Backing Up

Wearing a backpack is a very secure feeling.  I can only think it reminds me of being strapped in my pushchair.  Sadly my pushchair was crushed under the wheels of a reversing lorry whilst I walked down Chiswick Common Road with my mum and sister.  Since then I've had to walk everywhere.

I bought the backpack with the carte cadeau which was the leaving present from my old work in the UK, so it is as if I carry their good wishes with me always.  Well something like that anyway.  What I'm getting round to is that baggage goes with you. 

People often talk of moving abroad to start a new life, or something like that.  But this isn't a list in a Word document, and you can't choose to restart the numbering where you wish.  We are all gypsies in that wherever we end up, we unpack all our good and bad crap and set up camp.  Whatever you were really rubbish at back home, you'll be really rubbish at here.  Similarly whatever you excelled in, carry on excelling here.  Or there.

Long, long before Brussels was definite, I had this image.  It was me, somewhere foreign, good haircut, rather fine pair of boots, taking a measured Sunday stroll then dropping in at a neighbourhood bar to drink some sort of pale aperitif.  Slightly portly gentlemen looked past their wives at me.  After a while the fine boots would take me back to an elegant apartment where some beef slow-cooked itself among chestnuts and beer.  Perhaps a new twinkly friend would come round to share it.

It is good to keep images like this as reference, although we all know Sundays are more likely about going down the bottle bank and rushing to Carrefour before it shuts.  Catching up on the X Factor, messing about on the internet and not sewing up the hem of my trousers.

I really should at least go to Gent for the day.  Without the backpack.

Not Today

And so I have an appointment to see a Doctor (possibly not a Timelord, though that would be quite amusing) at the community help place, and we'll take it from there.

I did not attend the auditions for Calendar Girls - it's best I don't commit to anything at the moment in case rehearsals clash with appointments or minor headfucks.  My feeling is that this blog is coming to an end soon.  I could go on until the Germans find the bookcase and uncover the annex but perhaps it's best not.

For one thing, it is not that hard now to connect the me who writes this occasionally entertaining diary to the me who works for a fairly high-profile organisation.  That makes me a little uncomfortable.  But more than that; it doesn't feel like I'm dancing in an empty room any more.  Perhaps it never was like that, but it seemed so.  Now I'm dancing with concerned or outraged or slightly horrified eyes on me.  Which, if you've seen me dancing, is probably not that unusual. 

In an ideal world, this blog would end with me finding a lovely, kind, insouciantly muscular chap who doesn't mind about the slight mentalness; and I'd put all my books on shelves in a spacious, elegant flat, then turn to him with a smile.

Of course that's all bollocks, and it will no doubt end something like this.  But not today.

Mary Poppins Redux

Tonight I did a little emergency pick up for my old family, in a very literal sense.  H is now at school, so I collected her from the garderie.  She was so exhausted she sprang up into my arms, as I was simultaneously protesting "I can't carry you!" and fell promptly asleep.  A sleeping 15 kilo child over one and a half kilometres, in the most slippery afternoon heat.  My arms have not stopped shaking yet.  I just kept breathing and telling myself thank goodness you're fit, thank goodness you're fit, thank goodness you're fit...

Baby C, who is barely a baby now, was all delighted and crazy again, doing turnovers backwards off my knees and then carefully enunciating "More".  I had to physically prise her off when I left.  I suspect she would have been quite happy to get in my backpack and come to my house, as long as there was pasta when she got here.

It's way too hot for September, enough now.  I'd like not to have sodden hair roots by the time I get to work, and attractive bubbles of sweat on my cheeks.  Such a good look.  Talking of good looks, my daughter and I were childishly amused by this in Paris at the weekend:

Silence Is Not Golden

I have worried people; for this I apologise.

This may not have been the best place to write the things I have written, but at the time it seemed like a safe place.  This choice has been challenged - why did I not just write it down for myself at home.  Why did I not just talk to my family. 

