Please Don't Adjust Your Sets....

My blog brain is on hiatus but ...It Will Be Back!  I promise. I apologise for lack of clown in the very bad replica BBC test card but Grace had a hissy fit and legged it into the garden when I said she had to wear a hat. Hope you are all well.
Tanvi x

Fighting Talk

image from internet

I am gritting my teeth. Sweat is beading under my fringe and my legs are twisted around each other. My friend C, on the opposite chair, is equally scrunched up. We are listening to a CD ....a workshop on Non Violent Communication. It is fascinating and for me it much of it makes very good sense BUT the man’s voice, a painfully slow, American drone of a drawl, is driving us nuts. I am aware of the irony, the fact I am having to hang on to the armrests of my chair so as not to up and head butt the CD player.

‘Does irritation still count as anger?’ asks C, lips near white as her knuckles

‘Can’t talk. Listening,’ I hiss going puce in the face.

The man is talking about how anger is useful as a signal. Why are we reacting in anger to the particular situation? If we unpick our anger we always find an ‘unmet need’. Resolve this with care and compassion and one will find, apparently, the anger obsolete. This ‘signalling’ works with guilt and shame and elements of depression too. Unmet needs. He uses an example of a married couple who come to him saying they are having terrible rows.

‘I just get so angry with him,’ says the woman

‘Why? What behaviour is he exhibiting, exactly, that is making you react this way?’ asks our American droner

‘Because he...errr...he....never..err...he doesn’t...’

‘If you told me what you wanted me to do I would do it!’ interjects the man

Again the woman thinks. ‘It’s hard. I can’t say exactly.’

Then she realises. ‘Ohhh, she says. ‘I actually need him to know what I want before I know and then to just do it. ‘

image from internet

Hence she has revealed an impossible conundrum that she can only solve by understanding her ‘unmet need’ is for something only a telepathic soothsayer could help her with. She doesn’t have one of those. She has a husband. She will need to actually work out what she wants him to do and ask him to do it. It’s a revelation to them both.

I’m not sure if it saved the marriage or if she ran off with a Betazoid (whispers to people without TV, ’that’s a clever Star Trek reference to a telepath soothsayer’ ..cough) Non Violent Communication is a particularly useful way of engaging warring communities to understand that the needs they externalise as violence and fury are actually about unmet needs within; safety, autonomy, sustenance etc. Once an unmet need is exposed and understood it can be negotiated. And it can work equally well for the individual, especially for those people like myself who spend a lot of time enraged at themselves. How many times I day to I want to whack myself upside my own head? ‘You blithering idiot!’ I scream at myself when I do something imperfectly. All rather pointless self abuse which I would be mighty relieved to stop.

I intend to delve into the ideas around NVC in greater detail in the hope that it will help me with all my interactions...(mainly, I would imagine, because by the time I have actually worked out exactly why I am pissed off and what the unmet need IS ..the situation will have resolved itself.) There is need of this I think, of finding something positive to grip on to. Something possible and useful. I don’t know if you are feeling anything like me what with the current icy sluicing of tsunamis and radiation, the fearful boiling over in Libya, Yemen, Cote, D’Ivoire, Syria...? I feel helpless and that all is beyond my understanding and certainly out of my control. I want to fight the injustice, bring help to the displaced, be ‘of use’ and at the same time to run somewhere safe. ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home..’ Its classic ‘flight or fight.’

Maybe the drawling American man will have some answers. Ruby Slippers. (C) T. Bush 2011

A few days ago on yet another very overcrowded commuter train, the woman opposite me insists on squeezing onto the seat even though I have asked her to keep it clear. My guide dog needs a bit of room to breathe,’ I say apologetically.

‘I know dogs,’ the woman says, unpacking her handbag without looking at me. ‘She’ll be fine.’

I am furious. But I remember American Drawl Man. ‘Why?’ I ask myself. ‘What exactly is my unmet need?’

I wait until the train creaks slowly out of Kings Cross and begins to pick up speed. Then I lean across and smile at the woman who has placed her expensive shoes either side of poor Grace’s head.

