I enjoyed the drive back on Sunday, very early. Empty motorways, on cruise control all the way. I got up at 3, read but could not go back to sleep. When I went down at 4.30, B was in the kitchen. We talked. He always calls me Dave, with his Bermondsey accent. He still writes every day, in the early morning. And reads books that are well thumbed. He said it was difficult to explain but that it was to do with Zen and enlightenment. He often includes some of his writing in letters to J. More recently, he has become anxious when travelling, worried that he has forgotten something, as if his memory is not so good.
B, J and P had spent two nights on the Gower in some dodgy accommodation. It had been raining. The area was quite touristic but they met a shopkeeper in a small village who seemed warm and friendly.
Saturday night, J cooked. We drank and laughed but we kept slipping back into silence as if we couldn’t keep it going. We were all tired, but not sure what of. Tired of something, or missing something, not able to find it. P played the mandolin and guitar. Then they all sang Goodnight Irene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSDyiUBrUSk. We had all gone to bed before Match of the Day.
When we were children, J and I weren’t close, and there has always been a competitiveness between us in the background. Sometimes on social occasions he says quite hurtful things, seemingly in jest, particularly after a drink. It always takes me back a bit, and I wonder whether he deeply resents me inside.
I took a detour down to Gillingham (Dorset) on my way to Bristol. I’ve got a 20 foot self-storage container on a farm in Great Milton, full of stuff, most of which is not mine. One of my projects for 2019 is to empty it, no doubt to the annoyance of friends and family who have used it for years.
I popped into Plant World in Gillingham and bought a Christmas tree. Last year I was the last person to buy a tree there before Christmas. This year I’m almost the first. I chatted with the woman who runs the place about living in London vs the country. She told me she had worked for British Transport Police in Kings Cross for many years before coming back to the country to look after her mother. “They need good people”, she said, both in Kings Cross and in psychiatry. Not me.
I’m up early now, 3.30 and only 2 degrees outside. I think the need to protect “self” and “space” is a concern about entanglement. Klein used the term projective identification for the way people can put feelings into other people. I think it is one of the core processes that operates in inter-subjective space. As in – you make me feel… In analytic theory it is important to be able to separate feelings evoked by the patient’s transference, from one’s own feelings. Of course this happens all the time in everyday life but particularly in close relationships. We feel lost, confused, intruded upon, stuck. Living alone is one way of avoiding that. I think being honest and open is another way. Unspoken feelings are the problem, particularly when you don’t know where they are coming from. So easy as it goes.