fresh and alive

a day for reflection…

…with nothing much happening. Time to ponder on life and love and why the staff in the mobile Starbucks kiosk outside Paddington Station make a better Caramel Macchiato than those in any of the Starbucks in Oxford.

I slept really badly last night, taking ages to drop off and then waking at 5.30 a.m. I gave in, came downstairs, had a cup of tea and read for a couple of hours before feeding cats and dog. Sleeping under the roof is fun, but the dawn chorus seems to kick off before it gets light at the moment and is extra loud in the loft. Not that I’m complaining. Being up there is a bit like being on a galleon sailing through cloud and wind, starlight and sun. When it’s very windy, you can feel the house flex and hear the creak of timbers. And on sunny mornings, we have dozens of rainbows cast by the faceted glass crystals hanging in the windows.

At the moment, we climb to bed up a stepladder – a proper one designed for residential lofts, but a ladder none the less. I wonder if, one day, we will be too old. I remember  (and I think it was on one of Michael Palin’s globetrotting TV series) seeing a little old woman in some place like Ladakh or Bhutan, leaping nimbly up a nearly vertical ladder to the upper floor of her dwelling. I seem to remember she was in her eighties.

So why do we, in Western culture, assume this strange cut-off point after which we need to live in one storey buildings or sheltered accommodation? Many years ago, when looking for a house to buy, my partner and myself were shown round their home by a couple in late middle age. It was obvious how much they loved the house, which was immaculately cosy. She had her sewing room and he had his shed with pristine tools on hooks and shelves. The garden was well-tended and obviously cherished. But they had reached a certain age and, although they were still physically fit and active, had decided that they now needed to go into a retirement home. Why? My own grandmother was rolling and mowing her lawn till the day before she died at the age of ninety. She obviously hadn’t heard of the law that says we have to give in gracefully to the aging process and stop enjoying life.

it’s the cats’ turn now

Just to even things up as the dog has held centre stage so far – here are two of the five furry protagonists.

boundaries and responding to the weather

Is everybody affected emotionally by the weather? I suppose we must be. I suppose it’s even something that happens at gut level and stems from our distant past as a species that lived outdoors without the benefit of central heating and supermarkets to ease life. I don’t personally do depression (for which I’m very grateful) but even I find myself cheering up immeasurably when the sun shines, or feeling exhilarated by an approaching storm. I have people close to me whose moods are very much altered by weather and the changing seasons. What prompted this line of thought was the resumption of rain today. We took the dog out in it this morning and got muddy and damp. Though I can see blue sky outside now, as we move towards the end of the afternoon.

To digress, why is it that some people are touchy about their own boundaries but oblivious to those of others? They lay down ground rules before you’ve even got to know them, telling you how much space they need, not even adopting a wait and see attitude and letting their interchange with you find its own level. But…when you do something that doesn’t include them, they feel hurt, pushed out, abandoned. And they are unable to let you do your own thing, fussing and suggesting and taking over. Could it be that taking their “freedom” so seriously is a way of being in control and of protecting themselves? I just wonder how free someone can really be when so much of their time is spent defining and guarding their parameters/perimeter/fences.

emerging

 

emerging

 

That’s how it feels, coming out the other side of seven intensive months writing a book and now a week setting up and networking this blog. What I long to do now is laze around, watch rubbish TV and read trashy literature, just so that I don’t have to think. And yet I have a feeling of exhausted satisfaction. It’s all been fun, it will be fun again. Meanwhile, we are lucky to have so many wonderful communication and media resources available to us. We can be in touch and make friends with people from all over the planet – imagine how different our world is to that of people even fifty years ago. We’ve lost much that was precious, but it’s been replaced by some incredible things. The world is truly filled with wonders that we have quickly come to take for granted.

Still, there’s nothing to beat a good book, a bag of donuts and a cupper!

and now more rain

 

not my bike though

 

 

approaching spring and dog stuff

Today is so mild I had to undo my coat when I took Dennis for a walk. Spring is definitely in progress: daffodils, narcissus, hazel catkins and the dark green leaves of bluebells. On Aston’s Eyot I saw monkshood just beginning to unfurl from tight, lime coloured cones an inch or two above the earth under the hawthorns.

Aston’s Eyot was a dump in Victorian times. They deposited everything from medicine bottles and bits of pottery to exotic plants. I once found a solid silver spoon in a jam jar – perhaps a child had been scraping out the last of the jam and threw the spoon away with the empty jar by mistake. Today I spotted a beautiful section of chamber pot, an Art Nouveau design in blue and gold and coral on white china.

I wish people would clear up after their dogs though: or, if they do, would refrain from hanging the poo bags in the nearest bush or tree. Not sure about the biodegradable qualities of your average nappy sack or Sainsbury’s carrier.

We met horses on the path and Dennis decided, for once, that he wasn’t coming back when I called. Luckily they weren’t fazed by him and the riders were relaxed about it. Lots of squirrels and pigeons to chase. I wish he didn’t. He nearly caught a squirrel in the snow this winter: it was very slow, only just managing to get up a tree before he reached it – probably torpid because of the cold. They ought to be hibernating, but our winters have been generally so mild over the last twenty years or so that they seem to remain active all year. Anyway, I don’t want him to catch them, partly because it doesn’t do to encourage the chase instinct in border collie cross type dogs (they’ve been known to get themselves killed pursuing cars), partly because I don’t want the squirrels mauled, not least because they could deliver him a nasty facial injury, and lastly because we have five cats and I think a running cat can look perilously like a squirrel to an excitable dog.

