shadows of echoes of memories of songs

Lorem adsum

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:33:00 GMT

Hi. I don't post much any more because I don't even know where to start and I don't know how anybody would hear it through all the noise.

Everything is deafening. The pressure of it on my ears is giving me the bends. Apparently not everybody has words clattering around in their heads all the time? Is that how they get things done? Does anybody still get things done?

I used to be able to pick words out of the noise and put them down on paper.

( There used to be a poem here )

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Looking back over my shoulder

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:57:14 GMT

I haven't posted here for years, I haven't done a 'year in review' for years, it's already nearly halfway through this year, I can't remember how to write anything any more, I don't even know if anybody reads this, but here we go:

( Questions, questions )

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It's a brain of two halves

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 22:05:14 GMT

So someone has made this game where you play Tetris and Snake at the same time with the same controls. It feels like this is both a) the thing I was unwittingly training for throughout the 1980s, and b) a metaphor for my life.

After a few minutes on it I managed to get as far as 8:12 (Tetris:Snake). It's much harder than it looks. But it also feels somehow familiar, and I eventually realised that that's because I spend an awful lot of my life with my brain in split-screen mode, listening to two loudly-delivered monologues, one in each ear, which scramble my brain on different frequencies. It goes something like this:

Channel 1: "I'm going to play with my magnets. I'm making a house! Housey housey house, housey house, house house house, look! I've made a number H for Hazel! A B C D E F G H I J K ELLAMENNOPEEEEEE Q R S T U V W X Y AND ZEEEEE NOW I KNOW MY A B C NEXT TIME WON'T YOU SING WITH ME mama DID YOU HEAR my alphabet song? IT'S SINGING TIME MAMA"

Channel 2: "Oh - mum, can I tell you something that happened at school? Mum, right, so, yesterday, I mean, it wasn't yesterday, but the bit I'm going to tell you is, but on Tuesday - I mean Monday - so at lunchtime, mum, Iris said - cos I was playing with Iris when it happened - I mean, it's not a bad thing - well a bit of it was bad but I wasn't doing that bit - so yesterday, right, mum..."

and occasionally I find myself literally unable to finish thinking the half-thought I've had in my head for half an hour, something like "what do I need to put on the shopping list", but I can't even work out why I'm having trouble concentrating because the noise is completely bypassing the actual conscious noise-processing bits of my brain and going straight into some kind of background process that slowly grinds the entire system to a halt, until suddenly it breaks through into the conscious & I realise that for the last 10 minutes Img has been trying to tell me something very important about her complex web of friendships, and H has been trying to tell me something very important about a picture of a dog, and I have to stop and tell them both I'm sorry I somehow haven't heard anything you've been saying for the last 10 minutes or managed to hear myself think.

It occurs to me that I do a split-brain thing to try to get myself to sleep sometimes as well, counting backwards from 100 to 1 while visualising the numbers in the other order. So 'saying' 100 in my head but 'seeing' the number 1, 'saying' 99 while 'seeing' the number 2, and so on. Like the thing where you try to pat your head & rub your tummy at the same time (which is easy) only both the head and the tummy are in your head. God knows what the people who say it's impossible to see pictures in your head would make of that.

It does absolutely drive me round the actual bend, though, the way Img orbits elliptically around the point of what she's saying, getting asymptotically closer to the inferred point of the thing, cocooning herself in a series of infinitely-nested parentheses. I don't know WHERE she gets it from hem hem.

On the other other other hand, mind you, this. I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

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Food intentions

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:12:47 GMT

I can't cope with writing a blog post a day. The days just run out too quickly & by the time they get near the end I'm too brain-tired to do anything except household chores. Yes I know I'm supposed to do it in the morning like my morning pages ahahahaha. I'll tell you about my morning routine some other time but let's just say there isn't much space in it for writing.

