When I'm old and Grey

My mother used to sing that song and I keep thinking when I get old and grey I'll move up to a remote part of Weardale, a gorgeous stone cottage and have dogs and cats and an open fire and drink lots of whisky. This was such a lovely dream except for several things.

Firstly, I would be grey if it wasn't for Julie at Saks in Durham.

Secondly I live five walking minutes away from the hospital, a mile from the fire station and just up the road from the police station. Five minutes from the train station and the bus station.

Thirdly, I don't want cats and dogs. I keep forgetting how much work they are, how much they cost and how generally fed up I would be at having to make extra plans every time I wanted to leave the house.

Fourthly, I love all the restaurants, the gala theatre, being ten minutes walk from Chiquitos and all the student productions, and the concerts and the Shakespeare, NT live.

Fifthly, I wouldn't be able to see the cathedral every day.

Sixthly I do have my caravan and go walking up in the dale and since I'm only there in the summer I feel as if I have the best everything.

After that, there isn't  a Majestic wine warehouse up there or M&S food or New Look.

I can remember being desperate to live in the city and I have a beautiful house with original fireplaces and lots of lovely stained glass. I have a gardener, a lady who sorts out the house and the window cleaner turns up once a month. The Rington's tea man would keep leaving tea by the door even after I moved because I never seem to be in when he calls.

Also I have very good neighbours.

My friends live here.  That's it. Town Girl Wins!!

ps I am writing  a series of books about Weardale!!!

Charity Begins Where?

I give to charity, I like to think freely. Over the years I've been involved in various kinds of fund raising and volunteering to help other people and I like giving, it makes me feel good to benefit other people so it isn't all one way traffic, how could that ever be but I am so tired of being besieged on television by famous actors showing me horrific scenes of children dying on cancer, dying of lack of clean water, dying of cold, hunger and poverty and abused children lying in corners.
Yesterday over about an hour and a half I got oxfam, British Red Cross, NSPCC, dogs chained up and skinny or being put out of cars and left by the side of the road.
Must I be made to feel guilty because people abuse their children and turn out their pets? The fact that we are dropping bombs on Syria ( not in my name or my MP's ) and an advert is asking me to help the children there seems such a stupid contradiction and although I have given to all of the above charities and dozens more in the past and will in the future I am so tired of watching children huddled in corners, crying and dying and the looks in their mothers' eyes.
Communication has never been so good. I have to save the planet, I know. I am giving as much as I can. I recycle, I hardly go anywhere, I walk places. I eat locally grown vegetables, locally caught fish, local butchered animals though less and less meat being now aware of the energy and food it takes to get that far though I eat lamb because I'm surrounded by farms and if I don't eat the bloody lambs half the farmers in the dale will go without.
My car runs on unleaded fuel. I give away books, clothes. I keep a lawn at the back of the house because it's better for the air than paving.
I am becoming more and more aware that the narrowness of religion has meant that contraception is unavailable to millions of women, that war which men create causes huge problems, that women in most countries have very little voice and no power and the world around me allows white middle class men to get fat and own big houses and their own jets and because there is never enough to go around they are so greedy, so proud of themselves or too stupid to think that they can only sleep in one bed, eat so much, drink so much, their insecurity causes division and yet I know that it is a silly argument in many ways. We have to make money, we have to trade, we have to let people go ahead and try to make us richer, I just want there to be a fairer way to go, that there is no corruption in the churches and in the industries and that people will be employed because of the ability they have and not because of their background, their colour, their gender or the way that they speak.
Power without morals is corrupt and causes huge problems and I will not solve them by donating three pounds for a hat and gloves to a child in Syria though I have already given such a thousand times.
I am sponsoring a guide dog so that a blind person in my area can take a job. That's what I like, an object, a future of some kind for somebody who  needs this help. My guide dog's name is Goldie. It will take two years and £30,000 before she is ready to stop somebody stepping off a curb and being run down by a motorist because the disabled person can't see or can't hear or can't understand.
I  have given extensively to Water Aid, which is my favourite charity because if you have no clean water it doesn't really matter what you do have.
I give to people who live on the streets in Durham. I give to the old man who limps and plays the penny whistle so beautifully in the town. I haven't seen him in ages. Perhaps he died. I miss him.
I give to the accordionist who plays on Framwellgate Bridge because he can't play and was mocked by local young idiots. I wanted to smash their teeth in so I helped him.
I give to Christian Aid and the British Red Cross and Help the Heroes but I know that I cannot save the whole planet and I do wish that people would leave me my choices, impossible though they are, between hunger, pain, abuse and neglect. I am doing what I can and almost everyone I know does the same and we can do without the adverts on  television. They would do better to give that money directly to those who need it. We can all do without any more guilt, we feel bad enough as it is.

