Category: writing

Arthralgia

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While I was on holiday, something a bit odd happened. A couple of times, for no particular reason, I found myself wishing that I’d taken my walking stick with me, because out of nowhere I was suddenly too exhausted to walk without it. When I got home I seemed to be better, and managed a normal day at work last Friday. Then I woke up on Saturday morning unable to walk without a stick again, and with pain in every joint of my body.

On Monday I shuffled over to see my doctor, where the magic word of the day was ARTHRALGIA. This means that there’s pain in all my joints. Which I knew already, thanks. I’ve had blood tests done, looking at thyroid function and inflammation markers, and they’ll come back next week. Every time I’ve had those tests done before they’ve come back within “normal” limits, so I have no doubt that these will be the same. All my doctor could say was, “maybe it’ll go away”.

Well, maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll be fine for months, and then one day I won’t be able to get out of bed because of the pain.

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The trouble with pain is that, like depression (from which I also suffer), it’s invisible. Unless you’re openly weeping, or covered in gaping wounds, the general assumption is that you’re fine. I mean, you look fine, so how bad can it be?

Well, the trouble with pain is that it varies. One day you might be able to go to work as normal, the next you might not be able to get out of bed. It’s also subjective. A pain that might cause one person to merely sigh and reach for the paracetamol might leave another person bedridden. All of which makes it very difficult to explain that yes, I may have been fine yesterday, and I may look fine, but today I just can’t make my body work.

This is why I don’t have a full-time job. Even though I look fine, I’m just not well enough to travel to another place and stand up and talk to people for forty hours a week. At least working part time, I can try and make sure that I get enough rest while I’m at home, so that I can get through my working days without hurting myself. The difficulty comes when I’m ill on the days when I am supposed to work.

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Obviously everybody sometimes has time off because of illness, but if it’s just everyday things like coughs and colds, it tends to be just a couple of days here and there. Maybe a week. In fact I only took a week off work after my last hip operation! But I might find that this current bout of pain lasts for another week, or a month, or six months, or who knows how long. And taking lots of time off work because of a mystery illness, when you look fine, and can often do other, gentler, things when you’re at home, leads to resentment from the people who have to cover for you at work, disciplinary action if you’re perceived to be taking too much time off, loss of trust if you suddenly become unreliable, and all sorts of other unpleasant things. I’ve lost count of the number of jobs I’ve resigned from, having been told that I’d taken too much time off sick, and having been made to feel no longer welcome as a result.

Of course, it’s easy to understand that no employer wants to be constantly having to find cover for an employee that’s hardly ever there. Employers need employees who are physically and mentally capable of doing the work set out for them, and they have every right to expect that. But where does that leave me? I am capable of doing the work… but not all the time. I’m reliable and hard-working… when I’m well. And unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict when I’m going to be ill, or how long the illness might last.

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I’ve been really lucky during this past year, in that my most recent surgery has left my health very much improved, and I’ve been able to find and keep a job that I’m really enjoying. But if this current development doesn’t pass quickly, I don’t know how things will work out. Like so many people in my line of work, I’m employed on a temporary contract, and my employers would be well within their rights to replace me if I’m no longer able to do the work that they need me to do. Even freelance work isn’t any better, because I might be simply unable to guarantee that I’ll be well enough to work on the appointed day.

Recently I’ve been applying for traineeships and internships and looking at professional qualifications that might enable me to build on this new career that I’m enjoying so much. But if I’m not going to be well enough to actually go to work, then what on earth’s the point? I can get myself as many qualifications as I like, but if the state of my health won’t allow me to get out of bed then it’s nothing more than a vanity exercise, not to mention the most enormous waste of time and money.

Perhaps the pain will pass in the next couple of days. By the time the blood test results come through, I could well be completely fine again. But if I’m not? Who knows how long the pain will last, or what I’ll be able to manage. Perhaps it’s time to re-think some of my plans.

(Why the doll pictures? Sitting in bed and needle-felting her hair was about the most strenuous activity I could manage today, and I still hurt my hands doing it. But being able to make something, or accomplish one small, simple task, even when I’m ill, helps to reassure me that I can still achieve something.)

Geek? Moi?

TARDIS & R2D2

Internet, meet R2D2. He’s 35 years old, which in fact makes him one year older than my husband, who found him in the attic.

