I'm bored, Mum!

Don’t you remember those days when, as a child, you kicked around the house, moping and getting in everyone’s way because you just couldn’t think what to do? I soon learned not to express those particular sentiments to my mum – she had a habit of finding me something to do that wasn’t quite what I had in mind! “Nothing to do?” she would say. “I’ve got too much to do – I can soon find you something…” Then I would end up helping her with the cleaning or popping down to the local shops for a loaf of bread and somehow that didn’t help.

It’s a bit the same as an adult. It’s not that I don’t have anything to do but usually these down turns in mood and inclination follow a particularly busy period when tiredness sets in, positive feelings evaporate and the adrenaline starts to fail me. Normally, I would be out of the house at my temporary job or one of my many and varied volunteering exploits, but nobody needs my services today! I could, of course, write the Christmas cards; I could finish turning up that troublesome pair of bedroom curtains which are made of two flimsy layers and look great but are so, so difficult to sew; I could make a real effort and go down to the shed in search of paint brushes and a tin of Peach Blossom and carry on with the interminable job of painting the woodwork in our hall, stairs and landing: eight doors, door frames, skirting boards and banisters! But not today. Today I can’t summon up the energy or the inclination for any of that. I think I’m feeling lonely.

I think back to a period of my life when I lived in England – on a small island, in fact. The pace of life was slower then and it was in the delightful days when bringing up children was considered to be a worthwhile form of employment in its own right (whoops, I’m showing my age – oh well, why not? I am who I am!). I found it easy to make friends in those days. Waiting outside the school gates to pick up the kids, we struck up conversations and made friends. I had a number of good ones, all sharing the ups and downs of that particular lifestyle: life at home, to-ing and fro-ing with the children to school and to part-time jobs. There was plenty of time to socialise, as well as time to be ‘useful’. When that feeling of boredom struck there was a simple answer for me – go and see Jean!

Jean lived a ten minute walk away. She was a lovely simple soul – or at least that was how it seemed. She had a husband, five children and a gloriously messy house. I am not a messy person but I secretly envy people who are! I long to be able to begin a new task without clearing up after the first; to go to bed with my clothes strewn all over the floor instead of hung up neatly in the wardrobe; to smile happily at my unexpected guests even though I am in the middle of a frenzy of baking, whilst the dirt has been gathering in steadily growing dust balls under the dining room table, because I would always prefer to be cooking than cleaning. But I have been too well brought up! Jean worked hard but had a knack of being welcoming even when she was frantically busy. In addition to bringing up five children, one of them disabled, and the others at varying stages of adolescent exploration or childish tantrums, she made ends meet by baking and icing wedding cakes. On my days of boredom I would slope round to Jean’s house, simply for the pleasure of slouching in her kitchen, with my feet up and a mug of coffee in my hand and just ‘wasting time’! She baked; I made the coffee. She constructed fantastically complicated flowers, made out of icing sugar, and I watched. Eventually I got up and did something useful – like the washing up! But I loved going round to Jean’s home, just to do nothing except wile away a couple of hours nattering. We talked about everything: the weather, the children, the local schools, the local gossip, the other children’s mothers, plus all the spicier ‘taboo’ subjects such as sex, religion and money.

Wasting time is a crime nowadays. Everyone is busy. Job applications require you to fill in details of your past job history meticulously , ‘leaving no gaps’, and interview panels seem more likely today to ask you about what you didn’t do than what you did. I’m bored today. I’ve had enough of being busy. I’ve emailed all my friends and suggested getting together for coffee but they’re all busy. Today would be a good day for turning the clock back, I think, and going to visit Jean!

Maybe I’ll write her a Christmas card…

Happiness Points

The British government is currently planning a survey of the happiness of the British people in the light of the economic crisis, spending cuts and general austerity measures. Viewers of the BBC’s Breakfast TV programme were this week asked to participate in a similar unofficial survey, pre-empting the government’s research. 11,000 participants sent SMS messages to the programme indicating their estimated happiness score on a scale of 1 – 10. The results showed that the average scored was 5.9, slightly higher than a similar survey of Dutch citizens earlier in the year. How should we estimate ‘happiness’ and how important is it anyway?

In the early days of marriage, living in the sprawling suburbs of London, we learned to like board games. At heart, we were really outdoors people and homesick for the country lanes and seaside, but we tried to adapt. At the outset of our life together our thoughts often turned to the future. We wondered how life would turn out, what ups and downs we would face, how work and home, family and friends would pan out and whether or not we would achieve that elusive quality of happiness.

Accordingly, one of our favourite board games to play on a winter’s evening was entitled ‘Careers’. In common with the best board games it involved making certain choices and collecting points to achieve the goal one had chosen. The choices in ‘Careers’ were between Fame, Money and Happiness. The goal was to collect points, in precisely the ratio previously decided upon and to be the first to fulfil the pre-arranged ‘contract’.

