October is chock full of rememberances and obituaries. A few days ago it was the 20th anniversary of my father's death, and it hit me harder than the others. Perhaps because the place in me where that grief lives has not healed so much as callused and frosted over, tight and aching as skin after a burn. Most days I trundle along just fine, but every so often I stumble into a conversational bear trap (especially of the kind my mother favours: "Oh I remember the day that I told you that your dad died, and your lower lip trembled and your eyes filled up with tears and you looked so so sad. Do you remember that day?") and I have to stop talking, I have to walk away because my throat shuts like a fist.

I am fiercely, ridiculously loyal to those I love and I'll probably keep missing him my whole life. Partially because it makes me so so sad that there's so much of the world that has passed him by - that he will never have a laugh with my husband or hold my child- and partially because it feels like it's the only thing I have left to give him. Because amongst other things that missing says: I have loved you and I will love you my whole life.

That and occasionally a lit candle and a note pinned to a church corkboard: For those who are still missed and loved as much as they were in life.

Last week my old boss died. She was an eccentric and extraordinary character who worked herself into the ground and had such passionate convictions. I miss her, greatly and I keep remembering things about her and feeling the simultaneous surge of hilarity and sadness.

Like the bright red lipstick she favoured, and the strange conceptual art she created and her passion for Tito and the colourful tales from her childhood ("And that was the night that my mother and little brother and I spent in a forest on a Montenegran mountain surrounded by wolves") and the fact that she wouldn't wear jeans because they were American.

She was always so bad at accepting gifts and seeking help, to the point of comic proportion - such as the fact that she never let anyone but her do the washing up. We all knew her cancer was terminal but she never talked about it, and she left work at the end of May and made herself (deliberately, I think) inaccessible. And then in the middle of last week, there she was, flaring in our minds like a firework so that all of us who had worked with her (even though we were scattered across many different offices) suddenly were thinking and talking about her, trying to find a way to check on her, to reach her. And the news the next day, that she had died.

And whether you call it coincidence, or the twanging of intuition that connects us to those we have loved, or the spirit of a woman saying goodbye- whatever it's name, there was a moment of something there, a pause in the stride, a shiver in the spine.

I dreamt of empty, snowy fields and it sunk in that she was gone.

Sometimes a dream is all you get of goodbye. And sometimes it's a postcard (To my Great Team, take care of yourselves. I miss you and wish you all the best), received the day after she died.

I'm jealous Midlands, and other people with snow. I am dead jealous. I'm totally not over snow yet. I keep looking up at the sky and going Come on, come on, just one more little flake, but so far -nada.

It's raining though, which somehow isn't the same.

All week I've watched the snow becoming tarnished and broken, or freezing into ice. It has made me melancholy and prone to accidents.

And now but for a dusting in the garden, it's all gone. I feel bereft, like I've lost something.

Z keeps looking up at the sky in the same hopeful way every morning, but it's mostly because he just wants another excuse to work from home again. Philistine.

Snow brings out my ultimate nesting fantasy. It makes me want to pile up blankets around everyone and snuggle together where it's safe and warm. It's like I spent my past life as a bear and still haven't caugh onto the whole Working Throughout Winter Rather Than Eating And Sleeping.

Snow reminds me of home. No matter how long I have lived here, no matter how much I love England, I still don't feel right here. Things taste and smell wrong. But snow blurs things; the lines between worlds. It smudges time like a thumbrint on charcoal.

And then I am in two places at once. Looking out into my garden and being lifted onto my father's shoulders so I can see the snow on the roofs. Walking to work but also walking in a different place, with fir trees and hills you can zoom down on, on your sled. Smelling the frost on my father's coat, having snowball fights.

Loss walks with me, always has. I resign myself to my two worlds, but I long for the one I cannot have. Winter brings out my melancholy. Yearning increases with the dying of the light. And I long most of all, to undo myself for a while. Stop time for a sleep and dream of what I've lost. The sea, the fields, the land I belonged in. My father.

I love the life I have, and the people I have in it. But I think I would be happiest if every once in a while - a couple of days a month perhaps, I could simply unexist myself for a while. Dissolve into light, into air. Become something stark and ordinary. The shadow of a tree, the flight of crows.

"Hello mum. I love you."
"Hello sweetie. Wow, you're a mum and I'm a mum! We're both mums! There's two mums and one daughter in this conversation!"
"I don't know if that will ever stop being odd."
"What did Zeljko give you for Mother's Day?"
"So far, a blank look."

