Another post on the subject of musical instruments.
When I was young, we bought a piano. My mother played piano, so it wasn’t a purchase utterly devoid of logic. I have a bizarre memory that in order to get this upright piano (for that is what it was) from the home of the seller to us, the buyers, it was wheeled through the suburbs. I am fairly certain that this memory is aprocryphal, however.
I suspect the idea was to introduce us children to The Piano. My parents would have been helicopter pushy parents, but they lacked the confidence. Imbued with a greater sense of ambition, we might have begun speaking Mandarin at three.
I did sit and plunk away at the keys, but my hands are too small for a full-size piano. As it turned out, the person who played the piano most was the cat.
We had a cat called Dorcas. She was small and black, one of those creatures who always had to look perfect. I walked in on her once when she had missed a jump from the chair to the window sill and was clinging desperately to the radiator beneath. After several minutes of scrabbling, she realised I was watching her and immediately put on a display of licking, as though to say, “I entirely intended to be here. What are you staring at?”
The piano’s position in the living room was a perfect perch for getting a view of the entire place, and anybody in it, not to mention the bay window to one side. Dorcas often used it to get from the floor to the bay window, which prowling would be accompanied by several discordant notes as each paw landed on a key.
At intervals, Dorcas would pause, disturbed by the noise, and glare at anybody in the vicinity, demanding to know who was making such a racket. If nobody answered, she would delicately sit down, producing a low, heavy rumble from the piano.
This was about as much playing as the piano ever really got. By the time my brother, the musician of the family, took up the interest, it had been sold. I was reminded of this when I tried playing my flute today and wondered how it is somebody who has spent all her life touch-typing can have such weak fingers. Out of practice, flute playing is very hard work.
I still await the responses of the neighbours. In the meantime, I have taken up cringing on their behalf.
“Did you ever play violin?” my father asked.
I gave him a baffled look. “Sherlock Holmes played violin,” he explained. “I think I need to learn.”
Ah, the method actor at work. I never learned violin, I was strictly a woodwind player. This was largely due to a strange habit I had when playing any instrument. If I played anything other than a woodwind, I tended to take breaths and let them out slowly, as if I was playing something requiring the breath. It was embarrassing.
I played flute and saxophone, saxophone mostly, and tenor saxophone most of all.
Add in an obsession with A-grades, being the academic best and a tendency to over-weaning goodness and yes, I was Lisa Simpson.
I have no idea what possessed me to do this, but even though I never passed Grade 5 in either instrument, I kept them with me when I went to university, and despite not playing a note for over a decade, they have lived with me wherever I’ve gone in the world. Saxophones aren’t small, by the way. Mine traditionally lives in the lavatory.
For some reason, I’ve felt a little inspired by my father’s dedication to his new-found career as a thespian (he’s going to see Sherlock Holmes this weekend, for professional reasons, he says). Out has come the flute, along with my rather elderly marked sheet music from all those years ago.
I haven’t dared try out the saxophone. The problem, you see, is that I live in a building with no sound-proofing between the apartments. I know every single detail of the life of my downstairs neighbour, and would be as well informed about my upstairs neighbour if my Spanish wasn’t so rusty.
None of this is conducive to re-learning a musical instrument. I should know – my next door neighbours are musical and I hear every wrong note. Every time I pick up the flute, I imagine them cringing in agony at the sound I make.
I haven’t lost the embouchure, but the flute requires a lot of lip tension to reach the highest notes. There have been more than a few unbearable shrieks from my beloved Buescher-Selmer as I try to recall fingering, appropriate lip-tightness and the blob on the line on the page in front of me.
And finally, there is the problem of writing about playing the flute. It is a minefield of double entendre. An innocent thirteen year old, I wouldn’t have imagined that my favourite instruments were so burdened with the innuendos of fingering, blowing, lip tension and timed inhalation. Had I the mind I appear to have now, I’d never have made it through class with a straight face.
Today, I went through the arduous process of tax self-assessment online.
It’s my very first go, having had an agent do it for me for the last couple of years. I picked a moment of wellness to call my accountant to ask him to take me through the details of my business accounts, and the bits I needed.