The Perfect Christmas ( fictional obviously )

I like to read and listen again and again to my favourite Christmas Day scene and it comes Anthony Trollope's beautiful novel, Can You Forgive Her. I know it's a crap title, there's hope for all our titles.
It's set in Cumbria which is one of my favourite places, being as wild and untamed in parts as my beloved Weardale when Alice and Kate, who are cousins, go to stay at Vavasor Hall where their grandfather is the local squire.
This is mid nineteenth century and as unlike our Christmases now ( I blame Charles Dickens in part and Marks and Spencer for the rest ) as it could possibly be.
Alice receives a letter on Christmas morning - can you imagine that happening now, and this in the middle of nowhere  - which is from her cousin George in London, Kate's brother.
They have breakfast with their lovely grumpy old grandfather and then they go to Church.  The Hall is not far from Penrith and within an energetic person's walking distance from Shap. After church, with a big piece of fruitcake each to take with them, they set off on a long walk, promising their grandfather they will be home in time for dinner which is promptly at five o'clock.
Off they set in one of the loveliest places on earth and the day is fine and they are very close. And Trollope knows his Cumbria so well. He describes the lovely walk and their conversation and eventually Alice tells Kate that she has received a proposal of marriage from George.
They get back and their grandfather scolds them because the beef is almost on the table and they rush upstairs to dress for dinner. After that I imagine them sitting over a huge fire because that's the end of the scene.  In order to find out whether Alice marries George you should read the book or if you're idle like me download the audio which is read by Timothy West and is superb.  Trollope's women characters are the best in fiction.  His young men tend to be either dull or complete bounders. George isn't dull.  George, in Trollope's language, is a scoundrel.

Where is my Ark?

I heard on television news last night that the water authorities in Cumbria are saying that the people who have had to abandon their homes because of flooding won't have to pay their water rates until they are back into their houses. Was it meant to be funny?  Perhaps, having just come back from a very wet Kendal, I have lost my sense of humour.

In October when I had to abandon my beloved caravan for the winter my daughter suggested that I should plan ahead and spend a couple of days each month at a Premier Inn. So I paid up my £32 a night and duly booked Newcastle, Kendal and Ashington.

Last month in Newcastle I stayed at the wonderful waterfront listed building on the quayside and had meals looking at the Tyne bridge. The only criticism I have of it is that the wireless internet was absolute crap. The rest of it was so perfect I hesitated about coming home!

This month was to be Kendal. Unfortunately the awful flooding in Cumbria put me off rather but I went anyway. The River Kent had gone down but there are dozens of homes and businesses which people have had to leave. Outside on the pavements all their furniture, but the thing that really got me was that a lot of them couldn't get through to their insurance brokers and were advised to go online. The electricity has been off in Carlisle and other places so what were they to do. For some of them this is the second flood in six years. How heartbreaking. I know what it's like, I have been flooded. I remember my perfectly sanded and varnished maple floor disappearing beneath inches of water which had been through the sewage station first I think.  I tried to carry out the deep fat fryer, slipped and after that kept falling in again and again with oil on top of sewage.

My husband, being brighter than a lot of people, went off and bought a pump . He didn't want the rescue people anywhere near our pale pink carpets which were also brand new. We pumped the damned water out ourselves and me, at thirty six, and full of pluck,stood and cooked dinner in my wellies in six inches of water. Wow. Just call me Noah.

The Premier Inn in Kendal has perfect beds and if the lovely staff thought the strange older lady who lost her rag all too quickly over small matters was completely nuts I don't have the patience that I had at thirty six.

Less than a year after my beautiful maple floor was ruined my husband died and my life was ruined. It never got back to where it had been or maybe I should say that it never moved on in certain ways. I am forever banging my head against some bloody ceiling beyond which my happiness once was.

