Through a dim haze...

...I remember the yesterday that was.

I went up to visit my grandad. This involved a very pleasant journey up the A46. This is my favourite time of year in some ways - everything is at its absolute trembling peak of perfection before the decline into autumn. Before starting my main travels, I picked up some bargainous pots in town - 6 large clay pots for a tenner! - and ran into some rather pretty purple peppers. It was overcast as I headed up towards Stroud, but the A46 is bordered by some magnificent wheat fields (one has a rather splendid iron-age fort in it!) and as I drove past, the combine harvesters were busy making those big plump uber-neat cylindrical hay-bales. The only sad part was a butterfly hitting the windscreen - bugger! I really hate driving sometimes, although I've never hit anything larger than a bug.

Just as I reached the further edge of the plateau, before the descent into my home valley, the clouds suddenly lifted and it was a glorious day. Hazy, but beltingly hot, and the world looked beautiful. In some ways, I always get sad driving through my home town. It's got a lot prettier since I lived there, with cafes and brightly painted gift shops, but the memories are always bittersweet and something has always changed. They've boarded up the house next door to where I live - I guess it just got too dilapidated - but my dad's old van is still parked in the same place :/

Plus, worst of all, Stroud has got a new and glaring McDonalds, and every time I drive along the road to my grandad's house, I almost get marmalysed by some moron munching on a McBurger. Sigh. My grandad is doing pretty well considering he's 87 now. I didn't stop long because he had to go for physiotherapy at the local hospital, but we got chance to munch crisps, drink tea and catch up on some things. I think I probably take after my grandad to be honest - most of my family are bouncing extraverts, but there's a quiet streak that must come from him, I guess. It's not without it's downside, but I'm happy to get that hand from the genetic shuffle. He was also really pleased with a rather nice new painting that he'd just bought, done by a friend of the family.

I was slightly at a loose end after packing off my aged gramp in an ambul-bus (he was lapping up the attention ;)). I had planned to go for a walk along the local cycle track, but it seemed so hot that instead I decided to go and visit the church at Selsley. This is something I've been meaning to do for years - it's supposed to be a very fine "Arts and Crafts" style church, built by a guy with the reputation of being a satanist/pagan/general nutter, according to who you speak to. The plan went well until I overshot the local parking. "Oh well", I thought, "I'll just pull in at one of the laybys on Selsley Common". Forgetting, of course, that a mile or two can fly by in the company of Mr Automobile. Result: a very long trek across the savannah that is a stroud hilltop in the summer, stumbling wildly up and down the banks of small stone quarries, hoping feverishly that I was going in the right direction. Once you've got about 100 yards from your car, you generally can't see it any more.

So despite the heat, I managed to use up a good half of my flash-card before I'd even got to the church, and acquired a rather fine black feather on the way. The church was very nice - pretty and continental looking, with William Morris windows and pretty earthy tiles. There were some loud people, but they went away after I tried to make friends with them ;) so I got some good photos (to be uploaded soon!) and stopped in the graveyard to take advantage of the handy shade and water supply. I grossly over-estimated the distance back to the car and popped up in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, on the summertime hills of Stroud, the middle of nowhere often also contains a Winstone's icecream van, where I revived myself with finest icy coldness before wandering back to my solar charged oven on wheels car.

Apart from having a great day, a discovery to be proud of is that I can jam my sunglasses over my driving glasses. Looks a little strange, but at least I can see on sunny days :)

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random thoughts relating to my life
This evening I was surreptitiously hosing my garden. I'm not sure if we have a hosepipe ban - probably not - but using a hose is always something I feel vaguely guilty about. That's by the by - my thoughts were going back to my childhood, playing in the garden in summer while my dad would tease us with the hose, and we'd "accidentally" get soaked. I thought that maybe the saddest thing I could think of was a garden like that, that once had been loved and enjoyed, but had been neglected and forgotten, buried under the weight of weeds and family strife. It made me sad- and always did - how my parents house, shop and garden, all three sources of light and joy, slowly degenerated as they slid into alcoholism. The pretty things were neither looked at or used, and everything slowly crumbled into decay. I recently read Great Expectations, and the image of Miss Haversham's preserved and dusty grandeur hit quite sharp and painful into my heart.

I can resolve to never let my life go down this route - I don't believe that effort only serves to maintain the position you've got - but I think there is a deeper problem. All my life, I've been gripped with a terrible horror of losing things, of not appreciating things properly. I've always been hideously concious of mortality, particularly that of loved ones or treasured moments, and deal very badly with change. I guess it's quite sad - what should have been a drive to appreciate life turned into a lonely, slightly gothic burden for a grown-up little girl.

The note to myself here is firstly to try to shed bits of that burden as I go forward in life, and secondly to start a photo-documentary of my childhood haunts and happinesses.

On the steps of recovery
I'm still pondering on this one. I riffled through the pages of a book on ACOA, but felt bad that I hadn't been so terribly abused as the people there. That last sentence came out strange, but basically I felt like a bit of a fraud. I also had a think about steps, and I think that before my dad died I'd graduated onto the second step. I'd acknowledged that my life was in a tailspin, and I'd made steps to deal with that. I was reconciled with not seeing my family any more - I loved them, but their burden on me was unacceptable. And I had actively started seeking for some sort of greater power in life. I was happy and hopeful and positive for the first time since I was a very small child. But my dad's death has made me regress, I think. Sometimes I wonder if I could have changed things by sticking around, and whether the price I paid for happiness was too high. So I think that maybe I've taken a step or two back, onto the border of the two steps.

The note here is to phone Al-Anon and try to find a local meeting. This makes me scared and guilty.

And finally, the to-do list. I've done a lot of good things since I last did this, and I'm not going to rigidly do a list of things I'm pleased with. But I am going to recycle old points from my list into a new one:

• Explore the Lake District by map and make holiday plans
  
• Do a work plan for my last OU assignment
  
• Speak to my boss about time off for that yummy Old English course
  
• Write at least one web page
  
• Sort out my webspace and upload my pics and essays
  
• Cope with my brother's visit serenely (TM to apel ;))
  
• Plan the vegetable bed in the garden
  
• Make some notes from my book on Wicca
  
• Apply for next year's OU course and the course on meditation
  
• Start planning my photo-documentary
  

Oh yeah - hot weather has ripened my tomatoes :)