freedformwriter
FreedFormWriter
Wandering chronicler. Blogging about writing, swimming, and my shambolic life. Current project: Lockdown Diary.
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Sitting in a tin can
No blogs for a while - this is sorta why.
I yank open the hotel-grade curtains and a blaze of blue sky reflects off the tower block opposite. The few deeply recessed pinpricks of light from early office workers look like stars. It’s my first morning waking up in a little island of tower blocks wedged between one of Lisbon’s motor arteries and a giant hospital complex. I arrived the evening before in the utter stillness of a Sunday and…
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#amwriting#anxiety#onthblog#recovery#stress#wellnessblogger#wellnessjourney#writersinspiration#writerslife#writingtherapy#chronicillness#GulbenkianMuseum#HBOT#hyperbaricchamber#Lisbon#longcovid#ModernistArchitecture#oxygentherapy#postcovidsyndrome
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Spring Tide
Camping adventures in the Algarve continue!
There’s an enormous cow skull attached to one of the trees. That’s the second thing I notice about my campsite for the night. The first is the remains of the sort of quasi-Bedouin hospitality that freewheeling Westerners like: water-damaged round cushions, a rolled-up rug, a rusted metal lantern with a star pattern. After staying in legit campsites, the kind with lanyards, this weekend I’ve…
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#Algarve#camping#connectingwithnature#katherinemay#mindbodysoul#naturetherapy#onthblog#Portugal#rest#retreat#wellnessblogger#wellnessjourney#wintering#wonderfulwildwomen#writersinspiration#writerslife#enchantment
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Wintering in the Sun
Next to me in the beach parking lot, a young couple lounge just inside the door of their off-white camper van consuming the fresh fruit that must be their breakfast from the vantage point of what must be their bed. She remains ensconced in her blanket despite the quickly dissipating February morning chill, while her partner, lean with emphatically shoe-free feet, hops up periodically to gently…
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#Algarve#camping#connectingwithnature#katherinemay#mindbodysoul#naturetherapy#onthblog#Portugal#rest#retreat#wellnessblogger#wellnessjourney#wintering#wonderfulwildwomen#writersinspiration#writerslife
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River Bend
Five years since my travels in India! This is one of my favourite moments from the trip.
year after year in a sealed glass case
a Roman water nymph made of bone
she struggles to summon a river out of limestone
Alice Oswald
The bus swings around another hairpin turn to reveal the next sharp river bend. I try to focus on the sliver of blue sky glimpsed for a moment between the two cliffs, but I can’t resist a surreptitious peak down at the…
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Where we once belonged
Watched The Beatles documentary. Loved it. Wanted to enthuse about it. Ended writing about family history. Typical!
“The Beatles are the bestselling band of all time,” blares the practiced announcer voice as the screen shows black-and-white reels of suited Beatles beset by screaming fans. “Why?” my friend asks. We’re watching the obligatory preamble to the first part of the epic Beatles’ documentary Get Back. At least, it’s epic in length. Nine hours. Its scope is just the month the band recorded the album Let…
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#amblogging#amwriting#getbackdocumentary#lifehistory familyhistory#lifewriting#musichistory#ontheblog#thebeatles#thebeatlesgetback#writersinspiration#writerslife#writingblog#writingblogger
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Solitude
First blog in a while! Today's is all about solitude: how we find it and how it finds us. And how I'm intentionally squandering it.
Red, green, red, green, red, green…
My eyes dart back and forth between the lone palm tree and the looming shaft of the construction crane. The first is native to Portugal’s Algarve, coastal to its bendable core. My second fixed object is imported from Luxembourg to build another gleaming white holiday villa for foreigners. I count to fifty. I’ve already shaken my head side to side and up and…
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#amwriting#anxiety#howtolivealone#mindbodygreen#mindbodysoul#onthblog#persistentposturalperceptualdizziness vestibulardisorder#pppd#recovery#relaxation#selfcare#solitude#stress#vestibularexercises#wellnessblogger#wellnessjourney#writersinspiration#writerslife#writingtherapy
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Tattoo Redo
It turns out I’ve got two choices. I can conceal my history within a large black rectangle, an inky darkness within which the past can go to sleep forever. Or I can allow that same history some space to breathe, adding new elements around its stubborn centre.
