Category: books

Posted on

Surprise Visitor

I had a lovely surprise yesterday afternoon. I was sitting in the garden when there was a knock on the door, which surprised me a little, because although I was expecting my daughter and the grandkids, it was a bit early considering she’d messaged me not long before to say they were in McDonald’s at Petersfield services – and also I’d left the door unlocked, and usually the kids just barge in when they get here. I was even more surprised when I opened the door and saw her brother waiting to be let in. I knew they were trying to meet up here while she was staying (it’s his birthday today), but apparently there was an email and two texts which I’d managed not to see, saying that he was coming, but that his wife was staying home with the two dogs. I must be getting even scattier than I thought I was.

Anyway it was lovely to have the four of them here, it was almost nicer in a way that it was just us without their other halves, (although I get on well with both my daughter-in-law and prospective son-in-law). We sat in the garden drinking prosecco and tea (Simon was driving) while Simon and Flick (whose birthday is next week) opened their presents from me. Then my wonderful offspring managed between them to fix (for the time being, at least) the shower room light switch, the speakers on my kitchen music centre and the strimmer.

There’s another family birthday coming up next week: my little cat will be fifteen on the 6th August. She’s still not eating – it’s been over a month now, and I am preparing myself for the worst.

I may or may not be writing in the mornings while Laura and the children are here. Depends on when everybody gets up. Yesterday I didn’t have time because I’d had a rough night then slept in till 8 and was in a rush to get to a writers’ group meeting for 10.

I feel I should have more to say. Life gets in the way of thought and writing.

I’ve downloaded a sample of a book that was recommended to me on Amazon. It’s very spooky the way it does that, because it is about a writer who is trying to write a biography of DH Lawrence, and a novel, and is a stream-of-consciousness rant about how he miserably fails to write either (but writes this book instead). The opening section got me hooked, though I can see how it could also be massively irritating to a lot of people. Like this blog, it rambles on and on without ever getting anywhere, although he is obviously doing that deliberately and skilfully, whereas in my case it’s just about incompetence and lack of imagination and talent.  

For a brief moment, it made me determined to stop fart-arsing around (excuse the expression) and actually do something with my writing. A brief moment, until reality set in again.

Posted on

Addictions

Yesterday evening I remembered something else the counsellor said last week, which was that the image of me smashing the mirror and thereby myself made her think of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. My first thought was: no, that’s not right because it’s not my idealised image that I want to destroy, it’s the ‘real’ me, but then I realised that it’s the portrait which is the raddled and depraved monster that Dorian has truly become, and that he destroys to achieve the peace of self-destruction.

Can I find peace without destroying myself in the process – if peace is what I want? I sometimes – when I’m striving for the positive – feel grateful that I’ve managed to avoid becoming addicted to drink, drugs or risky sex – (though I also suspect that my life would have been more enjoyable with more of that, especially the sex). The fact that I didn’t go that way wasn’t down to lack of inclination or innate moral sense so much as lack of imagination when it came to the possibilities, not knowing how to go about getting that sort of a life, and assuming that it wasn’t for the likes of me, that I was just too boring. So I tried to become Mrs Sensible, although the irony was that I was equally shit at that; not bohemian enough to make it as a Bohemian, but miles away from being bourgeois enough to be convincing or content as a bourgeois wife. Then I searched for solace in the life of the mind, and thought I’d found my true calling at last – except that the intellectuals weren’t ready to budge up and let me in, either.

Somewhere in all that mess I managed to spend twenty years raising two children – for which I’m grateful every day, because if I hadn’t I would now be truly alone. Not that emotional support in old age is the best motivation for having children, any more than financial security is a good reason for marriage – but sometimes life has a way of subverting your best intentions and aspirations by providing (you just might find) the things that you need.  

So I didn’t become (as a kind friend once predicted) an alcoholic, or hooked on anti-depressants, or any other kind of prescription or non-prescription substances. But am I addicted to self-analysis, to rumination, to trying to tease out what exactly feels so wrong? I can see there’s a strong argument for that, and also that all the self hate, anger, frustration, disappointment, is just as dangerous and self-destructive as any other kind of addiction. But like any addict, I don’t really have a choice – if there was ever a time when I could have chosen another path, it is too far back in the past to unravel and retrace the steps that brought me here.

Where does ‘trusting myself’ fit into all this? What about trying new things, learning from failure, acquiring wisdom, moving on?

