Bugz. I haz them.

I knew going away on holiday in the middle of the growing season would cause me problems … I hadn’t, though, quite anticipated the scale.

It’s so terribly demoralising. Two weeks ago, I left a bunch of good healthy crops all on the verge of being ready to harvest, and I was in lip-smacking anticipation that I’d come back from holiday to find my garden overflowing with good things – courgettes and beans and cabbages and squashes and lettuce and spring onion and tomatoes and and and and …

Instead, I come back to find that contrary to the reported weather, it’s been very dry in the garden, so although nothing has outright died, the ground is very dry and hard and there hasn’t been much productive growth.

That, actually, I could live with.

What is appalling is how quickly the pests have moved in and DECIMATED what I have. I’ve taken out my Rodale’s guide to Companion planting and given it a very stern talking to.

The companion planting of marigolds and fennel and other distractions has not deterred the various cabbage white butterflies one whit, and where I went away leaving burgeoning ranks of cauliflower and red cabbage and calabrese and savoys and purple sprouting brocoli, now all I have is stiff, pathetic, skeleton-veined remnants, fragments of their former selves. What’s more, those fragments were still crawling with the drasty caterpillar fiends that had so ravaged them.

War is now declared. The children are horrified at my casual genocide, but I’m going to save those plants if it’s humanly possible to do so. To that end, I’ve been out in the garden (with my gardening gloves on) hand-picking the wretches of my blasted brassicas and dropping them into a bucket of water. Caterpillars can’t swim, but, as I said to Honey: it’s them or you that gets the meal – what’s it to be?

I know I do tell them that one shouldn’t harm living things, but I find it amazing that they can get tender-hearted over ravening pests, but don’t turn a hair when they eat the ever-so-much-cuter lambs and pigs and cows and chickens that pass over their plates. Admittedly, the critters aren’t slaughtered in front of them, which I’m sure makes a difference, but to me a bug is a bug is a bug. Unless it’s a spider or a ladybird, both of which are very welcome in my garden.

It gets worse: the dry weather has destroyed my lettuce, and what didn’t shrivel has been mightily snacked on by the slugs and snails, as have the beans and peas, and they also seem to have a particular fondness for courgette and squash flowers. I’d hoped the gastropod effect would be pretty minimal whilst I was away, but it seems I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by their apparent absence and the dry spell before we went away.

I don’t use slug pellets: although I’m not an organic purist, I do try to avoid using chemicals on the garden as much as possible, and try for natural solutions to problems and pests as far as possible. With the slugs and snails, although there are organic pellets available, I worry about the onward effect in terms of the birds and hedgehogs that include these pests in their diet of wholesale elimination. I’ve tried various other deterrents – the ’slug stoppa’ granules had no effect, and, worse, looked like cat-litter on the ground which had obvious and unpleasant results. Beer traps just seem to attract more slugs into the garden, and copper rings are expensive and have little apparent effect, particularly when trying to protect a whole bed rather than an individual plant. I tried – once – my grandmother’s tried-and-tested method of going hunting through the garden and snipping them in half with a pair of scissors … whilst most forms of bug-death are tolerable, that’s one I can’t repeat – I almost lost my lunch, and just the memory of it makes me want to heave. My compromise had been to hunt them down in the early evening and collect them in a lidded bucket, and then alternate between releasing them into the woods, a good hundred metres away from my garden, and offering them up the next morning on the bird feeder.

This evening, my desire for vengeance got a bit blood-curdling: instead of my usual method, every one of the blighters got dumped into the bonfire pile.

Yes. I did light it.

I’m not sure how many of the plants will recover and go on to produce anything edible … but I’m going to be doing my best to help the garden recover in the next few weeks in the hope I can salvage something out of it.

What it means going forward, I’m not sure. It’s been a hard and painful lesson, but I’m loath to net the vegetable patches and swathe things in horti-fleece, purely because it is *so* unsightly, and I certainly don’t want to start spraying my food with chemicals just to keep the pests off – but they have been so much worse this year than in previous years, so I don’t know what to do for the best.

I guess the planning for next season will have to include some more research on natural pest control methods – and I’m wondering too, with the brassicas, if either spreading them out around the garden more, so that there’s less concentration of attractive fragrance for the butterflies and/or companion planting with different strong-scented plants might work  too. I sense some library time coming up. I guess we might also have to reconsider when we holiday, although I feel a little churlish refusing to holiday because of the garden. I wonder if I could find another gardener with co-ordinating holidays who’d sort my pests out & do a little watering & light weeding if I did the same in return? That’d be good ….

My one consolation is that the root crops – carrots and beetroot and parsnip and potatoes – are all looking very splendid. I just hope that I don’t find them riddled with carrot-fly when I dig them, or that the same evil weevil that tunnelled through my radishes with such abandon has also savaged my remaining healthy-looking plants.

Getting back into the swing of things ….

We’ve had an absolute beauty of a holiday, and I’m slowly easing myself back into something approaching a routine with my work and writing.

Wish you were here?

A part of me still is, I think – certainly I’m still moving on slow-time and feel disinclined to re-engage with the dull, mundane doings of everyday life. I’d much rather be sitting on the beach ….

Of course, now I’m back, I feel like I ought to be piling back into the work, but the holiday rhythms persist and I find myself struggling to do without a mid-afternoon siesta. I strongly suspect that if it was just me and Bellaboo, and the others were back at school, then I would be taking a little siesta whilst she napped in the afternoon – I slipped into the routine so easily, and adapted so quickly to that burst of morning activity, the lazy lunch and long rest afterwards, then another burst of activity, longer this time, in the evenings – it feels like a very natural rhythm by which to live. I’m looking at ways I can try to bring some of that into my life on an ongoing basis, whether by meditation or relaxation or a quick yoga session or something in the middle of the day that will induce that sense of pause and rest – given that I’m not sure a nap is feasible.

It felt good to have the pressure off for a while – even though I took some writing work with me, I didn’t feel compelled to sit at it – I picked it up and set it down as I pleased. I was surprised how well I managed without my routines – being able to live in the moment has never been one of my strong points, but somehow having so much less and being in a different situation completely removed the ordinary pressures and stresses of my daily slog – to the extent that I felt there was a valuable learning for me in the idea that having so much *less* than normal actually gave me more freedom and removed so much of the must/ought pressure of the ‘to-do’ list that rides my back here so often.

It’s a reinforcement of what I’d been feeling for a while in the early summer, and had somehow lost in the fatigue and flurry of the last few weeks of term: that the (domestic) to-do list has to go, and instead what I need to do is view most of the things on it as optional activities that I can choose to spend my (free) time in doing, that possess value only in the utility or satisfaction that they give to me, and not in the expectation of recognition or reward.

Of course, it’s easy to make such space at the moment, outside of the frenetic term-time, but feeling less driven and less harried is something that I’m hoping I can carry on even after the children go back to school, and that I can build on to resist the gradual, toxic buildup of stress by allowing me to see clearly what is important, and what is not, and help me to keep my priorities straight.

But, for the meantime, it’s still the holidays for the children and we’re away again next week.

And so, for this week, I’m just keeping things ticking over, continuing the recharging process and trying to build new habits in terms of managing tasks and my own expectations of myself.

