The Maroon Diaries

One of my biggest frustrations in the pursuit of blogging is the failure of a photographic image to match up to reality as I perceive it. I see something, and I want to share it with you. So I take a photo, but when I look at the image I have captured, it doesn’t look at all like what I was seeing. And so I can’t share the experience, and I give up on the fledgling blog post. I have tried a few different devices in my search for verisimilitude, and I don’t know if the better camera is producing a ‘better’ image or not, to me, it’s just another version of the image that’s not the one I saw. I went to start doing the dishes a little while ago, (as one must, repeatedly, apparently) and I was struck with one of those moments that I wanted to share with you. Beauty can always be found in the most unexpected and unappealing places, even in the dirty dishes in the sink. There was a bowl. It had been filled with peaches and cream, and then when it was empty, filled with water and left...

Aye, and I've been a terrible bad, bad blogger again. Not only that. It's worse this time. Not only did I stop blogging again, but this time I stopped following the blogs I love, as well. And now I know. Life is less without blogging. I miss it terribly. So, what the hell happened, Lady Demelza, to get yourself into such a state? Ah, well, that's where the exciting news comes in. I left off blogging when I got too busy with the mission of moving house. This is where I live now. It's so beautiful I could just burst. I started out with the best of intentions, and a long list of half-finished draft posts that I intended to keep me going through the busy move. But the process of packing, sorting, cleaning and moving proved more than I could handle as it was. The digital world seemed less relevant as the physical world became so very full and demanding. Then I arrived, and as fate would have it, there were some 'issues' with the Internet connection ...

I didn't wake up so well this morning. As soon as I was conscious I felt irritated, disconnected and anxious. My mind was running over in circles of negative thought. I felt the shadows of the night's dreams - quite a string of disconnected anxieties - still present in the morning light. This is something I'm used to. It's a common feature of a depressive illness - to wake up in the midst of the hardest emotions, and to struggle to rise out of them somehow to reach the realities of the day that is unfolding. Taking care of how I wake up is an important part of my mental health management. The discovery of the blogosphere was a remarkable boost to my morning experience, possibly the best one since I discovered tea-drinking in my late teens. First thing, when I wake up in the morning, I make a cup of tea. I often dream of having someone to make a cup of tea for me and bring it to me in bed - oh, surely, the very definition of luxury - but in the meantime, the thirst f...