Anyway I've been trying to do stuff with food tonight. I got a 10p cauliflower & a 10p bag of new potatoes from the Co-op's reduced bin last week and was meaning to use them for something, & then I was away at the weekend & got tonsilitis & suddenly found I couldn't eat anything that wasn't basically a liquid. Yesterday there was only about a 2mm gap between my tonsils & I could hardly move my mouth because everything hurt, & there weren't any GP appointments for a week but the receptionist took about 15 minutes of rudeness and patronisingness to tell me this, so I took the kids to school/nursery, got home, had a bath, thought "I'll just have a lie down" & then slept (waking occasionally from weird & disturbing dreams which I fortunately forgot immediately) until 3pm, so basically forgot about food entirely until the evening at which point I tried to eat some tinned ravioli because that's quite slippery but I forgot that it's all grainy inside & the graininess got stuck on my tonsils & it was horrible. I did however accidentally invent an excellent drink: aiming for hot honey & lemon, realised I had no lemons, thought "what else is in this fridge", ended up with hot honey & garlic+ginger paste. IT IS EXCELLENT. It makes you smell of garlic but who cares. I was thinking well garlic is good for colds or something, and ginger is good for sickness, so it's all healthy stuff, & then I started feeling guilty about being so fucking stupid & went & looked up Cochrane Reviews on health benefits of garlic and ginger, expecting them to be all like "don't be so fucking stupid" and actually it was more like "eh, maybe" on garlic and "actually good for nausea, maybe good for other things" on ginger, so there we are.

This morning I felt more human & managed to eat some of the stuff from my Brexit stockpile: tinned rice pudding, tinned peaches, and a spoonful of malt extract (because I am either a) Tigger or b) from the 1950s). Felt much better. This evening I actually felt more or less normal but with a sore throat, but a throat with an ACTUAL GAP in it again, so had a baked potato with cheese & pineapple DON'T JUDGE ME, I have fond memories of baked potatoes with cheese & pineapple for £1.80 from the spud van in Loughborough town centre. I have now eaten all the rest of the tin of pineapple though, after realising it was best before some time in 2017 so I thought I'd better not keep it open long, & I'm not sure that was a good idea at all, because I think it has tried to eat my throat.

ANYWAY THOUGH, the 10p cauliflower. I thought I'd have a go at making it into some kind of cauliflower-based curry in the slow cooker, so googled for some likely recipes to follow a bit & ignore a bit, but when I went to the Co-op they didn't have half of the things that were listed, and what is red curry paste anyway? Not the Thai sort I think. So then I started googling for recipes for red curry paste, standing in the veg aisle going "sorry - sorry", and ended up buying some things that would hopefully help, and also some 10p leeks and some 10p corn-on-the-cobs, because really for 10p you might as well buy anything you're even remotely likely to eat because they'll only throw it away at the end of that night. Made something approximating a reddish curry paste based on three different recipes & a vague memory of how I used to do this 15 years ago, only that was Thai curry paste which is different, so who knows, really. It tasted OK anyway so let's see how it goes.

I used one of the 10p leeks instead of some of the onion I didn't have for the curry, & then chopped the rest up and froze it in the hope that you can freeze leeks, because by then I was so tired of googling uselessly for all the things I don't know, my search history is like

red curry paste recipe
red curry paste recipe -Thai
simple red curry paste recipe
even simpler than that red curry paste recipe
substitute for garam masala
can you use leeks instead of onions in curry
2 cups in grams
OK then 2 cups in ml
what the fuck is a cup anyway
29 ounces in grams
29 american ounces in grams
what is wrong with you people

and so on. My mum used to make leek & mushroom pie and it was lovely, maybe I'll have a go at that one day. I also sliced up all the green bits off the outside of the cauliflower & froze them because you can fry them up like winter greens with a bit of bacon & it's edible. I would freeze some bits of bacon too (bacon is always on BOGOF but I just don't use that much of it) but I'm getting to the point where I need another bloody freezer and there isn't room unless I get rid of the filing cabinet, which I don't really want but where else would all the stuff in it go?