I used to have this very model of R2D2, many years ago. Sadly, the original R2 was lost when a friend’s neighbour’s Jack Russell chewed him beyond repair. I’d complained about his sad demise so often that when Paul uncovered this little fellow stashed away in a box, he decided to give him to me.

Altogether now: Awwwwwww!

(Seriously. You know it’s true love when a man in his thirties gives you a gift of one of his own original Star Wars figures.)

So here he is, on my desk, guarding my TARDIS. Which is a USB hub. It makes the sound of the TARDIS when you plug in a USB drive. (Yes, you can turn the sound off.) Admittedly I stole that from Paul when I got tired of having to grovel about behind the computer to plug things in, I didn’t go looking specifically for the geekiest USB hub I could possibly find. (And I’m fairly certain somebody out there can tell me that this isn’t it!)

But while I don’t tend to display my geekiness as much as some of my friends, I’ll admit it here and now:

I’m a Star Wars fan.
(Episodes IV to VI, obviously, plus the surprisingly good Clone Wars cartoons.)

And a Doctor Who fan.
(Tom Baker, plus everything that Steven Moffat wrote for Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Oh, and The Doctor’s Wife, of course.)

I’m a Pratchett fan, and a Gaiman fan, and a Sherlock fan, and a Prisoner fan, and a Lost Boys, Labyrinth, Bladerunner fan.

When I was little, I used to go round to a schoolfriend’s house. Not to play with her, but to hang out with her younger brother who had an AT-AT. Awesome. When I was at art college, my boyfriend at the time also had an enormous collection of Star Wars stuff, including a cardboard Death Star set. We used to spend hours lying on the floor in the dining room, making the trash compactor work, or making stormtroopers walk into doors. As you do. When you’re nineteen. It turns out that when you’re late getting home because you lost track of the time, it’s incredibly difficult to get your parents to believe that’s what you were doing! He also took me to see Bladerunner when the Director’s Cut came out. We came home from the cinema and immediately watched the original version on video, which confused the living daylights out of me.

Labyrinth is definitely my comfort film, and no, not just because of David Bowie’s remarkable trousers. It’s because of the details. Most notably the bottles of milk that I spotted when my Dad took my sister and I to see the film at the cinema, and which Paul insists that I’ve imagined! (You see them when Sarah enters Jareth’s castle. They’re to the left of the door, although they’re probably cut off unless you’re watching the widescreen version.)

Good Omens and Wyrd Sisters are my comfort books, the ones I’ll always take with me if I’m going on holiday or into hospital, and the only two that I’ve read so many times that I’ve had to buy new copies because the original paperbacks dropped to bits. Oh, I tell a lie. I read my Dad’s copy of Hitchhikers until that fell apart. Sorry Dad…

I don’t buy (much) merchandise, or write fan fiction, or make clever gifs for tumblr, or spend time analysing plots and possibilities. So perhaps I’m not a geek at all, and my liking of these things is simply to do with my age, in that these films, books and television shows were the primary cultural phenomena when I was growing up. Although I know that my sister’s never seen Star Wars, hasn’t read Pratchett, and almost certainly doesn’t have an R2D2 and a TARDIS on her desk.

So yes. Perhaps it’s time to admit that I am just a little bit of a geek after all. Although I’m guessing that doesn’t really come as a surprise!

Wordless Wednesday: Only Eight Who Do.

Supermodels

A Couple of Thoughts

I’m with Amelia. Don’t be misled by her statement that personal adornment should be of secondary importance – it in no way means that we shouldn’t strive to look and feel beautiful in what we choose to wear. But for me, at least, it’s time to be comfortable. No more synthetic fibres, constricting waistbands or crippling shoes. I want, and need, my clothing to allow me to be healthy, comfortable and useful. My tiny revolution starts here.

Obvious, when you think about it, but something that’s sadly overlooked. We’re so divorced from the understanding of how our clothes are made that the cost of the cloth itself in human terms is barely even considered. We go shopping not because of need, but to make ourselves feel better. A different kind of need, but one that we’re so often looking to fulfill in all the wrong ways.

I’ve been looking at blogs such as No Pants 2011, The Uniform Project, the Brown Dress Project and Wardrobe Refashion, but they were all fixed-term projects that have now come to an end. I’ll be writing more about what I actually want to do in terms of changing my own approach to the way I shop and dress, once I’ve thought it through in more practical terms. But I definitely want to make changes that I can stick to in the long run, in terms of what I choose to buy and what I decide to make.