I feel as though my capacity to recover is at full stretch and so must those poor people in Cumbria must feel. You get to the point where if your internet doesn't work as mine doesn't on my phone now that the stupid Premier Inn internet knocked something about it, and the wine you are drinking too much of is rubbish, you lose it.

Your cafe is underwater, all the Christmas plans you made are horribly defunct and once again life is shitting on you from a great height. After I reached Kendal I discovered that they had just pulled some poor bloke dead out of the river. I have a very close relationship with rivers, since my husband drowned and some canoeists found my daughter unconscious.

So, with my friend Leah Fleming, I did what I could. I went to Kendal, I spent lots of money, I laughed and talked and ate and drank and wrote with my laptop on my little table in the Premier Inn's dining room. But please, if anybody from there should ever read this, talk to however provides the wine list there. It really is bloody awful and you can take it from me because I drink an awful lot of wine. It tops me shrieking from the rooftops when stupid things go wrong.

Bad Language

I don't know when some words got to be 'bad language' and I've never understood that people think cursing has power. Words of course can have more power than anything else but it's strange that people get so upset about the use of cursing in novels.
My mother was a farmer's daughter so we were used to 'bugger', 'damn and blast' and 'hell' when we were small children. We didn't know what any of it meant, all we knew was that she was having a bad day and that was her way of letting rip without losing her temper. My father  never swore. I heard him say 'hell' once when he was driving me across the fell to school. It icy and some bloke nearly drove into us.
The first time I heard the word 'fuck' was  when I was about nine. I went to private school and one of the other girls said it. I was rather taken aback but she thought she was very clever.
Most newspapers delete words that they think their readers might find offensive though considering the difficult lives people lead it seems odd they have time to feel offended about such trivia. I worry when I don't have onions in the house.
When I was writing my first books for Hodder and Stoughton, this was 1995 onwards and I had a character, very upper middle class, who was inclined to swear a lot so I put a great deal of it in figuring that my editors would probably object and call for half of it to be taken out, in which I would get what I wanted. Alas, such open minded women, I don't think they even  noticed.
It's like sex. If you are being told a good story and the sex is important then why would you not put it in?  Or violence. But if necessary. Anything gratuitous defeats the object, surely.
I went to the cinema twice last week and saw what I think are the only two films available at the moment which are not full of killing people.  Then the games which people play on Xboxes and whatever. Why is killing people so exciting?  And why on earth do people exquate sex and violence as being something that goes together. Consensual sex is not violent in that both parties are agreeable to whatever is taking place. So it should be rape and violence, shouldn't it?
I do think a good story, all of the best stories, have neither sex nor much violence. If you take the classics, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Lawrence, Dickens. They wrote the best stories and therefore they didn't require sex or violence or anything else which seems to excite people in the worst way.  Implication is everything. Think of Brief Encounter. It's all about time and loneliness and missed opportunities and people trying to choose between what they want and what they think they want and what the consequences will be. Isn't that more exciting than watching a whole load of paper figures being mown down on screen?  It's watching people making a mess of things or trying so hard to lead decent lives that you bleed for them because that's what life is like. Everybody is out there having a difficult time and they need stories where they empathise, characters they care for and an out come which makes them laugh or makes them cry, or both.
There is a lovely saying among frustrated writers which goes something like 'We write songs for bears to dance to, while all the time we're longing to move the stars to pity.' And because so few of us manage this we go on trying to make people believe in what we write and to care as much as we do about the people in our stories.

Izzie, Lizzie and Katy go on Holiday

Usually for my birthday my daughter takes me somewhere glamorous. Last year it was Prague where I wore a long black velvet dress to the opera. The years before was Athens where we stayed in a gorgeous hotel and our room looked out at the Acropolis and we watched the changing of the guard.

This year, however, she has acquired a large yellow (, sorry, golden!) labrador so we drove to the wilds of Northumberland, the new labrador in back of a brand new ( and I mean that day!! ) Mercedes CLA 180 sport, gleaming white and smelling - of dog.
Izzie is seventeen months and has been rehomed three times. She thinks nothing of licking a bowl of fruit even though she knows it isn't hers and she likes bananas for breakfast, carrots for lunch and will east tomatoes when the wind is in the east.