After all, I’ve got plenty of time.

Pain, passion, power

I put my fear back in its box
And I put the box where love is blind
And I walk in the dark
Where pain waits smiling
And I know that I can’t leave

I look at what I’ve become
I’m a pure and perfect lie
Like a blind man falling
Scared and helpless
And I’m still falling from grace

I’m so cold
Don’t leave me blind
I’m so cold
Don’t leave me blinded

I don’t know why I’m afraid
I don’t know why I’m unsure
And if it all comes down to
What I’m feeling
I don’t know what I can say

Gary Numan – Blind lyrics, Jagged Album (The link will take you to a youtube recording of the ‘Blind’ performance last night … I wish I could include the whole performance – I can highly recommend taking a look at more of the youtube recordings from last night ).

We went to see Gary Numan at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire last night, and it was one of the most intense and overwhelming experiences of my life – the man is a legend and I could run out all sorts of cliches to attempt to describe how awesome he was. But I’m not going to do that … I learned some powerful writing lessons last night and I want to try to capture them.

Gary Numan by Arathrael (Flickr Creative Commons)

 

Gary Numan has been one of my heroes for more years than is comfortable to count, and over the past 30-odd years has produced a pretty constant stream of edgy, dark, epics that both keep his existing fans fanatically loyal and attract new fans to his work. As a performer, I guess that 30-odd years of live work has allowed him to hone his stage presence so that he can both hold and electrify an audience to the extent that they are totally with him for the duration. The age range at the concert last night was the broadest I’ve ever seen – from people in their late fifties, through people of my generation right down to teens for whom this must be amongst their first experiences of live music (and it’ll be a hard act to follow if it was).

As a writer, understanding that this is a desirable state of affairs – to have people so loyal to your work that even after 30 years they are still desperate to hear not only the *new* works but to hear again the old standards – made me think a little more deeply about how he does it, what it is about his work that commands such adoration and commitment.

I think there are a number of elements. Firstly, his themes are consistent – dark, edgy, futuristic – and his songs are both passionate and intelligent, and all have that epic electro-synth-rock drive underneath them … but even with this consistency, he’s evolving,  so that he’s moved with the times, from the punk energy of the Tubeway Army through the controlled emotional stillness of New Wave to the current incarnation – electro-rock-god. So, with his consistency in terms of theme, he’s constantly finding new ways of exploring those themes and keeping them relevant to his audience and the musical times in which we find ourselves. It’s an offering that satisfies the needs that drew his original fans to him in the first place, but gives some new twist to keep them interested, a new interpretation, a shift of emphasis and delivery that builds on what has gone before but does not repeat itself. And those same twists, reinterpretations and shifts are what draw in new fans.

That’s something worth thinking about: certainly, I think you could do a lot worse than to have people coming back to you again and again and pulling new people in with them, because your work has something powerful about it that compels such loyalty.

How does he do it?

Thinking about the structure of the set gives some clues. The music is epic in scope, theatrical and utterly compelling, rich, complex and carefully structured so that the contrasts of peaks and troughs add weight and emphasis to the lyrics. The set echoed this, with the slow build of tension and energy up through the songs until there was a massive explosion of power in the heavy guitar drive of Pure about midway through which carried everyone through to the emotional and poignant conclusion of ‘Prayer for the Unborn’.

To engage with and involve an audience to that extent, to carry them with you, is a feat every writer should aspire to, to evoke that heartsick yearning, the adrenaline rush of total commitment to the action, the tearful farewell ….

How does he do it?

And this is where one of Holly Lisle’s lessons is vividly illustrated, for me, at any rate. For copyright reasons and out of fairness to Holly, I won’t go into any detail about the lesson, which is part of her SURVIVAL SCHOOL FOR WRITERS, but, essentially, she says that in order to write powerful, compelling novels you need to draw fully on your experiences, emotions and understanding otherwise you just won’t deliver the goods. I read it, but her meaning didn’t fully dawn on me until last night.

What Gary Numan does so well is to take us to the dark places in our souls, to write out of the fear and pain and longing, the unacknowledged needs and terrors with such total, unflinching honesty that he provides a black box for his audience to place their own fears, believing that he understands and can take their pain and reshape it so that, just for a while, it becomes a little more bearable, to take it to a place where it can be shared and diminished and translated into something common and controllable.

To bring that level of passion and power into my writing, I need to be brave enough to face the levels of pain that go with it, to open up my own black box and take a walk into the darkness to find those levels of emotional honesty that will allow my stories and characters to engage with readers across the barriers of words and genres, to speak from one soul to another and to be strong  enough to bear it and go back again and again.

It’s daunting and frightening.

Those things are in the black box for a reason.

But perhaps that’s the boundary between those people who are artists and those who are not: artists access those dark, lonely places to express and articulate in words or music or images the shared fears and needs and emotions on behalf of everyone else who has to keep them under control and shut away so that society can function. And in return artists are permitted that necessary relief in child-like playfulness, to stay connected to a child-like sense of emotional honesty, intense sensory awareness and distance from social dissimulation in order to both offset and maintain that contact with the painful isolation of the black box.

To go there myself, for real, to allow all artifices to fall away, to fall from the grace of contentment and complacency? 

It’s daunting and frightening.

Those things are in the black box for a reason.

I’m scared and helpless, but I know that if I want to deliver the stories as they exist in my head, then I cannot pull back from those truths, I cannot diffuse them, I cannot distill their power without accepting their poison back into me and hoping that somehow I find the antidote before they drive me into madness.

I know I cannot leave.

A pause for thought ….

It pleased you to make me endless

You empty this frail vessel over and over

Then fill it with fresh life again.

You carry me like a hollow reed over hill and dale

Eternally breathing new melodies through me.

At the immortal touch of your hand

My little heart loses itself in joy.

Still you pour into me, and still there is room to fill.

(Deepak Chopra, Living the Infinite – On the Shores of Eternity, Poems from Tagore)

All in all, a good week – everything on the list is ticked off!! (which is nice), but plenty of food for thought, and so a pause to reflect on what I’ve done and learnt and a look at what I’ve got coming up seemed in order.

I started back into Holly Lisle’s Survival School for Writers (How to Think Sideways) and am up to lesson 14 now.  I’ve reached the conclusion that I do need to be applying this to actual writing, rather than just constructing theoretical situations to test out the techniques. I’ve got so much out of the lessons this week, that I’ve realised that I should be using these techniques on the edits I’ve got in progress AND in some of the short stories that are picking up multiple rejections.

I guess that’s pretty obvious, but eureka moments do shift the universe left a couple of paces and need time to adjust to . 

I’m already being pinged a lot of new ideas and fresh perspectives on existing stories, all of which help me explain and understand the issues with them, AND these ideas are showing me new ways of approaching them to resolve those problems. All of this is tremendously exciting and energising on the one hand, but on the other I feel rather daunted, because the amount of work and the urgency with which I want to carry it all out *right now* is overwhelming.

So, some sort of replanning/rethinking needs to happen.

I’m going to use the ‘time off’ whilst we’re away camping next week to figure it out, I hope.

