Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life, page 1039

The stats thing

I’ve been blogging a little while now and long since gave up the initial obsession with the Stats page. When you first find it, right at the start and people are actually reading your page it is something of a magnet. After a while you realise that numbers aren’t people and it is the interaction, the building of friendships and relationships that really matters.

So these days the only stats I usually look at are the ones on the little graph on the dashboard. Every so often, however, curiosity takes me into the main stats page to cast an eye on the referrers and clicks to see what, if anything, I am getting right… or wrong. And to smile at one number, over 20,000, that means I really have reached real people; the comments. That’s the one that matters.

Out of curiosity I had a look at the most viewed posts over the past month. How to make a living as a writer is twice as popular as anything else, whilst the small dog is, apparently, on a par with New Knickers. This, I can only put down to all the shares and reblogs both those posts had… and Ani seems to manage quite nicely therefore to beat me hands down on my own turf, so to speak. As usual.

The clicks are interesting, showing, as they do, where people have clicked on a link in an article. It is reassuring to know that they do. The search terms are always amusing… or they were till they became limited by Google’s reticence on releasing them. One can see why when the top search terms by a clear margin are still every conceivable variant of ‘dog xxx’ and Ani’s 30th post, with almost 7000 views, is by far the most viewed on the blog. Though perhaps not for any reason either she or I intended.

The referrers section is interesting. It shows how people have found the blog, and though it is far from being an exhaustive list it is useful, showing, as it does, where your presence is most effective. Most of the time there are the same ‘culprits’ listed… social media pages, guest posts and reblogs and the handful of standard referrers that are always present.

Tonight I wandered over while I took a break for coffee. The top referrer was a new one on me; Google News. Since when am I on Google News? A quick search is of no help at all. And more to the point, what have I done to get there? Because, I’d sort of like to know about it. Is this fame or notoriety? Am I about to see headlines like “Writer runs naked through woods” (which would be blatantly untrue. I never run.)

Will I be overrun by  hordes of reporters? Or is it just a glitch in the system somewhere? Because, quite honestly… I’ll put the kettle on and they can all come in. There are all these books to promote…

Magic

ARS GEOMETRICA VII

Originally posted on Stuart France:

Operation Two:
’… to him that overcomes will I give a white stone, and
in the stone a new name written…’
- Revelation 2:17

…The ‘Twelfth’ Leaf.

Albedo: A White World.

Was it a coincidence?

Twelve Tribes of Israel… Twelve Jewels on the High Priest’s Ephod…

Twelve Disciples of the Christ…

…Twelve Gates into the New Jerusalem.

Twelve Months of the Old Year.

It certainly suggested that thus far the leaves were in fact in the correct order.

Scratch that.

All it really suggested was that the Twelfth leaf was in the correct place.

But why this headlong career though the leaves of the book?

And why did we feel the need to so hastily transcribe its contents?

Something told us it was not ours to keep.

The ‘Thirteenth’ Leaf:

In terms of number symbolism alone that really was very clever…

We decided to be audacious;
‘Why are you wanted…

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Shoe shopping

I am sitting here contemplating a toe. It is not a bad toe, as toes go. While it may never win a modelling contract, it would not call down squeamish aversion. Unless, of course, one is averse to toes in general. I know this toe intimately. Know its quirks and its uncanny talent for weather forecasting. I know its history. I am, after all, rather attached to it.

It seems somewhat out of place, even though it is in its accustomed position on the end of my foot. It should not, however, be visible. It should be decently clad. I am, after all, wearing shoes.

A cursory inspection shows I have walked the soles off them again. To be fair, the little ballerina pumps were never designed for rock climbing, tramping the moors or being put through the washing machine umpteen times, but then, what can you do? They’re comfortable. And for less than the price of a brace of fancy coffees I can’t complain.

So, I’m going to need new shoes.

And this is no joke.

My family have long refused to accompany me when I have to go looking for shoes. Mention shoe shopping and my sons melt into the background. As did all former partners after the first abortive foray. The image you need to hold in mind is of a small tempest descending in wrath upon the various shoe-sellers in the area.

I may be the only woman on the planet who hates and detests having to buy new shoes. While I have the shiny stilettoes, the sparkly heels and suede soled dancing slippers… and I love them all, more as works of art than apparel… I seldom wear them. Largely through lack of opportunity, it has to be said, but also because… well, let’s look at this before I commit myself.

I cling to my comfy old pumps because they are just that… old and comfy. They are not smart, barely even attractive, but they actually move with my feet. They are like gloves. The fact that they now have a fair bit of unintentional ventilation too is neither here nor there. If it weren’t for the toe sticking out of the side they would do me a bit longer.

