lockdown – of words & books

Let me tell you about Spring – it’s brilliant. Bloomin’ brilliant. It feels like I’ve stirred awake and blinked away a soul-hibernation. (Though, you know what? I think I need to have an internet dive on hibernation. Mainly, I equate it with bears but I’d like to know the dynamics of it.)

Our lockdown is lifting – it hasn’t fully lifted yet, and there could still always be another (perish the thought!) But yesterday I went to the zoo and watched orangutans doing roly-polys and a tiger pacing in its pen.

A few weeks prior found me whizzing round country lanes and breath-taking views of a world overflowing with greens and golds and rugged red-browns.

It’s quite shocking, really – the way you can allow your world to narrow. You see, I’m always fond of saying see the extraordinary in the ordinary or look for the everyday adventures (which to be fair, when typed out, seems terribly trite but sue me, this is my blog – I can be cliché if I want to) but sometimes I forget to.

I forget to look for the good, for the quiet joys, for the adventures.

I forget, and the world feels bleaker for it. Like a grey sky is staring oppressively down at you and the future is just one long trudge of complicated paperwork and taxes and missing socks.

It’s easy to be reactive. To let inertia settle in your bones. Stagnation … heck I don’t know, to fester in your soul. It’s harder to be proactive. Or rather, it is easy to forget that we have choices, that we have free will, that we aren’t leaves on the stream of life just drifting down-

Okay. I’m sorry. It’s been awhile since I last blogged but have my metaphors always been like this? Because a) holy cow what the heck am I a poet or what and ii) ?????!!!!!!!!!!!! and 3) I don’t know whether to be ashamed or immensely proud of it.

(Both. I’ll take both.)

My point is – and I do have a point – is that we always have a choice. We can choose how we act. We can’t control others or, for example, the weather but we can choose to be kind. We can choose to wear a raincoat if the sky is looks threatening. (And to jump in a puddle if there’s no one around. Because come on – you know you want to. Shoes dry but joy stays.)

I’m attempting to choose better. I’m not always successful, but like a moth always ceaselessly fluttering towards the light of life- alright, I’ll stop with the metaphors.

A Suffragist Abroad has been renamed to A Most Irregular Prophecy – and it’s odd how unconsciously a thread of this sort of thought has seeped through into the book. Though I didn’t compare the main character to a moth.

… mainly because didn’t occur to me at the time of writing, but I suppose there’s always the next book?

happy reading / keep going … like a moth

ness rambles, ness talks about life

these days

February 9, 2021 nesskingsley

Work is no longer a car journey away. It’s at the desk at the end of my bed. It’s hard to switch off sometimes – work and its worries have a way of attempting to follow you around. I think I’m doing better. I know I’m fortunate to be working – even more so to do it from the comfort from my home.

I’ve finished a scarf. It is a bit too short (even though it is taller than me) and is wibbly and wobbly, full of holes, different colours, and dropped stitches. I love it. I’ve worn it to the dentist today.

(Yes, the dentist. I have been to a different place and seen different people!)

Sometimes, I go for a walk in the park. The grass is growing muddy there now – too many footsteps of people not allowed to go far from their homes. The river was swollen, and the trees bare of leaves.

this is VERY MUCH MY LOCAL RIVER IN ENGLAND. YEP. IT IS THIS. THIS IS IT only: no hills, no chalet, no snow, wide, brown, some beauty, such cold / Photo by Rhiannon Stone on Pexels.com

It is cold and it snows now and then. It rains too.

I’ve plunged into editing Project If. No. Wrong verb. ‘Paddled’ would be better. It’s two years old this month. Had a year to marinate. It’s on my calendar in big, bold letters scrawled across each week: X Character Must Die it says for one week. Dark Knight of the Soul is across another. (The ‘k’ is crossed out. I am very good at spelling.)

A Suffragist Abroad is with her editor. I am tempted with the idea of putting a care package for them. They’ll need it.

I’ve read a lot this past weekend. Recharged my batteries. There’s a short course in hieroglyphs I’m taking. I’ve realised that Turkish Delights are delightful. The birds sing earlier in the morning now. The days are getting longer.

Sometimes I catch myself – when I’m walking, masked and avoiding passing people too closely, when I read the news and see headlines with death tolls and vaccines and fishermen’s woes, when I’m talking with my family and wondering what the world will look like when it’s over and saying ‘Uncle X has had the vaccination’ – and I think: wow, this is bizarre. If I time-travelled and told past-me, she would have gaped.

literally haven’t seen one of these for years. but I’M PUTTING IT HERE BECAUSE IT’S PRETTY. let me have this okay? / Photo by Annika Thierfeld on Pexels.com

I haven’t been to church in a year, I miss it, but God is not confined to a building. The world keeps spinning, and life keeps moving onwards. It doesn’t wait for us, and yet we can steal moments – in the garden, beneath the stars, or wrapped up warm, with a book in our hands – to breathe.

happy reading!

ness talks about life

living under lockdown

May 2, 2020May 4, 2020 nesskingsley

Shopping trips now are gloved, masked affairs where avoiding other shoppers a major priority. It’s bizarre and surreal. And yet food needs to be bought, these trips have to be made.

No more is there a 45 minute-1 hour commute to work. My desk is at the end of my bed and there’s no need to wake up at 5:15 am. No need, but I still try to get up at six because a routine is important damn it. Meetings are held over Microsoft Teams and instead of the radio, my own music plays.

Every day we are told the amount of people who have died – what caused alarm when we heard Italy’s, Spain’s and France’s death tolls, now seems part of the every day.

(Seven hundred today, I would call across the hall to my dad.)

(These are people – PEOPLE! With lives, and families and loved ones and hopes and dreams – all snuffed out and gone, leaving unfillable holes behind. A damn tragedy that can’t be communicated by numbers.)

(It seems that the Sword of Damocles hangs over everyone’s heads.)

It feels as though we are in a tonally off novel – I and my family are spending so much time together, enjoying nights around the fire in the garden, playing on the x-box, sharing meals, staring at the stars – and yet the world outside is one in which the illusion of immortally is thinner than ever and death seems even more present.

Reality intrudes in the form of crossing the road to avoid other pedestrians, a firm two metres between those queuing, the news online, tales from colleagues and friends on the front line, and delivery men who no longer wait for signatures but deposit their parcels on the doorstep.

And then the door closes, hands are washed and we are quiet again.

Keep going, friends – one foot in front of the other! Be kind – to yourself and others. Take comfort in beauty where you can find – a soft breeze, a blackbird’s song, a good conversation with a friend over Zoom or Messenger, or diving into a really good book.

I’ve found myself reading more than ever: Georgette Heyer, Elizabeth Peters, and C.S Lewis are keeping me company these days. I will keep blogging, I’m sure, but I often pull up a draft and stare at the blank whiteness of it and think but why?

And that’s okay. I’ll post again, soon – rambles about books and things I find interesting and all that sort of thing – but for now, this will do.

Stay safe!

Ness

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.
psalm 46 v 1-3