I’m considering the planned CONTAIN THIS HOUR novella as a test-bed for the HTTS work. As it is, it’s an experimental piece, so I feel I have less to lose by ‘playing’ with it than with the SERE project which is really burning me, and it’s considerably shorter at around 40k planned words than the anticipated 120k-odd that SERE will need. To work HTTS together with the novella in this way fits, more or less, with the headline timings of the different pieces of work I’ve got lined up. 

Initially, I’d planned to clear the HTTS backlog in July, and then work on the ANNETH edits in August, with CONTAIN THIS HOUR dropping into September. What I’m now thinking is that switching CONTAIN THIS HOUR back into July/August will work, mostly because I can work offline in notebooks whilst we’re on holiday.

I did some work on the planning of it this afternoon whilst Honey was riding, and realised it was stalled because other than a pretty high-level concept and a handful of Philip Larkin poems, I had virtually nothing else driving it … so …. back to the drawing board. I’ve now got sentence, a clearer concept/outline query for it, and have started going back over the character pre-plans to flesh it out. I can already see that although it’s only planned as a little novella, it’s going to be a big task to get this story done right.

The first problem is how I weave together two apparently unrelated stories – to an extent I did this in DISCONNECTION, but this takes it a step further – so that they both share the same resolution or, perhaps more accurately, the resolution of the older story, the war-story, sets up the resolution of the contemporary story thread.

The second problem is that this story takes a big step out of the spec fic comfort zone I’ve been playing in up to now, and means that I need to tie this fictional world more closely to reality than I have done before – in novel terms, anyway, as a startling number of my short stories are firmly grounded in a contemporary reality. There’s a part of me that’s rebelling against this, telling me that I could switch it equally well into a spec-fic fantasy environment, but I know that’s just my fear talking: this is a mainstream story, a blending of a WWII love story with a more modern family morality tale and it will be written as such. It will *not* work as well as a spec-fic, because place, culture and historical period are as important to the story as the characters themselves.

A further contributing factor is that because this more mainstream, the themes are much smaller in scale – no epic fantasy heroic struggles here, no space opera political machinations to factor in. This is a human scale story, and the costs and benefits are personal, nor global. The world will not end if Florence’s does, and so getting to grips with her hopes, fears, needs and ambitions requires that bit more finesse. It will be interesting to see if I can manage the subtleties …

So: plenty of thinking done on CONTAIN THIS HOUR. What is equally fascinating to me is the corresponding level of new thoughts going into the novels waiting to be edited, and how this can be applied to my short story writing …. and how the heck I’m going to find the time to work them all in! The novel edits are pretty much scheduled, so that is less a concern, provided I can contain my own impatient enthusiasm to get started on them, but the short stories are more problematical: I guess I need to find some patience from somewhere and just turn them round, one at time, and get them back out there again, better and stronger than before.

I keep hoping that I will learn that time is immaterial, and that I do not need to get stressed that I have so much backlog stacked up, feeling that I have the almighty list constantly on my back like the old man of the sea. I have moments when I can accept that all things have their season, that there is no rush, that I do not need immediate gratification. The frequency and duration of such moments are increasing, so that I feel like that more often, and for longer.

But all too soon the panic returns, the looming sense of onrushing death and failure to shape my stories and ideas and put them out there, the eye of the clock watching me and demanding that I obey its command to perform now and now and now and now, whilst still the stories pour into me, and still there is room to fill.

I need to set aside this need to pour my stories out in a single, rushing stream and become more mindful of what it is that I am doing. In the sea of my own silence, I work these words for my own enjoyment, and the satisfaction of the craft comes as much from the process – as it does in sewing and working with textiles – as it does in the completion of an object or a story.

When I accept those moments of awareness and insight, when I work a story for its own sake rather than to be able to say ‘I finished another story’, then the work I produce is better, and gives me more satisfaction because I have been more involved and more intimate with it, and because it is more wholly given from my core self.

As a writer, this is a powerful lesson to learn.

We’re all going on a summer holiday …

Goldfish play

They do not work.

They do not set the alarm clock

And get up at half-past seven

And get on a crowded commuter train

And go to the office.

They are playful creatures.

Goldfish play.

from Goldfish Nation by Wendy Cope (Serious Concerns)

 

The summer holidays are almost upon us again, and the annual debate about whether the schools’ long summer holiday should be curtailed has started up again.

The proposal is that the school summer holidays should be curtailed from the current six-week stretch, to a two-week blast “just like the rest of us”.

The arguments supporting this point of view are powerful. For working parents, it avoids the need to juggle holiday, and it also avoids the stress and expense of finding suitable and affordable childcare to cover the portion of the holiday that the parents can’t cover – day camps, childminders, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends all get pressed into service and the children can end feeling rather passed from pillar to post, well and truly farmed out. At least until they are old enough not to need formal childcare, but that’s a transition that brings its own set of problems and anxieties. The whole business is an inconvenience that ought to be avoided, and an anachronistic hangover from the days when village children were needed on the farm to cover the busy harvest period.

Our agrarian days are well and truly over, so surely we should put a stop to this outdated practice?

Maybe, or maybe not. There are some other perspectives that ought to be considered here.

Firstly, back to those working parents. From my corporate days, I can still remember the hell that was negotiating holiday during the summer period. Only a limited number of people could be on holiday at any one time, given that the corporate machine needs to keep functioning. So, bidding for summer holiday leave started early, and caused so much resentment and argument that it was a permanent issue at staff meetings – in every organisation I encountered. Cutting the summer holidays to two weeks means that *every* parent in a given office will be trying to book holiday for those weeks, to maximise that precious family time. However, unless we are going to go down the French route with the ‘grand vacances’, when basically the whole country closes for August, it is not feasible to even imagine that allowing all employees who are also parents holiday in a given two-week period will leave a viable corporate function in its wake.

Secondly, consider it from the children’s point of view. Here in the UK, our children start school – formal education – younger than pretty much any other First World country, and both their school days and terms are longer than most other European countries. And, when it comes down to it, most children would prefer *not* to be in school. They want to play. But, we send them into school, and they work long and hard, and then we often add homework and after-school activities to that workload. The short Christmas and Easter breaks really don’t give them enough time to recharge their batteries in full, and by the time the summer holidays come around, children are exhausted, mentally and physically. They need a good long rest to recover their energy, space to settle the business of the previous academic year, to reflect and organise and absorb - often subconsciously – everything they’ve learned in the past year.

They need time to play, to not have the responsibilities of school and homework, and the pressure of expectation and performance on them. They need time to rest, to be themselves, to explore their world and their environments and their relationships with their families and others without the constant stress of school routines. Education and routine is important to the adults in their lives, less so to the children themselves. We need to be aware that we are not dealing with mini-adults here, and we are not training them up to be productive and useful cogs in the corporate machine.  Learning should be less about stuffing them with skills needed for the workplace – it should rather be about igniting their imagination and curiosity, and the summer holidays – endless weeks of long, lazy days – give them precisely that opportunity.

We should not force children into adult routines as soon as we can – they have no interest in alarm clocks and commutes and office jobs – rather we should allow them to enjoy the only period in their lives when they have no (or few) responsibilities and have to bear little of the daily stresses and compromises that will characterise adult life. We should celebrate their  playful natures, and allow them this precious time of freedom when they can wallow in their ignorance and innocence, and let their souls and dreams take flight.