They were also a bargain as you don’t pay tax on children’s shoes.

The Creator in His wisdom decided that, being vertically challenged and with a lower centre of gravity than most, I wouldn’t need much to balance upon. Therefore my feet are on the small side. Just at that crossover point between child and woman. Which means style is a little harder to come by. Just to be awkward, my feet stopped growing mid-size… and half sizes are also hard to come by these days unless you have a budget that doesn’t care. So, poised between sizes, with a high instep and slightly wider foot to boot, choosing shoes is a major hassle.

Go for sling backs and me and the shoe don’t match… there is either half an inch of sole or the equivalent amount of foot overhanging. Peep toes? I slide through them. Toe-post sandals? Not unless you want to hear me curse in several languages. And since when have feet been shaped like pointy trowels? Or square? My toes want as much wiggle room as I do. And then they have to put platforms on things.

There was a fabulous pair of sneaker style platform shoes… bright orange suede with black stripes… (look, it was the 70s…). I had just recovered from a broken ankle . Broken, I might add, on the safety buffer of a trampoline, just to add insult to injury. I was on my way back from the hospital, the cast newly removed, both shoes glowing vividly in their designated places. Falling off the platform of the number 77 bus and breaking the ankle again rather put me off platforms altogether.

I did try a pair of low ones a couple of years back… lovely shoes with an internal platform… just a little one. Perfectly safe. Or not, as the case may be… the ankle got its revenge and ‘went’, leaving me in an undignified heap on a Manchester pavement. Never again. I like to feel the floor through my shoes… not because of them.

I have spent most of my working life in heels. This has a lot to do with being vertically challenged. And a certain amount to do with having decent legs. Even if they are short. I was so used to wearing heels there was nothing I couldn’t do in them and in the corporate world legs are counted as an asset worthy of being included on your CV. Particularly in business sales and on building sites.

Heels were exceptionally useful in my van driving days too. The pedals are geared for the larger male foot and the longer male leg… with heels I could actually reach the pedals and keep my foot on the floor. No mean feat, I might add, considering I’d had to have a false floor put in the Mini. For some reason I also used to get a lot of help unloading too…

But it is the shape of shoes that really gets me. I have silently suffered the corns and abrasions, smiled doggedly through blisters while the offending articles were broken in. I had it down to a tee… by the time the first lot had healed the shoes would be good to go. My great grandfather always maintained you should pee in shoes to make them fit… but that not only applied exclusively to the leather shoes of his day, but it also had to be ‘maiden’s water’. Which eventually ceased to be applicable. Not that I ever tried, you understand.

But why, for goodness sake, should we have to squeeze ourselves into containers that are patently not foot shaped? Men’s shoes have at least a passing resemblance to feet. Apart from winklepickers, of course. But women’s shoes…?

I don’t ask for much, honestly I don’t. Neat, comfortable, attractive… a price that doesn’t need me to mortgage my soul… and a shape that won’t torture the sole. And something that won’t have the medics shaking their heads and sucking their teeth. Not trainers, apparently. Nor for that matter my ballet slippers. Or, in fact, anything else I have worn to appointments. Having said that, I am still refusing to have the bones in my toe fused. I want to be able to choose to wear high heels occasionally. Or not.

I only want a nice pair of shoes. Something feminine that takes into account the fact that I have toes. And that I actually like to walk in them. I can’t be the only woman to return a pair of shoes when the heel fell off only to be told they were not designed to be walked in.

I stopped wearing heels day to day when my son came home from hospital. I needed as much stability as I could get with six foot of son to help navigate the house. Since then I have grown accustomed to being able to go barefoot and vacillate between a pair of warm, slip on boots and the ballerina slippers.

But now they need replacing and we have a problem. The shoe shop in town has closed, leaving me access to the limited range of the supermarket or the fashion stores where neither comfort nor practicality come into the equation.

So if you hear of a small virago being forcibly ejected from Tesco, that’ll be me. Shoe shopping.

Swimmers

Noli Timere Messorem

“NO FURTHER THAN THE THICKNESS OF A SHADOW. WHERE THE FIRST PRIMAL CELL WAS, THERE WAS I ALSO. WHERE MAN IS, THERE AM I. WHEN THE LAST LIFE CRAWLS UNDER FREEZING STARS, THERE WILL I BE.”

Terry Pratchett, ‘Mort‘

Thank you, Sir Terry, and Bon Voyage.