Dogs, of course, were not allowed in the bedrooms at the cottage where we stayed but Izzie is very good at opening doors and managed to leap on both single beds before we could stop her. The covers were chocolate so you can imagine the mess.
She barked at the man who owns the cottage because he was working mostly in the communal garden.

On Boulmer beach she ate a huge quantity of seaweed and half a pasty outside Morrisons in Alnwick.  We scoured the internet for pubs which liked dogs and were very upset when we found that the only pub in the village banished us to a cold and windy seafront while the locals ate their Sunday dinners and laughed at Izzie winding her lead around the tables, attacking a bench with her teeth and we cowered in hats, scarves and sweaters against the incoming tide.
We were greeted at the The Red Lion in Alnwick with a cacophony of barks and whines. There were labradors, sheepdogs and spaniels.  Her favourite shop is Pets at Home or any supermarket that has discarded bread outside or the local park on Sundays where there are half eaten pizzas from the night before when the kinds smoked weed.

It's not just holidays. For Christmas I have bought her a bottle of Barker's Dog beer and Dog Cake Mix. I now own very expensive trainers ( from Cotswold ), serviceable green trousers from M&S and a hideous anorak with a gold zip.  We usually go to Mughli's on Christmas Eve which is the wonderful Indian restaurant in Knutsford. Now we are looking forward to an evening spent by the fire, a take away and the delights of television and dog smelling sofas.
Boxing Day will be a walk in Tatton Park where she will be able to greet her friends. There will be tennis ball throwing and my kids will have the joy of seeing all the people they didn't know before they acquired a labrador.  They are both very fit now and Athens and Prague seem a long way away but the beaches in Northumberland have been my second home since I was five years old when I walked my Boxer Dog up the beach at Hauxley Bay. I walked my spaniel there when I was forty five so what could be more appropriate than to watch Izzie like thousands of other lucky dogs before her run up and down hoping in vain to catch the wily seagulls?
At night when the tide is full the seabirds gather in their hundreds to feed and the moon rises about the North Sea.  What better way to celebrate my sixty fifth birthday?

Writing

When I was a little girl my mother used to take me to Woolworth's to buy toys. We had a decent amount of money and this was nothing unusual except that it was for me because I always headed straight for the stationery department.  No wonder she thought I was odd. I was one of four. The others were always outside as we lived in the middle of nowhere. I was always upstairs, just as I am now, in my office. It was never the bedroom, despite the pink furniture, I filled it with books and pens and papers and used my kidney shaped dressing table as a desk. It was the only bedroom on the back of the house and I could watch the sun going down. When I got older one of my friends would join me there, put down the sliding sash window and we would hang out there smoking full strength capstan which my rather kept. My parents never tried to stop us smoking and drinking, they had more important things to think about. They fed us royally, loved us, educated us and kept us safe.  It was a very good childhood which I did find rather difficult but writers always feel out of place and I was a writer before I was anything else.
I don't write letters much any more. Who does?  Email is swift and efficient but I could never get through a day before turning to a notebook and pen. It's my  Linus's blanket. Everything can go wrong but there is always writing.
I'm just starting another book. I spent three weeks waffling but now I have an idea and I'm doing lots of research about what kind of people were transported, what kind of quarries are there in Weardale and getting lost in the world of my own ideas. So much easier than the real world.
I do care very much about politics and what is going on but creative people have to slide away or they cannot work.  I love to go away to this place where I write even though it is hard and frustrating and lonely. I can't do with people around too much, I need a big space into which to write.
This is my favourite time of year. I love to start writing in the run up to Christmas when the nights are clear and the frost is white on the fields and the cold wind nips at my ankles and the dusk comes in at around four. It's bliss for me.  I am doing some research on W H Auden who spent a lot of time in Weardale. He hated warm weather and loved the howling gales in the this area and the relentless wind, rain, sleet and snow. Nice to think that he did. It's always my preference.
I'm going off to my caravan now, the best place to write. I have to make the best of it because it closes at the end of October but by then it's too cold to be comfortable up there and it's always something to look forward to when Easter arrives. I should be halfway through my novel by then and I'll be putting pen to paper every day, watching the half grown pheasants toddling around the caravans and the big black cattle stirring behind the caravan in the fields and bunnies bobbing up on the horizon before night settles in.