Glimpsesofcolour

Right, nails have been painted purple. All I have to do now is find black lace-up boots (hope I didn’t throw them out), don black skirt and purple Victorian-style top, black dangly earrings, bracelet, necklace and ring, cover face with v. pale powder, do purple eyeshadow, black eyeliner, black mascara, and finally put on and adjust long black wig.

I am going to a costume party tonight. I am going to be a somewhat middle-aged Goth. Will have to go without glasses as the look just doesn’t work with them (can you be a Goth with glasses?), so I shall probably be a myopic astigmatic Goth as well. Son is a skeleton and The Grouch will wear a Frankenstein mask. It’ll have to do.

First, fall out of bed with difficulty, eat up porridge son left when he went to school, bath and dress as fast as you can manage. Look at watch and conclude you have 45 minutes to get to the hospital, which should be enough. Check A-Z one last time to make sure route is in your head, then forget to take it to car.

Drive along route as memorised – first bit fine. Manage unfamiliar left turn at familiar junction, start looking out for major right turn to hospital area, with snail-shaped junction (as portrayed on map). See no snail-shaped junction or right turn, eventually arrive at perfectly normal, non-snail-shaped junction with lights, right turn and sign indicating correct area but wrong road number. Decide to go straight on in case junction you want is further on.

Rapidly realize that you are in a shopping street you shouldn’t be in, and if you don’t turn off soon you will be up over a flyover and on the way to central London in completely the wrong direction. Take a left, discover it takes you back to the road you started your journey on, but heading back home. Start to cry and curse. It is now (apparently) 11.00 am which is your appointment time.

Calm down sufficiently to locate other A-Z in car, manage to find correct page while in queue, annoy other drivers by trying to consult it while edging forwards. Decide to take next left, then find the turning left lane is blocked by roadworks till the last 10 yards. Manage to turn left at last minute, consult map again.

Successfully find next left turn which promises to take you to a road which will take you to another road which will eventually take you to the hospital. Amazingly, it does. Come to end of this road without realizing it is the end, where you should have turned right and right again, instead of which you have got caught in a left lane. It is now well past your appointment time.

Manage to turn round in a side road, head in the right direction and up the road where the hospital is supposed to be. Go a long way up this road, over a roundabout which shouldn’t be there, and end up almost in an army base. Turn round again and head back the other way. It is now 25 minutes after your appointment time. Eventually find turning to hospital, next to the Tube station you failed to spot on the way up. There is no hospital name sign and no ‘H’ signs anywhere.

At some point in this whole farrago, switch from CD (which you have now heard all the way through) and to the radio. Hey – something’s wrong here – why is Woman’s Hour on after 11.00? Realise that the clock in your car has not been turned back, and that you are in fact *half an hour early* for your appointment! Must have looked at watch wrong on way out. D’oh!

At least the psychiatrist is sure you don’t have bipolar. Inability to read clocks disorder, now that’s a different matter…

Decide to take rest of day off, go to Brent Cross shopping centre and get new ‘best’ shoes and a new coat. Both very satisfactory. New brains unfortunately not available in M&S (it’ll come: ‘this is not just any high-quality brain, this is an M&S brain…’)

..what a day of quiet, with opportunity to pray, think, write, draw and sit in a ten-acre garden, can do for one’s general state of mind and spirit. I went to my Quiet Day yesterday and had loads of space to just be, to sit on a bench under a yew tree watching the gentle rain, hear Mrs Blackbird shirring her wings, watch a robin bouncing round on his invisible space hopper, and the squirrels scalloping the lawn.. I think I must be a nature mystic.

The raft of problems from filing piles to son’s homework, still remain, but I feel refreshed, restored and ready to start tackling life again. One of the tasks on the list is to apologize to therapist for failing to turn up on Friday (and failing to ring to tell her why). I have a feeling I will be saving the apology till next week’s appointment so I can use it as an intro to a declaration that I want to stop therapy. The relationship with this particular therapist just hasn’t worked, and it doesn’t seem to be doing me much good, even after nearly three years. That’s a lot of time and money!

Currently playing in my car, though not with much enjoyment from me, is ‘No Regrets: The Best of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers’ which I bought solely because of the title track (one of the best songs ever) and because I had a duplicate album*, which I’d bought by mistake, to exchange. Apart from No Regrets itself, it does also have ‘Jackie’, that wonderful Jacques Brel song, which is worth a second listen.

Anyway on perusing the not very informative sleeve notes the other day I was shocked to discover that not only were the Walker Brothers not brothers, but nor was any of them called Walker. In fact Scott Walker’s real name is Scott Engel, though he doesn’t look Jewish to me. Another cherished illusion shattered. Next they’ll be telling me the Beverley Sisters weren’t sisters…

*(‘Best of Captain Beefheart’, which proves my musical tastes are catholic, if nothing else)

Today everything is grey, there are no glimpses of colour. Have wasted the morning playing Solitaire and snapped at The Grouch. Feeling horribly envious of others, and as though nothing is going right in my life – which is patently untrue. That’s depression for you.

I have a Quiet Day on Saturday at the local study/retreat centre. Hopefully that will help.