‘Just so you know, ‘ I say sweetly. ‘My dog has a tendency to vomit when she gets stressed.’

Then, as the woman looks up horrified from behind her newspaper and in vain tries to move her legs, I lean back and feign sleep. Seems my ‘unmet need’ was to ensure we all respected each other’s space. See how easy Non Violent Communication is?

St Iving Off!

'What’s that?' There is a most remarkable sound coming out of Daisy's rucksack.

‘Flamingos.’ says Daisy unperturbed.

'Oh,' , I say blinking. 'Noisy aren’t they.'

'I had seagulls before', says Daisy 'but that made things a bit difficult at the seaside.'.

I can see her point. We are in St Ives in Cornwall and the sky is tattered with gulls. Having their cry as a ringtone on one’s phone might be more than a bit confusing. A lot of missed calls.

Ahhh St Ives in winter! Just look at the light and the quaintness and most important for Surly curmudgeons and sea dogs like me and Grace, look how empty it all is! Whole beaches to ourselves and harbours to mooch around in.

I cannot recommend it enough- although tis jolly far away. One has to contend with quite a lot of sites, shops, restaurants and bars being shut for winter refurbishment but there is still plenty of great seafood, the Tate shop and enough art and tat shops to please. And even without a car to get across to some of the more wonderful, less accessible beaches, St Ives itself has plentyof sand and surf, all in walking distance and one can always hop on the train. (Right, where is my 10% from the Cornish tourist board?)

My friend, Daisy, and I had organised a couple of rooms in a luxury self catering apartment at a ridiculously low winter rate. As part of the Treganna Castle complex the apartment was at the top of the hill overlooking the town with views out onto a golf course. I had thought it would be a perfect writing retreat but it turns out that staying in too gorgeous a place is dangerous for writers. How could I sit, hunched over the same old computer all day when ten minutes down the hill was roaring surf and wide open beaches full of light and sound?. Plus Grace, having realised on the first day that any movement away from the apartment and ‘down’ meant BEEEAAACCHHH, completely forgot almost every moment of her training and insisted on plunging , with me gripping white knuckled to her harness, over the edges of any steep steps or cliffs she came to no matter where they led. This did cause some conflict, a few angry words but hey..who could resist this expression?

I must thank the guitar wielding, genius cook and inspired driver, Daisy for putting up with my belly aching about work (and literally belly aching, as somehow I had managed to bring a nasty bug along that made me pretty sick for several days...although strangely didn’t stop me getting through the wine box...) And Grace for being the happiest beast in Cornwall. For Rachma and Steven for letting us drink their gin on the way up and back. The sea the sea the wonderful sea!!

Briefly on other news; In Zambia I was sad to hear that Bente Lorenz passed away at the end of last week.

In a career spanning over 50 years, she will be celebrated as a internationally renowned potter, a master of ceramics and glazes, writer, artist and an inspiration to artists across the world as well as a great and kind friend and mentor. My love goes to her children and grandchildren.

All photos copyright (C) T. Bush 2011

She's back!!

image from internet

I know, I know...once again the blog got filed under ‘bury head in sand’ and the year is suddenly rounding up on the middle-end of January. Gadzooks! Apologies (and I have to give an extra thanks very much to a particular reader who gave me a gentle boot up the backside to get going again. You know who you are!)
Right then. Where are we? Ahh yes...a smashing and relaxing Xmas with my sister and her fiance, a tub-thumping New Year and a crash dive into the bleak mid winter. Such I believe was the pattern for many of us, running hell bent towards the end of the year, eyes shut, fingers in our ears, shouting ‘ Yabadabaddooooo! We made it!’ only to find there was no ‘it’ to make and the morning after was still full of plot holes and winter and ‘what next’s and job hunting and cut backs and the usual hangover of world politics.
I realised that although my 2011 needed to include such things as ‘income’ and ‘love’ and ‘adventure’, I wasn’t going to be able to do any of it or even think straight until I had finished the first draft of my thriller ‘Witchgirl.’ The only problem was that it didn’t seem to want to be written. I tried concentrated blasts. Nope. I snuck up on it, pretending to walk past the computer and then ambushing the keyboard. Nope. I turned off facebook. (This helped but was unsustainable), and I even attempted to remain seated in three hour blocks three times a day. Nada. Not even an eloquently constructed sausage. I whined at everyone (hence facebook on again) and eventually went to far as to moan about the unfairness of it all to my poor cousin in the States- she of the post back surgery-and-by-the-way-I-am-still -in-agony,-still-have-kids-and-a-job- to-deal with-and-am-not-allowed-to-even-swivel-let-alone- pick-up-my-own-martini- glass, cousin. I called to cheer her up with my whining.