The problem with food is the same as the problem with stuff, though. Between the internal(ised) voice saying "you've got to get rid of everything because you're a dreadful hoarder & everybody hates you & nobody could possibly live with you & your house is a tip & your children will die of germs from the filthy kitchen floor if they don't die of stuff falling on top of them first" and the other internal voice saying "you've got to store as much actually-useful and actually-edible stuff as you can because things are going to get harder & harder & more expensive & nobody is going to be there to look after you", I feel like I'm being ripped in two, giving stuff away with one hand & buying it with the other. I'm not sure there's a fix for this, though, I think this is just the two modes you have to oscillate between because capitalism.

Time for a mug of Bovril & a bath. Got to go back to work tomorrow.

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Let them eat fishcakes

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 23:29:21 GMT

Went into the Co-op at lunchtime to see if they had hot dog buns (because my mum had bought me a pack of posh veggie hot dogs for the kids & I wanted to do them for kids' tea tonight because they're very very quick & we only have half an hour at most between getting home & having to go out again on Mondays) and came out with an amazing haul of bargains from the nearly-gone bin:

Pack of 6 finger rolls - 19p. What I went in for, at about a quarter of the expected price!

Pack of 2 fishcakes - 69p. That'll be my dinner then, with various bits of leftover veg.

Pack of 2 strawberry trifles - 80p. Treat for the kids (H doesn't like jelly though, so I get the jelly out of hers).

Pack of 5 cinnamon bagels - 31p. Breakfasts for me for the rest of the week.

Pack of 8 soft bread rolls - 10p. Bread pudding, or bread-and-butter pudding, or freeze for later, or some combination of the above.

2 x Pack of 2 giant crumpets - 10p each. They'll be dinner tomorrow with cheese & a fried egg on top.

This came to £2.29 before my NUS Extra discount which brought it down to £2.07. (I paid for the NUS card -- £32 for 3 years but it was worth it for the 10% off the Co-op. It seems to be a university thing but I don't think it's specific to Oxford.)

£2.29 is, in a meaningless coincidence, the price of a bag of Babybels.

I don't often buy them any more. Turns out the kids are just as happy with a slice of whatever cheese we have in, which is usually plainest mousetrap Cheddar, or Red Leicester, or Brie. Cheese has got all expensive hasn't it? I don't think it's anything to do with Brexit because they're all English cheese (Somerset Brie seems to be cheaper than French).

Anyway it turns out that all the cheap bread was best before yesterday, except the 8 bread rolls which were best before two days ago. I didn't think you were allowed to do that. Or is it only use-by dates that matter for selling stuff? But bagels etc are clearly fine the day after their best-before dates, particularly if you're going to toast them, and it can all go in one of the freezers if there's room. (I have two freezers: the big one as part of the big posh fridge-freezer that we bought when we had money & were still playing at being a real family house; and the under-counter one with the broken drawer which I bought off Gumtree for a tenner and cycled home with, once there was nobody to tell me that I was a hoarder for wanting to have food in the house.)

I was expecting to get loads of cheap and/or thrown-away pumpkins after Hallowe'en which I could roast & eat, or roast & make into soup, or try making into chutney (not that I really need more chutney after the summer's apple glut) but I didn't get any in the end, just the little one my mum bought for Img to carve. Roasted that & put it in some pasta at H's request, though once I'd made it she flatly refused to eat it, & Img ate a tiny bit & then said she didn't like it. So I ate quite a bit of the pumpkin pasta yesterday, & a load more for lunch today, & there's some left for lunch tomorrow, & there's another tupperware full of pumpkin in the fridge, & I roasted the seeds & they make quite a good snack, so maybe I didn't need lots more pumpkins after all.

There's no moral to any of this, I'm just wittering about food. The fishcakes were really quite tasty though.

