinating plant do have a peep at the link here: https://awkwardbotany.com/2020/07/08/the-hidden-flowers-of-viola/

For me, violets are an unexpected gift from life, quite other than I imagined them to be. Perfumes rarely capture the true beauty of a scent, and this is one where the synthetic perfumes associated with the flower fall very short of the reality. Yardley have always produced a violet perfume; in my childhood and until fairly recently, it was very much the classic Parma violets sort of scent. But recently it was reformulated (to various online wails of protest, because it left behind the very sickly-sweet variant) and is far closer now to the mossy, green, and ethereal odour of sweet violets in a hidden nook. Guerlain does two perfumes that have violet at the heart, Apres L’Ondee, and Insolence, if you wanted to push the boat out as they both cost a hefty amount more than the very modest Yardley offering.

Another treasure you need to get close to to appreciate its extraordinary beauty is moss. In the last year especially, I’ve found myself assailed by more anxiety attacks and even panic attacks, than for many years. Purely by chance, I found a grounding method that works for me, and that is when I feel that rising tidal wave of panic, I look for moss. Even in the centre of Norwich, there is moss to be found. It sits on old stone walls as little tussocks of velvet; it hides between paving slabs and on rooftops. The purity of the greenness is soothing and calming; the texture is often soft and reassuring. The closer you look, the more you see. Little fronds uncurling, tiny flowering stems extending into the cold air, often holding beads of dew or rain like jewels being shyly but proudly held out for your admiration. Lichens too will draw my eye; these lowly beings are a scientific marvel and mystery, being not individuals but rather communities working in harmony for the good of all. Made up of fungi, bacteria, algae, lichens are everywhere, some only where the air is clean and pure. I’m currently reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book on fungi Entangled Life which has a chapter on lichens; it’s a revelation how little we yet know about lichens and fungi, and the discoveries are already challenging how we see life as a whole.

Today is Epiphany, the day when the Magi brought their gifts to the Christ-child, named as gold, frankincense and myrrh, and it seems fitting that I have brought you a few gifts too, of violets and of moss, of things you need to get close to the earth to begin to appreciate, maybe even on your knees to even see, and start to ponder on the need for humility in its truest meaning (that of being close to the earth).

A reading from “Angel Lights”, a story for Christmas

A beautiful reading of “Angel Lights”, one of the tales from

Méchant Loup: Modern Fables

for Sensible Grown-ups 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B083HGHSRB/

read by Naomi, from Inanna’s Festival in Norwich.

https://www.facebook.com/vivienne.tuffnell/posts/10158901453546306?notif_id=1608289758035976&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif

 

If you go further down the page, there’s some readings also from the WIP, “Voice from the Cave”, for the Winter Solstice. 

I’ve been fighting hard to keep going at anything right now, so this may be my Christmas post, as WordPress is making it all much harder to post anything. So may Christmas/Solstice/etc bring you much joy after a truly tough year and may 2021 bring us all relief and reunions. Bless you all. 

Pumpkin Spice as An Ancestral Issue

Pumpkin Spice as An Ancestral Issue

It’s getting to that time of year again. The nights are drawing in, and the heat of only a matter of weeks ago is a memory (thank goodness; I wasn’t coping, especially with the hot humid nights). Cooler, fresher mornings are making me consider putting the duvet back on the bed; we’ve had instead a sheet with a blanket on the top for most of the summer. I’ve brought in the most tender, temperature sensitive plants back into the house after their summer break in the garden; the scented geraniums and the dwarf myrtle will follow soon, once I’ve cleaned windows and window ledges. The two olive trees will come in after that.

After the dry summer, the trees are bright with berries and their leaves are beginning to change colour. In woods we visit, the smell of autumn has been hovering for some weeks. We’ve spotted fungi erupting in all sorts of places. Bird song has altered. Our lawn is littered with more poo from hedgehogs as they forage among windfall apples and snuffle the cat food I put out every evening. The males will be looking for places to settle for their hibernation, while the females and the youngsters continue to feed voraciously to fatten up for winter. We rarely see slugs or snails here, probably because the hoggies and the visiting ducks hoover them all up.