I don’t want to be boring or preachy or holier-than-thou about any of this, and I certainly don’t want to go around wearing ugly clothes simply because they’re comfortable. (You will NEVER catch me in fleecy boots and tracksuit bottoms!) But I can definitely work on not buying things to cheer myself up, and I can try to design and make some pretty-but-comfortable clothes from recycled or more sustainable fabrics. That seems like a good place to start.

Doctor Who meets Helena Bonham Carter.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this was one of my Christmas presents this year. A box set of all eleven Doctor Who figures. They were held into their TARDIS-shaped box (it had doors! with velcro!) with forty-four little twisty ties, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate the little Doctors as I was wrestling them out of the plastic.

As a general principle, I think bow ties are cool. We were watching some Sylvester McCoy episodes yesterday, and I genuinely contemplated knitting a fair-isle tank top with a punctuation motif. I like long scarves and big coats and funny hats.

And then I thought of someone else who likes long scarves and big coats and funny hats. And wearing things in lots of layers, and generally looking a little bit crumpled.

My fashion inspiration for 2012?

Doctor Who meets Helena Bonham Carter.

With the somewhat eclectic contents of my wardrobe, that should be pretty easy. Watch this space for pictures, if I manage to make it work…

For the young who want to

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy, Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (1982)

I have a problem.

Dear Internet, I have a confession to make.

My name’s Claire, and I have an uncontrollable addiction to diaries.

At the end of 2010 I bought a small, slim 2011 diary from WHSmith. It had a week to view, with a page for notes facing each week. Small enough to go in my handbag, plenty of room to write. Perfect. Yet within a couple of weeks I’d bought an A5 sketchbook and a packet of sticky squares. I pulled all the pages out of the diary, and stuck each one onto a double page spread of the sketchbook. Much nicer! Still a little organised weekly diary space, but much more room to write and draw and doodle. And much nicer paper to do it on. I stuck to that one for several months, using it as a scrapbook as well as a diary. I glued in flyers and tickets from events I’d attended, wrote shopping lists and drew designs for lingerie.

And then it started to look a bit full, and the cover started to split, and it wouldn’t stay closed, and it looked a bit scruffy. It was much too fat to fit easily into my handbag, and I fell out of love with it. Decided that tidiness was the order of the day, and replaced it (in about July) with an 18-month Moleskine. No doodling in this one, at least not in pen, as the paper’s too thin. But the book itself is nice and smart, with a notes page against each week so there’s plenty of room to write. Except it does than annoying thing of squishing up the weekend days into half a space… and in September I got a weekend job, which meant squeezing a lot of writing into a very small space.

The two diaries shown above, I bought yesterday. The top one’s another Moleskine, this time a brand new teeny-tiny one. (I may have also bought a matching address book and a couple of teeny-tiny notebooks to go with it. As you do.) It has a day to a page, so plenty of room to write even though it’s such a little book, and it doesn’t squash up the weekends when I have a lot to fit in. There’s deliberately no room for notes and tickets and doodles – this is just for keeping a track of what I’m doing and when I’m doing it.

The other one‘s more of a journal I suppose, and I have to admit that I feel faintly embarrassed about showing it to you. Every year those calendar stalls appear in shopping centres, every year I look at the Llewellyn calendars and diaries, and every year I walk away without buying one. Sometimes friends buy me calendars about witchcraft or spiritual inspiration, and I keep those long after the years have passed because the illustrations are so beautiful. (I got rid of all my books on witchcraft a few years ago, although I see them occasionally in Oxfam and toy with the idea of buying them back again.)

I followed The Artist’s Way for a while but couldn’t keep up with the Morning Pages, despite buying a special book in which to write them. A relative bought me a lovely Wellness Journal, but the categories don’t quite fit the things my doctors want me to track. I bought a lovely hardback notebook to write down my tarot readings, but I’ve managed to get out of the habit of making time for readings at all. I’m hoping that this new book will help me to keep track of all these things in one space. It has dedicated pages for tarot readings, monthly and weekly calendars, places to write down goals and plans (which is something I think about all the time), and lots of space for writing and scrapbooking and hopefully clearing out the contents of my brain a little. I don’t think of myself as a particularly spiritual person, which is why I find talking about this slightly embarrassing, but I do find that the more carefully I think about what I actually need and want (as opposed to what I think I ought to need and want, if you understand the difference), the better able I am to cope with life. And writing things down has always helped me with that.

