Life Update

Tags

editing, Jericho Writers, Living in the moment, Memoir, narrowboat life, Netflix, Russell Brand, simple life, The Salt Path, Upwork, Voluntary simplicity, writing, Zadie Smith

Today on the boat

We are three weeks in to a month long lockdown here in England, with rumours it might go on for longer, and that we may be given five days to socialise over Christmas which would need to be offset by twenty-five days of lockdown in January. I sympathise with anyone who has strong feelings about it. For me personally, I’m pretty easy going about it. We have planned to go to my mum’s for Christmas Day and then stay at my husband’s mum’s for a few days. However, even if restrictions are lifted over Christmas, I will say to my mum that if she prefers us not to come, and to spend Christmas with a less risky friend, rather than my husband and I who both work in care homes, that is fine. In that case we would offer to work an early shift at work to allow people with kids to have some of the day off. I don’t really mind about being locked down for January either.

That said, I have felt very restless, particularly at the beginning of this lockdown, and am now treating it as an opportunity, or a lesson, in practicing patience and being here now. In fact ever since we’ve come back from our travels I’ve been thinking about going somewhere else. As my husband said, maybe what we need to do is just accept where we are and learn to enjoy that, before anything else will become possible.

Living on the boat in Autumn is good for that; the bright fresh walks in the countryside, the cosy feeling of the wood burner, the store of logs and kindling and spare gas bottle just delivered by the fuel boat yesterday. We’ve maintained most of our healthy living programme from September. I made someone laugh at work the other day when I said that the worst thing I’d done since August was eat two packets of crisps (potato chips.) Cooking from scratch is another great way to appreciate the moment and feel grounded.

Writing

My book: I submitted my book to five agents, which I found using Jericho Writer’s agent match search facility. I had some interest from one, a rejection from another, and am still waiting to hear from the others. According to this great article by Zadie Smith, in an ideal world you’d put aside your book for a year, if not, three months, before editing. My plan is to resist any urge to do anything until 23^rd January or afterwards. That will be three months since I last looked at my book. Then I will edit again and get the word count down- it’s too long and that may be off putting, and after leaving it I will hopefully see where it can be cut and see things which need doing much more easily.

Upwork: I’ve begun a foray into writing for money. Upwork is very easy to get set up on, and scrolling through the constantly updating jobs is at least as fun as scrolling through Google news or Instagram. The variety is fun- one person wants articles about ferrets, from people with some knowledge of them. Unfortunately my experience is very limited, I once saw a man walking a ferret on a train, John used to talk about wanting one on his boat, and we both once saw a man in Ramsgate walking two ferrets on a lead.

My first job was ghostwriting/editing a young American man’s very exciting travel story. It was fun and I was able to do it well. I’m currently pitching for a few more. A lot of the jobs are very low paid/are suitable only for professional copywriters who can write a 500-600 article start to finish in half an hour, but there is a huge variety. It takes time to build a profile, get reviews and be able to pitch for the better paid jobs. And by pitch- I just send them a nice friendly message, although forums abound on putting snazzy proposals together. Clients range from companies churning out content, to individuals writing their memoirs. I recommend it!

Reading

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, about homelessness and walking the South West Coast path. Here’s a link to a great article about her and the book.

Russell Brand Booky Wook 2 and Revolution from a charity shop, amusing and interesting.

Watching

Netflix: The Queen’s Gambit, Baby (Italian with subtitles, in my learning Italian phase) Plus loads of old films my husband has found on YouTube, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Dead on Arrival, Charade

Self portrait Pushkar 2020

About the author

In 2018 in our forties and fifties my husband and I sold up, gave away most of our possessions, and went travelling for a year, mainly in India, and also to Thailand, Tokyo, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam. My personal/spiritual/travel memoir of the year is completed and out with agents. I live on a narrowboat in rural Northamptonshire UK with my husband and two cats.

Thank you very much for reading

Follow me on Instagram thisisrachelhill

Goodbye BoJack Horseman

Tags

Bojack Horseman, letting go, Netflix, Non attachment, Raphael Bob Waksberg, the present moment

Practising non attachment doesn’t mean you don’t love people or things. It means holding everything with an open hand and letting it/them go with as much serenity as I can.

I haven’t started watching the final half of the final series of BoJack Horseman, so no spoilers in the comments please.

If you haven’t watched BoJack yet, I envy you for the long hours of pleasure ahead. While my husband was away I rewatched everything from the very first episode through to the end of the first half of the final season. Then I watched one of those last episodes again, twice. And listened to the end credits songs on youtube. And cried.

Please don’t shy away from the show for reasons which may mean you miss out on something you might grow to love. Like how I refused to entertain the idea of watching Battlestar Gallactica because it was Sci Fi but it turned out to be one of the key enlightening media experiences of my life.

I might have assumed I would not like BoJack as it was a cartoon and the concept might have sounded silly at first. But I overheard it whilst my husband was watching it and my interest was piqued.