I like autumn, despite the melancholy. The first anniversary of my father’s death has slipped by; I toasted him with a pint of Guinness with dinner. All Hallows and associated festivals lie ahead in October; there is usually a service here to commemorate our beloved dead. Last year it was too raw for me to attend, and this year spaces at the service will be fewer than usual because of social distancing measures. I hope to attend, and remember with love those who have gone.

Over recent years I have noticed the proliferation of items for sale that have the scent or flavour of “pumpkin spice”, and the attending ridicule of women for liking it. It’s largely contemptuous dismissal by men, powered by an underlying unconscious belief that everything women enjoy as trivial and without real value. Pumpkins as Halloween food and décor are a fairly new thing in the UK; pumpkin spice is actually a much older thing indeed, and has little to do with the vast round orange vegetables. It’s a mix of the sweet spices like cinnamon, allspice, cloves and a few others, traditionally used for baking certain recipes. As a child, trying to get my mother to cook and bake more adventurous things, I got her to buy a variety of herbs and spices. One of those was something called Apple Pie Spice. At home, she opened the bottle and took a sniff; her eyes went misty for a moment and she said one word: “Mammy”. Not, as she explained a few moments later, her mother, but instead her grandmother, who had lived next door. My great grandmother, in fact. That single inhalation of scent had taken my mother back to childhood, and brought a much-beloved grandmother into the room for a moment. Mum was someone who hated nostalgia and rarely reminisced. She seldom talked about her childhood, or showed us old photos but in that tiny breath of mixed spices, she went back, almost bodily. She was back in her grandmother’s kitchen, helping her bake apple pies and other delicious treats. I have often thought that many of her memories from that time are probably deeply traumatic; the roof of their house was blown off by a falling bomb while they sheltered under the concrete thrall shelf in the pantry. Brothers, uncles, cousins, were away at war; desperate shortages of food at times meant that while they probably never went truly hungry, food was doubtless tedious and boring and precious. Mum in her later years talked about never having had teddies or other soft toys; she had a rag doll that someone made for her, but that was it. We gave her a zoo’s worth of cuddly toys, which she loved, but that early lack went deep. I suspect for many that lived through such times there are cavernous wounds, papered over with material comforts in later years.

Spices were once as precious as gold, and their use in food sometimes a matter of conspicuous consumption. Cardinal Wolsey went one step further, using saffron (still one of the most costly of spices) as a strewing herb. In humble families, a pinch of ground cinnamon in a simple apple pie was a way of giving the food an almost magical savour, a pinch of love. That’s why so many of the traditional Christmas foods are heavy on spices, because these were things you could not afford to use every day. They were brought out for the feasts of life, when those you loved had gathered close for that time. They enhanced both the flavour, the fragrance and the properties of the food. Most spices have beneficial effects; cinnamon is anti-viral and many are antibacterial as well. Sometimes added to disguise the taint of food past its best, they protected the health as well as adding to the taste.

In the case of pumpkins, the spice is added as pumpkins have very mild flavour. I’ve made pumpkin pie just the once; we held a Halloween party for my daughter’s friends, some of whom were American (we lived close to a couple of US airbases at the time). The kids looked at it, and because it was unfamiliar to most of the guests, declined to try any. The one American attendee said she didn’t like it anyway. I ended up eating it all myself over a couple of days. I rather liked it. But I think that if they were a vegetable that grew well where I live, I’d feel honour-bound to find as many ways of using it as possible, because of the hungry times in my ancestry. At the moment I am processing as many of the apples from our nine trees as I can, stewing with cinnamon and honey and freezing them for use in the winter when the trees are bare. Last year I didn’t do this; there was too much going on to worry about endless windfalls and waste. But as I add the spice to each batch, I think of the great grandmother I never knew, and of the line of faceless grandmothers going back centuries, and then I think of the younger women daring to have pumpkin spice coffee, defying the (mostly) men who would shame them for liking such a thing, and then I think, “You go, girls. You enjoy that spice. And devil take those who would use it to diminish you.”

