new year, new promises, to break....

So here we go again, dear Blog, I make another attempt to keep you going.
My excuse for neglecting you, and I'm sticking to it, is that actually I have a lot of other things to do and I won't bore you with the details.
I am now official sock and mitten knitter to 2 princesses, who are very demanding.
In between that I am making changes to my sitting room - why does it take less time to put everything back on shelves than it does to take it off? It seems the more I clear out the more appears - it's breeding in secret places!
I have managed to prise the carpet shampooer back from my offspring so the next task will be to use it - sometime.

Now I am sixty

Well, Blog, it has finally arrived. The dreaded 60 and I am not sure how I feel about this particular milestone.
So much seems to change and yet is it so much? At 59 people still treated me as if I was part of the scene and I didn't feel much different to the way I did at 58.
I am not sure if it's the hype that changes attitudes or not. After all chronology is man made, and 60 is a socio-political border-line created by the state as a means of production control, except that now as everything goes belly up it actually counts for little.
The last three weeks have left me somewhat confused. I can tell that age is exerting an influence on the workings of my body but how much is down to the advance of age or the effects of past exertions is not so clear.
I have to face the fact that I am entering a new phase of my life and, like it or lump it, it is the last phase.
I can jump two ways - sit and wait for decline or embrace the freedom aspects and minimise the negatives.
I know what the answer should be but my humanity is frail and I know enough about myself to realise that without conscious effort I will fall into the former rather than lumber ( no gazelle like leaping for me!) towards the latter.
The constant battle with this recalcitrant and anarchic body of mine has been going on for years. I win the odd skirmish but now I have to work harder and devise more sophisticated strategies just to stay in touch.
What I have found is that at last I may be debt free sooner than I thought now that my student loan has been cancelled due to reaching the magic age, my prescriptions are free and if I can carry on working and collect my state pension (once they've got their act together and decided my entitlement) then for once in my life I might be able to stop always having to make choices and have my cake and eat it, for a while at least!
To the medics I have become a geriatric, possibly to be assessed, on each meeting, for competence if not for crumbling skeleton or lackadaisical bladder. I am constantly listening for the change in the tenor of their approach and questioning. They forget, or are ignorant of, my knowledge and expertise in this area, and I for my part, am anxious they should not make assumptions.
My post war generation should not go quietly into the long goodnight of settling for mediocrity and patronage.
We will want atms and internet access, pasta and sushi, a little eclat rather than inconspicuousness, when the time comes for us to need social care.
Woe betide anyone who makes assumptions about me or talks over my head rather than to me. The proverbial faeces will definitely hit the fan!

Scramble

My mind meanders through lists of words.
I view the grid and while I try to string letters together time ticks by.
How do these people have time to pass messages as the clock slices away
at each three minute slot?
My eyes turn somersaults finding words longer than three letters.
At zero the graphics change - a revised list of scorers pop up plus a list of all the words
in the grid, many of which are incomprehensible.
Are they plucked from some World Dictionary?
I wonder who searches them out.
Are we being duped, victims of a huge joke?
Someone on another part of the planet sniggers as they make up words,
the weirder the better?
Even so, when the clock starts the count down the pulse quickens and you hope
your eyes can pick up the sequences of letters.
Your fingers slide over the keys, illuminating the developing words.
Each word registers points, hopefully rapidly enough to lift a players position and
thereby raise each word I.Q.
My brain/hand/eye co-ordination seem so sluggish in comparison to other players
and then the laptop freezes - exasperation seethes as seconds melt away.
I resent the phone ringing with a minute to go, it equals words/points missed.

There is very little give and take.
Anyone exceeding the maximum room I.Q. is ordered off to higher places.
The Great Glory is the "greenie" - the green highlighted word scored only by
one player.
What exultation!
Eventually, reason surfaces and I take myself in hand.
I return the game to its rightful place and remind myself that in the great scheme of
things it is inconsequential and still second to the Great Solitaire,
the ultimate panacea when stress levels rise.

Dear Blog, you must think I have abandoned you and I admit my guilt in neglecting you but you must realise that there are other dimensions to my life. However, I will try to do better.

The particular story I am about to relate started with my calming two, near tearful, members of staff who were at the end of their tethers with a difficult client. Then onto calming said client who, in floods of tears, couldn't understand why we couldn't just pick all her sixteen stone up, bodily, and place it just where, when, how she wanted, without the use of equipment.
By eight a.m. I ached everywhere and mused that this was just the first hour of the shift. This client is one of several who need lots of our physical and emotional effort plus the two we are nursing in bed, both looking at death at very close quarters. Then I juggled the various dynamics of staff tensions. If I didn't have another agenda, one that is spiritual rather than temporal, would I work this five day week, including evening, weekends, bank holidays, for eighteen thousand a year? I'm pretty sure no man would!
It's hard work and even more so at weekends when we have one less pair of hands and the same amount of work. So, we do more work for the same money. It rankles but I am told this is the way it always was, will, has, to be. Put up and shut up.
Rant over.

Onslaught

I have survived the onslaught of the two youngest grandchildren, one, two and three-quarters, with eyes full of attitude, and the other, one year old, with bi-lateral dimples. One trampolines along the shattered sofa, the other lolls against it leaning on one elbow contemplating the possibility of toddling across the gap to the futon.
Miss Attitude tosses her long, dark, crisp and sumptuous hair that almost, but not quite, overwhelms her elfin features.
Miss Dimples' shorter, light brown hair, like a cap, gently curves around her chubby features with her trade mark extra long tendril trailing beyond the nape of her neck.