I watched it, started again from the beginning, and fell deeply in love. The opening credits, with their warm yet bright pastel colours and languid music which sounds kind of like bubbles popping, have brought me into the present moment many times:

Ill in bed in my peaceful white room, alone in the house, the beautiful colours on my tablet the only colours in the room. On a train in India, the emotions of this thing from home being with me everywhere bringing tears to my eyes.

What about the content? Depression, fame, Hollywood, consumerism, addiction, guilt, loneliness and despair…

It is also very funny.

Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, feminist, vegan, and all round good guy.

Wasn’t this post about non attachment? I haven’t yet started that final final part. I am re watching the first part of the final season again with my husband first. (I think he’s indulging me) But I’ve already un-followed all BoJack related accounts and hashtags in preparation for when it’s over.

Fall in love, fall deeply in love, but when it’s over it’s over. Cut the cord and float up and off untethered and unbound, ready for whatever it is that you are going to do or be next. (Also works for clutter, clothes, hobbies, routines, ideas and beliefs.)

Thank you for reading

Life update

Tags

Atypical, Bojack Horseman, Life on a narrowboat, love, marriage, Narrowboat, Narrowboat living, Netflix, Periods, Shameless, Shameless US, solitude, The menopause, writing

‘I feel proactive/I pull out weeds’

My husband and I have spent the last month apart; this worried a couple of people but there’s no problems, it was just for him to have a break, for me to have time alone to write and for us both to have the experience of being in the world without each other. It turns out, two weeks was plenty.

I did lots of driving both big trips and just around the local area (usually we default to him doing the driving). I mostly ate Covent Garden soup and Wicked sandwiches from the little Tesco on the way back from work. Always also in my basket were vegan staples avocados and bananas, plus satsumas, and bread for the swans.

I bought fuel, managed the fire and kept warm (it got cold right after he left, then warmed up, then got cold, now warm, will get cold tomorrow, this is the UK!) I emptied the toilet and filled the water tank.

I managed life on the boat fine. I did lots of writing/editing and I went to work usually just a couple of long shifts each week.

A couple in their sixties, experienced boaters who have been continuous cruisers for two and a half years including in London, live in the same place and have provided nice regular chats as well as the warm security blanket of them knowing I’m on my own and saying that if I need anything I can go to them.

People at work have suddenly become astonishingly friendly, as if I reached a kind of tipping point. One day I had to fight the urge to look behind me, convinced that a member of staff must be greeting someone else, she looked so pleased to see me. Another hugged me, ‘I wondered when you’d next be here.’

I had the odd lonely moment but this was almost always quickly followed by loud noises outside the boat heralding the arrival of two hungry swans.

I had the highs of spiritual insights (see below), and I maintained awareness and acceptance of the natural highs, lows and plateaus.

Writing

I’ve been editing/polishing aiming to get the book all to the same stage. When I get to a place where the chapter is more or less done (small tweaks may still be needed but I know what to do and one session on it would do it), I move on. I’m probably between a third and half the way through, maybe more. I hope to have this phase done by the end of February. Then another final polish until it is all as good as I can make it on my own.

I write almost every day, for about an hour or two. If I overdo it or try to rush it it doesn’t go so well, I get fatigued, and I lose confidence. I had one brief dip/anxiety; I forced myself to just do a bit. Half an hour later, I was okay. I could see what I was doing and had confidence that I could do it. I stopped then, grateful for that, and mindful that just half an hour was enough to give me back my hope.

One night, driving home, listening to some spiritual music sent to me by friends this month, I thought about explaining how it is to write a whole book, ‘You have to keep going. And you have to make it good.’ And then I got goosebumps. ‘Oh my God, that’s just like life….’

What I’ve been reading/watching

About people living on boats, funnily enough! I am interested in the people living in London and in particular the Continuous Cruisers. The lifestyle is explained here and this article outlines detailed tips and scary dangers. For Des, and anyone unfamiliar with the hitherto counter culture and now much more mainstream lifestyle choice of living on a narrowboat.

‘Things not to say’ from the BBC

Short films of people from different walks of life explaining the clichéd, irritating and insulting things people say to them.

Netflix: 

Before the first week was out, all of Shameless US Season 7 (I adore it, it’s based on the original Shameless set in the UK. The US seems so much tougher, I would love to hear what my American and Canadian readers make of Shameless US Season 7, no spoilers so no details) and the new season of Atypical about a teen with Autism and his family and friends. I love this so much. So then I just went onto, as planned, re watching BoJack Horseman from the beginning. Depression, fame, nihilism, existentialism, barely unremitting sadness. Don’t let the fact that it’s a cartoon fool you.

The superpowers which come with the onset of the menopause, from mumsnet. I’m always looking for the deeper meaning and spiritual context, here it is: ‘Am I having a mid life awakening or a personality transplant?’ ‘I feel like I just woke up from the matrix.’ Reading this I thought, as I often did when my regular monthly period would arrive, ‘Ah, that explains a lot….’

