rhubarb forgiveness

in which i make things out of rubbish, buy a book of ovarian poetry and get weird about fountain pens

I am pleased to announce that I can sort of sleep again after weeks of having to stay up all night sweating profusely. Cortisol withdrawal keeps breaking up with me and then suddenly calling me at 3am to say it misses me. I wish I knew how to block its number.

don’t pick up!!

I ordered six rhubarb crowns online and then broke the news to Nettle and Dandelion that they would soon have to dig six holes since I still have all the vigour of a piece of printer paper¹. I ordered the crowns without consulting anyone because I prefer to ask forgiveness rather than permission, at least when it comes to rhubarb. The hellhound was out of commission for digging for a while due to an injury it sustained while chasing a deer across three ploughed fields, despite us pleading with it the entire time not to. I tried to persuade it to dig a little now that it’s feeling better but it must have consulted with its hellish union as it is now demanding unsustainable amounts of cheese for even a single hole.

doesn’t the term “rhubarb crown” imply the existence of some kind of rhubarb monarch?

Due to ongoing flimsiness my life remains small – I like to think it is a miniature and compact life, like one of those sets of travel toiletries where everything has to be under the size limit for airline security. I said to my therapist that I feel I now get to make about 4 choices every day, while during the peak of my flare it was more like 0.5 choices (0.5 choices is where you ostensibly have one choice but then don’t even get to do the option you chose half the time). It seems to me that the average person in modern society has hundreds of choices at any given moment, the most common effect of which seems to be paralysis rather than any great self-actualisation.

of course all lives of any size must inevitably contain one of those weird folding toothbrushes

With my four daily choices I am doing lots of things. One of them is learning Scottish Gaelic, which is a wonderful language for muttering strangely to yourself in the fog (Dandelion also pointed out that it must be one of the best languages out there for saying rude things about people in public without them knowing, though none of us yet have the skills to do so – best I can do right now is calling someone a cake or saying they are “so grumpy”). Another is converting bits of rubbish into trinket boxes (I am going to outstrip my supply of trinkets at this rate, so I may need to start making those out of rubbish next²). I have also unilaterally decided that we are going to become a fountain pen household of the most intense variety. What is the most intense variety of fountain pen household, you may ask? I’m not sure yet, but I suspect it involves a selection of really unusual inks. Imagine signing for a parcel with iridescent orange ink that smells like oranges. Just imagine.

strange messages from the fog. for some reason the composition of this is making me think of those vintage Nancy Drew covers. wouldn’t it be funny if someone translated Nancy Drew into Scottish Gaelic

Weirdly, I have noticed that over the last few months I have been consistently doing more things that I really enjoy than I did when I was less ill. I find this rather unexpected and have been puzzling over the cause of it. I think in part my numerous constraints make me more inventive, and perhaps more determined (things seem more valuable somehow when they are harder to access). But more than that, I think when you are healthy it is tempting to wait for the perfect moment to do something, as moments seem in abundant supply. In contrast when you live with an autoimmune axe hanging over your head at all times any borderline acceptable moment will have to do³. And there are so many moments to do things, actually, once you can’t get picky about them.

The other day Dandelion said to me, “would you like to own a poetry book about a giant ovarian cyst?” and I of course said yes without asking any further questions, and now I do own this book and I am very pleased because it is absolutely B R I L L I A N T. For context, Dandelion and I were in a bookshop that was having a sale at the time, but my answer would have been the same wherever we were.

A frightening thing is that we are going to the North of Scotland in February. I love Scotland and feel rather alarmed at (maybe (hopefully (agh please let it happen))) getting to go there soon. Since I have a magical immune system and never know when I am about to turn into a toad I do my best to take life day by day, but travel requires advance planning which is quite challenging in that regard. I have to remind myself that it is ok to have to cancel things, even things I really don’t want to have to cancel. Often it does not feel like it is ok.