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Through a glass

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 23:33:46 GMT

I've run out of time to write something specific for today, so have a bit of a thing I wrote a while ago:

* * *

How much juice do I pour into a glass for the kids? It suddenly seems vitally important to know how full the glass should be. How full were the glasses when I was a child? Different glasses, different juices. It was different at other people’s houses, it always is. Our everyday drinks glasses were short and squat and satisfying to hold, saved-up-for with green shield stamps, but there were also the tall glasses for special occasions, what I now suspect would be called hi-ball tumblers, but then were just unspokenly for best, or for grown up drinks, not for apple juice but for lemonade. But for every glass, everyday glasses or best glasses, there was a place to which they would be filled, and more than that would be considered greedy unless you were using up the last bit of a carton and it would have been silly to put it back in, and less than that would be considered mean. And I suddenly don’t know where the right point is on my own glasses, the 1970s ones I bought for 50p each from the hardware shop that surely can’t survive much longer with its cardboard drawers full of screws. My glasses and cups and plates are all things I have acquired, not things I have grown up with and lived with, and I don’t know how they work. Will the kids think they haven’t got enough mango juice? Will they think they’ve got too much, and worry that they can’t finish it? Things have not yet found their place in my life. When I go back to my parents’ house I use the for best glasses, because I'm an adult now, or else I drink coffee in the little brown cups we never used to use at all; the squat everyday glasses look dishwasher-scoured and sad and I can’t remember where you’re supposed to fill them to, and it matters, it matters.

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Time, flies

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 23:12:19 GMT

Now that the house is freezing, I'm finally free of fruit flies. All summer the kitchen and dining room were plagued with them; every time I put a piece of food down it would be swarming with tiny winged specks within seconds. Opening the food waste bin released a cloud of them. I sealed everything in tupperwares, in bags, under lids and cloths and tinfoil and cling film, and nothing succeeded in keeping them out. Too tiny for visible flight, they merely scattered themselves from nowhere to everywhere, sown like the seeds of failure.

Part of the reason the house is freezing is that I have to leave the windows open a crack otherwise everything goes mouldy. Clothes at the bottom of drawers smell mildewy; I daren't look behind furniture that's close to outside walls. The bathroom was stained black with mould until the walls were stripped back and repainted with mould-free paint; how many more unrotten days has that bought me? The hours are breathing hotly on the glass, the walls are silently weeping.

If I could successfully keep out the flies and the mould, what other decay would creep in? What other things would seep through the cracks and pile up in damp and crawling heaps to remind me that entropy always wins?

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White rabbits

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 03:11:57 GMT

Somehow it's November, which probably means it's time to admit that I am not going to get round to making any New Year's Resolutions this year.

It also means it's NaBloPoMo, which I thought wasn't actually a thing, but now that everything is a thing, it turns out it is a thing. Truly this is the Age of Thing. Or rather, since the damn thing is as old as lolcats and Twitter (I still remember my first lolcat, it was a PDF of images shared by email, also Twitter on dumbphones, 140 characters using only thumbs, jumpers for goalposts, isn't it, eh) we are probably now in the Age of Post-Thing, which means I should get on with it & post this thing before you all lose patience with me.

So anyway, what this means is that I am going to try to write something here every day this month. Much of it will probably only be of interest to me, if that (I am getting so boring in my old age that I even bore myself), but if you can think of a thing you'd like me to write about, or a question you'd like me to answer -- even one of those dopey memes that used to do the rounds on LiveJournal back in the dark ages -- then shout now. I need to get back into the habit of writing something. Even something about nothing.

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Late junctions

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 21:33:17 GMT

By the time I get time to write anything I've forgotten all the things I want to write, or else they've become mere retellings of dreams, in which all last night's luminousness has faded into flatness.

I get the kids to sleep, and I do all the chores that absolutely need doing -- the putting/throwing away of food-related things that will go off otherwise, the loading of dishwasher & washing-machine, the packing of school bags for the next day, and the bare minimum of tidying to stop me going actually insane -- and by then the sentence has run on so long I've forgotten where it started and what I was doing, and eventually I go to sleep.

The next day I remember that I was going to do something.

There were things I was going to do. Things I was going to write. I had things to say. I don't have things to say any more. All roads lead to the road not taken.

H will be 3 next Friday and it just terrifies me that all this nothingness is her actual childhood, the thing she'll remember, this thing, this absence of a thing, that's barely even memorable while it's happening. My life is scrolling past behind soundproof glass and I have no idea what the kids are hearing.