We went through the screens together, and as I was setting up my return form online, I had a great many questions to answer.
They included (I kid you not):
Are you participating in a tax avoidance scheme?
I read this out to the accountant. “Seriously?” I asked. “They ask you that?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how many people actually tick the “yes” box.”
This is how the government goes about catching people for tax evasion. They ask them if they do it. And amazingly enough, quite a lot of people will tick yes. Which just goes to show, if you’re going to be a criminal, you really had better be cleverer than that before you do it.
I’ve been doing some thinking about my organisation here. Having moved all my Holosync material to Zen in Heels, I’ve set up a blog called Sit Down and Write, which will cover all aspects of my writing, writing tips and book reviews.
You can find it here, if you’re interested. I haven’t added much to it for now, as I’m still dealing with severe depression, which restricts what I can do a lot of the time. However, I’m going to be working on it in the next few weeks, so hopefully there will be more soon.
A second story about my grandmother.
The scene opens at a restaurant in Small Town, where my parents live. It is one of their many amateur dramatic society dinners, this one a Christmas one. My father is the rising star – a kind of aging Brad Pitt – of the amateur dramatics world in the air and in demand. He is shortly to begin rehearsals for The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which he reprises Robert Downey Jr’s role as Sherlock Holmes.
In the midst of this, my mother’s phone rang.
My mother, it has to be said, isn’t great with her mobile. It has a tendency to be left in places, sucked by small children, abandoned in other people’s cars and on driveways. On this occasion, the riotous mob of baby boomers celebrating the Christmas season was too much, and she didn’t hear it ring.
When they finally left the restaurant, they were in for a surprise. It was the fire brigade.
There had been a fire at my grandmother’s flat.
In a rush, they headed down to the complex, which is one designed for the elderly who are still able to be reasonably independent but need just a bit of help occasionally from the support staff.
My grandmother was fine, but it appeared she had started the fire herself.
Now, my grandmother is a woman who likes decanting. Whatever she buys has to be unwrapped and stored in tupperware containers. Hence, pretty much everything in her fridge and freezer are all stored in plastic boxes. In a fit of my grandmother’s famous stubbornness, she had decided she didn’t like the new fridge my parents had bought to replace the one she had broken by swinging on the door.
This left her with a problem. Where should she put all her food?
She claims that my mother once told her that you could keep food cold by putting it in the oven. Where she got this idea, nobody knows. She decided that if she put the temperature to zero, and turned on the fan, it would keep the food cold. This is actually a technique my father uses for defrosting, but not one you’d employ to keep food cold.
Having hit upon the solution to the problem of the unwelcome fridge, my grandmother put all the food in the oven, and turned on the fan.
Unfortunately, she didn’t just turn on the fan, she put the temperature to 150.
Rather predictably, the whole place began to smoke pretty quickly, as the plastic melted in the heat.
When new tenants arrive in the building, they are given very clear instructions about what to do in the case of a fire. All residents must stay in their flat until the fire brigade remove them, unless theirs is on fire, in which case they must leave.
For some reason known only to my grandmother, she decided to ignore the important part of the instruction, that if one’s flat is on fire, one must leave immediately. So against all reason and logic, she sat in her chair with the smoke swirling around her, waiting for the fire brigade to get her out.
Fortunately, she was found very quickly, along with a puddle of melted plastic, some very cooked food and a ruined oven, by the fire brigade, who called my parents and insisted she be checked for breathing difficulties. She was fine, however, although she has left the complex staff baffled at the notion of keeping food frozen at temperatures of around 150 in an oven.
My mother, of course, denies responsibility for the origin of the defrosting technique. It is now known as “The Great-Granny Method” in my parents’ household.
This is a story about my grandmother. She’s ninety. She generally moves at a slow pace, with the use of a zimmer frame, and can take an hour just to make toast.
It’s important you remember that.
Shortly before Christmas, she had a mysterious fall in her kitchen. They didn’t find out about this until she called to say that the handle of her fridge was broken, and that it needed to be replaced.