Although he did offer to go out and buy ingredients to make me a meal after he'd remembered he'd forgotten. Which is the point when I shoved the baby in his arms and shoved them both out of the door and forbade them to come back for 2.5 hours while explaining lovingly that fuck flowers and chocolates the most precious and needful gift is some time all to myself.

I have now been enjoying one hour of freedom and it tastes sweeeeeeeet.

Z had a week off between leaving his old job and starting his new one so we spent a lot of time laying down wooden floors and painting walls in his old house before people move into it. In many ways it was gruelling and exhausting and in some ways it was fun - (like eating takeaway pizza on the bare newly-laid floor of a bare house, and dancing with no music through heaps of sawdust)- but in most ways it was boring and exhausting. I don't think I'm really cut out for DIY. I lack the attention and the patience and physical co-ordination. Also powertools make me nervous since my vivid imagination always provides me with many scenarios of disaster.

I think the heat and the paint fumes conspired to make me light headed and I constantly had flashes of myself from the vantage point of an outsider watching a movie in which a dark-haired woman pranced around hammering and painting walls in her underwear. As though with each laid board we deposited the ghosts of ourselves around the room, filled pockets of still time. Left them scattered around like love, or laughter.

But hey at last the floor is done and the walls are done and all limbs present and correct and to celebrate this we got some Turkish takeaway bad voodoo lamb yesterday which has been disagreeing with me ever since. I spent the night tossing and turning and wailing in wretchedness and begging for death. But I happened to survive, and the cat and I have spent this day embracing and moaning our miseries to each other while he wilts from the heat and I swear to not ever ever ever eat anything again ever(except for apples and dark chocolate, for medicnal reasons). My cat, I've discovered, shares my penchant for drama and melancholy, and we both find our bitch fests soothing. (I swear that animal could not be more like me if he went around in pink glittery hats; one of these days Z is going to come home from work and find us on the sofa molded into each other eating popcorn and watching trashy films; for the moment though we content ourselves with mutual sympathy and forlorn asthmatic wheezing).

I went to Belgrade recently to see my grandmother and make my peace with her as well as I could, which was by and large a success. It feels good to be able to say I forgive you and be loving and gentle. For years it was a very important part of my healing to feel like I had a right to be pissed off on my own behalf and the behalf of my parents, but I think fundamentally I'm not an angry person. It felt good to let go of being angry not because the reasons for my anger were not justified but because it felt like the right thing to do. To say I forgive you in full knowledge of everything she had done, and who she was and to just love her, regardless. Ultimately because it feels more good to be kind than to be the record-keeper of transgress and disaster.

And while I was there I ran into an old lover of mine, who is married with children these days. His wife doesn't like me, so we don't really keep in touch, except sometimes when our paths cross in brief, unexpected meetings. It always feels good to see him again, no doubt more so for the spontaneaty of the encounters. A burst of joy, a gift. Like finding a £20 note in between the pages of a book, like a postcard from a friend.

We hug, we smile at each other, we make small talk and inquiries of what's new while in the background memories of summer afternoons and that winter night float on by. We part as warmly as we greeted, we are always happy for each other. And walking away the insidious unsaid words swirl about our heads like streamers: I still care about you, I sometimes miss you, do you ever think about me in your new life.

When I was little, about three or four, and adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd say *A famous ballerina*
And when someone laughed and inquired how I knew I'd be famous I gave them a withering look and replied:
*You can't seriously think I'll be just ordinary.*

Ah, the confidence of youth. :)

There are other memories of the termedously self-assured person I was once. I know I had very definate opinions about books ever since I could talk, classing certain ones as *stupid*. Or I'd list reasons why a certain story was bad and ways in which it could be improved. If someone asked me how I thought up the stories I was telling my dolls I'd tell them *They are like the stories I heard only much better*

I'm not sure when I began to lose that confidence. I know most of it was gone by age of eight, I remember it eroding in pieces, through getting shouted at or de-valued, and thinking that grown-ups must know better than me because they were bigger and there were more of them. That if what they said contradicted what I felt, since they were bigger than me thier wisdom would also be greater, and the fact that so much of what I felt contradicted external messages/teachings only meant that I was useless and stupid and wrong and that my feelings/insincts/thoughts could not be trusted.