My tattoo artist Olga is quite literally sketching out the possibilities on her tablet, design layers sliding on and off with professional…
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#adventureculture#adventurewomen#amblogging#amwriting#creativity#geometrictattoo#graphictattoo#lifewriting#metoo#ontheblog#tattoo ink#warsawtattoo#wellnessblogger#writerslife#writingblog#writingblogger
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Fast Fiction Feminist
Why we can be heroes AND heroines.
This week, I'm reviewing the feminist pop-culture takedown The Heroine's Journey.
It’s a bright, sunny day, and a woman – okay, she’s a goddess – is just going about her daily business when BAM! her husband is murdered by his brother and chopped into pieces, or BAM! her daughter is sucked under the earth by the god of death, or BAM! her sister-in-law murders her for staging a power coup against the underworld. Right. I’m not sure if that last one works. But Ishtar is only…
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#amblogging#amwriting#gailcarriger#heroinesjourney#herosjourney#josephcampbell#ontheblog#romancelandia#WriteChat#writersinspiration#writerslife#writersonwriting#writersvoice#writingblog#writingblogger#writingritual
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Octo Inspo
Finally writing about my diving accident at the the end of the summer. Also about octopuses and why we're so into them at the moment. Please don't read if underwater stuff scares you!
It’s taken me a few false starts to write this one as the accident felt quite raw for a while.
Thumbs up?
He gestures with his free hand, the other fixed to the swaying anchor chain. His goggle-magnified eyes are wide. A question mark. Thumbs up, I respond. Normally this is the universal hand signal for ‘it’s all good, dude.’ But in the upside-down world of scuba diving things can get turned on…
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#adventureblog#adventureculture#adventurewomen#amblogging#connectingwithnature#exploremore#naturetherapy#scubadiving#swimblog#writersinspiration#naturedocumentary#octopusteacher
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Note to self
What the hell do I do with my lockdown journal? and other writing questions.
‘A single construction worker has returned to the abandoned building site across the road. He’s placed a blue beach umbrella beside the new pool making it look as if he’s having a party for one.’
I’m reading over the final week of my defunct lockdown diary. The part I didn’t even have the energy to post. I wrote it in late May when I’d just emerged, blinking, into the bleached brilliance of…
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#amblogging#amwriting#diarywriting#findyourvoice#journalwriting#liveinspired#lockdownblog#lockdowndiary#lockdownlife#lockdownwriter#ontheblog#WriteChat#writersinspiration#writerslife#writersonwriting#writersvoice#writingblog#writingblogger#writingritual#journaling
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Overdue end of the Lockdown Diary…
Day 55
I’ve taken to swimming in the bleached pool in hopes that the chlorine will substitute for a soap scrub under the cold-water tap. My frog-kicking feet strike the bottom in the shallows, so I make little doggie-paddling circles in the deep end. Still, there’s sun and sparkle and the natural mood lift that comes from being buoyant. It’s a nice break from spreadsheets. I sit my glum cluster down in front of my endlessly-updated google docs and review home repairs and car searches and trade recriminations about why we still don’t have hot water. We try to leave these pleasantries out of our virtual Sunday coffee with our missing member. It’s enough of a stretch as it is.
Day 56
Soon I’ll need to wear smart tops with my pyjamas like all the other WFHers, I tell my girlfriend. I’ve just had a meeting on Microsoft Teams. The topic: IKEA PAX closets. It’s the type of unfunny joke designed to point out just how much damn work I’m doing to sort this house out. I check The Portugal Resident for the latest on beach protocol. Good news! No sign of policed beaches with surveillance drones swooping overhead. The worst limitation for some people is only being allowed a half-day sun lounger rentals. But I’m not cheered. Immediately on opening the article, two advertisement banners have appeared trying to sell me funeral insurance. Must have for expats 40+! Jesus Christ. What have I got myself into?
Day 57
We have hot water!
My longed-for bath is anticlimactic. It’s suddenly in the high 20s and I’m already plenty warm. And perhaps I’m not feeling so fragile anymore. It’s been a week since I unpacked anything, but now I bustle about listening to Radio 6 Music. Synth music recommendations are punctuated by hourly news flashes about soaring unemployment sign-ons, inadequate testing, and Trump’s latest mad cure claims. Lauren Lavern does her ‘House Music’ feature. Was ever a concept – to submit videos of your household appliances making music – better suited to our times?