The space apart, the space together

I read a blog post by someone who married someone with a different language and from such a vastly different culture that there’s things the other person can’t ever know or understand, and that means the writer has a space that’s private. As someone who likes a lot of time alone, I totally understand and relate to that as a concept. However, my marriage is not like that. It’s really important to me to feel really understood. My husband and I spend a lot of time talking about all sorts of ideas, and together it feels as if we create a new space together to live in, outside of ourselves and in addition to what we’d have individually. Even in the early days, I had this sense. I used to visualise our new relationship as one of those air plants, growing in a thin glass bowl, suspended in the air between us, growing separately from the both of us, yet something we were both growing.

Anyway, we’ve missed each other, and neither of us currently want to go on separate adventures in the near future.

And in case you need more convincing about Bojack:

Thank you very much for reading

Waving Cats and Dream Hotels: Da Lat, Vietnam

Tags

anxiety, Atypical, Dalat, death, Enlightenment, meditation, Netflix, spiritual awakening, Vietnam, waking up

For more photographs of Da Lat see a previous blog here

Straightaway we loved DaLat. All of a sudden there were old buildings, full of character, old shops and old flats above shops. Apparently there was a tacit agreement from both sides not to bomb Da Lat during the American/Vietnam War hence all the old buildings. It made us realise the contrast with where we’d been before, that all the new, boxy, functional buildings were new buildings built after the war.

There were street food stalls with great big pans of eggs, some looked like chicken eggs, some were small like quail eggs, and big pans of stew or noodle soup. There were grills with tortillas on, with egg poured on to cook omelettes on top of the tortillas. In the street were stalls with piles of scarves, and furry hats with ears on and ear flaps with long furry scarves attached, like kids hats. It was a big change of temperature, again.

From the window of the taxi we saw lots of hair dressers and shops selling cool looking vintage clothes, and tried to remember where we were relative to our guesthouse. It was such a relief to be in DaLat, it was as if we’d left the bad behind in Nha Trang, immediately we both felt better even just driving through.

Ours was a family run hotel, we tried the wrong one at first, we knew it was wrong as it looked too posh, but both had similar names something like My Dream and Dream Hotel both with dream in the name anyway. Ours was a small homely guesthouse run by a well dressed woman with nice waved hair. In the reception were two little dogs.

 

Our room was in some ways old fashioned with a big wooden wardrobe and a sideboard, and in some ways modern with black and silver flock wallpaper. In the room we were aware of the change in climate; the room smelled very slightly damp, and a bit of mildew when we opened the wardrobe. In the wardrobe, and in a neat folded pile at the bottom of the stairs, were the thick synthetic blankets that were so popular in Nepal and which we’d seen elsewhere too, in Pushkar. I always like to know there’s another blanket, just in case.

Again we were reminded of the difference in tolerance for noise between us from the UK and people in South East Asia generally. Across the road from our guesthouse was a van parked outside which beeped all day, apparently no one complained.

I continued watching Atypical on Netflix which I’d started on the train to Nha Trang. The show is about a teen with autism, in one of the episodes I saw in DaLat he goes to stay at a friend’s house for the first time. His friend has done his best but we see the unfamiliar environment through the main character’s eyes; there’s a waving cat, (the gold cats originally from Japan and China with beckoning paws), an aromatherapy diffuser glowing a colour and puffing out visible scent, and a gold and noisy halogen heater. All these things loom large and become too much for him to cope with.

The next day I saw a waving cat just like the one in Atypical. And on the stairs of our guesthouse was the very same aromatherapy diffuser, the same style but in a different colour…

Mind you, as it turned out, there were waving cats everywhere. One day we sat at an Italian vegetarian cafe, we had vegan cookies and tea. On the sofa next to me sat a real small orange cat, who let me stroke them and purred. In the window of a shop across the road was a waving cat positioned at such an angle that we were facing each other both at matching angles, me turned slightly towards the real cat, the waving cat turned slightly towards me, so that it seemed to be waving directly at me.

I can’t remember if we meditated in Nha Trang or not but we did in Hue and we did in DaLat. In DaLat I found that meditation was helpful for my anxiety. In meditation I felt my anxiety change to excitement, or maybe I was able to reinterpret the anxiety as excitement and to change fear into possibility or excitement; rather than fear of the future, excitement about life’s unknown possibilities. In meditation I was distracted by wanting to think about to my do list. With great effort I dragged myself away from that and asked myself, Why do I want to do this? The answer: because I’m anxious. But beyond anxiety, there was calm, and in meditation I was able to access that, the calm that is always with us.

For every meditation in DaLat I sat on the end of the bed facing the window with my eyes open. There was a pair of silvery white curtains, a net curtain, and a slight gap where I could see out unhindered. Outside the window wasn’t much of a view. I could see two electricity wires. In meditation these represented free will and fate, or free will and possibilities, or ‘you’ and ‘environment.’ I thought about how molecules bond. About how if you raise your frequency you attract ‘better’ things or at least you attract a match.

