Nomad

I seem to have a nomadic ability to put down roots very quickly — to just stay in whatever situation I find myself in and not budge. To get used to, and quickly make a home of it, wherever it is. I did it there in the laneway, almost putting down roots, bizarrelly got used to things, and week after week did not budge. It's as if something switches off in my brain and I don't want to leave more than I want to do anything else. It's not that I want to stay there, I just don't want to leave... It's not really on a conscious level, the not wanting to leave, I'm replaying old scenes, acting out old pain, but I don't always see it.

I feel myself putting down roots now here too. But in a good way. Here right now is where I want to be. I am beginning to feel comfortable and 'at home', and even though I feel stir-crazy at times and sometimes feel that all the air has been breathed up in the place and that I have to just get out fast, mostly it is a good feeling and one that I hope lasts. Just propping a pillow against the headboard and laying back to read a book is an amazing feeling, to just be able to do that...in privacy and safety adn comfort! Or pottering about doing nothing, feeling carpet under my toes, or standing barefoot on the cold tiles in the jutting-out kitchen at the top of the house in the mornings, eating toast dripping with butter and staring out at the early sky and down on the big horse chestnut tree, which stands like a guardian of the house at the end of the neighbours garden, swishing loudly in the slightest breeze. I haven't listened to any Beethoven yet, dont' seem to have any CD's with me at all, but I shall, when this house is quiet and empty one day, one evening when a dramatic sunset is spreading pink and mauve across the sky, and the last of the birds are hurrying through it...

But there is plenty of music about. This morning I ate the last piece of soggy melon, which I bought myself as a treat on Friday, and listened to the rain splashing against the pipe and patio outside, standing there trying to remember the smell of the woods after rain, a smell I love and miss. It came rushing back, that complicated, ancient, deep down smell. And I missed it hugely, physically. I haven't been back yet, and this morning listening to that rain tap down, I thought I might, just pack a lunch and drive back over there, but in the end it didn't seem right. Not yet.

I need to be here a bit more firmly first. Here, miles away from the woods and my life the past nine months. I think I need a layer in me to heal over first. My room here is a good size and bright and airy, and until this weekend was still full of bags and boxes slumped against the cream walls and furniture. It took me a while to bring myself to open them, to have the courage to put things on shelves and away in drawers; to find a place for even the smallest possession felt like such a monumental thing, such a statement, and was quite emotional, in ways I hadn't expected. I did it slowly, bag by bag, evening by evening, but now it is done, more or less: everything with a home, somewhere I know where to lay my hands on. I even have a desk with a drawer I keep opening and closing, smiling down at all the pens, and the big black stapler and the two burgundy hole punches I found in seperate bags in the car. Not using them yet, just opening and closing the drawer idiotically and smiling down at them all settled neatly in there, getting used to them there...

I had no idea I had so much in the car, I had forgotten... I even had a new pair of boots still in their box in the boot, which I had completely forgotten about! there half-buried under piles of other bags. A good pair of waterproof walking boots that I could have really done with during the winter walking those endless wet pavements, or could have sold or pawned for things I was even more in need of. So much surprised me coming from the car, so many things I had forgotten I had squeezed down into bags and boxes and cases. While I was there I didn't want to draw attention to myself by rooting around in bags and boxes looking for things, or tugging things out of bags that I might never fit back into them. So I rarely touched them. I lived in the same two or three outfits of clothes and used items from the same three or four carrier bags. I suppose if I had of taken things out of the other bags they would only have been any good to me if I could have wrapped them around myself for warmth, or eaten them. Anything else would have been superfluous: beauty and ornament have their place but when you are freezing cold and your stomach is shrivelled in hunger they are quickly relegated. Bag after bag came out of the car in the end, endlessly dragging yet another one up the stone steps, and still the back seat seemed packed up to the roof — it was like that old advert for the mini, with person after person coming out of it, and still almost full. I can't think for the life of me what I needed all that stuff for, but I'll no doubt remember all too soon...Though hopefully my time in the car has shown me, if nothing else, that none of these things, no matter how pretty or seemingly necessary, are going to make me happy, that happiness lies elsewhere.