Separately, travelling as a sick person is rather difficult because disability requires so much gear, which is not something that seems to be talked about very much. Every bodily function that I offload to an external device results in more stuff to haul around, more things to store. I feel a bit like one of those plastic toys whose box says ‘comes with accessories!’ except we have to call a medical hotline when one of them gets lost under the couch.

guys i heard if you buy this now you also get the sjogrens syndrome one for half off

But on the other hand I am excited to stay in a house that is not my house for the first time in over six months. I wonder what my house will do with itself while I am not in it. I feel like part of it at this point. Hopefully it doesn’t collapse when I am removed from it (hopefully I also don’t collapse⁴).

We are deliberately going to Scotland in winter to try to sneak in some fun while my disease is asleep. Winter has started to feel like a friend in a way that’s interesting. I feel a little pang of hurt now whenever I see someone maligning my seasonal friend online, suggesting that they would like winter to just get out of here or that they’d prefer it never came at all. Poor winter, it has a hard enough time already with all the greenhouse gases we insist on flinging about. Give a thought for the gentle winter sun, which lets me see frost sparkle and feel its warmth without waking up my fussy antibodies. We all need some quiet and gentle light sometimes.

leave them alone guys i like their flimsy little sun

In two weeks it is the Pagan winter festival of Imbolc which we have been celebrating as a household for a few years now; this year our friends Clover and Bracken will be joining us, which makes it feel more like a proper holiday and less like the three of us just being odd(e) in our house (though I enjoy that too). I plan to write more about Imbolc in future chronicle instalments but for now I shall say that I have built up an enormous wintry altar of ivy, pinecones and candles, and it feels nice to acknowledge my chilly friend who I perhaps also maligned in the past. Thank you, winter. Long may our breath rise in spirals and the air snap with cold.

I hope the frosty gods approve. I am also in the process of hacking up an old nutritional yeast container (more rubbish!!!) to make it into a postbox so that we can send messages to winter.

Thank you as usual for reading and wishing you an odd(e) week,

If you’ve read this far, I have an extra ask:

One of the things I’ve particularly enjoyed from other newsletters I read is getting recommendations for books, music etc. This is not a thing I thought I would like, but I think in this day and age, when there as just so many things you could be adding to your brain, there’s something nice about getting an idea from a random human with no particular agenda instead of an algorithm or someone trying to sell you something.

So with this in mind, would you be interested in a short section at the end of the chronicle with some Odde Suggestions? (along the lines of a poetry book about a giant ovarian cyst).

1. I think we can all agree that printer paper is the most timid and wishy-washy sort of paper. Any sort of watercolour paper would kick its ass in a fight, to say nothing of that extra pulpy handmade stuff with the different coloured bits in it… Even tracing paper has that whole mysterious “am I here or not” thing going on, so at least it has conviction. Scrap paper is, of course, the most scrappy.

2. Making stuff out of rubbish is an excellent antidote to all flavours of perfectionism – it’s hard to make rubbish worse even with very bad art, and when you inevitably somehow do make it worse to you can feel comforted by the fact that it was already on its way to the bin anyway. On the occasions it becomes non-bin-worthy you have just performed modern alchemy by creating something out of what was meant to be single-use plastic, and can now reasonably call yourself a warlock.

3. It occurs to me that this is another form of making things out of rubbish. When it feels like it is “the ideal moment to draw/write/learn the bagpipes”, there is pressure to be great, to do it very well or at least have a large amount of fun/reach enlightenment by doing it. Conversely when the moment is already rubbish it would be hard to make it worse, so attempting the thing becomes lower stakes in terms of both achievement and enjoyment. (FYI I am not learning the bagpipes, but it totally sounds like something I would do). I suppose I am lately fortunate (?) to have a lot of rubbish moments with which to create all sorts of interesting things in a low stakes way.

4. If I do collapse unexpectedly in Scotland I at least hope that a Victorian will do me the decency of composing a really bad poem about it.