I got the black wig at the fancy dress shop for £6 – haven’t opened it yet so I don’t know how good it is but I wasn’t prepared to pay £17.50 for a superior one which would require one being a Goth more regularly to make it worth while.

Also got some lovely earrings and a scarf, neither of which are black, from the vintage clothes shop nearby. Before that I had a lovely lunch with one friend in a very comfortable pub with sofas, and afterwards I had an equally lovely tea at the London Mennonite Centre with the lady who had been my ‘auntie’ at college, detailed to look after me when I was a fresher 35 years ago, and whom I haven’t seen for 21 years. She has no right to look so young, but she said I did as well, so that’s OK. Note to self: find some other words to replace ‘lovely’…

…of having a light box next to my desk, if I never remember to switch it on? Several days of glorious weather have seen me not bothering with it because I was getting enough light anyway, but today is grey and gloomy, and I definitely need that boost of artificial sunlight to help me through the SAD season. So that’s my excuse for sitting here instead of doing all sorts of useful stuff.

Why then have I spent all these sunny days indoors and now, the one day when I’m going out to see friends, the sun has hidden itself? Once again, a failure to ‘carpe diem’.

Oh well, one of my objectives today, as well as having lunch with a new friend and tea with an old one, is to get to the fancy dress hire shop and get myself a long black wig in order to be a Goth at a costume (not Halloween, please note, but costume) party next Wednesday. Which will be fun. My own hair is short and blonde (with a little help) so that wouldn’t exactly work. Now where are those black laced boots from last winter? I do hope I haven’t thrown them out. And then I have to devise costumes for son and hubby – it’s a hard life being a mother.

Have just learned that this week is apparently Energy Saving Week. That’s good – I’m certainly saving mine. Stayed in bed till 10.15 today..

In order to support fair trade and to ease congestion in my overflowing jewellery box, I ordered from Tear Fund an earring stand. It arrived the other day, and I duly assembled it by screwing the bits together. Basically it’s a kind of miniature cake stand, in what looks like olive wood, with a circular base and an upright column (nicely turned and finished with a sort of upside down plumb-shaped thing at the top – what’s the name for one of those?), which supports two further circular trays. Each of these is pierced around the edge with multiple tiny holes into which one inserts one’s earring hooks so that eventually, earrings hang down all round with a Christmas tree effect. It all looks rather attractive and it just accommodates all the open hook earrings I possess (the bottom tray is dished to take studs, but I’m leaving those in the jewellery box with the ‘closed-hook’ earrings – the sort where the hook is secured by a little latch bit).

Now here’s the really funny bit: on the top tray, there is an odd number of holes! In what circumstances, I ask myself, might one want to store half a pair of earrings? Hope springs eternal, of course, when one has lost a favourite earring – it’s always the favourite ones – and elects to keep the other in the vain imagination that its twin might eventually turn up. And indeed this very scenario happened in the summer, when I found my missing amber earring just when I’d bought a replacement pair, which I didn’t like, in Lithuania. But then, if one has been storing a widowed earring in that extra hole, what does one do when its pair does reappear?

It could of course be a provision for those with only one pierced ear, or indeed those unfortunates in possession of only one ear. But then there would be no point in the even number of holes on the lower tray, nor the catalogue’s boast that the item allows storage of 36 pairs of earrings (it doesn’t, it only stores 20 and a half pairs). I can only conclude that Tear Fund’s quality control is a little lacking in this case. But it made me laugh, anyway.

Yes, I know that’s a contradiction in terms, as ‘migraine’, from ‘hemi-cranial’. means a one-sided headache. But it’s the best description I can come up with for the headache I woke up with, and which I think has been building up for several days. It had that nauseous feeling that comes with a migraine, so I suppose I could just call it a sick headache. And it didn’t respond to homeopathic migraine tabs, which usually work, but did respond to paracetamol.

What was migraine-y, though, was the general feeling of being ‘out of it’ that came with it, a sort of all over weakness and spaced-out sensation; and the weirdly pleasant floaty feeling after the pain wore off. I remember that feeling from when I used to have weekly migraines.

Officially I don’t have migraines any more, since for the last few years I’ve been taking amitryptiline as a preventive (it’s officially an anti-depressant, or at least anti-anxiety drug, but is also used for nerve pain). However I do still have a chronic pain down one side of my neck, and perhaps it’s the osteopathy I’ve recently had for that, which has triggered this. It seems to be made worse by lying down, possibly because my lovely goosedown soft pillow is not really quite supportive enough. Today before church, our paid elder (nearest thing we have to a minister) was giving away pillows and cushions she didn’t need any more since getting married (not that her husband resembles a cushion, just that they’ve merged their stuff and have some surplus). I took a small square cushion in hopes that placed underneath my pillow, it would add the necessary height. But all it seems to have done is to make my cloud-light pillow harder.

The strangest thing of all is that after I’d had an early evening sleep and joined my family to watch Robin Hood (recorded last night), I had a strong feeling of re-entering my body and feeling all its sensations again, as though I had been on some sort of astral trip. Perhaps migraines, or double-sided ones, make you live so much in your head that all the rest gets forgotten. Pretty much the same thing that dualistic religion does, then…

PS I could blame the Hat of More Than Oriental Splendour for the headache, I suppose, but I won’t because the headache happened before I put it on.