My instinct as soon as I moved in was to want to hide all the evidence of my homelessness, to want to start afresh, burn my boots and put down new roots, have nothing more to do with the way I had been living. But I have bravely kept onto things, and have to remind myself that I am writing a book about it now and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in how I ended up. Lives unravel, people don't (or wont) keep up for all sorts of reasons and have to find other ways of living all the time, I am not the first and I won't be the last, so these days I am trying to hold my head up as I crane it around the corner to see what's coming next — (as long as it includes mugs of steaming tea and lots of hot buttered toast I'm sure it'll be fine whatever it is, hopefully I've learnt to shrug off the rest, and to smile.

reconnecting

It's difficult to get back into my stride with blogging. I have started to write here so often during these last two weeks, to type away about this and that, and almost-started just as many times: sat in front of a screen, deep breaths taken, my sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair tucked in behind my ear, fingers curved, poised and determined, at the keyboard... but for some reason I have always hesitated — just that little bit too long in the end, and never actually got around to sending anything - found distactions from one day to the next, as is my wont...Obviously it's different now, both here in the blog and in my situation: the urgency has gone from it, for one: in the car this blog was such a reaching out, such a cry for help in a way, that it feels over now, and in some ways I'm even half-embarrassed at the loudness of the yell I screamed from the laneway. And secondly, since I turned off comments in the end, the connection I had with readers — all those wonderfully distinct and largely postive voices from so many near and faraway places that shouted back each day at my shouting out — and which gave this blog its life — were suddenly silenced, the connection fizzled out.

I miss that connection, and hated turning comments off, but in the end I felt I had little choice, as someone started 'masquerading' as me, opening another blog called Wanderingscribe and sending abusive comments and emails out, in my name, to those who had posted in my blog. Obviously those messages weren't from me, and most people would have known that (well they did because many of them emailed telling me) but some people didn't understand, and unfortunately assumed it was me, emailing me upset and angry. The only thing I could do in the end to stop it all was to eventually switch comments off. It was probably just one person, and I have no idea if they are still doing it, because except for that one time to find out what was happening, I refuse to go there to look, and reopening comments on my blog is just feeding them, aswell as taking too much time by me to vet them all, so I won't do that for a while, and am just sorry that someone has spoiled it for the rest, and that all those conversations going on so loudly sometimes at the side of my blog have had to end. Email is not the same, but it is always there if you need to contact me, though most people realise that most of my time and focus has had to switch to writing the book now.

Time has got the better of me again, I'm timed out, so rather than leave this yet again, I will post this bit now...definitely back tomorrow to say the rest. My neck is slowly beginning to come up out of my shoulders, you'll be pleased to know, and I am starting to uncurl. Life is good... More tomorrow....

nesting

Sorry, you are right, I should have at least put up one blog in all this time! I have a pile of excuses, but none of them justify it. I know if you have been following the blog, and been routing for me, then you will definitely want to know how this last couple of weeks has been, I'm sorry, I would have been disappointed had it been me reading. Everyday it feels like I've got a million things to say, which I want to come and 'unburden' myself of here as much as anything, but when I come to put them down, all I end up doing is creating a blog on the template page and then suddenly not knowing what to say. You'd think, wanting to be a writer, that I'd be able to grab at least a couple of the days thoughts and impressions to share and expand on here, but nothing comes, and before I know it I've run out of time. So each day I've resolved to leave it until the following day.

And now it has been nine days since I posted. Time is all messed up at the moment, all my senses say that it can't have been that long, but calendar says it is. Curious too that it is nine days since I posted and nine months that I was in the car for. Or maybe not! But sometimes, in all the other thinking I am doing for the writing of the book, it is hard not to think of the significance of that many months. I try not though.

All is well, you'll be pleased to know. I will write about settling in things and teh up-down experience of all that, but not now. Because what is causing me concern at the moment is my neck. I can't think much beyond it right now. Hopefully it is just transtional pain, straightening up from being scrunched up in the car night after night, but it is searing pain at the back of my neck right now, frightening pain. I have to hold it very very still, it feels like it needs a collar, and every tap of the keyboard I feel as a red-hot twinge in my neck. Not nice. So this is all I am going to write for now. Hopefully this pain will go soon, and I can tell you how it is going, relearning to live indoors: how I have forgotten how to hang my clothes up after me, and eat from plates and bowls with knives and forks, instead of with my fingers, and on my knees; about all the simple pleasures I am quickly learning to take for granted again already. Last night I had the place to myself for the whole evening and forced myself to watch Big Brother, to kind of re-socialise myself into living indoors, and with others again. Not sure it is a good idea to sit night after night staring at a collection of people cooped up in a house going mad.

They could at least plant a big tree in the garden for them.