It is still difficult for me, to follow what I feel is right on the inside. Because it feels... frightening and shockingly self-indulgent.

I'm attending a ten-week training course to do with working with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Despite the hour long commute each way, and the cold, and the fact that I left with whopper of a headache, I've really enjoyed the first session and am looking forward to next week's. I think the migraine had more to do with other people than me, I must be more mindful when it comes to shielding otherwise I sometimes pick up and absorb other people's heaviness like a sponge.

I think it will be potentially a very challenging course, we will be doing some very deep stuff emotionally, including role play and I know that can take its toll. I've made space for it in my own life, yet deep is where I want to go. I yearn for the profound exploration of the psyche, my own and that of others. To find depths and secrets and the thousand different facets of a situation or a human being. To dive in and explore that which is hidden.

I am curious to see how many people will drop out. I am the only one of the trainees so far with anything resembling calm and confidence. Everyone else is quaking and part of it makes me question my own feelings of self-assuredness, my own feelings that I do know what I am doing.

I am very proud of myself because I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning and go to the gym, even though it was a really ungodly hour of 7:30 am. I did quite a few exercises, also got shown some exercises to try which would get me fit without straining my knee and I am really buzzed. I am very very very proud of myself. I aim to get into that bloody gym as often as I can.

My goal at the minute is three times a week at least, but hopefully five, three gym sessions and two sessions in the swimming pool.

Because as much as I hate getting up doing that exercise really made me feel soooooooooo good. True, the only reason why I actually made it down in the first place is because the nice trainer man said he'd show me how all the machines worked and give me pointers on safe ways for me to exercise but hey, it got my butt out of bed regardless of how much my butt wanted to stay in bed.

The best thing is I dragged myself to the gym with remnants of a migraine and after the exercise my headache went away. :)

I have firm intentions of going back there tomorrow. :) I hope if I get myself into a disciplined groove early enough I can keep it up. And to channel the tiredness/negativity I feel into exercise.

I did better than I thought I would, but I was very focused on my breathing and was able to push past muscle pain, so I'm very happy with myself.

I could say of course that being ill in emotionally trying times makes me better.

Which in its own way it does. I wanted to sleep. Not move or think for a while. My body was obliging. Although walking around open windows with only underwear on helps too. Self-destruction is not to be undertaken lightly after all. Invariably it requires an element of planning.

"I've caught the flu" an early English expression I learned (useful in school) which I remember puzzling me at the time. As though you could open your hand to it, snatch it from the air. As though illness were a butterfly.

Now that the wily hormones have settled down once more my state of mind also is improved. I've even done something productive. Following a conversation with a harried publisher who managed to sound genial while simultaneously impressing upon me the need to complete sketches and do so with some haste. I set to work.

Sometimes deadlines are a gift. They say that grief can be put aside. They say that it can be forgotten or transformed and merged into something else entirely. A voice, an image, flowing words.

Sometimes my hands are clumsy and sometimes they know what to do as though by magic. When the mood takes me. WHen I become something greater than myself, even if for a moment. When I pick up a pen, a paper, colours, a brush. Mix them in. Let them flow until they become fairytale things. A horse, long-maned. Intricate flowers. The graceful neck, the curved wings, the long tail feathers of a firebird. Orange on the outside, red on the inner layer, with a turquoise heart.

A fairytale for a cookbook. It was not my idea but the characters of Russian fantasy are easier to render than fruit and vegetables.

I do not know exactly what the man heading the enterprise intends. Certainly half of my family seem to be working on it. Like a small creative Mafia. My grandmother's old RUssian recipes, inherited from her grandmother, altered, adapted, translated by my mother. Written down, re-written.

Originally, he had asked my grandmother to give him a few pictures of the Tzar to print with the recipes. She had refused, indignant, outraged.
"THe Tzar is not for cookbooks!"

So he asked me to paint instead. THe symbolic, stylised flowers winding themselves up the corners of paper, blooming above soups and entrees. Characters of tale and legend disperesed among main courses and deserts. My aunt sniffs at the notion but I do not mind. THere is something beautiful about painting, about any act of creation when done from the right heartstate, the right state of mind. A moment of love captured on a page. Being greater than oneself for a nanosecond, prserved like a fly in amber, in time.

And who knwos, perhaps it will even work. Perhaps as he hopes, if, when, it is published, people leafing through it will think or feel that they are eating fairytales, or history.