My parents, who care for her and live in the same town, went down to make sure she was all right. She spent last Christmas in hospital, and my parents were worried that she wasn’t strong enough to cope on her own in a flat.
When they arrived, they had a look around the kitchen, and examined the handle. It was broken indeed. An unusual make, it flipped in and out of a specially formed housing that was both beautifully designed and unbelievably impractical.
My grandmother hovering in the background, my parents studied the situation.
“So, how did you fall?” my mother asked.
“Well,” replied my grandmother matter-of-factly, “you know how you swing on the fridge door sometimes…”
“No,” said my mother. “I’ve never swung on a fridge door.”
My mother cannot remove from her mind the image of my grandmother swinging from the fridge door handle.
This week everybody is talking about depression. Or so it seems.
Giles Andrae has had major clinical depression, and has written about it for the Times. It resulted in a leader column not only praising his description of the “blank, blinking screen” which is all that remains when the brain shuts down, but a call to be more respectful of the condition. The chairman of HBOS has it too.
I think it’d be excellent if we could treat depression as a serious condition. I’ve met people who say “Oh, I’ve been a bit depressed.” They have no conception of what depression is and think it’s being “a bit sad”. The NHS website and every single leaflet, pamphlet or even book I’ve read on the subject doesn’t help.
It’s this description of “feeling low” or “having persistent feelings of sadness or low self-worth.” Everybody feels a bit low from time to time. But depression is different. Severe clinical depression is like being dead, but you’re still walking around for some reason, as though your body wasn’t informed that it was all over. Andrae’s description is accurate.
It strikes without warning, it can destroy your life, as it has tried to do this year to me, and it is often physically painful. It’s invisible, except when in certain exceptional situations it becomes obvious. “Feeling low”, whatever the persistence, isn’t depression. Depression can mean memory loss or the simple inability to do anything about anything. The reasoning for this, some apparent expert has suggested, is that you’re so preoccupied by negative thinking that you don’t remember things.
That isn’t true. You don’t remember because your brain isn’t working. You can’t make simple straightforward decisions about what to have for breakfast, so the brain just freezes up if anything bigger happens. Your life doesn’t fall apart necessarily because you believe you’re worthless or you deserve it, but simply because you have lost the cognitive capacity to do anything about it. Imagine being in a house that’s burning down, and you’re chained inside. You cannot get out, and no matter how aware you are of the danger, there is no escape.
I don’t want to be around people when I’m depressed. That’s not because I dislike cheerfulness or people living their lives. It’s just easier. I’d rather be quiet than have to put up with the “d’you want to talk about it?”, the sad-looking faces as people desperately hope you see them as sympathetic. When I showed up to see my friend and she said, “So if I tell you to pull your socks up, that won’t help?” as a joke, I was relieved. The last thing I wanted was to look at another tragic face nodding with excessive sympathy.
It doesn’t help, talking about it. A friend on Twitter remarked (and my mother agreed) that CBT works but only to a certain level of intelligence. I don’t want to talk about “it”. I don’t know what the “it” is. I have to live with it, 24 hours a day, so the last thing I want to do is discuss it. Being able to leave it alone, to be normal with somebody else, is all a person really wants. You need them to know that you’re fragile, but you don’t want them to rake out the cotton wool and treat you as infinitely breakable.
It would be great if people could treat depression as they treat a broken leg. Instead of pep talks about “getting it together” (would you say anything like that to somebody who had, say, developed cancer or broken their neck?) or this fawning “professional pity” as Pema Chodron calls it, just normal things like being taken out and not laughed at if you pick exactly the same food at every meal because otherwise the endless choice would be impossible, or respected if you need time alone.
And there lies what we need most. Respect. They give you crutches to help you walk if you break your leg. If your mind breaks you have to keep trying to think on your own. I feel guilty telling somebody that I haven’t done something because apart from my mother’s visit, I’ve been unable to get out of bed. People ask where I’ve been, or what I’m up to, and I can’t just say “I have depression” like I could say “I’ve had flu.” It’s a shame. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want excessive displays of dramatic sympathy. I just smile every time I meet somebody who just treats it like a normal thing, and me as a normal person.