The mind tries everything- the past, the future, guilt, ‘shoulds,’ things to do, but if you step back from that and let it go you realise that in order to have peace that’s all you have to do: Not do anything the mind is telling you to, or not then anyway. Most of it is not practical or possible, you can’t go into past, for example, so just experience peace, without thoughts. Choose not to think about it. Even if it is practical or possible you can’t do when sitting. Deal with stuff in its present moment when the time arises. Or not…

I thought of what someone (Peter Klopp) had said on WordPress, about light and shadow. He had said, ‘The brighter the light the darker the shadow.’ This was different; people say, the darkness lets the light in, know suffering to know happiness etc. But this seemed to be saying that if you have a bright light, you have a dark shadow as well, as a kind of balance or side effect, something that has to be managed, or accepted maybe. It resonated strongly with me and was strangely comforting even though I felt like I didn’t understand it fully.

In meditation I often thought about Atypical, that’s okay I thought, at least I’m not thinking about stuff I’m anxious about. I felt a pain in one arm and the centre of my chest. I thought about heart attacks, and the tarot man in Thailand telling me I needed to look after my heart. Both my granddads died of heart attacks, I hoped that’d be how I went, easy, one in his arm chair, one at the pool side at the swimming pool.

We are animals that have become conscious. We know we’re alive and that we’re going to die. It’s not ‘spiritual’ or new age or complicated. It’s just if you realise, really realise, I’m a being, I’ve got a life, I’m here, wow, it’s going to end, I don’t know when; then that’s so exciting! Is that waking up/enlightenment? And maybe that’s why people in the East seem to enjoy themselves more, because they are okay with death, whereas we in the West tend to push it away. Oasis in Nepal saying matter of factly, ‘So I die, I die, they be sad for a couple of weeks.’ People of all ages in Vietnam and Cambodia dancing and exercising and socialising simply and cheaply, our Thai friend always laughing and joking…

I began to see the benefits of yoga and meditation, after the low period in Nha Trang. Even my arms felt a little different. I used to do loads of yoga and arm exercises at Sea Win in Kerala relative to now or before now although at the time I didn’t think it was that much/very good.

Just like hitting x number of followers, I look forward to it but when it comes it doesn’t actually do anything.  Or when I was one stone lighter, yes I was pleased but I don’t think I ever felt I was there, I always wanted to be thinner, I never felt my body was perfect. Although, I didn’t have a sense of it being wrong, even before that, just kind of neutral. I could wear all these clothes, buy stuff on eBay, anything fitted and felt good, but it didn’t really do anything, I knew it was just a surface thing.

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Free Churro and the Free Churro Project

Tags

Bojack Horseman, Connection, Death of mother, Death of parent, difficult relationships, Free churro, Free Churro Project, Grief, Instagram, Internet, Netflix

Something wonderful from the internet.

200 people from all over the world recorded themselves recreating the eulogy that BoJack Horseman gave at his mother’s funeral.  That monologue filled the entire length of one episode and fans recreated it in full, many of them in costume, dressed up or with sets.  Or just themselves.  Clips from the 200 monologues were edited together to create the monologue above; the person’s country and Instagram name are on each clip.  The top video is an extract from the original episode.

If you’ve experienced grief and/or difficult family relationships, this may still resonate, even if you are not a fan of BoJack Horseman.  If you want to read about BoJack Horseman, I wrote a post about the show.  Here it is. 

Thank you very much for reading

Thank you to all involved in the Free Churro Project, you came together and did something wonderful.

P.S.  What is a churro? A: ‘A sweet Spanish snack consisting of a strip of fried dough dusted with sugar or cinnamon’ (Dictionary)  Sounds yummy!

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

Keeping the faith

Tags

Anything is possible, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, escape the matrix, family, Greggs vegan sausage rolls, guilt and forgiveness, India, Narrowboat, Netflix, parents, Technology, Travel memoir, writing

Photo:  our boat

So adjusting back, or rather into as we’re in a new life, has felt harder than we anticipated this week.  Especially technology.  E.g. My husband applying for jobs and doing CVs on his phone…

My trusty tablet failed me (Samsung S3) about which I’d kept saying, you just need to last the year, then I’ll get back and set up WiFi and go back to using a laptop.  Well we didn’t set up WiFi straight away, I thought perhaps I’d manage by going down the pub or hot spotting to my husband’s phone, not wanting to get bogged down in lots of contracts etc…. plus I’d got used to working on my tablet and thought I’d just get a keyboard for it…

I only lost a few hours of work- I religiously email everything to myself as often as I get a chance- it was more the shock when it suddenly decided to not recognise my password. I’ll need to factory reset it when I can face doing that.

Anyway now we have WiFi, there was a special offer on and we got a super cheap deal.  Setting it up was hard, then resigning in to everything, computer doing updates, blah blah blah, all was stressful.  But once I had put on all my emailed work, seeing all my chapters laid out on a big screen was nice and I’m sure it will be much easier to work where I can flit between documents easily.

