I’m rather depressed this morning so thought I would try to ‘write it out’This has been a week of meeting people and catching up: lovely but I find too much stimulation of this kind very tiring. Just the way I am made. I need silence and a certain amount of isolation to function. Anyway.
During the week I have been with people as they deal with a lot of problems: so why should I enter into the equation? It is they who are at the sharp end. But it weighs heavily on my heart so to see people hurting.
A dear neighbour has had to have a much loved dog put down, and her daughter and family are dealing with some big problems at the moment: she is grieving and very worried. Two friends have husbands who have cancer, one has had an apparently successful operation (:)) but the other is bravely helping her husband along the final part of his journey. I spent a day with a close friend who has just come out hospital and is still recuperating: he had some sad stories of the people in the bay with him. A very young member of my close family has Asberger’s and as puberty advances is struggling with emotional problems and feelings of suicide – very worrying and frightening. And a shock from the blue when another friend announced that she has just been diagnosed with breast cancer of a very aggressive kind which has spread under one arm. I have just been helping her buy her tiny little dream cottage in an idyllic spot and after New Year husband and I went over and spent a day with her taking out modern fireplaces to reveal the C18 original behind. She was so happy and is now reeling with shock. So I have been giving what immediate support I can and calling up medics. I know to arrange for supportive conversations to help her decide what path of treatment to follow.
So this morning I feel heavy, exhausted and tearful, full of worries for a lot of people.
But I expect it is just that I am very tired or that the usual annual bout of SAD is beginning to hit.
Because there have been happy events too.
Another friend has just become a grandmother for the first time and is in seventh heaven.
A dear blog friend is recovering wonderfully well from a tricky operation.
And yet another friend has just been invited to Buckingham Palace to have tea with the Queen.
Not a Garden Party full of people, but a small, intimate group of people, inside the Palace, for Afternoon Tea. As some of you will know, this year celebrates, on 7th February, the two-hundreth birthday of Charles Dickens .
There are National celebrations planned for the whole year and a major new exhibition in London. My friend is the Secretary of the Dickens Fellowship here in Sheffield: the secretaries of all the Fellowships around the country, about 30, have been invited by the Queen to tea. Not the figurehead Chairmen, but the guys who do all the work, the secretaries. But that is very typical of the Queen and Prince Charles, who have their feet on the ground. Also invited are the celebrated actors Miriam Margolyes
For those of you who are not Royalists, well neither she nor I are ardent Royalists but we much prefer the British system to any alternative on offer, where power and money become mixed up in the election of a Head of State. And we both really appreciate the sacrifice of personal life and the dedication to Duty which our Queen represents. So this invitation is really wonderful to us, in fact I am not sure that I am not more excited than she is. She has picked out a new dress but does not like the neckline or belt and is having it altered: my friend knows a good tailor and often buys old clothes at charity shops and then has them slightly altered. My friend is not tall and often the proportion of clothes is wrong if you are short.
There are exciting events all year in honour of Dickens so for those who like his work it is going to be a feast of delights.
(Incidentally, this year also marks the bicentenary of Edward Lear, that great British institution:
an artist, illustrator, author and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised. He figured most prominently in the childhood of many generations and I fear that he is eclipsed this year by Dickens. Of course one cannot compare them, they are too different, but he deserves recognition too.)
Today the sky is grey, both literally and metaphorically, and rain is here, as it was yesterday. There is much work to do and not enough time to do it in, but I feel apathetic and tired. I want some fun. How selfish that sounds. Don’t we all.
So I will go and play my flute which always makes me feel better and then take a blustery, wet walk. And perhaps do some baking with the goose eggs, they really make the most wonderful cakes!
Now, I hope I have not depressed you too by letting all this out. That is always my worry when admitting to life not being absolutely fine. Perhaps sad is a better way of describing my mood today, rather than depressed.
So, how about a pact? Everyone who can, make sure you have some fun today. OK?
stopping by woods 