Tuesday, 26 February, 2019
Mired in the blahs a bit. The wedding was a nice little oasis of colour and new stuff to do but, for the most part, February has been spent right here at home or around the neighbourhood. And it’s not as if there’s nothing going on here. It’s all in my head!
My head being a bit full of tinnitus.
If you think tinnitus is just an annoying, somewhere-in-there, ringing in your ear, you’d be only partly right. Mine is ‘recurring.’ I can go weeks, months, even years without it – or at least there’s ‘acceptable’ level noise in my ears all the time but then every now and again it gets serious. It spikes and I can’t cope. This isn’t ‘carry on regardless’ any more. It leaves me incapable of doing even the ordinary things. I’m hypersensitive to everyday noises and instinctively avoid them. Running taps, the shower, the sound of footsteps, the wind blowing leaves, traffic driving by, someone unwrapping or rustling paper… This is called hyperacusis.
My personal kind of spike is this – Sometimes there are baby crickets making some noise occasionally, sometimes there are bigger crickets being a bit more insistent, and sometimes there’s a whole meadow full of really huge crickets in full voice for hours on end, if you’re lucky with intermittent breaks. Has anyone ever made a really loud noise too close to your ear? Yelled? Blown a whistle? If so, did you pull away immediately to avoid the noise? Imagine if you couldn’t.
One more thing about tinnitus – it isn’t actually in your ear, although it can certainly drown out other noises or upset your balance (quite a bit in my case) but it’s coming from your brain. Your brain is filling in gaps of sound or frequency with something recognisable. Sort of like phantom limb syndrome….
So back to Hackney and getting out when balance is on my side. It’s unseasonably warm. It’s T-shirt weather for some. My phone weather tells me it’s 19C. And it’s still February.
But Spring is here. Or making a brief preview. Temperatures are going to be even higher but then back to normal next week. And it will be my birthday. I’ve never had a nice weather day on my birthday. Hmm.
Staying home means cooking, and changing temperatures bring on the contrasts in lunches and dinners. Being at home all the time, not working out there, means three meals a day at home unless I can talk myself into a lovely lunch somewhere – usually solo – to satisfy the Foodie in me.
I started a pottery course. Years ago I had a circle of friends, gathered through my ex-husband. They were quite a crew. What happened to such things? This isn’t a thing for me any more, at least. I do miss it, to be honest. There were couples, Clint and Jackie, Al and Sharon, David and Joanne, and the solo and very intellectual Robert. We even lived in the same house for a while – a commune of sorts. I wasn’t working so became the cook, paying my rent that way. And David, who is still a friend (long story for another time) had a brother Michael. In turn, Michael was married to Maria.
Maria was Dutch. She was a slender, pretty fair headed hippy along the lines of young Michelle Phillips. And she was a potter. They lived in a house on Scollard Street in Yorkville – the luxury of it in those days, even more so today – much more so. At the back of the house was a shed and there Maria would throw pots. It fascinated me even though I somehow never saw her make anything, only saw the finished work.
Fast forward to today and my friend, June. She’s also a potter and I have never seen her pots in person, only through her Instagram feed. She’s a shy, loner kind of person, a cat lady of sorts. Somehow I would never have imagined that she was also creative.
I’m taking a ten-week course and I’ve had four lessons. With each one I do a bit worse. The teacher, also a Maria, tells me she’s been a potter for 15 years and four lessons tells me nothing. She also assures me that, by the end of course, I will have a ‘beautiful pot.’ We shall see. Meanwhile, I am ruining pots, having them capsize while they sit to dry, covering myself in grey sludge… Every week I promise myself I will get one thing done properly – only one thing. Every week I fail. Am I being too hard on myself? Of course but, oh to have eye-hand coordination and not just barge in and hope for the best!
I’d like to keep at it but I’d also like some personal training, one-on-one. Maria lives in Vancouver, June in Waterloo, Ontario. Not close enough! Even my London friend Lisa, who has been learning, lives almost two hours away. We’ll see how it all turns out.