Moving around the board, one encountered various life experiences, accidents and opportunities, such as ‘spotting a yellow-bellied sapsucker’ which might prove useful if you were intent on building a career as a zoologist. In addition, you might gain various degrees, become a success on the stage or acquire large sums of money through career advances or inheritance. Alternatively, you might pick up a card which offered you the girl of your dreams, you might win a romantic holiday to the Bahamas or escape a serious accident, which could dramatically boost your score of happiness points. For me, and indeed, for us as a couple, there was never any serious question over which of the three kinds were most desirable. Happiness points always came out top.

It is no secret in life, or in board games, that what you decide upon and set your heart upon, is not necessarily what you will end up with. We were no exception to the rule. However, as we look back, we can identify in our lives, if not in our board game successes, a good share of happiness and contentment, together with a relatively lower score in the other two commodities! So perhaps we succeeded relatively well in our goal. It is a mute point how far the possession of ‘comfortable’ sums of money may contribute to happiness but, leaving that aside, we can be moderately satisfied with the results. Family and friendships have brought us joy, together with a modest share of sorrows. Work has given us some satisfaction – not many outstanding successes but, there again, a few. As for fame, we never made it. Any successes we have had have remained private affairs and neither of us have had a flair for marketing them. Who knows in the end how life might have turned out with a different balance in our goals? Life is probably as uncertain as any board game.

Our environment has been important to us. Strongly motivated by a sense of place, we have been sometimes charmed, sometimes bored or frustrated by the places we have settled in. But over the years we have enjoyed many delights and pleasures in a whole array of holiday locations and, in some cases, in our more long-term dwelling places. Generally speaking, to the best of our ability, we have headed for happiness points and have, it seems, achieved quite a few. Where we have headed for fame or success the road has often been rocky and stressful and, in many cases, disappointing. The race for money has not, frankly, often interested us and the results we have achieved there have probably reflected this! We have enough on the whole, but not an abundance, at least by the standards of those we mix with.

After many years, we have changed little. We no longer have the board game but, faced with it once more, would make the same choices all over again. As with board games, so with life! We don’t seem to have learned much over the years. Should we be sorry?

Colours of My Mind

Last weekend we went shopping for colours. I love colour. I always have. A black and white world would be a kind of hell. Colour is what it makes it live.

The colour we found at the weekend came in boxes: 36, 24, 12 colours in a box. We saw colour in tubes, too: fat, squashy tubes of vivid colours, waiting to be squeezed out like toothpaste, blended, merged, mixed, brushed, scraped, textured and slapped on the canvas in 101 tantalising shades. There were small packets of moulding clay in a variety of colours. They are bright and temptingly tactile. They look inviting. I am a child – I want to play!

I am jealous of the artist. I admit it. He sits there mixing, blending, stirring, absorbed in his art, applying personalised colour schemes to his personal creation, recreating life in glowing shades of colour. The results are bold, striking and immediate, jolting me into his personal view of life, showing me what he has seen. He is a lucky man. He has the tools for the job. With just four tubes of paint, he tells me, he can create any colour he needs. We have purchased them from the dark recesses of an artists’ paradise – a treasure trove of pastels and paint boxes, easels and canvases, oils and watercolours. They beckon to us, inviting exploration and experiment, indulging the artist’s own fantasies and dreams. We have chosen carefully: Burnt Umber (not Burnt Sienna), Cadmium Yellow (not Lemon), and a special kind of Crimson. Ultramarine has been discarded in favour of a deep Prussian Blue. It is important to get the details right. The rest will follow.

For me, too, detail is important. But I have no tubes, no boxes, no colour. Yes, there is colour in my imagination – my head is full of it; the brown/yellow/golds of autumn fill my head right now. Leaf shapes and leaf colours, earth textures and earth colour fill my daydreams. But I have only one tool. I can draw simple lines only with my pen. Words are my only medium and the words must tell my story of colour and shape, with textures and shades of meaning, moods and emotions. My words alone must tell the whole story, paint the whole picture, squeeze out the truth and apply it to the page in a multi-coloured spectrum rivalling the artist’s.

Language cannot be mixed in a palette, but careful choices must be made from a vast treasure store, as tantalising to me as the artists’ shops we have visited. My Word Store, as the Anglo-Saxons would have named it, is a huge chamber with dark recesses filled with treasure. It is only important to be accurate. I must learn to choose my words and phrases with infinite care.

Where language fails I must use my imagination, invent, embellish, like a James Joyce or an Edward Lear and add to my personal word store a Jabberwock, a gyre or a gimble. Where words fail me or laborious descriptions produce a ‘dead frog’, faithfully observed and accurately depicted, but lifeless, I will become an Impressionist. I will abandon detail for a while and try to evoke an impression, capture essence or express a feeling or mood. I will approach my subject from every angle and build my meaning layer upon layer like a Cubist. I will dissect my subject and reconstruct it, describing its multi-faceted being from a unique point of view and shedding new light on its objective reality. Braque and Picasso will be proud of me.

