I did something new and for the first time today. I entered a writing competition and felt a surge of tingly energy and a rush of something good after hitting send on the email. Entering big things makes me feel small though.
Sometimes microscopic. I’ve noticed this before and in other creative spaces I’ve put myself into; how quick I can be to mute my own excitement, to deflate my own tyres and run myself into the ditch before the wheels are even turning. It’s an old strategy and I wish it would leave me be though know it’s trying to keep a younger, smaller me safe.
But entering things like this competition also makes me fizz and want to sing and trill like this skylark up in the tussocky grasses of The Downs too. Feeling wide-open with joy and possibility, in a playful and vital way. Because I’ve made something and that feels really good.
Waiting until the final day for entry submissions was cutting it fine. She coughs, that’ll be another familiar strategy there to recognise, sure enough. Conditions were certainly not favourable today either. A string of pressing problems and priorities tugged at my marionette strings to lure me off and away from the keyboard like an old Pelham puppet, legs tangling over each other and arms in a twist. But I held fast to the chair, stayed put just long enough.
Stayed put and seated long enough for calf muscles to start to sting and tingle under the desk. As I read through the final sentences, my ears also itched and the skin at the nape of my neck crawled making shoulders hunch up and squeeze shivers down to my shins. The writing wasn’t the cause of this; I was hearing the to and fro scuttle of an impostor overhead in the ceiling space. And feeling revulsion.
It wasn’t a giant word count, but still, it took a long, solid session of sit and focus. My eyes can’t always manage the protracted perma stare and panning across wide Mac whiteness and letters.
Only one of them - the eyes - has ever properly focused my entire life long. I never thought so much about this until the other eye - the good and dependably functioning eye - began to decline midway through my forties.
I’ve a congenital cataract in the right one and this blurs everything and lets in way too much light so I can’t read text at all. Giant billboards at a push. When concentrating at a screen, there can be a sensation of urging the not quite able eye to move, move, move to the right and just get out of the damn way. I sense my brain wanting one eye to shunt the other. I sometimes wear an eyepatch at home to stop the glare.
Steeping myself in strength five coffee has made the day shake. The anxiety and ‘the palps’ peaked around one in the afternoon. It was difficult to work out how much of this anxious thinking and twitchy mouth was glossy brown and bean-shaped and which part was the giant adult-sized guesses, risks and uncertainties I need to force my juddery brain to calculate this summer. And everything large other than mountains scares me now.
Large rats included. The idea of rodent imposters rattling through the ceiling space and under the kick boards of the kitchen disgusts me, makes me clean counters, cupboards and vinyl floors frantically and look around for shame in all directions. I think there are also rats running amok in my mind right now, as well as actual pink-tailed scavengers physically mapping their mayhem around our home.
Rodent impostors in the between spaces of my mind, ruminating, nibbling away at my self belief and shredding strips from my confidence blanket to nest themselves in.
We went to the cinema on Saturday night. It’s had a complete refurb and is even blacker in the foyer now than before. All this extra darkness seems to have made the ‘small’ cups grow even bigger. Perhaps they’re made from mycelium? And swanky wipeable recliner seats as big as beds - more black again - open out to lift limbs up into adventurous, acclimatised air. I did kind of like the seats.
We went to watch The Goonies 40th anniversary edition screening. It’s a coming of age 80’s Spielberg adventure in case you’ve somehow missed Chunk, Data and One-eyed Willie (we’re not related, though I do envy his bejewelled patch). A gang of curious kids on bikes from the poor side of town, a Pacific west coast industrial town with picket fences, clapboard porches and some suitably wild weather to storytell the quest. They discover a galleon hidden intact in a cave for centuries and with a huge bounty of pirate treasure. All glittering gold doubloons and an abundance of precious stones.
I’ve possibly watched this film with its superb soundtrack as many times as I’ve spent years on this earth. We even once made a family pilgrimage to Mikey’s house on the hillside and to the impossibly imposing Cannon Beach where the kids skimboarded. I’ve no photos from this monumental family adventure though; soon after leaving the Goon docks in Astoria we drove to Seattle and the hire car was broken into and my camera stolen whilst I was schlepping everyone up The Space Needle. They were having a heatwave in Oregon at the time and I remember feeling sweaty furious at this loss.
Big sums of anything scare me now; sums of money, piles of clothes, volumes of food, pronouncements of love. I leaned into these before, these big things. Created space for behemoths like a large family with many mouths and legs and arms that morph and move in different directions. Large things demand a lot of care and love and consideration.
Back then I don’t remember any qualms and the commitments made were massive. I’ve one big decision to make this summer and it’s scaring the Bejeezus out of me in its very permanence. I’ve to sort a permanent home.
For thirteen years I’ve muddled and made a home under the roof of someone else’s house. I do want to splash paint on a wall and bury bulbs in a garden but to say aloud the words ‘get on the property ladder’ is terrifying because even the name sounds treacherous. A ladder takes you up to somewhere you can’t stay for too long and is something you can have the most atrocious fall from if it’s not held steady at the base.
Clover Stroud is hosting a write with me from a far away place this week. A place I’ve been to and spent time and with as many children. Back then, amidst travelling to slide boards across a Goonies beach and dodge cactus prickles in Texas, I chose to rise and run miles not rise to write lines, to join myself into some sense of communion with the landscape and love around me.
Today I’m doing both. There’s another giant thing ongoing this summer. Another behemoth decision which looms like a towering mountain on the horizon. Multiple ladders are propped against the bulk of this one to make the ascent possible and I’m grateful not to be climbing it alone.
I’ve run up to the top of the Downs and the whole lump of land is alive with an electric bird noise. Of skylarks trilling in the tussocky grass. It’s a giant stubbly knee of land and scuffed dry like my own. It’s peaceful and playful up here with the birds and away from the bigness of decisions left down below.
I found this poem about skylarks and saw that it was written by a man who lived a long time ago, acclaimed by Oscar Wilde but not. someone I’d heard of before. And it was funny to read then, after filming the trilling of this tiny bird on a scrubby hilltop overlooking the Solent, Isle of Wight and Portsmouth that the author was born in the very same town.
The Lark Ascending, George Meredith
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.
Have you ever had the misfortune of a rat in the kitchen? What am I s’posed to do? Yes, I know that song too. I have a dog and a vulnerable young adult at home and don’t want to lay poison down for fear of well, causing harm to the living things I love. There’s never a good time for vermin and yet now is so not a good time.