'Tanvir,' she said. 'Just write it.'

'Whatdaya mean?' I asked sulkily.' I am a creative. I have to wait... '

'Just get to the end and THEN go back and make it pretty.'

'Really?'

'Really! '

And so and so after much whimpering I finally tucked in my chin and did a slightly off centre judo roll into my final few chapters. And it stinks! Hell yeh! Trust me I am not being modest here. It pongs big time.. but at least I am now in the final few thousand words.
I intend to get to the end by THE END OF THE MONTH! Dad a daaaaa!

And that’s bascically why I have been unblogged folks. At the moment it hasn’t been worth the wait but maybe..just maybe...after a great deal of plot darning, some character renames, an additional sex scene and a spell check this blasted book might be my ticket into 2011 after all.

Apart from the above mentioned, I didn’t really have many resolutions this year but I did decide to continue the one major lesson I learnt last year. I learnt that life can be hard BUT it is you who decides if life is shit. It’s a very simple attitude correction. Feels like having one’s posture adjusted by a physiotherapist. You may feel like a plonker as they twist you into shape; elbows back, neck relaxed, chin in..but then your entire spine suddenly feels gooey with relief, all supple and sexy. Problem is that it takes practice. One is barely out the clinic door before one is slumping and chin poking all over the shop again. You have to keep telling yourself, straighten out, boobs out, elbows and chin IN.
Same with life. I don’t mind hard. Hard is just a challenge and it feels good to get through things that are hard. ‘Shit’ on the other hand is a steady circular downward thing. (I know my metaphors are getting out of hand) I have learnt that approaching things as ‘hard’ as opposed to ‘shit’ makes them possible, sometimes even exciting.
So from now on everytime I hear myself winigng about things being just so shit , inclduing the problems involved with getting my novel fixed, or money, or eyes, I will straighten up and say nope...things are probably going to be hard but that's quite all right. Boobs out, chin in, come on 2011!!

Grace Dec 2010 (c) T. Bush

Mooning over my Dog!

Dear All, photo: 'Solstice Dog 2010' (c) T Bush 2010

Grace is three today! A winter solstice dog and especially for her an eclipse! a moon eclipse. There was a total eclipse of the sun on my 30th birthday on the summer solstice a few (okay..more than a 'few') years ago....freaky huh? Anyway she doth love the snow and eats as much of it as she can reach but working in it is not possible as there are now no defined kerbs and everything smells different and a dog just can't concentrate dammit!

So we are safely holed up in Radsock for the Xmas week and want to wish you all a warm and loving time of it. Sending love to my cousin who goes into surgery tomorrow, to all my family and friends dotted around the world and to all the wonderful people who check in on me from time to time on this 'ere blog. It has been a pleasure writing for you this year!

Keeping this short as I am sure you are all busy mixing cocktails and trying to work out cooking times per kilo for the turkey you have weighed in pounds. More soon but now there is the season finale of CSI: Miami to watch (research you know....purely research..cough cough..)

Much much love and be careful out there,

Tanvi and Grace.

