Patterns

I’ve been bewitched by the old Suffolk houses that surround me. They’ve left me utterly intoxicated without the inevitable hangover. When I stand in front of them I soak in their detail, I drool over them, lap them up, swirl them around my tongue like a fine wine. My body is flooded with pheromones. I can’t get enough of them. I’m an addict. I should find a Twelve Step programme. I, Denise, admit that I am powerless over old houses and my life has become unmanageable. Only it hasn’t. My life has been enhanced by the joy of seeing them, sometimes going inside them, and knowing they’ve survived for hundreds of years, often not much changed from when the Tudors and their successors built them. I'm amazed by them, fascinated. They sit in a landscape also largely unchanged, give or take a hedge or two. Their outbuildings, too, speak volumes. Yes, you get the beautified ones, but even they retain old oak staircases polished to a rich auburn by thousands of feet; the mullion windows, the massive inglenook fireplaces, the beguiling timbers with slots where shutters preceded glass, or mysterious blackened hooks. Only two houses in this village are still thatched, but there are a good number of very old ones, and I plan to photograph them all as a record for myself. I shall print them on these pages.

Which brings me to another matter: this blog. I started it at the urging of my daughters who thought it would be cathartic, but I was lacklustre in my response. Eventually I found myself just doing it one day, and eight months on I cannot imagine not having it as an outlet – for my feelings, and my discoveries, for my progress. It HAS been cathartic. I love writing. It's how I earned a living, but I'd forgotten how necessary it is to me. Writing things down regardless of whether or not they’re read by others – that’s really beside the point – has been liberating. Unprocessed stuff is what keeps us from moving on when things have gone wrong. That’s why therapy can be so helpful. In this blog I’ve told it how it is, the good and the bad, the painful and the gratifying, the funny. By so acknowledging my daily activities and my feelings I’ve found a sort of pattern which shows me that life is naturally undulating, neither good all the time nor bad, for most of us. It just is, and we have to grab it while we may and appreciate what’s great about it, while weathering storms as best we can. We’re human. Things hurt, and they can thrill. That's the deal.