The Secret Garden

Something is not quite right

Something is not quite right with the world. I don't know what to make of it. I finally have my bedroom more or less how I want it (after 10 months), I have the study and the kitchen approaching muster, and I have a brewing cupboard (major achievement!), but something still isn't quite right.

This morning I wore my nice new clothes from East and Monsoon, and secretly fantasised about buying household items from Heals on my lunchbreak. I even - momentarily - considered a manicure. All in all I feel quite the domestic goddess. But something is nagging at me and shattering the good feeling.

I'm in trouble again at home. Now, I could say that there are other reasons for this person's bad mood - transferance, anxiety, PMT - and I do believe that they all play a part. But the fact remains that after only two weeks I'm in someone's bad books.

Ostensibly the problem is that I'm not cleaning enough. Or tidying. Or doing some other domestic thing. The painful rub is that I am. I'm cleaning like a bastard. I'm sugar soaping, scrubbing, wiping, removing the paint marks from lino, mopping, hoovering, polishing and washing. Yet it doesn't seem to be enough.

I refuse to ostentatiously brandish the hoover. To chase someone round the house vacuuming under their feet. To huff and sigh and tramp off into the kitchen to do the washing up. Quite frankly that's childish. I hoover and mop when the house is empty. I scrub and wipe paint flecks without comment. I clean the bathroom when I brush my teeth at night so it is pleasant for the morning.

In short, I do all my cleaning in private.

Is that what the fucking problem is? Does nobody trust me unless they watch over me? Do I have to arbitrarily shuffle items on the side to make things look different and therefore "clean"?

Give me a break. Any idiot can do that.

What most morons don't seem to be able to do is to wash the skirting board once in a while. Clean the fly specks off grime-encrusted glass, bleach the fucking toilet, wash behind the U-bend where it is filthy, clear the stinking drains. Those are the invisible jobs that I do, and so far all I am is villified for it.

Well fuck you.

Lady V - why have you forsaken me?

Sigh.

I'm in a funny mood today. I got sunburnt yesterday, and am now wearing about an inch of makeup to try to hide my poor red forehead. I don't normally wear makeup at all, so I feel a bit like one of those celebrity "how not to do it" pics where they show Barara Cartland wearing industrial strength blusher and false eyelashes you could knock people over with...

The funny thing is that looking around most women are wearing just as much slap as me. And it is normal for them. WEird.

I think all of this has come to the fore this week because I have just under a week left before Lady V takes herself off on her travels and heads retrograde in my sign. Not just gone, you understand, but gone backwards. Maybe it is so she can get a better view of my poor dejected face as she thumbs her nose at me and my plans for love yet again.

The hard way

Well I did get the snot beaten out of me, and it wasn't pretty. Challenging life experiences - 1, small insignificant human being - 0.

Still, I can take comfort from the fact that this was a learning experience. Something that I will certainly never forget. Again everyone was very helpful with the advice in hindsight, but nobody stood in my way to stop me from learning the hard way. Maybe trying to speak at my grandmother's funeral and breaking down completely at the lectern was something that I needed to do for my own personal and spiritual development?

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe it was the most devastating and embarrassing thing that I have done in my whole adult life.

What I can take away from the experience is that there are important lessons that I learned from my grandmother. That I can be true to myself, and fearless, even in the face of crushing defeat.

Maybe she had one last lesson to teach me afterall.

Running to stand still

Bugger.

Virgo (Aug 23 - Sep 22)
You might be running on a treadmill today as you attempt to do the right thing. You could be sure of a specific course of action and simultaneously sure of its opposite. It's rather confusing, for the closer you get to a decision, the further away the solution appears. Unfortunately, inaction won't work either, for you are in a transformational process. Move slowly; you have more time than you think.

"...a transformational process"? In my experience that means getting the snot beaten out of me in the name of a learning experience. I thought I was done with the life laundry. Obviously not.

Bugger.

The end of the ride

I've been sat in front of a computer for 11 hours a day, almost every day, for the last month, so I have no excuse for not posting here in so long.

Things have been intense. First intensely social, then intensely personal, then work-related intensity, and now intensely emotional. I would say that it has been a rollercoaster but it hasn't been. If it were a rollercoaster, then so far all I have experienced is the cranking, jolting, inexorable journey to the top of the first peak.

The car would be almost vertical, and I would be staring straight up at the sky.

From that position I wouldn't know if I'd reached the top, or if I still had a way to go. I wouldn't be able to see the track laid out before me or to assess the pitch of the drop. I would have to use my senses - strain my ears to listen for a change in the clanking of the chains, hold my breath to feel if the weight shifts from my chest to become weightlessness in my stomach.

That's how I feel today. I have that same sense of helpless inevitability - a feeling that I should just hang on and wait to see how I'll feel at the end of the ride.