And we watched Netflix (Quicksand, recommended by a friend of my husband, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles from Google Play) on the laptop; it was like being in the cinema!  After a year of watching everything on a phone or at most a tablet, it was amazing, I couldn’t get over how big the writing was!

Boat news:  I am now fully competent at emptying the cassette toilet and filling the water tank. We got a second futon off the secondhand site, and went to collect it one evening, and went out for a curry.

We were excited to chat to Indian people, the place was called Delhi something, but the people were from Bangladesh and hadn’t been to India.  We had a nice chat anyway.  We decided we don’t need to go out to eat after a year of doing it all the time, but I did enjoy putting on earrings, a nice top and a jacket (I have turned into a bit of a slob on the boat); and I did feel really happy:  evidence, see below:

Big walks have continued, I have almost made it into the next village (I go a bit further each time). Greggs vegan sausage rolls have continued.  I have a correction to last week’s post; there were not anti vegan sausage roll protests outside Greggs, everyone just thought there was.  A group of protesters had been hemmed in by police, just happened to be outside a Greggs…

We went to Norfolk and got spoiled with a lovely dinner, use of a luxury shower and luxury smoothies, and went to an event for my son showcasing his work prior to his exhibition in New York.

In the year that I’ve been away he’s bonded with my nephew who is younger.  My son did his CV and my son and his friends all helped prep him for the interview- he just got his first job- as well as providing socialising and fun.  I also got to meet my son’s new girlfriend, his agent and some new friends, who were all lovely people.

My son also sent me a lovely Mother’s Day email filled with memories of good things he remembers me doing when he was a child and teenager, and I think we’ve both put the past behind us (he was a troubled teen and I couldn’t manage his behaviour, or live with him by the time he was eighteen; he is almost thirty now).

So all good there.

I saw my mum, she was restrained in not asking me a lot of questions and I seem to have, for now, created better boundaries. However, my son and nephew told me that she had said (re me going off to India,) that I had had a mental breakdown/mid life crisis, so I’ll probably need to stay strong to ensure that that relationship stays within certain limits.

Has anyone watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer?  Do you remember the episode that fans hate, where she is shown in a mental hospital, having doubts as to whether any of the being a slayer world is real.  It’s never fully explained- she has been spiked with poison and could be just having visions- which is why fans hate it.  ‘What’s more real,’ she says to her best friend Willow, ‘A scared young girl in a mental hospital, or some kind of superhero slayer and vampires?’

In the mental hospital, her mum keeps saying, ‘Believe in yourself, believe in yourself,’ meaning come back to there.  After a lot of conflict, Buffy chooses to say goodbye to her parents and go back into the Buffy world.

Photos:

We have a beautiful location

There is also a caravan and camping area.  See loo emptying point on the right by the bins, a short wheelbarrow walk from our boat!

Sheep opposite our boat

Beyond the caravan area, a pond and trees

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house left job decluttered almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Just arrived back in the UK and now living on a narrowboat.  Writing a book about everything…

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

Everything we watched on Netflix this trip

Tags

Atypical, Big Mouth, Billions, Bojack Horseman, Netflix, Sex Education, The Umbrella Academy

BoJack Horseman I’ve written about BoJack Horseman before; in a post about the show here, and about how the show has kept me grounded during my trip here

Atypical About a teen with autism and his family and friends.  Beautifully narrated facts about Antarctica help explain how he feels within the world.

Big Mouth More adult animation, about growing up, puberty, sex and relationships

Billions

Dear White People

Derry Girls

House of Cards

Kiss Me First

Maniac

Russian Doll

Sex Education The director is a big fan of John Hughes movies (me too- I LOVE  Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink) and so it looks like an American High School (or what they look like in films and shows anyway) but it is set in Britain.  Made me cry anyway.

13 Reasons Why Kept me company whilst alone and scared of spiders in Thailand

The Affair Kept me company whilst ill in India

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina +The lead played the daughter in Mad Men  -Contains spiders

The Kominsky Method

Wanderlust

Wild Wild Country Gripping documentary about Osho’s ashram in Oregon.  Looked great at the start, and we moved into Osho’s guesthouse in Varkala partly inspired by it.  Later episodes took a more  sinister turn.  We had a wonderful time at the guesthouse though.

The Umbrella Academy
‘We’re not kids anymore. There’s no such thing as good people and bad people, there’s just people, living out their lives.’

Thank you very much for reading

Kolkata to Varanasi by train

Tags

Bojack Horseman, happiness, Incredible India, India, Indian train journeys, Kolkata, Love India, mindfulness, Netflix, Safety, Travel

Draft book chapter

We got a taxi to the train station which gave us a view of Kolkata whilst being insulated inside our ac car.  We passed steel shops full of pipes and sheets of steel, lots of small trade or industrial units, like the auto parts area of Chennai.