Io: by me (2009 - Painter X)
“I’ve decided,” I said to my friend Fran while we were in her car. “I don’t think I have depression. I’m going to call it Boris Johnson.”
A few people have been in touch to remark that I don’t seem to have updated Amnar: The Inheritance on Podiobooks. All I’ve been able to do, for most of the last few months, is update the podcast on my own site, a task that takes ages simply because of the strange complications of my mind. I’ve been in a state, for ages, where big decisions are impossible. It can take hours to choose whether or not I want a cup of tea, or what to have for dinner. Bigger matters, such as going outside for anything, let alone big life choices, are impossible.
I’ve never actually been in such a state before. I move around and seem normal, but anybody who has been with me in an environment where I need to make a decision about anything, and I just freeze up. It means I struggle to be creative in any way whatsoever. Effectively, I have writing block. But because writing is like breathing to me, the solution has been to simply write about what I’m experiencing on my Holosync blog, Zen in Heels.
Very, very occasionally, a thin beam of light in the form of an idea comes to me. They flit about like moths, and disappear before they become clear, and long before I have a moment to make any use of them. Still, they are emerging and I’ve been considering them carefully. Because very gradually, while I’m unable to actually write Amnar, something new and possibly better than ever before is starting to develop.
For a while, I’ve had a sense that even as I was developing a better Io, there was still something missing. It’s been nagging at the back of my mind as I try to deal with everything else in my life. Very, very slowly, it is starting to emerge, however.
The Awakening plot basically deals with Io’s struggle to decide between the Amnari and the Tiomke. But although we see Io’s side of it, and the side of the Amnari trying to convince her not to side with a totalitarian dictatorship, we don’t see the perspective of the Tiomke, except through the eyes of the other two sides (either when Daar and Io meet Captain Vasha, or when Zoriel spies on Destorva and the senior officials in the Gap Chamber).
So I’ve been debating whether to either re-write or insert the view of the Tiomke, introduce Tiom himself, and guards who are trying to find Io. I think this might add a missing element to the whole story, although it will lengthen it.
Sometimes there are advantages to having writer’s block. Not being able to write at all has at least given me time to get some perspective on the story as a whole. Although I’ll probably annoy fans who have been through several versions of The Awakening, it is a development I’d like to explore, once my current situation improves.
A recent comment has come into this blog asking if I would discuss something about life after anorexia that we often forget to talk about. So I’m going to be talking about the slightly unpleasant topic of what happens to the body after anorexia.
I want to start by saying there is a gross error made in the treatment of anorexia in the assumption that once you’re eating normally, you’re cured. Every time I read a story from a recovered anorexic, I find the same thing. They all say they still struggle with body image, with self-esteem. Eating again, as hard and as painful as that is, that’s the easy bit. It took a month to eat normally, and five years to gain a sense of self where I can look at who I am physically with confidence and be happy with who I am.
But that doesn’t mean I’m completely and entirely recovered, that anorexia is in my past. Because every meal out presents me with problems. Not of the emotional kind, but of a physical nature. This is where it gets confessional, where it gets difficult. For as confident as I am about myself, as little as I care what people think about the fact that I have permanent scars on my wrists, some things I’d rather not discuss in company.
I was anorexic for about fifteen years, and anorexic to the point where I hardly ate anything at all. For a year, I was severely addicted to laxatives and diuretics. For another period of about six months I took diet pills, which were frighteningly effective. The damage to my digestive system means I have real problems eating a lot of foods.
It became easier to say that I was gluten intolerant, because most of the foods I struggle with are wheat based. For some reason, it’s easier to be mocked by people who consider gluten intolerance to be fake than to sit plainly and explain that fifteen years of starvation plus addiction to laxatives has left me with permanent damage to my digestive system. If I had a camera, I’d take photos of their faces and put them up on display.
You end up walking an awkward line. Once you’ve crossed over into that other place, if it does physical damage, you’re never going to make it back. It’s a reminder of it. Even worse, if people know about it, they seem incapable of treating you as a normal person, but with a kind of patronising over-care that I find intensely annoying.