What was I going to do tonight? Eventually and intermittently sleep, I suppose?

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Stand in the place where you are

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 21:56:53 GMT

It's probably about time I did a general update. Is it? I don't even know if anybody reads this. I started writing it 6 months ago and ground to a halt. I feel there's now too much backlog of backstory to start talking about anything. Maybe the answer is to forget it all.

The community I felt I had on LJ has gone, and maybe that community was more to do with the ages & stages of our lives than it was to do with the technology or the platform, and yet... I miss LJ, even though people are still over there. I miss IRC, even though I'm still on it occasionally. I miss usenet, even though it still exists. Those places aren't my places any more, and I don't have a new place to take its place. Twitter is still a thing, but it's horribly changed from the days when I signed up so I could text a group of people at Glastonbury.

So where am I? I'm still in the house I moved to in 2009, but not with any of the same people. These days it's just me plus Img (age 8) and H (age 2.5). How can Baby H possibly be 2 already? But here we are, she's walking and talking and thinking and singing and making jokes and counting and showing signs of starting to read (definitely recognising letters, possibly recognising words). This morning she told me we don't have wings. She's not wrong. Meanwhile Img is generally buried in a book or rolling her eyes at me. "It's MY CHOICE how I live my life!" she yelled at me the other day, week, month. (Eye)roll on the teenage years.

I have two lovely boyfriends, who we'll call A and D, but one of them is not out as poly, and the relationship with him is Complicated for Reasons, so that's ... interesting. I don't really know how to talk about relationships any more. I don't feel I'm doing very well at being there for anybody, including myself.

There is too much to do. There is ALWAYS too much to do. Someone said, ages ago now, "I don't know how you manage to do everything on your own!" and the short answer is: I don't. I don't miss having someone to help actually doing stuff around the house, because a) the Lovely Boyfriends do help when they're around, so b) the small amount of help lost is probably outweighed by help gained, and c) even if it wasn't, it would be TOTALLY outweighed by the sanity gained in the lack of obstruction and gaslighting and telling me I'm useless. I would miss having someone to help with the project-managing side of life admin, the deciding what to do rather than the doing it, except ... I don't remember ever having that? So it's hard to miss it. What I really want is to live in a commune of like-minded people and share things and concentrate on the things I'm good at. But all the people I know who share that desire are married to people who don't share it, and Being Married is more important than living your best life.

I feel like I'm not explaining any of this stuff properly.

H still doesn't sleep through the night. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a luxury. I can't function without caffeine, not in a jokey "instant human being - just add coffee!!!1" kind of way but in an "I am 100% dependent on this drug and I suspect it is slowly killing me" kind of way.

I miss the friends who have gone. Every day. Every single day.

Is this all there is?

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Weighting

Mon, 15 May 2017 20:26:58 GMT

A dropped stitch will gather dust.

I am left undone.

Alone I can put out my light,
can lighten my darkness. I must.

No matter how many days I wait
nobody will move this stone.

Mine are the only footprints,
every misstep is my own,

it turns out you never carried me
and now you are gone

I am the light
one

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Over, here

Mon, 15 May 2017 18:19:26 GMT

I think I've successfully imported my LiveJournal here. It's all still in boxes and I don't know if everything survived the move and maybe eventually I'll unpack it and put things where they should be, or maybe I'll just leave it where it is and wonder occasionally why I ever thought any of it mattered.

I didn't plan this move. The writing has been on the wall for some time (by which I don't mean everybody moved to Facebook instead), but I hung on far longer than sensible until the Terms & Conditions suddenly became actually untenable. Sometimes it feels as though everything in my life is merely a clumsy metaphor for something else.

I don't have a Plan for doing something Different with this journal. Life won't wait while I sit around trying to think of a way to reinvent myself.

Is anybody even reading this? Does anybody want a recap of the story so far, or at least the latest significant plot points? Or shall we all just keep on keeping on?

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