It’s raining. And I need my breakfast.

Posted on

More About Mirrors

I sat on the edge of the bed facing the mirror this morning, as I do every morning, inside my thoughts. I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, nothing too grim today, just general. I’d had quite a vivid dream, though now I can’t remember what that was about, either.

Yesterday I read to my therapist what I wrote two days ago. She was impressed by the idea of smashing my head into the mirror and breaking both it and myself.

‘That sounds as though the mirror is the life you wish you’d had’ she said, which seems to make sense because of the frustration of the gap between what is there and here. She went on to talk about a theory from someone whose name meant nothing to me, about the image we have of ourselves and how we negotiate our inability to reach it. That sounds banal – of course we all must feel that way – but I expect there’s more to it than that. I pointed out that there’s a physical mirror on the wardrobe by my bed, so inevitably I see my reflection when I get up, but there again, I often use mirrors as a metaphor for my life and relationship with myself.

‘You keep saying the same things’ she went on ‘but every time you say it in a slightly different way, and today it’s smashing the mirror that’s significant.’

Before I went travelling, I was seeing a hypnotherapist (the third time I’d tried that), who in our sessions told me to imagine myself going into a room where there’s a mirror and the image inside it is the woman I want to be, with all the qualities other people see in me that I can’t find in myself. Then I was supposed to enter into the mirror and merge with that person, because ‘she is you’. She made me an audio file, which I used to play every night in bed, till I started screaming back at it: ‘but that’s not really me, can’t you see that?’

There’s a postcard on my desk, propped up in front of the monitor. It turned up a couple of days ago, tucked inside a book. I’ve been staring at it because I couldn’t remember how it got there, or where it came from. It’s a painting by Paul Nash, titled: ‘Landscape From a Dream’, and on the back I’ve written: ‘My book is the story of my journey, the reasons why I went, the places I went to, the things I saw and did, the feelings I had about them’ and addressed it to myself at the old house, which dates it to 2014 after I came back from Prague, when I was failing to write S2S.

I rummaged in the heap on my desk and found the book – called: ‘Show Your Work!’ – it started to make more sense, because I remembered writing the card in the Tate café.

And then I noticed the mirror.

Posted on

Writing Joy

Everything I say or write
comes from a thought,
a spark inside my mind.

That almost – almost – follows a haiku structure. Just needs a little tweaking to fit it into that 5/7/5 syllable pattern. That’s what the words do, when they occur to me, they often lay themselves out in a rhythmic structure – usually iambic, often in short, sharp lines like these. Sometimes I’ll combine them together into longer lines, hexameter or even heptameter, and then I might throw the odd shorter line here and there, maybe at the end of a stanza. So, in the three lines above, the first two could be combined into a single line with six feet, followed by one of three.

Don’t ask me why I’m sitting here analysing my own poetry style this morning, god knows, it’s not as though I don’t have other things to write about – though having said that, I can see why I did it that way, it was just that the first sentence that came into my head when I sat down at the keyboard did so in that rhythmic way, so just for fun I laid it out as a poem – albeit a pretty trivial one.

You may have noticed that when I’m writing prose, I often go in for long, rambling sentences, lots of embedded clauses, lists of this and that, shamelessly long processions of adjectives and adverbs, diversions and distractions, self-references, repetitions and contradictions, mixing metaphors with abandon, alliterating whenever I can get away with it, indulging myself in ways that no decent editor would stand for thirty seconds. That’s when you can tell that I’m writing for myself, for the sheer joy of the words and the exhilaration of it all and because – well – I just can’t stop myself. Personally, that’s when I think my writing is at its best, when I read it back and it makes me smile for the fun of it and the magic of it. That’s what I think of as my Tristram Shandy style, and I hope you (if there is a ‘you’, whoever and wherever you may be) enjoy it too, and don’t find it too irritating or forced, because it isn’t forced, not at all, even though (as now) it may sometimes be self-conscious, that’s not because I’ve deliberately set out to write this way so much as I’ve stepped into that stream and allowed myself to be taken along by the current, because I’m enjoying myself.