They have playful natures. Let them play.

Constant Creativity

Imagining is like feeling around

in a dark lane, or washing

your eyes with blood.

You are the truth

from foot to brow. Now,

what else would you like to know?

(Rumi, Birdsong)

Coming off the back of last week and a bit of reflection on the year to date, I feel like I’m getting into a good rhythm of activity, and feeling like I have a fantastic balance in my life between family, work and play – of course, it helps that for me the two ‘work’ elements pretty much *are* play.

Balance Beam, Sheilaz413 (Flickr Creative Commons)

Of course, my balance is not perfect. I have wobbles, days when I can’t even find my own centre of gravity, let alone balance anyone else’s needs with my own, and I have great days, when I just float with practised ease through a sequence of apparently physically impossible manoevres to get from the beginning to the end of the day. There are days when I’m too tired to remember, or want to remember, what I’m supposed to do, when I’m stupid and sluggish, and there are days when the behaviour of others pushes me to the limits of what I can tolerate, leaving me physically exhausted and emotionally and mentally drained.

But, on the whole, I am getting closer to a balanced life, when each part is coming together and I feel that I am living a complete existence.

There are three factors at work here.

The first is understanding and acknowledging what’s important to me, the ‘headline’ items that I can’t do without. For me, those things are family, writing, textile arts, home, and garden. Defining this list has allowed me to disconnect from any activity that doesn’t come under one of those headings, and that has freed up huge amounts of time and energy.

The second part came when I moved away from writing lists to ‘time-blocking’. Instead of having an enormous, overwhelming to-do list, I block times of day for certain activities. To give an example: I get home from the school run at approximately 9 a.m. every day, so I spend an hour on general housework and ‘daily’ chores, but instead of having a list or rota or routine or whatever, I will do a quick ‘tour’ of the house and just decide what to do based on what needs doing most. What doesn’t get done in the time available, doesn’t get done – it might get done tomorrow, if it’s higher priority than the other things that need doing. 

And this is where the third element comes in.

Being in touch with my creativity, allowing myself the time and space to express myself, is something that runs through everything I do, and is so closely connected with the ‘enjoy’ element of the intention I set myself at the beginning of the year.

It’s taken me a while to understand how closely the two are connected, and how creativity comes into play to generate enjoyment even in the most tedious of housework tasks. But viewing my life in terms of constant creativity, and trying to make sure that everything I do is driven out of that creativity, has transformed the way I see a lot of things. I read somewhere that artists are the only people in society who are permitted to not grow up, who are allowed to carry on playing way past the time when everyone else has gone out and got a sensible haircut and a safe job, as if we are the guardians of the dreams everyone else has had to set aside. To see my life in terms of a privilege granted, in terms of something that is worthwhile both for my own sake and for others, has let me approach what I do much more lightly, with more sense of play about it.

Because, for me, creativity is so closely allied to the sensual side of life, the transformation of a room from a messy, dirty, cluttered space into an ordered, sensually appealing space is an act of creativity, and I am able to focus on the pleasure I get from a completed chore whilst I am doing it, and at the same time see the chore itself as a worthwhile act that feeds my own sense of wellbeing, and that of my family. Gardening is a creative pleasure, because there not only is the anticipation of the taste of the food, but there is also the visual appeal of a well-planned garden and the fragrances and textures of the different plants that combine to make a coherent whole.

In other areas of life, my creativity lies closer to the surface, but it is interesting for me to start seeing how it feeds off itself.

For example:

At the moment, I am in a ‘learning’ phase with my writing. I’m working on Holly Lisle’s ‘Survival School for Writers‘ and I’ve just come off the back of a month or so of administration, editing, short story submissions and critique group work – all these things are good and necessary, but they are not the same as writing – the actual process of sitting down and letting a story flood out onto the page. At the same time, I’m experiencing huge levels of doubt and insecurity about my writing, because of course the higher level of submissions and critiquing activity is leading to more criticism and rejection: whilst I can’t shake my belief that my *writing* is strong, it does all make me doubt my ability as a *storyteller*, but that’s not for discussion here.

What I have found is that, at the moment, I’m generating fewer story ideas than I would normally, but both the ideas and productivity in my textile arts are off the scale. The number and quality of ideas I’m getting is astonishing, and I’m almost resenting having to do paid work for others because it’s interfering with my desire to get on with the work I want to do for *me*.

I figure, in a pretty simplistic way, that my creativity runs at a pretty constant level, though perhaps slowly and steadily increasing the more I use it. What I figure as an extension from that thought is that because it’s not being channelled into writing, it’s diverting itself into textile projects and busying itself over there. This is a good thing – the last few weeks have generated some fantastic refashions and stock items, and some wonderful ideas for bigger projects that I want to try, as soon as I get a space in between commissions .

When I think back, and compare textile art idea generation currently against that in a period when I was heavily involved in a novel first draft, I can see that there’s a corresponding curtailment (I keep a separate diary/sketchbook for my textile work, everything that goes in there gets dated) in the volume and quality of ideas and desire that is generated for new textile experiments.

I’m quite taken with the idea that the apparently unrelenting rush of ideas swirling around me does have its own rhythm and balance, too.

What’s useful for me is to see that the creativity I bring into my writing and the creativity that drives my textile arts are not two separate elements that I draw on as and when needed, but part of the same whole, and that acknowledgement has been like fitting a couple of jigsaw puzzle pieces together and suddenly seeing them fuse together to make a single, complete, picture.

Seeing beyond that to how I can allow creativity into the other areas of my life and let them get absorbed into that same complete whole is something I get in flashes, like a puzzle piece I know fits somewhere here, but can’t quite join on yet. It will come, but it will take more time and more patience and more testing until I get there.

I am optimistic, though, that I *will* get there.

End of Quarter 2 – Progress Report

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Fallen Giant by Duncanh1 (Flickr)

I’m starting the report in reflective mood: perhaps a little negative, but with a clearer picture of both my capacity and desire for work than I had at the beginning of the year. It’s been an odd year – a lot has happened, and with Bellaboo growing out of her ‘baby’ phase into a delightfully cute toddler, balances have shifted around to the extent that I feel I have much more time that I can *choose* how to use, rather than being tied to the intense dependencies of the baby.

I anticipated that this change would happen, but what I didn’t anticipate was the level of demands that arise just on the day-to-day that eat up my time, nor that I would encounter a set of personal issues that have put me back in counselling therapy.

As a result, I’ve achieved less than I hoped I would. However, what is undoubtedly a massive benefit that by far outweighs the slower progress is that I feel I am settling into a good routine of working and playing, that I am holding to my two intentional words for the year – COMPLETE and ENJOY – and that I feel I am making good progress.

Not only in my writing and in my business, but in personal terms as well, I feel more settled than I did at the beginning of the year, and whilst my passions for writing and sewing will continue to drive me, I feel less crowded by other demands on my time, and that I am able to pay more attention to the ‘big rocks‘ and as a result I am getting more done.