Tripping

The woman is blocking my path, thrusting the wheelchair at my legs.
‘I don’t need a wheel chair,’ I tell her for the second time. ‘I am visually impaired but there is nothing wrong with my legs.’
She is having none of it however. Here in Philadelphia airport the disabled Are Assisted In A Wheelchair, dammit!
‘It will be faster,’ she says. . She is pretty solid and behind her is a rattled looking security guard. Behind me the passengers are getting restless I submit..and here’s the rub. It IS a lot faster. Barbi for that is the wheelchair pimping woman’s name, puffs along at the speed of sound whisking me through customs, baggage reclaim and back into the departures. Everyone is terribly nice, talking to Barbi over my head as if I am a well behaved child. I get a ‘well done’ when I hand over my passport. I wonder if I should drool in gratitude. Barbi, in spite of my protestations and constant pointing at my fully functioning legs, transfers me into the back of a peeping electric cart driven by another hugely fat woman who does not look as if she would be capable of walking herself.
I am taken all the way to my gate and off loaded. The seat is uncomfortable and dirty and there is an hour until we board. I ‘undisable’ myself. I will not remain in my prescribed seat. I will not be good. I stalk off back down the shiny corridor passing the fat lady in the electric cart.
‘Are you alright?’ she yells confused as to where I might, cane a-swishing, be heading.
‘I am going to find a bar.’ I yell back over the peeping. ‘I might actually NEED you to pick me up after the amount of Bloody Marys I shall be imbibing.’
‘Oh my Lord!’ wails the woman as I grin wickedly and narrowly avoid walking into someone’ luggage.

I spend two days in New York holed up with my cousin and her two small children in their apartment in Manhattan. My cousin is in agony. Problems in her spine are causing nerve compression and the pain is truly excruciating. Nonetheless she is still having to run a busy nursery and kindergarten, look after her two small kids and generally ‘cope’ with life in the Big Apple until her surgery. She is now on extremely high doses of pain medication and has been advised to keep nipping at the vodka (the last remaining weapon against nerve pain) until her surgery

The vodka-nipping bodes well for me of course but I soon realise that even I, with my Lusaka trained liver, can’t keep up with the constant martinis and still manage to keep fully focused on the small ones. On day two, we head to Philadelphia to my cousin’s folks for help and thanks giving.

These are the smalls.

They look cute don’t they? Adorable in fact. Do NOT be fooled. The little one on the left can go from Zen Master to Monster in under 10 seconds. In Philly they go from riotously sweet to..well .....just plain riotous and at one point the lad, Ben, sets off the burglar alarm which triggers a phone call from the police. In an effort to make them calm their rampaging it is decided to try and string out the police situation.

‘Oh now look what you’ve done.’ shouts his mother. ‘The police are on their way! Now you will have to go to jail.’

‘Its not jail, Mummy, its ‘juvie,’ Ben corrects her.

‘I won’t let them take you!’ Zen Monster shrikes turning into a tiny Bonnie (of Clyde fame). ‘I won’t let them take you alone! Quick lets go and hide!’

This is rapidly getting out of hand and their granddad stomping downstairs, ringing the door and pretending to be a policeman only adds to the hysteria. They hole up upstairs, barricading doors, recruiting mercenary teddies and making catapaults out of pacifiers......

We all reach for the vodka..

Later, amongst other outings, we take the kids to a Chuck E Cheese restaurant for a treat. For those of you who may not heard of a Chuck Eeeeagh Cheese it is a pizza serving amusement arcade. Little children are given tokens and set free within. Our hands are stamped on entry so that we can’t try and sneak off without taking our children (and vice versa). It sounds like it should be sweet but the whole place smells funny; of anxious sweat and old nappies and the kids, loaded up on coke, run from game to game without pausing to put down their pizza.
My poor cuz, recently back from an MRI scan at the hospital, sits opposite me in the far booth, watching her son licking the mirrors on the merry-go-round..

‘You know Chuck E Cheese is a rat?’ she muses.

A rat running a children’s restaurant. Indeed, at one point a thin person in a large rat mask and hairy gloves comes out of a hole in the wall and dances with the exhausted staff before throwing hundreds of prize tickets into the terrifying crowd of seething sugared up children and scampering away.