Isn’t that something like what I was writing about yesterday? I remember using the metaphor of being a surfer – being carried by the waves of thought, not able to control them but managing my responses to them. Oh, so much I thought about saying before I sat down in front of this keyboard this morning, and none of it has been said, or will be said in the twenty words remaining to me. But I’m glad I’ve written this, and hope you who’ve read it are glad too

Posted on

Reading (Part 2)

On any normal Monday… I’d be getting out of the pool around now. Except that it wouldn’t be a normal Monday, it’s Bank Holiday – not that that makes much difference to me. Five years ago (261 weeks) it was Bank Holiday, and I had breakfast at Rocksby’s, sitting outside on the prom, watching the sea and the boats and the Isle of Wight across the water and marvelling that I was here and how exciting it all was, never mind all those boxes I had to unpack. Rocksby’s is gone now, or rather, the basic structure and a couple of the staff are still there, but even when it’s open, it’s not the same, and the bacon sandwiches are terrible. Everything changes.

I rang my brother yesterday, it’s a thing we’ve done on and off over the years since I’ve been on my own, ringing each other on the first Sunday morning of the month. It’s been a bit erratic over the last couple of years while I’ve been going to writers’ group on Sundays, but as he said last month, now he knows where to find me on Sundays (or any other day). I told him that I’m enjoying not having to go out and interact with people, and he said something like: ‘that must be a blessing’ which was such an unusual word for him to use that I had to ask him to repeat it. But it’s a good word, appropriate, because yes, I have been feeling blessed, living in my cosy, stress-free bubble.

I told him I’d thought of him because on Saturday I heard a play on the radio about the life of Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons books, which I know he loved, and his daughters loved, and my sister loved too, though to be honest I was never all that interested in them (though I didn’t say that to him). It was one of those things that my two elder siblings did that I felt I should do as well (like staying married to the same people for fifty years), but didn’t really appeal to my nature.

That got me thinking about the kind of books I did read in childhood, and at first I could only think of Narnia and The Wind in the Willows. Partly, I realised, that was because they predominantly came from the library, we didn’t have many books of our own and the ones we did were mainly Ladybird and Observer books, things like that, vaguely educational. It’s not that Mum and Dad didn’t read books, they did (though, as I realise now, it’s not always so easy for adults to find the time), but they also got them from the library – books weren’t a high priority for spending limited cash, when there was an abundant supply which could be borrowed, and were reserved for birthday and Christmas presents.

My preference in books was always magical, which I may come back to another time.

Posted on

Reading (Part 1)

I woke at about 2.30 filled with a strange dread which I now can’t remember at all, I just know that I experienced it and it wasn’t a dream. I did what I usually do in the middle of the night, and started to listen to radio programmes I’ve downloaded onto my phone. I can’t listen directly because the wifi doesn’t reach to the bedroom, and when I first moved here I kept running out of mobile data, but the downloads work fine as long as I remember to keep them stocked up by downloading them when I’m in the wifi zone. Most of them are only streamed for a month, but there’s always plenty more.

I’ve downloaded episodes of Hilary Mantel’s ‘The Mirror and the Light’, third of her Thomas Cromwell books, read (abridged) in fifteen 15 minute episodes on Radio 4 last month. I’d played back the first few, when I found out yesterday that they’re only available till tomorrow. The 15 minute serials are good for listening to in bed, because if I fall asleep I only miss a few minutes, whereas if I fall asleep half an hour into a two hour drama I have to start it all over again another time, or worse, sometimes I wake up again while it’s still running and I’ve missed great chunks of the plot, or hear the denouement and spoil it for when I try to listen to the whole thing.

Anyway, life being what it is, I’ve got a good excuse to spend some time today and tomorrow listening to the last eight episodes.

I’m two thirds of the way through reading ‘Wolf Hall’, the first of the trilogy, on kindle, and I’ve seen the TV series (which I think was the first two books). The radio version is read by Anton Lesser, who has a wonderful voice and a great face for radio (as the saying goes). I could listen to him all day. In the telly version he played Sir Thomas More, but now I will always associate him with Cromwell – it’s not first person, but very much written from his point of view, and very sympathetic to it – which most historians haven’t been.

I wonder why I don’t spend more time reading, but the real answer is that these days I like being read to, for the simple reason that I can do that and crochet at the same time, whereas I can’t read and crochet – it’s mostly to do with holding the book and turning pages, (whether real or virtual). There’ve been times when reading has been the greatest joy in my life. It makes me quite sad to see ‘read a book’ appearing on lists of goals of ‘improving’ things to do during lockdown, an achievement to be proud of, when the essence of reading for me has always been that it’s an indulgence, and a great pleasure, something to be done for love and the excitement, satisfaction and happiness it brings.