Mostly Dennis’s chase instinct has been channelled into rocketing after a tennis ball. It’s his drug, his fix, better even than leaping into puddles, streams and stagnant creeks. This activity has been banned from the house though, after the advent of deep claw marks on the wooden floors and the smashing of a lamp. In fact it’s this collie excitability that I am finding it hard to adjust to. Salukis, my previous breed, are laid back, reserved and cat-like. Collie crosses are in your face, huffle-puffle, pant, scurry, take notice of me. They want to interact with you constantly and they go from quiet to hyper in seconds. On the other hand, it is lovely to have a dog who comes  when he’s called instead of disappearing into the next county in pursuit of a dot on the horizon a mile away.

Dennis looks like a little black wolf whereas Inka, my Saluki bitch who died five years ago, was gazelle-like. Both beautiful in their different ways.

 

Inka

Dennis

 

 

sun at last, let’s dream of summer

 

literary agent: still waiting to hear, plus some points to consider regarding submission and rejections

She wanted the manuscript for a couple of weeks. Does a couple of weeks mean two precise weeks, or is it a loose term? I have no idea of the etiquette involved in this situation. Do I wait till she contacts me, or do I let a few more days go by and email her? Although she was so positive about my book, I have to remind myself that she may not take it on. Let’s be honest, in an industry where publishable work is turned down and  (so I read) authors are dropped by publishers if they aren’t sufficiently commercially successful, my book may never be published at all.

Writers  have to brace themselves for rejection, have to try to remain positive when a project fails. I know that sounds pessimistic but it’s the hard truth. If it does fail, you have to ask yourself some questions:

• is the manuscript good enough
• has it been polished and edited to within an inch of its life
• is it hard to fit into any genre (publishers don’t like books that encompass more than one or two genres)
• is your pitch letter as good as you can get it
• ditto your synopsis
• did you send it to the right agencies (you need to do some research and try to target agents who publish books in the same category as yours)
• is your presentation perfect, i.e. double spaced, printed out on pristine A4 paper if you’re sending hard copy, checked for spelling and typos

You need to try quite a few agencies, but if your book keeps coming back to you, maybe it’s time for a revision or rewrite or to start another book. A novel I sent out four years ago kept getting very positive rejections from both publishers and agents, some said they would have taken it but were full up, some said I wrote well but it wasn’t for them, one lovely lady agent was complimentary but said she didn’t know how she would market the book. Looking at it now, I can see a certain awkwardness in those vital first three chapters. I struggled with them at the time, writing and rewriting to get them up to the standard of the rest of the manuscript. One day I may visit the story again and amend it.

Meanwhile, keep the faith, keep writing and try to learn from any positive comments or constructive criticism thrown your way. Publishers and agents don’t bother to comment (as far as I can tell) if they don’t think your writing shows promise – so treasure those emails or standard slips that have an extra, personalised message attached.

of frogs and dogs

At last, after days of rain, the sky is pink and grey, with a line of gold above roof and tree tops where the sun is going down. The birds are singing, daffodils are beginning to unfurl and when I looked down the garden earlier I noticed the forsythia is fully out, bright yellow and fresh looking. No frog spawn in the pond yet though. It was so full of rotting leaves that the last two batches of spawn we had never made it to adult froghood, so I cleaned it out completely last month. However, no matter how severe the winter, the frogs have usually filled the pond with eggs by mid February. Maybe they don’t like the water being so clean.

I hadn’t heard the foxes for a couple of nights, but Dennis started barking manically at about 2am, so perhaps they’re back. They do smell, they are a nuisance, but I still find them romantic. And they don’t seem to bother the cats. I looked out of the window earlier in the year and saw two of our cats and one of next door’s sitting on the path and the bench and a fox standing on the lawn. They were all passively gazing at each other, quite relaxed. It’s only the dog that seems threatened by them.

I love Dennis, I do, but he’s really Mic’s dog. It was me that campaigned for having him, saw his photo on the Bluecross site, badgered and pleaded. I’ve always been a dog person, one for whom dogs make a beeline, but not when we went to meet Dennis for the first time. I didn’t exist: he made straight for Mic and rolled over in front of him.  He is very attached to me now, but Mic is his human. Not that I mind, I honestly don’t. Dennis is Mic’s first dog and they love each other deeply – it’s wonderful to see. He’s a man who should have had a puppy when he was a small boy.  Mind you, it’s me Dennis obeys, not Mic who insists on believing his dog is a small furry human child, his soul mate, his blood brother (and I’m not sure I want to find out which one of us Mic would rescue from a burning building).

a boy and his dog

I’ve never had this type of dog before. He’s a border collie cross and I’m used to Salukis. Collie’s are super bright, but their intelligence seems linear and controlled, whereas hounds are more intuitive: it’s the difference between left and right brain thinking. And collies are on the go the whole time, while hounds are laid back and aloof, only coming to life when they have an opportunity to run. It’s been a steep learning curve for me. But it is wonderful to have a dog who you can let off the lead without wondering if you’ll ever see him again. If only he would stop trying to herd our five cats!