A dash up the Big Hill last thing before the shops shut at the end of April 2014 got me wondering what exactly I was. The light was wonderfully golden, the sky was grey and brooding and everything looked bright and washed clean after the rain. Somehow I couldn’t quite enjoy it because I’d left my phone at home and I couldn’t take a photo. My mind seemed to be programmed to think of everything in terms of a photo and I couldn’t work out how it happened? I thought I was a writer not a photographer. As I walked home I puzzled over it.
30 April 2014
Last night I fell asleep last night wondering, what am I? Am I a writer who sometimes takes photos or am I a photographer who sometimes writes? Then again, maybe I’m a walker who writes a little and takes photos? Sometimes I think I might be a cook or a gardener and what about history, all this walking and thinking and wondering about the things I see has led me to explore the history of them. Is that a part of writing or something different? Then there’s the travelling, I’d almost forgotten that… Oh yes, and I’m a wife a mother and a grandmother too…
The fog horns woke me, working themselves into my dreams. The sounds of ships are a background to my life and, occasionally, a weather warning. Fog had crept over the city in the night, shrouding everything with white. Through the window the garden was in soft focus and the rails of the deck swathed in bejewelled fairy cobwebs moving gently in the breeze. Of course I slipped on my shoes and went out to take photos, all the while a Carl Sandberg poem tiptoeing through my brain.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over city and harbor
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
It may have been more autumn than spring outside but those cobwebs kept me out on the deck in my pyjamas for a while snapping away. The spiders seem to like our deck rails but, on any other day, their handy work is hidden. The intricacy of their lacy webs fascinates me, each one different but somehow the same. How do they know how to weave them? When I was a child Mother called them fairy cobwebs and I thought they were somehow separate from the ones we swept from the corners in the house, maybe really made by fairies and sprinkled with fairy dust.
Outside the front door I could hardly see the houses across the street and the garden shrubs were covered with a blanket of sparkling droplets. I walked down to the bus stop blindly with fog swirling around me.
The walk from bus to work seemed like a series of snippets glimpsed between the swirls. A snapshot of the desolate park, better with a veil of fog over it. A shadow of sun on Summer Street. The little boat, Suki II barely visible across the water with ragwort growing between the rocks in the foreground to add some colour.
A train clattered past the hippie wreck and figures appeared and disappeared along the boardwalk. Half way along my dog walking friend was suddenly there, as if he and his dog had materialised from nowhere. The dog greeted me, confused by this new, hidden world. The wooden boards seemed to go on forever without any reference points to see and I only knew I was at the end when board gave way to tarmac and the trees emerged.
At work the morning was beset with computer problems but eventually I managed to do some work. It was a busy day and, by the end, I was beginning to wonder if there was something in the South of England fog seeping into people’s brains. The phones were full of angry people, ranting and inarticulate with no concept of how to complain effectively. This was a timely reminder of all that is pants about working in customer services. Some of them had me worried for their health because, surely, getting so worked up about trivial matters like a slightly late bus or a less than smiley driver can’t be good for the blood pressure. There were times when I was almost holding my breath waiting for the sound of exploding heads.
Complaining and getting the desired result is an art. Rule number one is to remember the person dealing with you is the one helping you. They didn’t cause the problem. They probably get yelled at a hundred times a day, so it’s probably not wise to add to it if you want to be taken seriously. It never stops surprising me how many people still believe yelling, being rude and throwing around personal insults will get results.
One woman rang to complain that bus drivers keep being rude to her. Within five seconds I was pretty sure I knew why. She was aggressive, and talked down to me before I’d said more than how can I help. Every time I spoke, trying to clarify the salient points in her loud obnoxious rant, she told me to shut up and listen to her. It wasn’t the listen I was having problems with it was sorting the facts from all the invective. In the end she demanded to be put through to a manger, preferably one who could ‘multitask.’ For multitask read understand a jumbled rant covering several different issues delivered in no particular order loudly and peppered with personal insults. Seems to me you get treated exactly how you treat other people and, if people keep being rude to you, maybe you should look at how you act towards them.
The sun did eventually make it through the fog somewhere around lunchtime so I went for a little stroll just to try and add to the miles for the month. At the end of the day, tired and slightly disillusioned with humanity, I meandered over Cobden Bridge with warm sun on my back and a little blue sky overhead. The problem of what I am was still niggling at the back of my brain. Now I had solver of problems to add to the list of possibilities. In the end I decided I really don’t know what I am but maybe it doesn’t matter.
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what attracted me to your blog was how you made a ‘walk to work’ sound interesting. My Dad tried to encourage my writing by giving little hints. His letters were always more interesting to read than Mum’s even though they only had the same things to say. Gosh, aren’t we lucky to live in a time when you can publish a blog, or even a book, so easily?
I guess I have the kind of curious mind that is always noticing interesting things. A lot of my walks cover the same ground but there is always something new to see, especially along the river. I’ve always written, partly as part of my job, but also diaries and scraps of things that never came to anything, as you say, we are lucky to live in a time when we can share our ramblings with other like minded people.