Dame Julian and self-isolation – some lessons from the 14th century

Dame Julian and self-isolation – some lessons from the 14^th century

Despite having her writings, we actually know surprisingly little about Dame Julian,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich the anchorite whose hermitage in Norwich remains a site for pilgrims to this day. We don’t even know her original name; she took the name of the saint whose church she became anchorite of. The church and the cell were bombed during the war but later rebuilt, stone by stone, and the place retains an atmosphere of calm and contemplation; the visitor centre next to it offers refreshments, access to their library and a lovely little gift selection. If you go, they also allow you to park next to the church if you ask for one of their parking permits that will ward off the eagle-eyed traffic wardens.

The 14^th century was an especially turbulent one, taking in the Black Death (which reached Britain in 1348, ripping through populations weakened by 2 generations of malnutrition), wars, pogroms, The Peasants’ Revolt, social upheavals and religious movements galore. Dame Julian(born around 1342) saw the effects of the plague first hand, both the initial wave and the later wave that had a reduced effect. When she was around 30, during an illness that was almost fatal, she had a series of visions that are the basis for her writings, and which led to her becoming an anchorite after her recovery. While we know nothing for certain about her origins, education or life before the visions, given that she was 30 at the time, many have speculated that the likelihood was that she was or had been married, and may have had children. The surmise also goes that the illness she survived may have wiped out husband and children. Whatever the truth of this, the life she led after this cataclysmic illness and the visions was entirely different from what she must have led before it.

An anchorite was a hermit who pledged to stay in a single location, often walled in and supplied with the essentials of life via a small window. When a person became an anchorite, the service for the dead was performed, and they were then sealed in. However, they usually led productive lives, often making clothes for the poor and acting (via the window) as a counsellor to troubled souls. One of Julian’s visitors was the mystic Margery Kempe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margery_Kempe who wrote of her visit to dame Julian. http://juliancentre.org/news/margery-kempe-who-met-julian-is-remembered-in-the-anglican-church-on-9th-november.html

One of the most famous of Julian’s sayings was “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Sometimes people use this as a means of shutting up others who are worrying about what’s going on around them. Right now, there’s a lot of reasons to worry. Covid-19 is not the Black Death, but it’s a frighteningly infectious and potentially lethal virus, and there’s a lot of misinformation about it. Julian would have witnessed not just the Black Death but many other epidemics or pandemics that roared through the populace; mechanisms by which any disease spread were little understood then and it’s hard to imagine the terrible fear most people would have experienced. For many it may have felt like a judgement from an angry god. Even today, there are so-called Christians who are preaching that this pandemic is God’s judgement on a sinful human race; some who see this as stage in the end of the world prophecies that are supposedly laid out in the Book of Revelation. To that I say: utter tosh.

When the door closed behind Julian and she was sealed inside her cell, I wonder what she would have felt. Her faith, both in a good, kind, loving God rather than the hideous vengeful god usually depicted by the medieval church, would have kept her at peace, and her faith in the benefactors and supporters who ensured that she would be kept supplied with the necessaries of life meant that the usual worries and cares would be gone. She could focus on what she was there for: to pray, to work, to support others from her window, and also to write about her visions.

In my previous post I wrote about how pressured many of us feel by having so many reminders of what others (like Shakespeare) have accomplished in their time in quarantine. There’s a massive collective angst and anxiety that fills the air and reaches all of us who are sensitive to it, and many who otherwise would not be. It’s extremely hard to be creative when the world around us is filled with such turmoil and uncertainty and fear. It’s even harder when well-meaning people exhort us not to waste such an opportunity for extra time we didn’t know we had.

As well as the collective grief and fear and worry, there’s personal concerns that almost everyone is affected by; worries about money, jobs, family, the future. After losing my father six months ago, I had had a sense of relief that at least I didn’t have to worry about him getting the virus. The worry for my mother was short-lived, and replaced instead with immense shock and sadness when she passed away suddenly a few days ago.

I wonder how much of the collective grief that Dame Julian bore and prayed with in that little cell in Norwich, how many folks she comforted with her words of a loving God who cared for his children as a mother might. I would love to sit an hour in her cell now, and pour out my soul there, but I cannot. It may be many months before I can go anywhere that is deemed non-essential. But I can sit quietly in my home, and hold like hazel nuts the cares and sorrows of others, just as she did.