There are brief hiatus when their attention is held by Tomliboos and Pontipines. Miss D. lays her head by her sister's feet, flips herself over so that she looks endearingly at her sister upside down. They murmur to each other gently then Dimples, revealing two rows of lethal biters, attempts to fasten her mouth around Attitudes big toe. Not quick enough though! The older one withdraws her tarsals, casually, and recommences bouncing and flinging cushions accompanied by high pitched squeals.

Daddy reappears from his shave and hands out dishes of thinly sliced apple and high tech juice receptacles.
Attitude nibbles delicately, precisely, leaving thin, red arcs of peel while her sister bites fiercely, sucking in large chunks.
Attitude purloins her sister's slices, pretending to feed her, swapping them while diverting us all , from one bowl to another. "All gone!" She presents an empty pink dish to Daddy with innocent eyes.

On the floor they slide past, over, around, each other, interacting as they pass with varying degrees of gentleness and in their own language.
How I wish I had more energy; that I didn't haltingly pull myself up each stair and heave this non- conforming torso onto the landing to the toilet. I want to play with them but despite a willing spirit the flesh is weak and uncooperative.
I hate this getting older and having to accept that many and various bits of me aren't as efficient as I would like.

secrets

I showed a couple around the home a little while ago. An elderly man with a strong German accent and his nervous daughter. Along with all the usual questions about cost, etc., he kept asking me how much forgiveness there might be. I told him that as we all needed it I hoped there would be a lot. And would we need a lot of background information? Enough to make sense of the present situation, I said, but that of course we couldn't make anyone tell us what they didn't want us to know. That seemed to be a relief and he alternated between English and German, translating my answers to himself and their implications. The daughter seemed weighed down, trying hard to keep some sort of calm yet feeling his emotion was running away from her control.
She constantly tried to bring the conversation back to the prosaic in order to enforce some sort of normality but the whirl wind of his anxiety over took her and she gave up.
The tour was proscribed - no going into the lounges where other people were - "Show only to me the room". "Would it be necessary to eat with people?".
"Dad likes to keep to himself, very much." She explained with a nervous laugh.
Suddenly, I wanted to ask him to roll up his sleeves and let me see his arms. Of course I didn't but my mind replayed grainy black and white archive footage of striped clad bodies staring out with dark, hollow, eyes.
I returned to the present. I must have gone to auto-pilot because I seemed to have made the right responses. He was already out of the door, still muttering bi-lingually. The daughter tried to redeem some shreds of social grace and say "Goodbye" as casually as a bag of nerves can.

slacking

I am so cross with myself, in a very British fashion of course, because lack of discipline has meant I have broken my resolve, Dear Blog, to make regular entries into you (take that as you like). No excuses apart from idleness and endless Scramble/Solitaire/Word Challenge games on Facebook, in fact anything rather than concentrate on the task in hand.
Except I don't want you to be a task, I want you to be a galvanising force that opens up some disused synapses and gets my once fertile imagination flowing again.
I used to be capable of enormous imaginary clarity,full of vivid imagery and a group of characters who lived out their lives in independent, glorious living technicolour. They played their scenes across the screen in the frontal lobe of my brain and I simply recorded what I saw, heard, felt as fast as my little fingers could wield the pencil.
Then, as life became increasing complicated and other peoples' needs took precedence, I made the fatal mistake of thinking I could defer recording to a later date. I let other matters deflect my focus.
Fool that I am!
The scenes paled, the characters lost their clarity and now I struggle to maintain any sort of focus and depth. I read my drafts and shudder at their inanity and shallowness. Eyes open or closed, the screen is clouded at best and, at worst,blank.
Perhaps it's age or the combined effects of years of various chemicals meant to calm my fractured emotions, that have not only taken the edge off but blunted my fantasy-life so effectively it gives me no solace,escape or artistic release.
My latest fictional embryo lurches from frenzied scribblings to a slack few lines penned with lethargy. My advice to my daughter to keep her literary efforts honed through regular exercise, independent of a fickle muse, smack me between the eyes.
Take your own advice woman!
And also decide what it is you are trying to achieve - an ego trip based on personal fantasy or something that has a message, something useful. The conundrum is deciding what useful is. Am I deluding myself by believing I might have something to say or even whether anyone could possibly want to listen/read my ramblings. I have some good ideas - I don't thing it's too egotistical to say that - but unfortunately I struggle to make them cohere or maintain a consistent power. They seem like random strands, each interesting in their own right but I am failing to make the connections that would give them substance and staying power.
Someone once told me I was on the cusp of either being effective artistically or falling into the pit of the dilettante - perish the thought - and the terror is I have seen so much wither away through neglect and lack of perseverance that I may have done irreparable damage. I know I have lost some of my physical, tactile agility and so producing a picture or design is an enormous challenge but I have to believe that with "brain training" I can re- connect with an organ that dashes hither and thither and channel it again into acuteness and passion.
Andrew Thorpe and his three sirens may still have a future if I can shake off a few inhibitions and maintain enough anonymity to free myself from the constrictions of the person other people think I am ( or should be).
Perhaps I have the right to indulge myself and my own personal fantasies and at the same time create something other people might enjoy.
Watch this space.