Today we have an ear-and-nose clipper that sound like the opening to Gomez’s Get Miles, a squeaking garden gate that heralds Funkin’ for Jamaica by Tom Browne, and two hard-working dishwashers. Once unheard as they slogged away overnight, these machines are now part of the daytime soundscape. The one in York plays Waterloo Sunset as it starts, while the other’s mid-cycle interruption notification sounds like My Girl.
Hopeful dishwashers, declares Lauren.
Day 58
I fill my fountain pen with ‘Sargasso Sea’ blue ink for some fiction scribbling. My yoga and writing sessions are the one sacrosanct creative space in the week. But, last time, I used the hours to shop online for sheets. I guess I was desperate for tangible comfort. For something that would claim the bare bed and empty room upstairs as mine. Now, they’ve arrived.
I’ve gone full Byron Bay. Unbleached 100% linen. Ooooh, enthuses a friend, you could use the flat sheet as a tablecloth if you have a big dinner party in the garden. We clearly follow the same Instagram threads. I make a bedside light with an old tomato sauce bottle, removing the supermarket discount brand label – PorSi – with olive oil, then stuffing a length of fairy lights inside and finally knocking a jagged hole in the lid with a screwdriver.
Day 59
A single construction worker has returned to the abandoned building site across the road. He’s placed a blue beach umbrella beside the new pool making it look as if he’s having a party for one. In February, they drove a digger over the property wall, scooped out an Olympic amount of red earth and left. Outside the hotel on the corner I spot another lone worker lying full stretch on a second-floor wall and leaning out into space to wrestle a weed from a drainage spout. The hotel lobby is shrouded in white sheets like an aristocratic home shut-up for the off-season.
I show off my new haircut on Zoom at that night’s quiz. I booked the long-coveted cut on a facebook page filled with pictures of faceless women getting their roots retouched. The stylist wore her plastic apron medical style, while mine was tied up tight about my neck for the wash. She then slipped the neck ties through the ear loops of my mask, pulling it tight and low, before starting with the scissors. Ingenious.
No one’s even getting up at 8pm to clap the NHS anymore.
Day 60 - The End
I thought there would be more closure. More definite boundaries to the lockdown state. That I would know where it started and where it ended. I imagined concluding my lockdown journal when I was reunited with my girlfriend. A classic fade-to-black moment at the airport arrivals gate. My new beginning implied by a swirling shot of us embracing. We’re not together, but time is moving again. I’ve felt it ticking for this past week or more. I’m no longer in the state of suspension so evident in the UK.
The day is punctuated with delivery vans pulling up. Workmen tromping in. Renovating a house is an occupation focussed on tangible targets. Befores and Afters of predictably startling difference. There’s very little room for subtle observation. And, aside from flashes of existential crises when you realize that you’ve just spent an hour seriously discussing the pros and cons of detachable kitchen taps, your consciousness does not shift an inch.
Or maybe that’s just me. All I know is that I was a part of the lockdown masses in the UK. Now I’m a corona tourist. I do a final check-in with the live webcam of falcon chicks in Warsaw that’s proved a strange bond with my stranded girlfriend. The chicks are now enormous, unattractive mounds of mottled feathers and down. One stretches its wings. Testing. I swear it was just the other day that its stubby wings caused it to overbalance and topple over.
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Lockdown: Day 54
I’m half listing, half doodling. Determining to broadside weekend relaxation with the big guns, I’ve busted out my pro-markers and mindfulness drawing board. Across the now-visible Atlantic, my sister abstractedly replies while reading the key points of Phase 1 of Virginia Goes Back To Work. She does the books for a country club set up. I’m astonished to learn that the golf course had been functioning the entire lockdown. Yeah, of course. It’s outdoor exercise. Tees separations are reduced from 20 minutes to 15. Every tee is taken. The green’s snack widow doubles as take-away HQ.