It seems counter-intuitive to do less to do more, but actually I’m doing less of the stuff that really doesn’t matter – the sand, if you like, and so I have more time to work on the big, important stuff. Half the battle has been seeing my way clearly through all the attention grabbing clutter – mental and physical – that fills my life, as I guess it does for most people, and by disconnecting myself from those distractions, I’ve set myself free.

It’s an exhilarating feeling, and I just hope that I can keep it up. I just have to keep reminding myself that I am incredibly lucky: I get to spend my days doing the things I love the best, and with the people that mean the most to me. It really doesn’t get much better than that.

And so, to the meat of it …

1) Writing

Standard tasks:

- maintain schedule discipline of write/edit/submit a story every other week – I have a total of 12 stories in ‘finished’ inventory, and have clocked up 43 submissions this year. Sadly, no acceptances, but I keep the faith that they will come.

- maintain current crit group commitments - on track

- complete the “How to Think Sideways” course - I’ve fallen behind on this, but I’m planning out the next month to catch it up

 Anneth: I had hoped to have this out on the submission rounds by now, but a round of critiques has highlighted that I still need to make some changes, so it’s pencilled in for another rework in August, and then out on the submission rounds in Q4. It’s a bit frustrating, but I think worth the effort to polish it up to its very best before I send it out.

 Serpent of Colchis: edit completed in Q1 as planned, it’s now in the hands of my ‘Novel Club’ critique group over at FM Writers. I’m bracing myself …. whatever the comeback, the edits won’t get worked through until late Q4 this year, possibly even early next year, depending on how everything else goes – if I don’t get to it before Nanowrimo comes along, it won’t get touched until after the ‘Sere’ project is finished in first draft.

 Disconnection – the planned rewrite was completed at the beginning of May, so obviously the edits haven’t been started yet. Those now look like they’re dropping to the end of the first quarter of 2010.

Contain This Hour – this one is coming online. I’m spending the next few weeks catching up the HTTS course, and then I’m working on the Anneth edits, and thenI’ll be writing the revised-concept first draft of this novel. I have nothing scheduled yet for the edits: I’m going to wait until I’ve finished it, and then prioritise it into the list.

The list I generated back at the beginning of the year is pretty much out of the window at this stage – I know I’m not going to do half of what I hoped, but equally I’m not beating myself up about it. I’ll continue to schedule things along a timeline, because if I don’t set myself deadlines then I know I won’t perform: however, I’m considering them more as guidelines and not beating myself up about missing out on them – planning is an iterative process, after all .

In terms of outline priorities, the rest of the year looks broadly like this:

• July – HTTS
• August – Anneth edits
• September – ‘Contain This Hour’ novella revised-concept first draft
• October – ‘Serpent of Colchis’ edits
• November/December/January – ‘Sere’ first draft
• February – ‘Disconnection’ edits
• March - ‘Lest Ye Be Judged’ edits
• April – month off!
• May – Storyteller of Akal rewrite
• June – Sere edits
• July – Contain This Hour edits
• August – month off!
• September – writing – new novel idea codename Ziggy Stardust
• October – Storyteller of Akal edits
• November – new novel idea, based on expanding short story

Textile arts/crafting – from a business perspective, this is more or less where I want it to be right now, though I have branched out to an Etsy shop this year. There are a couple of objectives I want to state, though they feel a little nebulous at this stage.

- try 1 new stitch, technique or craft I haven’t tried before each month - done

- stick to my ‘buy handmade’ pledge I haven’t been buying much of anything, but what  I have bought has been handmade

- stick to my ‘wardrobe refashion’ pledge on track – haven’t bought any new clothes for me or the children this year – NCT sales, charity shops and ebay have kept us kitted out in fine style at next to no cost. It’s all good.

- do at least one of Marysa’s lovely courses at the Otter Bindery - the timings just haven’t worked out for me so far, but I’m retaining the intention …

For next year (2010), I’m thinking that with Bellaboo starting pre-school, I’ll have more time on my hands, so I’m going to gear up for doing a couple of craft fairs, and will also get myself organised and apply for full membership of both the Embroidery Guild and the Surrey Guild of Craftsmen.

This is pretty much on track. I’m withdrawing from Etsy for now, simply because I don’t have the time to market myself effectively there, so it’s a waste of time and money when I’m drawing sufficient business from the galleries. I’ve spent a bit more time and attention on smaller, ’stock’ items to try and draw people in – I’m not sure it’s working, but I’m certainly drawing a fairly steady stream of low-level income to supplement the commissions, so I’m happy that sort of activity is more beneficial than the Etsy adventure.

Personal - not so much here, though with so much going on in the above two, one of them must be:

- REMEMBER I HAVE A FAMILY

- I will take at least 2 weeks holiday this year - I’ve already taken 1 week off over Easter, and enjoyed it, and we’ve got 4 weeks of holiday booked over the summer, one way or another. I will do my best not to work at *anything* on these (1 of them is camping, which pretty much precludes writing and sewing, so I’ll be forced to meet my pledge like it or not ).

- I will try at least 1 new thing with at least 1 of my children every month I haven’t really been doing this, but we have been spending time together, so I think it counts … I’d rather not be doing things just for the sake of novelty …

- I will work through the “How to talk/how to listen” book – SHAME! I still haven’t opened this book …

- go to bed before midnight at least 4 times a week – I’ve got that nailed now, I’ve been forced to accept that I need more sleep, I simply don’t have the stamina I had 10, or even 5, years ago.

- Books/Reading

- I will read at least 20 books this year, and I will (try to) not buy any more books (excl below) until I’ve caught up my backlog hmmmm. I’m just not very good at ‘not buying books’, although I am using the library more than previously ….

This year, I have read:

1.  
   1.  
      1. Crystal Line – Anne McCaffrey
      2. Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
      3. Perfume – Patrick Suskind
      4. Mainspring – Jay Lake
      5. Escapement – Jay Lake
      6. We Never Talk About my Brother – Peter S Beagle
      7. Far Bright Star – Robert Olmstead
      8. The Painted Man – Peter V Brett
      9. Wolfblade (Wolfblade trilogy) – Jennifer Fallon
      10. Warrior (Wolfblade trilogy) – Jennifer Fallon
      11. Warlord (Wolfblade trilogy) – Jennifer Fallon
      12. The Nameless Day (Crucible trilogy) – Sara Douglass
      13. The Wounded Hawk (Crucible trilogy) – Sara Douglass
      14. The Crippled Angel (Crucible trilogy) – Sara Douglass

Given that I’ve got another trilogy waiting for me to start in on it (The Tears of Artamon, Sarah Ash), Jay Lake’s Trial of Flowers, Margaret Forster ‘Over’, Kate Atkinson ‘Not the End of the World’ & Stephen Hunt’s ‘Rise of the Iron Moon’ sitting in my tbr pile (and a lot of holiday coming up, apparently ), I think I’m going to trounce this target!! I’m wondering whether I should write reviews of all the books I read as well …. I think it would be worth the extra time, no?

- I will catalogue the existing collection on Library Thing - this still stands at its previous measurement of 8/32 shelves done, with 3 cartons yet to be unpacked. No progress ….