Well writing it down just for myself means it is still there orbiting my head and the reality is still true only for me.  As far as discussing it with family goes - how do you bring up this sort of thing, and with whom?  There is no way to slip it into conversation, or to explain what it feels like that I'm reading from a different history.  The communications I have now had with close family members indicate that it is something they want left in the past and not disclosed to anyone.

Anyway, I've contacted a place about talking this through privately.  Silence isn't really an option.

Hopefully we'll be back to me talking inconsequential shit before you know it.

Rock or Roll

And then it all went very wrong. 

I have to be very careful what I say; basically a close family member objects in very strong terms to what I've been writing.  It has been requested that I shut the fuck up, to put it bluntly.

When a child witnesses extreme domestic violence over a number of years, it does not go away because you become an adult.  The effects reach far and deep.  And yet it has gone away - it has been expunged from family history.  It remains only and very clearly in me.  It occurred to me yesterday that I've carried the burden of this knowledge and experience and abuse - for it is abuse - on behalf of the whole family.  Nobody else was there for the whole show, forced to witness such awful violence for years.   So not only have I carried this for the family, enabling them not to know, or to forget, or to pretend it was nothing, now I have been told to stay silent about it because it will upset the family.  I think this is quite common where one person has been regularly subject to something like this.  That person becomes the problem in the family because they rock the boat and everyone else quite likes the boat being still.

So I have the options either to brick myself up inside silence, to save everyone but myself, or to continue to speak the truth when necessary.  Neither option is easy.  But this is my life, my blog, my increasingly tenuous sanity.

Blink

For those of you who have never experienced depression, explaining it is like trying to describe to someone else a colour outside the known spectrum. For those of you who have, well, it might not be the same colour.

It's come and gone all my life and I have no idea if it's endogenous, or the result of an unremarkable but not very pleasant childhood, or both, or something else. There's definitely a very melancholic gene in this family.

Moving to another country was always going to be risky. You leave behind family and long friendships and the framework of your life in which it is more or less accepted who you are, and you come to a place where nobody knows you. Everything depends on who you are today. Over time it becomes clear that some old friendships are not going to stand the separation. I believe that there are people I will never see again, and it feels like they died.
　
Removed from the framework of all that is usual and normal and accepted, life does snake-like things. The Doctor said that rather than being linear, time is "more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff". I couldn't have put it better myself. Things that happened 40 years ago feel suddenly as fresh as if they are happening now.

Should it really still hurt this much, stuff that happened then? Should it still feel like there is a size 12 boot on my face (that looks like his face, and makes me want to claw it off every day) making sure I do not try to be ok? God knows. I'm going to have to work through this one, because these are not good days.

　
　

Slave to the Rhythm

It may not be obvious to the casual blogreader but I have not really had a holiday this year.  There were a bunch of luxurious half-days when one family was away and then the other, but apart from that it's been pretty flat out since January. 

In my childhood, when everything was in black and white and you wore jumpers all year round, holidays were not all that, anyway.  We had that two weeks every year, last week in July, first week in August, when we went unbooked to some seaside and drove round the coast until finally finding a B&B with a vacancy.  This was one of the few times my mother would use my father's first name.  You'd be surprised how much irritation, despair and contempt one word could express.

Holidays were the only time they really spent together and they were mostly characterised by embarrassment and a sort of public hissing.  And loathsome Victorian toilets on another floor.  Although Dorset was really nice.  Except when I thought I'd lost them at Chapman's Pool and caused a small landslip by screaming.  And that time when I was put in an attic room and everything rattled so much in the wind I started screaming.

This lack of holiday must be cream-crackering on some level though.  At weekends I just sleeeeep.  It seems a mournful waste of weekend but this creaky old body is telling me something. 

Anyway, in your first year of employment in Belgium, you don't get holiday pay.  I will however be taking a day off in October for The Big Family Wedding in Yorkshire.  It will be my first time staying in a Travelodge.