The links must be a bit of a lifesaver. Tours for the September wedding bookings continue, but she’s busy processing $3000 refunds for May nuptials. Well, I still haven’t got back my £140 for my Canterbury ceremony. Disappointed brides and grooms aren’t so bad, she says. But only the flintiest heart can stand to watch a girl in floods of tears because her Quinceañera is cancelled. She’ll never get to turn 15 again.
I’ve been saying the same thing about turning 40. I’m temporarily chastened.
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Lockdown: Day 53
I take to my bed. I amass a pile of books and close the shutters against the afternoon sun and the door against the rest of the house. I’ve decided to stop my forced march of productivity and declare myself an emotional wreck. I made an uncharacteristic midnight phone call to my girlfriend last night, unloading all my feelings about this past week: how emotional it was saying goodbye to my friends in the UK; how nervous I was about traveling; how my bed doesn’t have proper sheets, and how my bed doesn’t have her.
The fight that seemed to have died down yesterday evening has bubbled up again and I’m once again getting curt, staccato replies to my queries. I’ve retaliated by being pissed off that she’s pissed off. We don’t have the luxury of being angry with each other, I declare, there’s too much to be done. What I really mean is: I’ve had a fucking hard week and I shouldn’t have to put up with this shit too.
At last I emerge, discovering I feel infinitely better for having taken the time to feel bad, and take myself for a walk. The coastal path is a single dirt track trapped between the cliff’s edge on one side and the private entrances to the holiday complexes. I only plunge into the coarse vegetation a few times to avoid another walker, but the padlocked gate at the five-star resort stops me in my tracks. Due to COVID-19, we ask that people only enter by the main gate.
Privado Blockado.
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Lockdown: Day 52
The rough reds and greys of the building site have sharpened into clean white lines. The full size of the property is now apparent. Jesus it’s huge. We’re on an inspection tour of our ever-expanding neighbourhood, slowly walking the looping road that’s angled so each villa can strain for a sea view. I stand on tiptoes to look into the garden where the wall’s been dropped for the infinity pool. There’s a new fanciest house in town.
The skies have cleared for the sunset. I’ve got sexy Zoom lighting sitting on the front step doing my regular Thursday quiz. I’m trying to decompress after a tense day. One of my cluster is pissed off with me, the new arrival who insists on arranging things the old way. It’s a pattern I remember from when I started living overseas. I’d return to my family home and struggle to remember that this house and these people had existed without me for the past half year. Eventually, I accepted that I was a guest.
I can’t be a guest here.
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Lockdown: Day 51
The entrance is blocked. It’s been deemed safer to have everyone squeeze in and out of the shop by the registers. I am beckoned in by one of the well-tanned workmen who hang about the seafront. They spend the off-season repairing, repainting, and replanting. Everything here moves toward the moment when tourists arrive and trample everything underfoot again. If they come.
Masks are mandatory, but it’s one of those cramped markets where a two-metre distance is impossible. And it’s equally hard to stay vigilant knowing there’s only been three hundred odd cases in the whole of the Algarve. The current number actually went down to zero last week before an infected couple arrived in the region.
I teach my yoga class, panning my camera over to a rain-splattered front window. Chucking it down, I announce happily. Grey skies and temperatures in the mid-teens don’t normally cheer me. Perhaps I’m embarrassed to have slipped the net. Perhaps I want to pretend that I’m still in the same fish tank.
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Lockdown: Day 50
It rains hard in the night. I wake up early to the clouds breaking and the birds going crazy. And there it is. The sea, the strip of changeable blue that will greet me every day when I open my first-floor balcony doors from here to eternity. I try to let this simple joy at life’s continuance suffuse my mind. But no. Topics covered in my final taxi ride swirl in my head: No return to normalcy. Instead, beach-tracking apps and the return of authoritarian regimes that didn’t let people own so much as a book. No vaccine. Just Bill Gates masterminding some eugenical cull of the earth’s population. I should watch the YouTube talk he did five years ago. It’s all there.
There’s no hot water – my four-inch bath last night was heated by kettles – and the kitchen is just an empty room with a camp stove attached to the gas. Soon the carpenter and his assistant have set up a bandsaw on the backstep, slicing the thin floorboards destined for the downstairs bedroom. The neat square hole of raw concrete where the closet used to be will remain. Like the kitchen, we tore it all out after successive burst water pipes bred toxic mould.
It’s a shaky start.
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