- house and garden

- grow more fruit and veg this year than we did last year – stick to the planting and maintenance plan - on track, though the weeding is killing me, and a good downpour to save me watering & refill the water butts would be appreciated ….

- reduce waste again to 1/2 a bin bag every week - on track, and the council’s decision to introduce wheelie bins in September and food caddies will pretty much take us down to nothing – what we do have will, sadly, be the few bits of packaging we can’t recycle.

- take another 5% off our total energy usage for the year - so far, we’ve only cut it by 2%, but of course over the summer we use everything much less, so I’m hoping we can catch up on the target …

- declutter and redecorate loft, improve my workspace – decluttering is done, redecoration is not started

- list and sort out all the little leftover jobs now the refurb is finished - list is done, and in progress, but good weather isn’t conducive to interior work, so it’s slow progress – will probably pick up once the garden season is over ….

- and last but not least, get my BMI back down to 22. It’s completely out of control since Bellaboo arrived, and I don’t think I can call it baby fat any more. It’s just fat. It must go. GAH! Nothing doing here, although I have got exercise back into my life recently – combination of WiiFit and a weekly dance class – I’ll be starting another 2 dance classes in September, and I need to get some strength training into my routine as well. But BMI is refusing to move … I’m hoping that as I clear mental clutter, I’ll start being able to shift the barriers stopping me giving this the priority it needs.

 

All in all, it’s been a tough but generally productive quarter – I feel decluttered and positive and ready to move forward, so I’m hoping that the momentum will keep going even over the slower pace the summer holidays will necessarily dictate.

Sweets of sun and flower …

 

Noon, hiving sweets of sun and flower

Has fallen on dreams in wayside bower,

Where bees hold honeyed fellowship

With the ripe blossom of her lip;

All silent are her poppied vales

And all her long Arcadian dales,

Where idleness is gathered up

A magic draught in summer’s cup.

Come, let us give ourselves to dreams

By lisping margins of her streams.

(From “A Summer Day”, L M Montgomery)

 

 

Summer has stolen over my garden, and the straggly, underpopulated days of spring have given away to lush, flower-crammed borders and burgeoning crops.

 

Garden Chair by Nutmeg66 (Flick Creative Commons)

For a gardener, it’s a difficult time of year, even more so than Spring’s mad rush to get everything planted.

In Spring, I’m rich with hope and the frantic need to get the planting done so that I can reap the benefits in the summer – the soil treatments and early bug treatments set the scene, and when those first shoots start coming, it’s pure heaven.

Sadly, that Spring euphoria fades and there are inevitable disappointments – something doesn’t germinate (none of my native umbelliferous experiments – angelica, caraway, anthriscus sylvestris, yarrow – amounted to much, and I only got two of the eight hyssop I planted to germinate), or else there are losses following potting on. These are particularly devastating, I think! I had a wonderful batch of 20 rudbeckia seedlings, and Bellaboo got hold of them and de-potted almost the whole lot, and I’m left with 3 now. Very demoralising, as is the realisation that the pace of work doesn’t ease up just because the weather is hotting up and the planting’s over – there’s still a huge amount of work to be done with watering, weeding, maintenance and pest control.

Come the summer, and just when everyone is coming over idle, the second wave of gardener’s enemies invade … weeds and pests come marching in, and the plentiful germination of spring gets decimated unless the gardener keeps a watchful eye out … and even then, there’s always casualties.

I try to take an organic, non-toxic approach to gardening – I use little in the way of pesticides and herbicides, preferring to rely on natural remedies and hard graft to keep everything healthy. I’m happier doing it that, in part because I grow a fair amount of my own veg and I don’t like the idea of ingesting nasty chemicals (it’s one of the reasons I grow my own), and in part because the children are in the garden almost all the time during the summer months, and I don’t want them eating slug pellets or other nasties by mistake. But it’s a labour intensive process and this weekend I’ve been sorely tempted to resort to chemical warfare.

We have a number of perennial pests – from slugs, snails and aphids to brambles, nettles and bindweed – that always threaten to rampage through the garden at this time of year, given half a chance. The slugs and snails I’ve been dealing with using nematodes, and the destruction of every single one of the nicotiana seedlings I planted out this week have pointed out that I urgently need to retreat. It’s also proved once and for all that the ‘Slug Stoppa’ granules I bought as backup this year are worse than useless, so I shan’t be bothering with them again. So far, I’ve been able to clear the aphid clusters on the roses and herbs using my gran’s old remedy of dissolved soap flakes in water and misting the infected plants … I’m wondering whether or not to order a job lot of ladybirds and see what they make of all the little critters. It’s strange that we haven’t seen nearly so many this year as we would normally. I’m a little worried about them.

Another reason I don’t use pesticides is the bees. I grow a fair old range of fragrant flowering plants, including sage, lavender, borage and rosemary, so we get a lot of our fuzzy friends in the garden. Despite the panic elsewhere about the declining number of bees, it’s been very busy with them in my garden – I just hope it carries on that way. Bees are on the list of things I ponder every year – alongside chickens – as to whether I can add them into the mix. This year, again, I concluded against, but I will, possibly when Bella starts school, see if I can spend a day or so with a local beekeeper just to see how I get on with it. It’s one of those things – alongside country wine making – that I long to be able to do.

It’s been good fun getting the two older children involved in the garden more this year: both on bee watch – which they’ve thoroughly enjoyed – and in clearing out the nasties. Honey, in particular, has developed a peculiar affinity with caterpillars, and has spent at least an hour every day in amongst the brassicas clearing all the cabbage white grubs into her caterpillar hotel – a move that I’m more than happy with! Rumpus has contented himself with the odd shield bug and a collection of ants in his bug gallery, but it’s a start, and they’re both getting good at spotting ‘good’ predator bugs and ‘bad’ munchers and taking action. I’m enormously proud of both myself and them that they’re much less squeamish about bugs than I am, and they’ve set up a protective watch over a mother-spider guarding her big bundle of eggs under the curved arch of a savoy leaf … they’re desperate to see the spiderlings hatch … I’m just hoping they don’t do what the ‘daddy long legs’ spiderlings do and eat their mother when they hatch out …

Of course, the real joy at this time of year is that we’re starting to pull in our first few harvests. The winter-sown Shenshyu onions and shallots came up last weekend and are drying on racks - I’m looking forward to plaiting them up and hanging them in the kitchen – and it was wonderful to see that my planning paid off and the peas and beans were just coming nicely in between the onion rows and ready to be staked: that bit of successional growing worked so well, I’m thrilled. The sweetcorn and squashes have gone out in those beds, and I’m just keeping a bit of an eye on their performance in case they need a feed. We’ve been getting young lettuce leaves for a while now – I’m so disappointed that the saved seeds from last year of cucumbers and peppers didn’t germinate – and we’re getting the first tomatoes, too, now – my taste buds are just tingling in anticipation, as there’s nothing as sweet as a home-grown tomato, even the organic ones don’t come close!

We’ve had a couple of early cabbage – Spring Hero – which worked so well I shall be putting them on the list for next year, and the first sowing of early peas – Feltham Firsts – is podding up nicely. I keep running an experimental hand over them but I think it will be at least another week before we can gorge ourselves on them!!