There was the odd newly painted or well maintained building that stood out amongst the grey.  Pavement stalls sold basic provisions; I saw a stallholder sitting on the floor measuring out handfuls of rice or flour with his hand into newspaper packets.

We saw a big metal bridge, and huge grand colonial buildings, one big and red, they seemed to be mainly banks.

Kolkata train station was busy outside and in.  There was a big board with all the trains on, we were early and there was nothing about our train yet.  We went into a food place, it had a quieter seating area upstairs that was calm.  The manager came up to us and shook my husband’s hand, and asked us for our order; he looked a little crestfallen when we only ordered veg fried rice, a safe staple for travelling.

‘See, there’s always someone,’ my husband said.  Always in India there seemed to be someone who offered help or came to befriend or talk to us.

The station master told us which platform.  Our train was called The Doon Express, which sounded like something from Harry Potter.

The station wasn’t really that bad after all.  I’d been preparing myself, having watched the film Lion, but actually, after having food and then going back down and hanging about, it wasn’t as hectic as I’d thought.

There were a few dogs lying down, just sleeping right in the middle amongst where people walked.  There were lots of people on blankets, not sleeping rough, just encamped waiting for trains.

The colours of Kolkata station seemed to be navy blue.  A woman in a navy blue kurta and blue leggings, another woman dressed all in navy blue with a white scarf; a Sikh man wearing a navy blue velvet turban.

On the platform itself, it was dirty and dusty.  The train was delayed so we had a bit of a wait.  A man hung around us and stared at us a lot, in the end my husband shouted at him to go.  I felt uncomfortable, but it seemed like he was after money rather than being a threat.  There was an Indian man standing near us, and I felt as if he would have helped had we needed.  Another Indian man asked my husband about the train; although we were at the correct platform, we’d been advised to keep listening to the announcements as platforms can be changed at any time, which meant no one was 100% certain.  It meant we made a connection with someone on the platform.  I bought water from the platform kiosk and the man was super friendly which further reassured me.

There was a big queue for the regular class, people with big plastic drums, I didn’t know what of, food stuff, containers of possessions, goods?

We saw a fellow tourist and thought we were probably in the same class, and walked up the platform in the same direction as him.

Anthony the waiter had booked our tickets before we started booking our own.  We were in three tier, which is a step down from two, with shabby looking chains and no curtains.

A family got on, they seemed really hesitant to sit down, I wondered if it was because the women and girls didn’t want to sit next to my husband; he moved, we tried to offer to move places, us to move to the two side beds, allowing them the whole bay with the set of four beds, but we weren’t able to communicate with each other.

Just before the train left most of their party got off anyway as they were just saying goodbye, and some of the others went off to seats elsewhere.

A grandmother from a different family with a baby came to see us, ‘Say hi,’ she said to the baby.  She gave me the baby to hold, nonchalantly.  The baby’s parents came to chat.  They explained that they were a party of eight on a thirty-six hour journey to visit a Hindu pilgrimage site.  A family with a tiny baby, on a thirty six hour train journey, that’s how important their religion is.

We showed the family pictures of where we had stayed in Kolkata, the Grandmother’s face was a picture; they didn’t share our enchantment with the old buildings.

The baby was after the mum’s glasses.  The Grandmother tried to encourage the baby to take my husband’s glasses when he wasn’t looking.  She called us Grandfather and Grandmother to the baby.  ‘Not Auntie and Uncle?’ I asked, ‘No no, Grandfather, Grandmother,’ she said firmly.  Fair enough, okay, we’re old enough.

The woman, the baby’s mum, pointed at my Om pendant and asked me if I knew what it meant.  I gave a solid explanation and she nodded and seemed satisfied.  ‘Why are you going to Varanasi?’ she asked.  Indian people can be very direct.  My husband answered that one.  ‘India is one of the holiest countries in the world, and Varanasi is one of the holiest places in India, and the feeling you get from being in such a place is something we really appreciate, even though we aren’t Hindus.’

The family chatted to us for ages then left.  It was so sweet of them.  ‘Do you think they all just decided to come and talk to us? That they said to each other, let’s go and talk to them?’  My husband said.  We were the only foreigners we could see in our carriage.  Often when travelling on the train it was the same; we often wondered how the foreigners got to places.

I finished my blog and then we watched Netflix.  Like reading people’s blogs, Netflix provided a continuity, a thread that held me, wherever we were.

The comfort of watching BoJack Horseman together on my husband’s tablet.  As the silky intro music came on, languid with a sound like bubbles popping, I felt a wave of emotion and my eyes almost filled up.

‘Wherever you go, that’s where you are.’*  That’s true.  My white room in Harleston, my husband had gone out, I had stayed in feeling ill with a cold, and was cosy and happy watching endless BoJack; that music, the colours…  Every hotel room, every place.  The only thing I’m homesick for, is here.

I brushed my teeth and got into bed, my husband checked the chains to reassure me before I climbed up.  There was a clean white cotton sheet and a thick heavy charcoal woollen blanket.  I folded my scarf lengthwise and hung it over the chains which were covered in vinyl sleeves.