It’s perhaps one of the practical things I’d say to any anorexic. If you survive, you’ll look back and regret not just the time you wasted starving yourself, but the fact that every relationship involves explaining that while they make a joke out of certain things, for you they are the impact of damage you did while you could think of nothing but your own self-harm. And that trying to be treated and being a normal person living a normal life is a minefield.
This is the latest in a series of posts about Amnar, shedding light on the background to the world. This time, we’re looking at the dragons and dragonlords.
Introduction and history
Dragons (Draegunad), and the larger Dragonlords (Draegunim) are not native to Amnar, and were not in fact discovered until the first explorers from the newly founded mountain city of Nas Isca had been established encountered them. Nas Isca itself was originally intended to be an outpost to watch over the Gap that opened in the skies there, but there was no initial evidence of activity on the other side as there was at the Duum Gate and Nas Trinitari Gate.
At this point, there were only a few Capillites, and it was the original Guardian Defender who was part of the contingent who were suddenly presented with the appearance of a massive flying lizard-like creature coming through what became known as the Iscan Gate. For their part, the dragons had no initial interest in the Amnari, but had ventured through the Gate between the two planets because they had heard reports that intelligent species were establishing a civilisation there.
The dragons and dragonlords also wanted little to do with the Amnari, and it was down to progressive negotiations between the Guardian Defender that led to the appointment of a Capillite Guardian of the Dragon Realm from amongst the Guardian Defender’s team of warriors. The post was ratified by the High Ashad Isha.
The Sabat Draegunim (The Dragon Civilisation)
The dragons, having met with Isha herself, decided that the Amnari were sufficiently intelligent enough to communicate with. It was several generations before they became what I suppose we would consider the jumbo jets of the Amnari world. They considered this a form of service to the Amnari system, although it was entirely voluntary. Their presence in the Amnari world made it possible for the effective running of the educational and healthcare systems, not to mention allowing people from all over the Empire to attend whichever academy they wanted and to travel more freely.
Dragons themselves are not conscious in the same sense as humans, although they can and do happily communicate with Amnari, this is unusual. They live far longer than Amnari, and therefore may well spend time with tens of different dragonmasters and dragonriders in the course of their lives. They also came to serve on the line at Nas Trinitar, since they considered the Amnari civilisation worthy of protection.
Their motivations for flying Amnari about happily, fighting with them and aiding relief efforts during famine periods in places like the Nahabi and the Red Deserts, are not entirely known. Successive Guardians of the Dragon Realm have failed to find clear reasons, but it appears that the dragons simply want to, and find it an entertaining thing to be doing. Very little is known, similarly, about the structure of the Sabat Draegunim, the world of the dragons, since it is almost entirely uninhabitable for Amnari.
Dragonmasters and dragonriders
Both Dragonmasters and Dragonriders train at the Nas Iscan Academy, and are split into two groups. Civilian dragonmasters and riders only work in the main of Amnar, whereas those who have completed undergraduate warrior training at Duum are able to fight on the line at Nas Trinitar. All trainees start with an initial qualification as a dragonrider, able to fly dragons. Those who continue as postgraduates become dragonmasters who work with dragonlords.
The special skills required to build up a relationship with one dragon or dragonlord are developed, along with telepathy (Nas Isca also trains flight telepaths), the unusual forms of communication needed to understand dragon logic and certain aspects of the dragons’ culture. Masters take several years to build up a relationship with their beast, and are considered to be as expert as senior warriors on the line.
Dragonriders and masters both provide services to the civilian Uskele population, including the provision of Desert and Mountain Rescue teams in various states, and will carry individuals to and from the more remote settlements, especially those research stations like Cir Nafairu in the Nas Trinitari mountains, for example. They and their dragons provide the backbone to transport throughout the Empire.
The most senior Dragonmasters are those who serve the Caipashad Capillites, such as Naszha and Sadarin. Otherwise, dragonriders and masters follow a similar path through life as other Ta Dasi, although because of their frequent long-distance flights for those in the civilian corps, it is often difficult for them to maintain strong family ties. The most senior Dragonmasters relate most strongly to the Servants, for the reason that they by law cannot have children.