I also have a sort of a theory that once I’ve discovered the mythical perfect diary, my life will miraculously become so organised and uncomplicated that I’ll wonder how I ever managed without it. This explains why I have two beautiful leather Filofax binders (one much too big, one much too small), because I thought the ability to customise was what I needed. Apparently it wasn’t. And it’s why I buy a new diary at least every six months, because it invariably turns out that there’s something dreadfully wrong with the one that I thought was absolutely perfect at the time.

So, here are next year’s new diaries. Let’s see how long they last.

Wild Boy’s Ball

So, at long last, here is the completed stripy/steampunk outfit!

Paul and I went to the Wild Boy’s Ball at Kensington Palace, and had an absolutely magical evening. You can see all the photos that Paul took, over on Flickr.

We started off by going inside the palace itself, which was actually quite different from the last time I went. They’d repainted the entrance staircase, and changed quite a few of the rooms and installations. The giant dolls were gone, which was a shame, but they were allowing photographs (without flash) inside this time, which was brilliant. Perhaps the most enchanting but also the most creepy things were the new light installations by artist Chris Levine. At first glance they just look like a tower of flickering lights, but when you turn away from them you see people in your peripheral vision! (Sadly they gave Paul a terrible headache and made his eyes twitch.) I sat in the knitted throne, and was bowed-to by two of the Wildworks cast – who went on to give me a knitted orb and sceptre to hold until I made a wish!

When we came out we saw a show by The Gaiety Engine, which was hilarious. We also walked around the sunken gardens, which had been transformed with hundreds of red baubles hanging from the arches. Each bauble contained a piece of artwork or a secret written down by a member of the public. There may have been a certain amount of posing for photos… and as we were walking back, the official event photographer asked me if I’d mind posing for him, which was exciting – that’s never happened to me before! I suspect it’s just because I was conveniently wearing the right colour of dress, but he took some lovely pictures. Shame I didn’t think to give him my email address so I could get copies. You can see the whole set on Kensington Palace’s Facebook page.

I wanted to do the craft activities, so I made a pretty paper rose. (Like this, only bigger.) I didn’t make a lantern because there was a massive queue, but I rather cheekily brought all the lantern-making materials home with me, so I can make one anyway. Photos to follow when I’ve glued it all together and found a tea-light to pop inside. It’s very pretty.

There were supposed to be some people giving period dancing lessons and seduction tips, but we didn’t see them – although there was a small group of people in period costume, so it might have been them. At the end of the night there was dancing in front of the Orangery, run by The Last Tuesday Society. Every single piece of music was a waltz, and I tried very hard to teach Paul how to dance, but sadly he couldn’t get the hang of it. Which was a shame, because I could quite happily have waltzed for an hour, if I’d had somebody to waltz with. Paul and I did dance a bit, but it wasn’t waltzing by any stretch of the imagination!

smocks galore!

Smocking

How exciting – I’m in a magazine!

The magazine in question is a brand-new digital publication by Kate Davies, whose blog I’ve been following and whose knitting patterns I’ve been queueing for some time. So you can imagine how excited I was when she asked me whether I’d be willing to talk about smocking, and what I learned from the collection at the Museum of English Rural Life.

Issue 1 of Textisles is available as a Ravelry download, as it also includes Kate’s Warriston sweater pattern. It talks about the etymology of the word “frock” and the gender of a garment, and there’s a really interesting article about the English Smock. Then there’s a “Meet the Maker” section… which is me!

The next issue is due out in August, and will have a nautical theme featuring Kate’s Betty Mouat design. Whether you’re more interested in the textile history or the knitting patterns, Textisles is a fabulously well-researched and thoroughly interesting magazine. I can’t wait to read the next one – and I’m not even in it!

Eternal Magpie on Tumblr

Over the past few months I’ve also been keeping a blog on Tumblr. I’m using it mostly as a way of collecting and sharing images that interest me, or that I’d like to keep hold of for future reference. (This screenshot is of the archive, where you can view lots of thumbnails at once.)

I mostly use the “queue” function, which automatically publishes content as often as you tell it to. That way I’m not spamming people’s feed readers with dozens of images in one go whenever I find something particularly interesting.

I don’t use Tumblr for posting my own pictures, or for writing about anything, but if you feel like having a sneaky peek at some of the images that I find inspiring, you’re welcome to come and follow me.