I lay there, I felt the train, lots of shaking and movement, and relaxed.  I felt myself come back into India, and India come back into me.  Moving, clanking, like gears, like a chiropractor, like my body assimilating into India again, adjusting.  I felt safe, and I slept.

At four am the half of the family that were seated elsewhere came to the half that were near us, started chatting with each other and woke us up.  At five am they got off and more people got on, people just talking normally with no concession to people sleeping.  ‘This is India,’ we had to tell ourselves.

At six am I gave up trying to go back to sleep up and got up.  I went to the loo and afterwards I stood looking out of the door- at least one of the doors are usually wide open on the trains.

Outside there was miles and miles of green.  There were derelict buildings, some being used as dwellings.  In the middle of the expanse of green there was a little gold temple.  I felt India say to me, ‘I got you.’  I wasn’t afraid anymore, and all the love was back.

Thank you very much for reading

*Jon Kabat-Zinn

About the author

Sold house left job decluttered almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Currently in Vietnam.  Returning to the UK in three weeks to live on a narrowboat.  Writing a book about everything…

Goodbye Varkala

Tags

Chennai, India, Kerala, Minimalism, Monsoon, Netflix, Travel, Varkala, writing

What’s on top

This drawer shows that ‘stuff’ sticks to you/we’ve been here too long!

We went shopping in Trivandrum about an hour away, to a beautifully clean air-conditioned shopping mall, where they had Sketchers, Crocs, Woodland, Hush Puppies and Adidas shops.  Somehow we came out to India without really sorting out proper footwear and what we had has worn out, so this shopping trip was much needed, even if it felt a bit like being back in the UK!

We had lunch (Thali) in a vegetarian restaurant in town that had been recommended to us; no menu you just have a banana leaf put in front of you and staff come round and ladle food onto it, topping up throughout the meal, and little metal pots of sambar (curry), and chutneys.  One pot was pointed out as sweet, so we ate that separately at the end with a spoon.  Everything else we ate with our fingers, pouring the liquid onto the rice and doing our best to clump it all together.  I think I did better than my previous two attempts but I’m probably still at the level of a young child when it comes to eating rice with my fingers.  We ate breakfast, masala dosas and black tea, at the train station cafe.

We got the train there and got a rickshaw back.  On the way there we’d sat in sleeper which means you get a seat, on the way back the only trains available were passenger trains, the woman at the counter looked very doubtful, ‘passenger,’ she kept saying; those are the ones you see with everyone crowded on, and it was 5o’clock, so we chickened out and got a rickshaw instead.

From the rickshaw we could see the shops and the people and the colour of all the places we went through.  Me: ‘Look at that lovely saree,’ ‘Oh look that is beautiful,’ ‘Just look at those colours,’ repeated about fifty times.  The shops have big colourful boards/hoardings and are so full and so many and of such variety; all kinds of fruit, bright coloured teddies, suitcases, plastic buckets, children’s bright pink sequined party dresses…  It started to rain and it felt almost chilly.  I wrapped my shawl around me and looked forward to going somewhere hot.

Every day things, continued:  As well as shopping mall shoe shopping, I had my bloods done for my thyroid; an American woman living here told me where to go.  The lab looked a little bit old-fashioned to me from the UK but a blood test cost around £1.65, I just turned up and they did it straight away, and the results were ready to collect the next day.

Netflix:  I chose ‘Happy’ from my husband’s list.  I don’t have a list, just like I don’t find cat videos on YouTube but I do very much enjoy watching the ones my husband saves for me (I had better add, he gets them on Facebook, he doesn’t search for them either!).  Happy is very good, it is very violent (I take the earpiece out and shut my eyes for those bits) but it’s cartoon violence so not emotionally upsetting.  Very good anyway.

Wearing socks again was a surprising pleasure!

Travel update

When we stepped out of the ac shopping mall it felt hot.  We realised that we’d travelled around, train, rickshaw and a bit of walking, all in 29°C without it bothering us at all.  Compared with when we first arrived, we must be more acclimatised, which is good because on 29th July we are going to Chennai (which is on the coast on the other side of the country (the East) in the state of Tamil Nadu.  Chennai is hot, dry and where we are staying is ‘very busy, the real India,’ (Y, who lives there, told us), so it will be a big change from our monsoon cooled evenings, our quiet empty guesthouse in the middle of an out of season ayurvedic resort area…

We leave here (Varkala, Kerala) on Friday 27th July and go North up the coast to Kochi, still in the state of Kerala, for two nights.  I am excited as apparently there is a Body Shop there.  I have had the best of intentions but haven’t yet found a hand cream to replace Body Shop Hemp Hand cream.