(c) Ben Edlizt
Luckily it isn't all Chuck E Cheese. We escape in the evenings and there is sushi and cheese fries, delicious Cobb salads and the boil in a bag turkey and pie at Thanksgiving. All in all it is a manic but wonderful week. I love my cousins. They are all so smart and funny and so full of love for each other. They are exceptionally generous and gentle too. And the smalls, when good, are very very good. . The Zen Master is a marvellous cuddler and Ben gives me this work of art before I go. (I suspect it is a portrait of me after spending an hour at Chuck, E. Cheese)

(pic: Suzie and Irv in Philadelphia (c) T. Bush)

I arrive back in England to my icy flat and no dog and for a moment the heavy cold silence weighs me down. I even consider putting on the children’s channel and watching SpongeBob Square Pants all night...but then I remember Chuck E Cheese ....and I breathe a guilty sigh of relief...

Hedging Bets

‘Well, YOU’RE obviously not blind,’ grins the woman at the end of the bench. We are at the vet and Grace is still in her harness. I am not sure quite how to respond. It always surprises me how the assumption on seeing a person whose eyes are apparently undamaged, who is without a helper and who isn’t actually feeling their way along a wall is that the person albeit with cane or guide dog, is fully sighted

‘Actually I am..well not blind.. but visually impaired.’

I am staring right at her which is always a mistake. I should really roll my eyes wildly in my head; stumble up to her and run my fingers over her face. At least a small eye twitch...but I haven’t the time to ‘do blind’. I have nice make up on. I did my own mascara. If I twitch I’ll smear it.

She looks doubtful ‘Oh, really?,’ (This must be in case I am not sure.) ‘I thought you were training the dog.’

I do my required two minute spiel about tunnel vision and she nods enthusiastically, all green-wellied lady of the manor politeness. Slones are not an endangered species in Cambridge. She has come in to see if the hedgehog she rescued yesterday has recovered. It had seemed a little ‘off’ which is the polite word for ‘run over’. The elderly receptionist assures her it has been doing fine

'I’ll just pop into the back to check...but I sure you can take it home.’ The woman apparently releases homeless hedgehogs in her expansive garden.
‘I have plenty of room,’ she snorts happily.

The receptionist comes back rubbing her hands, embarrassed. ‘ Err...would you believe it..the poor thing has expired.’

Expired? I think, imagining a tiny bar code and sell by date on the little hog’s tummy. At that moment the vet comes through looking his usual dishevelled stern Germanic self.

‘Her hedgehog’s dead,’ says the receptionist a little desperately.

‘Ah.’ The vet blinks Prussian-Blue eyes from behind his glasses. ‘We must do better next time.’

Mum and John arrive from a brief jaunt to New York. John had just run the New York marathon and bested his previous time, which considering he had only just started training when I saw them in France a couple of months ago is remarkable. All hail!

I once made the mistake of asking him about sports shoes. 'I can’t remember if I over-pronate or ..you know the other...but what running shoes on the market would you recommend? Structured insoles? How about resprung layering with sweat resistant technology..?' I had wittered in my best athletic sounding jargon. He had raised a baffled eyebrow. Turns out he wears ‘trainers’, the older, the more used to his feet, the better.

Between them (Mum and John, not the trainers) they still, in spite of marathons jet lag and lugging of baggage, have more energy than Ritalin-deprived, 10 year olds on Tango and spangles. They pile out into my garden chopping, sawing, weeding, mowing and generally saving its life. They rearrange my furniture, put lights up, clean the loo. Although Grace and I can only hunker down under a table and watch all this, I am very, very grateful. The lights in the kitchen make a world of difference. I might actually try reading a recipe book for once I say dancing around. I might even stop eating out of the saucepan and put things on a plate now I can see what they are. Grace inspects the garden and is surprised to see that her dog run is still there, now that the nettles and bind weed have been cleared. She is even more excited to find she can, when no one is watching, now sneak all the way around it and poo secretly in the grass around the back. Image: Grace (c) T. Bush 10

The week ends with my boiler going on the blink but more importantly with the release of the wonderful Aung San Suu Kyi. Nervous joy greets her, everyone glancing over their shoulders for the guns. What has the regime got in store next you can almost hear them thinking. Why now? Is it real? Safe?

We wait and see.