I will use my art to its best advantage and transfer the colours of my mind to the limits of the page. I will not be beaten! The artist has inspired in me fresh determination to push the boundaries of my own art. This little pen of mine will yet dispense the glories of the spectrum and pour forth a torrent of literary delights from the Aladdin’s cave of my word store, not that I wish in any sense to be competitive, you understand...

Bridge of Sighs

“One spade.” “Two hearts.” “Two no trumps.” Pause. “Three hearts.” Pause. “Why did you do that?” said the plump, rather soft-spoken woman to her partner. “Well, I couldn’t leave you in no trumps,” he protested.

The game proceeded with the usual hesitation, exclamations, groans and sighs until it was finally done and the little group around the table paused to do the inevitable post-mortem and drink their sherry.

Across the hotel lounge another couple sat in companionable silence in a secluded corner. The elderly woman under the reading lamp reached for her Word Search from the little table next to her and scrabbled in her handbag for a pen, whilst her husband dozed in the armchair opposite her, a half-empty cup of coffee beside him. “Don’t let your coffee get cold, Donald” murmured the woman, leaning across and nudging his knee so that he stirred, came to with a start and blinked, looking around him as if not sure where he was.

The scene took me back to thoughts of my parents and their habitual jaunts to the Scottish Highlands or the Lakes on a series of ’55-plusser’ coach holidays. On their return their tales would be full of wonderful rides through glorious scenery, games of bridge played in hotel lounges and early morning starts, after hurriedly packing their minimal luggage, Mum washing out the undies and her one pair of ‘slacks’ and hanging them to dry over the bedroom radiator ready for the next day’s adventure. There were innumerable stops at motorway services, queuing for the toilets during ‘comfort breaks’ and visits to touristic beauty spots, with never enough time to walk there from the coach before it was time to board again and be whisked off to the next stop. Mum walked with a stick and tried hard not to complain about the perpetual trouble she had with her feet. The holiday itineraries, designed by enthusiastic, able-bodied people, never seemed to take age or disabilities into account in their packed schedules. Still, they all did the best they could and the little company of fellow-travellers banded together to help one another out during their short sojourn together. “Dorothy’s just coming” one of them would say when they returned to the coach. “Don’t go without her.”

Whether the verdict was good or bad on their return from these short holidays – and they were often disappointed – they came home with new friends, new bridge partners and happy memories. Then followed little weekend breaks to look forward to, staying with ‘George and Doris from Worthing’, whom they met on the Yorkshire Dales trip, or Eileen and Frank, who sat at their table every night in the hotel dining room at Barnstaple.

Sitting in luxury in our armchairs in the Wentworth Hotel, we had entered their world and their generation and I began belatedly to gather a picture of what their lives must have been like during those last few precious years together. Sadly, my father’s last days were spent in one such hotel on a trip to Torquay. With some sense of the painful irony of the situation, I remember that they were there taking a little trip away to celebrate because he had just received the all-clear from the hospital where he had been undergoing treatment for lung cancer. However, the strain had clearly been too much and one peaceful afternoon, resting in their hotel room, he suffered a final heart attack and Mum, turning to ask him the answer to a crossword clue, as she so often did, discovered that she was alone and Stephen would never again provide the answers.

But they were good years. Those last few years of retirement were filled with leisure pursuits, new surroundings to explore, favourite ones to revisit and congenial company. Like all good coach trippers, they enjoyed their share of enthusiastic sightseeing, gossiping and complaining, wining and dining, sharing jokes with newfound friends and, of course, playing bridge…

The bridge party is over now. They are gathering up their belongings, uttering thanks and appreciation all round, making sure of the arrangements for next week’s repeat performance and shuffling off home. It matters little in the end who won. A good time was had by all.

Crossing the Line

A name, a face from the past - from my other life - or one of them! How can this be? I have buried that life in a box, hermetically sealed, a life that once belonged to someone else. I am a different person now. I exist in another world. I have 'moved on'. How then can this apparition return to haunt me from the life that was someone else's?

He is different too. Older, more stable, more solid, thickset. He has married - settled? Perhaps he has children. He was young and arrogant, disturbing, when I knew him before. Now, I don't know. We are from different worlds and I do not want to go back, to cross the line, to open up old wounds.

No, he was not a lover, not even a friend. He is merely a representative, a reminder, of that other existence, that other life that I lived and wish to live no more. He is simply the youngest son of my contemporaries who were once colleagues, almost friends. Now the friendship is no more because we no longer agree. We have drifted apart. They do not keep in touch; neither do we, but there is no animosity.

It is strange how life has evolved, but worrying to realise that I keep my life in compartments. Maybe we all do. The old life is sealed off to prevent 'contamination', seepage, to guard against negative thoughts, pain and a creeping self-doubt. I am a new woman now, but not without flaws. The makeover is incomplete and the past is a vista I cannot afford to dwell upon. Life must go on. The past is past.

A new morning has broken, but not quite like the first one. But I must press forward into the light lest something more should become broken and be lost in the shadows that threaten to emerge from that box. I must press on... Still, his sudden appearance from those shadows is disturbing.