We are sorting out what to leave; it was good to have accumulated extra clothes during the monsoon as it was so hard to get stuff dry (our things smell permanently mildew-ish here!) but Chennai is hot (and modest I understand) plus I don’t want to carry more than I have to.  We are disengaging, getting ready to say our goodbyes, even as it’s changing here, shops reopening as the monsoon nears its end and the season approaches, with incredible amounts of building and repair work going on.

Writing update

I have had a few good sessions on the ‘Kerala’ chapter.  I got a bit overwhelmed (as usual) and thought, ‘I can’t do it’ (You can do it, but you have to do it).  I reminded myself of the mantra, ‘Start at the top and work your way down,’ that one of the dear housekeepers at my last job said to me when I was overwhelmed.

I broke it into three sections according to the three places we’ve stayed in.  The places, and our experiences, have been distinctly different even though they are only at most a twenty-five minute walk away from each other.  I have completed the first section and am working on the second.  I am glad that I haven’t got onto it until now as with a bit of distance I can see what each place was and I am able to ditch irrelevant, boring or crazy notes that haven’t lasted.

I have ordered the whole book like that, in sections according to the places we stayed, whether for two nights or two months; length of stay doesn’t seem to correlate with how short or long each section is.  I would like to have it all done in draft by the time we leave here a week from now, but I probably won’t, and that’s okay ‘Trust the process’

My Instagram followingthebrownrabbit

My husband’s Instagram (much better pictures!) travelswithanthony

Thank you very much for reading

See you next week

Escape The Matrix Part 3

Tags

escape the matrix, Netflix, reality, The matrix

This weekend I have been pondering the balance between personal responsibility and ‘the matrix’.  It is for us as individuals to keep our emotions in check, manage our thoughts, and stay positive.  This helps us create our reality.  At the same time, there is stuff happening all the time around us.  This could be things that might affect us in different ways, which we need to manage and also includes opportunities being thrown our way.  So people describe this as like learning how to ride two horses, one being fate, the other being free will.  Then you’ve got people like Richard Branson, who appear to have boundless confidence and seem to see how everything works and ‘play’ ‘the matrix’ to their own advantage.

For me initially it began with realising (mentally) what I had, and what I could do, and then realising (as in making real, putting into practice) that.

I had anticipated that as I took the big steps of leaving work and selling the house I might be ‘rewarded’ with a burst of creative energy and opportunities.  So far that has meant that I have experienced a kind of further expansion of my mind.  I pictured myself looking back and reviewing this life amongst others and saying, Hey, remember that time when we sold our house and packed in our jobs and went off to India?

But as if that isn’t exciting enough, my mind has begun to come up with even more crazy ideas and possibilities, as if there’s this sense that this is it, this is your last time around, if there’s anything else at all you might want to do, best do it in this lifetime.   Watching BoJack, I thought, hey, maybe it would be fun to go to Hollywood, maybe it’s kind of like somewhere to go for creative people who don’t fit in where they come from, like art school.  To wander around, immune to the pressures of youth and thinness.  How and why would we be there?  Write a book, ‘Our Guide to Escaping the Matrix’ (just us, telling our story), find our very own Princess Carolyn (BoJack’s agent) and have our story made into a film starring George Clooney and Kate Winslet.  It’s important to write things down, to spell them out, however crazy they may sound.

Anyway, to return to my point, if ‘the matrix’ is just a reflection of us and not a thing of itself, then maybe all you have to really do is the self management bit, not concerning yourself with the matrix at all, and everything will just happen.  Is that an invitation to limitless self belief or a cop out excuse to do nothing?  (But we’d still need to actually write the book)  (and we need money/an income stream- we do need to eat after all- and you have to spend your days doing something)

Back to Richard Branson.  Maybe if you have a really strong sense of self you just know what to do.  You don’t have to learn how to read the signs or think about timing.  You just know, and whenever you decide to do it, that’s the right time.

What I’ve been watching:

Films:  The Fifth Element

The costumes are designed by Jean Paul Gaultier.  They are all amazing but it got me thinking that if you have hands and fingers and you want to learn you could sew and make costumes.  If you are interested in something, if you follow that interest, with dedication and devotion, then with practice you will get good at it.

Frank

This is such an interesting portrayal of creativity, particularly group creativity, as it follows a band making an album.  In the woods, for about a year, with loads of craziness.  It makes you realise how hard it is- by that I mean how much dedication it takes, and how it takes time and practice to become good at playing instruments and writing songs.  It takes dedication, time and practice, and of course you need to be interested and want to do it, or why would you be there in the woods for a year otherwise, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it.  It shows you how it is done and what it takes.  I found that to be encouraging rather than off putting, although I am glad I am not involved in a group activity like a band, I prefer the solitary creative practice of writing.

Netflix shows:  The end of the f***ing world

Two young people.  Such good acting and really well done.

BoJack Horseman

What I’ve been listening to:

In a stunning example of awesome timing, my husband bought this CD in a charity shop for 25p, put it on the iPod and gave me the CD to play in the car.  I put it on for the first time as I left work for the last time.  Tracks 1 and 3 did give me goosebumps.