But the glory of this season is – and always will be – the strawberries. OH MY, the strawberries. We are in strawberry heaven, taking off a good punnet’s worth every day of the beauties, and most of them getting eaten before they make it to the kitchen … the crop this year is astonishing – such good size and wonderful flavour, and the quantities are just mindblowing. Bellaboo has eaten so many that she doesn’t want any more, but Honey and I adore strawberries and there’s no stopping us! But it is as much fun to wander around the garden with Bellaboo picking them – we have a little basket that she carries, and we pick them together and she carries them into the kitchen for washing – it’s such a precious little ritual we share because she’s so sweetly serious about it all – it’s her (first) very important job.

I’m over the moon that we’ve got little crops on both the blackcurrant and raspberry I planted this year – I really wasn’t expecting anything from them, so it’s lovely to see little cluster of black jewels on the currant, and the promise of a handful of raspberries on the canes. I shall be making sure I get to them before the blackbirds do!

It is gratifying that the hard work of the last couple of months is paying off, if rather daunting that there’s still a lot of hard work to be done when I’d like to be lying back and enjoying the sunshine – the front garden is a neglected, weed-ridden disgrace that I absolutely *must* attend to this week, so if the weather’s good the house may well have to tend to itself whilst I garden – but there’s something so relaxing about pottering one’s way through a vegetable bed and checking out what new delights are on their way – the first of the calabrese are starting to head, for example – whilst grubbing out the little weedlets, that it doesn’t always feel like work.

And, of course, now the summer harvest is starting to set, it’s time to start planning for the next rotation, and the next set of planting …. time to go back and see what worked and what didn’t, and to start pawing through those seed catalogues for the late summer/autumn plantings and the next wave of veggie delights …

It’s true what they say: a gardener’s work is never done, but I don’t think I’d want it any other way.

Sinks & drains

What is this life, if, full of care

There is no time to stand and stare

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows

No time to see, when woods we pass

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass

No time to see, in broad daylight

Streams full of stars like skies at night

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance

And watch her feet. how they can dance

No time to wait til her mouth can

Enrich the smile her eyes began

A poor life this, if, full of care

We have no time to stand and stare.

(W H Davies)

 

I have been stalled, badly, to the extent that I’m barely scratching the surface of the things I want to get done, for some weeks now. In fact, ever since we had the half-term holiday & I was forced to take a break. Ever since, I’ve been struggling to pick myself back up and get off that break and back down to serious work. There are a number of reasons why. Having that time off gave me a little pause: it lifted away the weight of the daily grind – the damn schedule, the to-do list – that demands my time and attention more than any of the children, always nagging away with that must-do sequence of jobs – housework, kidstuff, Magpies, writing, and gave me a taste of freedom.

Lazy Day on the Beach by Ohnasch.de (Flickr creative commons)

When I came home, the weight of it all settling back onto my shoulders was almost unbearable.

And the list stretches an eternity before me, never-ending, an infinite toil without thanks or hope of completion. Suddenly, having had the time to look up at the view, to see what was around me right now and to spend some time in the moment to just ’stand and stare’, has made me feel what dull drudgery I wallowed in before.

I felt defeated, overwhelmed and demotivated. I’m never going to finish that list, so why even bother starting?

And this is where a little past form comes into play: a life littered with half-completed projects, and I’ve sworn over and over again that I will either complete or close the lot of them. A further factor: my ‘Belbin’ profile.

Allow, if you will, a brief digression whilst I explain myself. Belbin is a management theorist who defined, in context of organisations, an assessment that gives insights into an individual’s behaviour in a team environment, based on the expression of traits for the various team roles. These traits are, to a degree, flexible in that most individuals will fit more than one of the 9 team roles, and that their traits will vary depending on the make-up of the team in which they find themselves. A more complete explanation of the “Team Inventory can be found over at Wikipedia.

In my corporate days, I went through several of these assessments (always a favourite on ‘team building’ exercises ), and I almost invariably came out strongest on three roles: my primary role was that of  ‘plant’ – the creative, uncommunicative, off-the-wall free-thinking problem solver (funny that), with secondary roles as the Implementer (as the name implies, the one who puts their head down, gets the job done & delivers the goods) and the Completer-Finisher – the picky perfectionist who insists it’s all done right.

When it comes to getting things done, these three are powerful traits that continue to do me great service.

Where they undermine me is in my core thinking. That damn Plant generates ideas like a little dynamo, always spinning new projects, solutions to old problems, better ways of doing/being/working. Trouble is, the Implementer gets hold of them before they’ve been through any sort of feasibility or practicability assessment and just wants to get at them, and then the Completer-Finisher gets totally frustrated that it can’t all be done in the available time and throws all the toys out of the pram, and I’m left exhausted and feeling like a total failure because I haven’t met the impossibly high standards I’ve set for myself.

So there’s the rub.

I’ve been wallowing – unable to get moving, paralysed by the weight of the almighty list in every area, and with little energy to move or change things.

Until last week, when I read Christine Kane’s blog, and, more importantly, her post “Are you leaking?”.

It made me realise that my mind was as cluttered up with ideas and projects as an attic-full of old boxes, and that the amount of energy they were draining off me was crippling me. I need to sort them out, and discard those I won’t ever use again. I realised that when faced with seems like a sisphyean task, I’ll divert my force around the immovable object and start frittering away my time on whatever time-sinks come to hand, so that I don’t have the time to even start the big project.

It also made me realise, obliquely, that it’s not neccessary to delay starting something because I can’t finish it in its entirety in the immediate timeslot available. It is possible to break these big tasks down into smaller, incremental chunks, and to accomplish those in series, over a period of time, will get me there as surely as trying to slog it through from start to finish and paying the price in exhaustion and loss of love in the project.

I’d been so focussed on completing the tasks, that I’d forgotten about enjoying myself.

I’d forgotten that these things on the list are the things I *want* to do, that they are things I *enjoy* doings, and that they are more important to me than all the daft (but fun) ways of wasting time I’ve been indulging myself in so that I don’t have to face up to those realisations.

So I’ve started making some changes.

I know it won’t be easy, and I know I won’t get it instantly right, but I know that it will be worth doing.

I’ll continue to disconnect from all those distractions, to avoid the time-sinks that eat up my minutes and leave me with nothing. And I’m going to carry on attacking the energy drains.

A simple thing I’ve done this week: if I notice a job needs doing, if it takes less than 5 minutes, I do it there and then. I have set times for certain tasks, and outside of those times I simply don’t do them. If they’re that important, I’ll do them in their slot when that next comes around – e.g. housework – but they get prioritised against the other housework tasks that need doing. And I’m building breaks into my day – two periods where I stop working and play with the children, allow myself to have a little fun.

We’re all doing well on it.

I’m feeling more energised and less stressed, and not having a to-do list hanging over my head is making life much, much easier. For the ‘work’ areas – writing and textiles – I have lists, but they’re worked out and prioritised. What I’ve done is to remove the timetables – as far as possible (textile commissions always come with deadlines ) – and just allow myself to take as long as it needs to take to get the job done. And of course the children are enjoying getting to spend more time with a less-stressed parent …

My Implementer isn’t totally happy about the lack of schedule, and my Aspie-self is more than a little uncomfortable with the new routines, but overall, I feel like the weight of tasks has lifted and I’m much, much happier.