Terry Pratchett 1948-2015

Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee – Part Two

Sue Vincent:

The second installment

Originally posted on The Silent Eye:

She must have been sitting there a while when I arrived for our regular Monday morning get-together. Her coffee was half finished. The one she had bought for me was full, but no longer hot.

“Keen, or am I late?” I asked, with what I hoped she’d see was a warm smile.

She was used to the power of words, to the polarity of debate. She was not about to let the early advantage slip away so easily. So she said nothing . . . the pale brown eyes looked at me calmly.

“Aha,” I said, not wanting to waste her precious half hour before the train, and conscious that, when working with anyone as competent as Alexandra, it’s important to know when to bend. “Okay . . .” I sat down, took a sip from my coffee cup and took my watch off, lying it in front of her…

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Guest post: ‘Riding at the Gates of Sixty’ by Alienora Taylor

‘Riding at the Gates of Sixty: Virginia Woolf’
by Alienora Taylor

This third novel  ‘narrated’ variously, by Virginia Woolf, her husband, Leonard Woolf, and her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, starts, in March 1941 with the novelist’s suicide. The lead up to March 28th, and the immediate aftermath, is seen through both Leonard and Virginia’s eyes.

The book then jumps back to 1927 – a year I chose because it was the one in which VW started to write ‘Orlando’ and I wanted to bring her relationship with Vita Sackville-West into the story – and takes us into the heart of the Bloomsbury Group, bringing in such characters as Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Clive Bell. The more social side of VW’s life is explored through meetings with, amongst others, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Dame Ethel Smyth.

There are flashbacks to VW’s childhood, young adulthood and her most serious experience of madness in 1913 – but the novel deals far more with the joy and creative inspiration she found in life than the bouts of mental illness.

The last two sections, ‘narrated’ by Vanessa Bell, bring us back to March 28th 1941.

The novel is a blend of known facts and imaginative flight. I hope that, in the latter, I have stayed true to the spirit of VW, even though some of the events described did not happen.

The following quote comes from the end of Part Two – and describes, from VW’s perspective, the insanity which drove her to walk into the River Ouse and drown herself.

VW in 1927 Image source: Wikipedia

Extract from ‘Riding at the Gates of Sixty’

‘March 28th 1941

Ah! That mirror lies to me! A red-eyed hag glares. I wire my hair out with claws. The Writing Room is a long tube blown violently into my right ear. I wade to the desk. It towers above me. I hook a quill pen from the tiny white pot and sheets of paper cascade about me. I pull at two of them as they float past. I have pulled feathers, many feathers, out of a poor bird to write with.

I laugh and strike, ‘Dearest…’ onto the page.

I remember who he is and a lifetime of love clears before my eyes. I am crying again, making the ink run.

It is too late for that now. I have many letters to write. I fear I am going mad again. I am a fool. He will not understand. He will understand; he has always understood and waited for me to return…fool, fool, he was lying – aiding the eyes which hide in trees, closed but potent.

The sound of tearing paper is all it takes – and I’ll be free to run lightly up the garden path calling, as I usually do, ‘Leo? Any post yet?’ – And all will be as it always has been. I look up and around the sunny room. There is a bird singing outside. My pen is held tightly.

‘Virginia!’

I stiffen. It is an imperious voice; I think at first it is Leonard.

‘Virginia, come my dear child – all these books still to be read. You are becoming very remiss these days. Come closer, that’s right…’

‘No, no, go away! I’ve made my decision… see the stilled pen? My eyes are clear; I can see the sun and hear the birds. You do not understand!’

‘Virginia, it has been raining all day; the planks holding your room together are dark with water, and slimy. You are miles from reality.’

He wants me back. I’ve been banished from his room for too many years. He’ll taunt me.

I cut my tongue licking the envelope. A thin line of blood coats the back…

I look out and the leaves are peaches, falling, falling; they do not land but bounce. My head swims. Leonard, come in now and hold me back.

The path yawns up to meet me; I fear falling. There are silver fish moving up the tree trunks; I watch then fascinated. They have a bed at the top which they leap onto and then wriggle in and out of the human shape lying there.

Those are human eyes straining to look at me. I must lie down. I must not be seen. She is too high up and visible.

The bedclothes will not hold me down by themselves; I will fall out on to somebody. I need anchors, swept up from amongst the trees and crammed into the folds of my tattered wings.

My stick snakes away through the grass. The mattress has pebbles in it. I am cold.’

