School’s out

Woo Hoo!

School’s Out for Summer!

It isn’t of course, I still have my day job to go to,  but I have just finished an assignment from hell: 4000 words on a subject so vague that they served waffles in the coffee-breaks.  It is one of those topics which should be impossible to fail (ha!) and at which it is certainly impossible to excel.  “This is as long as it’s broad” I said between waffle-breaks; “do you want us to consider the subject in width or in depth, because we can’t do both.”  In depth, he said, and so I’ll be criticised for not mentioning this, considering that or discussing the other.  Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  No high marks possible here.

But enough.  It’s done.  Just proof-reading and proof-reading and proof-reading to do between now and Monday when I post the bastard; “fly-fucking” as my Danish friend described the tedious process of moving a comma from, one side to, the other.

It’s May.

It’s magical marvellous May. The leaves are fresh, the lambs are running races, the cherry blossom is out, there is more green everywhere, every day.

If I could be whoever and whatever I could, I would be 35 and weigh 10 stone in May forever.  Today the temperature was perfect, warm in the sun and fresh on the skin.  I have a garden to weed, a house to paint, curtains to sew, books to read, scarves to knit, weddings to dance at, pots to plant, parties to go to, wine to drink, laughter to share, friends to delight in, and a whole blissful summer to do it all.

I’ve not felt this giddy when sober for years.

On the brink

On Friday, driving in to work, I saw the first green flurries of green coming out on the hawthorns, and I could finally welcome Spring.

Today I planted up twenty quid’s worth of perennials in my little slip of a bed 8 foot long and 3 foot wide at its widest.  Scabious, aquilegia, dianthus, saponaria, jacobs ladder, and a whole load of violas, since you ask.  This is all the garden I have, so it’s very important to me.

I love this moment, full of potential energy, when we’re poised and stationary at the top of the rollercoaster tipping delicately over into the accellerating, exhillerating plunge though the equinox, Easter, April and May to the riotous glory of midsummer.

Stockholm syndrome

I’m trying to get my brain back.

Recently I’ve had three extremely intense sets of things to think about.

1. MTAS and MCC we all know about
2. Work has been really full-on with a major deadline at the end of March
3. I am also studying and had a rather grown-up assignment to submit, also by the end of March

It is now April, which is nice. Whan that aprill with his shoures soote the droghte of march hath perced to the roote and bathed every veyne in swich licour off which vertu engendred is the flour; an’ all that. The weather’s been lovely.

My brain is full. Being packed by weight not volume, everything in it is trying to settle. It wasn’t helped that I came straight off my Easter “break” (spent writing up stuff that had barely settled down unfortunately) had one normal day at work (which was preceded by only three hours’ sleep) and went straight into a two day training course.

I don’t have a mind of my own any more. I’ve lost the ability to think, which is why I’ve been recycling my hard-drive here on my blog. I’ve lost the ability to kick back and chill. Everything that I’ve done in the last three months, actually make that everything I have done in the last five months, which was not work or studying was only justifiable because it was respite from work or studying. (Other than the MCC / MTAS stuff which was personal in a different way).

I no longer need to have the word “should” in my internal dialogue and I feel rather disorientated without it. What? I can sit in the sun and read trashy paperbacks, and that’s OK? I can weed the garden? I can swim? Go for a walk? Go out on the lash?

(The junior doctors of course live like this all the time, but that is one of the many reasons I am not now and never have been a junior doctor).

Without the word “should” to steer me, I feel a bit adrift. I do have other shoulds that I’ve been putting off until after Easter: building a book-case, finding suitable guttering, buying a sofa. But as well as feeling a bit adrift, I want to have nothing to do for a while.

But the odd and worrying thing is that I am so used to the mantra “should be studying” running underneath every single thing that I’ve been doing for the last six months that I cannnot think in terms of not studying. I’ve spent a lot of this week researching professional exams and checking out books for when I pick up my studies again after the summer.

I’ve got Stockholm syndrome.

Three swallows may not make a summer

I can forgive the weather almost anything in May. The rain is soft and refreshing, the mist pearlescent and full of secrets and promise, and the sunshine remakes the world.

Every May I am delighted each day by the changes. Poppies are out in the garden, furled and damp like wet butterflies but ready to open in the next warm day. Three swallows circled in the sky this evening, catching insects high above the valley. Each morning new trees are in green leaf. There is a lushness to May which has become tired and dusty by the end of June.

I would rather be out, breathing in the freshness of a wet day in May, than baking in full sunshine at any other time of the year.

Every day is precious. There are only 16 of them left this year.