Finally, I feel like I’ve got some breathing space.

What is really, really strange – and something I haven’t quite figured out yet – is that by consciously deciding to do LESS, I’m actually achieving more.

Election special ….

This week saw the UK lurch from the expenses debacle into the European and local council elections. Despite predictions that the expenses scandal would precipitate a high voter turnout to ‘punish’ politicians and send a clear message that these sorts of abuses won’t be tolerated, it looks like the turnout will be at a record low.

Why should this be? Is voter apathy making democracy irrelevant, or is a lack of perceived true democracy driving voter apathy?

I’m not sure there’s a simple answer.

Local council elections are rarely well supported. Certainly, where I live, you could put a Conservative badge on a donkey and it would get elected, so there’s little incentive for supporters of opposing parties to stand up and be counted, because there’s never enough of them to make a difference. And, if the main parties can’t make a dent on the Conservative stranglehold, then there’s little point in independents making the running, either. It was sad to see the likes of UKIP and BNP putting candidates up locally, and even worse to see them attracting votes – I find it disturbing that UKIP did better than Labour, though I’d imagine those are votes that would have otherwise gone to the Conservatives, rather than anywhere else. One does wonder, though, which way the 62% of the local electorate who did not vote would have gone, and whether that would actually have made any difference to the overall outcome. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that they didn’t turn out to vote. Aside from the general perception of the local result being a pretty much foregone conclusion, I think there is a general understanding that local councils really have very little power.

I’m not sure that this is correct. Certainly, in terms of big-picture politics, local councils are pretty much hamstrung by the increasing degree of state centralisation in terms of both budget and target setting for local services, but certainly I’d say that local councils are the state bodies with which most people have most direct contact, AND the state bodies who have most impact on the day-to-day lives of most people: things like road and public transport provision and maintenance, refuse collection and environmental services can have a huge impact on quality of life. Grumble though we do at the council tax, it does fund a raft of services that make life workable, and I’ll be the first to say that we are fortunate to live in an area with high property values and therefore proportionately high council tax incomes – this means that the local councils have the luxury of extensive green policies in terms of sustainable development & energy policies and recycling facilities which I know are not common across all councils.

These, then, are worth voting for.

It would be a happy day if control over emergency & healthcare service provision and education could also come back to local councils, instead of being driven by central government. The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, and it makes a mockery of the supposed ‘user-chooser’ model the government promotes. The reality is that there is little choice available – certainly, in the education system, it is all very well and good that in our local area we have Specialist Colleges at secondary level – one in the sciences, the other in sports – but that is meaningless if secondary schools are, by-and-large, allocated on a catchment basis rather than student aptitude or parent preference. If these came back to local level, and there was the ability to make a real difference in the provision of these services depending on which way one voted at local council elections, voter interest and turnout might well increase.

And this touches on the key of it: potential electors do not vote in local elections because there is a widespread perception that the power of local government is so limited, it makes no difference who is in power, and which is why, in turn, votes for those parties who are not the dominant party in the area tend to be protest votes and/or votes recorded by staunch supporters of the minor parties.

The same could be said of UK national elections. The expenses scandal has exposed a parliamentary system that appears to be almost completely morally bankrupt. Yes, very few of the MPs exposed actually broke the ‘rules’, but when the rules themselves are set so as to allow and encourage a degree of self-interest that few, if any, employments would permit. Here is a system that is secretive, self-supporting, and with little or no accountability, and no sense that any of its component members feel any sense of personal responsibility. I have written before about how large organisations cause personal responsibility, accountability and autonomy to dissipate, and the same thing is happening here.

Yes, the electorate is pissed about the expenses, but it’s more that the expenses furore is just the latest in a long line of political incompetencies, idiocies and downright corruption. But when it comes down to it, who do you act against? No one party is cleaner than the other, so there’s no alternative. One party is much the same as the other – there’s so little political ground between Labour and the Conservatives, that it effectively comes down to personality politics. Cameron is no Barack Obama, but when you compare him to the dour Brown and the lacklustre Clegg (who is he? I couldn’t pick him out of a line up – could you?), he’s downright dazzling.

And there’s another nail in the coffin of UK democracy.

There’s no real difference between the main political parties, so what does it matter which one of them is in power?

And it’s true. Not only is there a widespread belief that government exists to support the interests of business and property over the rights of the individual (and an examination of the legal system supports this perception), but there is also the fact that membership of the EU has brought the UK to a point where large swathes of national policy are dictated by Europe-wide treaties. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. Common European social policies should allow for the formation of a huge common ground on which all participating nations can connect with and build on each others’ diverse, unique and precious cultural heritages. Common European trade policies should allow individual nations to play to their own strengths, whilst taking advantage of the wider influence and power of a bigger trading bloc, so that a group of otherwise geographically, demographically or economically small nations can compete with the bigger global powers in a way not otherwise possible.

It is a beautiful dream.

It is shame the reality doesn’t live up to it. When I voted last Thursday, I was saddened to see that of the 14 possible choices, 7 were anti-EU right-wing organisations, committed to taking the UK out of the EU altogether. In part, one can see why. The EU, as an organisation, is broken. The idea of the individual nations coming together to determine progressive social and economic policies, guidelines that enable & facilitate success, is struggling to be seen against a backdrop of non-accountability and personal advancement that makes the Westminster expenses scandal look like a vicarage tea party, and it is this lack of accountability, and the predominance of a few powerful national figures who are interested only in protecting and advancing their own interests, that have opened the door to let the invidious miasma of these xenophobic organisations waft through our political awareness. They feed off the anger and awareness that a large number of our rights to self-determination have been eroded, without the corresponding payback of the benefits that such a union should bring us.

I am not anti-Europe: I think that only by acting in concert can individual nations make a real difference to the globalised environment in which we now all live and work – that is an unescapable reality. However, to make that difference, nations still need to have the ability to take local actions which are right in context of their own populations, economies and environments, and the wider EU organisation needs to have both the flexibility and accountability to deliver that. The hearts of pro-Europeans sink to hear tales of MEP expense claims, and the preponderence of good legislation that is either diluted or defeated by national or business interests, or bad legislation that is passed without debate or consultation at national level by unelected commissioners who hold more real power than the elected representatives.

This is something that needs to change.

However, the voices of the reformers (rather than the refuseniks) are few and far between, and so the electorate is left with no choice and no voice. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that voter apathy is rife. Our democracy is an illusion: not all members of society have equal access to power, and our freedoms and liberties are being gradually eroded in a system with such an uneven distribution of political power that the right to vote has become a meaningless gesture that has no real impact in terms of how that system is adminstered, or in how it responds to internal and external pressures.

We are in a system that is bankrupt in so many ways, that the attempts to patch and salvage it look increasingly desperate and futile, on an economic, social and environmental level. Until the political mechanisms start to accept that, and offer real alternatives to get us out of the current mess, alternatives that recognise the needs and rights at individual and local level whilst taking a broader, strategic and long-term perspective, the electorate will continue to vote with its feet and find better things to do with its time on election days.