Virginia Woolf was an English writer born in1882 and is known as one of the great modernists of the twentieth century. She was a significant figure on the literary scene in London and part of the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Woolf suffered from periodic bouts of severe bouts of mental illness, now thought to have been caused by bipolar disorder. She drowned herself in 1941, aged 59. Woolf left a legacy of novels and short stories, including ‘Orlando’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’.

Alienora Taylor

An English teacher for thirty years, I gave up the Day Job in 2012 in order to write full time.

A prolific writer since the age of eight, I have kept a journal since 1972, have written plays, poems, reviews and novels.

In 2012, I started my Alien Aura blog on WordPress and write something on it most days.

In late December 2014, I published a book of erotica (both poetic and humorous) entitled ‘Come Laughing!’

In January 2015, I published my second novel – ‘Long-Leggety Beasties’ - a humorous piece, set in a school and based upon my three decades of experience as a teacher.

‘Riding at the Gates of Sixty’, my third novel and first literary one, was published on March 10th 2015.

All three are available as ebooks on Amazon Kindle, and as paperbacks on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and CreateSpace.

A fourth novel – ‘My Esoteric Journey, Volume 1’ – is due to come out next week.

You can find Alienora on WordPress, Twitter , Linkedin, Google+, Tumblr and Facebook.

Poised

Paying attention

The mother looked harassed, sitting there filling out the forms in the dentist’s waiting room. On one side of her a quiet lad about twelve, obviously suffering. On the other, a young gentleman of perhaps three. Given the age difference there was every possibility of a third child, of an age somewhere between the two but currently at school. Mum had reason to look tired, of course.

Three year old was swinging his legs and looking round, smiling at everyone in sight. I caught his eye and smiled back, sharing that direct complicity that you only get, as a rule, from the very young. Particularly when they are intent on mischief.

His eyes wandered some more then lighted on his Mum. His face lit up with a big, beaming smile.

“Love you, Mum!” he said at the top of his little voice, leaning in for a cuddle. Mum wafted him away as if he was an irritating insect, not even looking up from her task. Puzzlement and disappointment chased across the little face. Crestfallen he shuffled back in the chair and seemed to curl in on himself.

It didn’t last long, of course. Small boys are resilient creatures and within seconds he was happily tormenting his brother. The whole incident took less than a minute before we were called into the surgery.

While we were in there, my son being reprieved from the dreaded drill…albeit temporarily… and I guarding the wheelchair in the corner, I was thinking about that little incident. I wasn’t casting blame … I don’t know the family and you can never read whole story at a glimpse. No, I was wondering if the mother really knew what she had just done, and what effect it would have on her son. She was so focussed on the sheaf of papers that have to be filled in at every visit these days that I doubt very much if she had even noticed.

More to the point, how often do I do that? Or you? Simply not notice.

It made me wonder. I would hate to feel I have dismissed or rejected expressions of affection through inattention or preoccupation, especially from children. I would hate to feel I have missed the confidences of a friend… or those small, tentative ‘feelers’ that are dropped into a conversation in the hope we will notice and give them space to speak what burdens their heart.

It goes without saying that I have, though, even though I don’t know for certain. How can I know? If I was not paying attention then the moment is gone and I would not know what I have missed. We are the last to see these flaws in ourselves, simply because our attention is focussed inwards.

We are all aware of those times when our attention meanders off at a tangent when someone is speaking. We have probably all read a book and found our thoughts wandering so that we have had to go back and start a page again. It isn’t that we haven’t read the words or heard them… we simply didn’t take it in. We weren’t ‘with it’, weren’t paying attention… though attention should not be regarded as a price to be paid, but rather as a gift of love.

Because, when you think about it, attention is a gift. The fact that we are able to lift our eyes to see the world around us, to be able to drink in beauty, share laughter, see a ladybird in the grass or a star in the sky… The traditional five physical senses allow us each to perceive in our own way, but none of them give us anything unless we give them our attention.

We can hear the warmth in a voice, read the hidden message in a mundane phrase… if we listen. We can gulp down hot coffee or savour its taste. Our skin touches objects every day, all day… yet how often do we take the time to notice the silken caress of water, the gentleness of the breeze or the life in the hand that touches ours?

There is that old saying, you have to give in order to receive. By giving attention to the world around us, we know its beauty… by being open to a voice we are allowed into the heart of a friend. By hearing a child say ‘Love you,’ we touch a moment of tenderness and joy. And in giving our attention to the moment, we give something else too, showing others that they matter to us.

We are human, we make mistakes… get distracted… frazzled… We will not always pick up the signals, nor truly hear every word. But we can try. Attention is something that grows the more we use it and so is the given gift that comes with it.