All the books that I write have a huge part of me in them but none more so than this book which was written in 2004.
During the first years of the new millennium I had a really tough time. First of all I got breast cancer, after that my beloved mother died and then I lost my job with Hodder and Stoughton. I think all of that, plus the rubbish in my life which had preceded meant that I began to have depression, I just didn't know it at the time.
Depression is something which writers seem to have very often, perhaps it's something to do with the amount of time we sit staring out of windows and not doing anything but this book which I wrote amongst the heartbreak of that time is the most important book of all. My daughter disliked it because it is my own story and a lot of the incidents in it have been played out in my life with heartbreak.
I recalled I think with a little detachment the time that my husband died and the women in this book are all parts of me and the different things I went through.
Some of it's funny, most of it's true.
At the beginning of the book three women lose their partners in a train crash. The book is set in Hexham, one of my beloved northern towns. My mother and I used to shop there and I knew it very well. The main male character is the solicitor, Sam Browne, who is friends with all these families and who tries to sort things out when tragedy strikes these people.
The woman most like me is Caroline. Unlike me she is left penniless and has to move in with her mother. Her daughter is like an earlier version in some ways of my own very precious child and I enjoyed that but Caroline joins a singles group. I took all of this straight out of life, the dreadful parties, the way that the men her age are talking to women ten or fifteen years younger, the appalling dinner she goes to.
'There was dancing. At her table was a tall, fair, handsome man. He leaned over and Caroline waited for him to ask her to dance.
'You ought to get yourself a man and quickly,' he said,'by the time you're fifty there are twice as many available women as available men,' and he turned to the woman on his right and asked her to dance.
This finishes Caroline off, it didn't do me any good either.
Well, you know what they say? When you have a lemon you make lemonade. I have made money out of the horrors and heartbreaks of my life.
The other two women are young. One of them is a deceitful cow who is sleeping with one man while married to another which makes things interesting when they both die on the train. There isn't much of me in her but there are bits which are like me. And I like her. She's gutsy and modern and doesn't care.
The other young woman Jess, I think she has the worst time of all and again I used direct experience.
'A man with a van brought videos to the door. He was Jess's saviour, her Jesus, her Messiah, her Buddha. He was Santa Claus, a chubby man with a van load of goodies. She could be somewhere else, she could be somebody else, she could be a story.'
'Safe and warm, Jess listened to her favourite sounds, the ocean, the wine as it poured into her glass. On her television screen, Bruce Willis was saving the world and she could help him By the end of the afternoon they had put everything back to rights. It was so satisfying. The baddies died, the goodies were saved. Bruce Willis's character went home to his wife and children . Jess watched him, she watched his car as it got smaller and smaller on the screen. He and his wife, sitting in the back seat, going home to their children, their house, their Christmas.'
Jess has no husband, no child, no Christmas. And worst of all because she is young people tell her that she will get over it. When people said that to me I wanted to kill them.
There is also a lot of deceit in this book. Deceit isn't actually something I know much about personally. When people have hurt me they have done it directly but somehow I can transfer the pain of what I interpreted as other people's betrayal, of how they didn't care about me, to deceit.
My mother used to say I had become a bitter woman but bitterness and anger are very useful for writers. All that pain gets translated on to the page and it pays the bills and buys the wine and sees me on a Saturday night taking my children out to dinner. Loss is never total. There is always something left and I like that people read it. That's the most important thing of all to me. That somebody out there thinks I have written something they want to read. It means the whole world to me.
Friday, 29 April 2016
Wednesday, 6 April 2016
Second wave of my backlist!!
It may seem to some people that I am trying to take over the whole world single handedly but I have waited a long time to see my backlist published as ebooks and now they are coming out in March April and May and so the list for this month to be published on April 7 are The Secret, Snow Hall, When Day is Done, and Sweet Wells.
This is Dryden's story and is one of three. The first is Shelter from the Storm and the third is The Homecoming. This is going to sound ridiculous I know but I didn't write them in that order. This story comes after Shelter from the Storm but was written last. I can't help the way that my mind works but I thought I was finished with Drdyden, whom I adored and didn't want to part with but as I prepared to write a fourth my agent cut in and said hadn't I done enough. I always regretted not doing another because I thought there was mileage left in it so regretfully I had to move on. The title came from the idea that when the work is finished it is the most beautiful thing in the world to go home to the woman who loves you. It was a saying that my wonderful father in law, Francis Hankin used. They had a glorious, old fashioned marriage. She stayed at home with the children and he worked. He was a very clever skilled man, a cabinet maker and one of the handsomest men in the world world. Apart from which he was a great father and a great father in law. I still miss him.
This story stands alone and is of a family tragedy. During the second world war my father's sister, who lived in London, died when the house was hit by a bomb. She was in the kitchen and died, her husband, two children and the dog were in the living room and survived. I badly wanted to write about this because her two children came to the live in the north with their grandparents and I wanted to find out what that was like for them and for the family. I couldn't write the book at first, I couldn't get it to work so I changed it around so that the man died and the woman and her two children came back to their roots and what happened after that. I do like the young people in the story.
This is the third of the Black family series, which was set around a steelworks in Durham City. The steelworks was actually in Tow Law and was owned and run by my father. The books revolve around his wife in Swan Island, his sister in Silver Street and his secretary which is the final story. I took the name from a farm in Weardale where the girl lives. My father's secretary actually lived in Stanhope and was well ahead of her time. She would trundle down the dale every day to run my father's office. She was the only woman in the works. Obviously the stories are at least half fictitious and this one especially. I called the little town Sweet Wells and like to think that when I drive up the dale to my caravan the town and the story are waiting there for me.
This is Dryden's story and is one of three. The first is Shelter from the Storm and the third is The Homecoming. This is going to sound ridiculous I know but I didn't write them in that order. This story comes after Shelter from the Storm but was written last. I can't help the way that my mind works but I thought I was finished with Drdyden, whom I adored and didn't want to part with but as I prepared to write a fourth my agent cut in and said hadn't I done enough. I always regretted not doing another because I thought there was mileage left in it so regretfully I had to move on. The title came from the idea that when the work is finished it is the most beautiful thing in the world to go home to the woman who loves you. It was a saying that my wonderful father in law, Francis Hankin used. They had a glorious, old fashioned marriage. She stayed at home with the children and he worked. He was a very clever skilled man, a cabinet maker and one of the handsomest men in the world world. Apart from which he was a great father and a great father in law. I still miss him.
This is the second book in a series of three and follows Paradise Lane. It's best to read them in order because the characters from the first book, Ned and Annabel, appear largely in this book which tells the story of a poor girl who lives with her aunt in a little pit village where they repair hats and how she comes into an inheritance, the lovely Snow Hall near Durham City. There Lorna meets her unscrupulous cousin, Ralph, who expected to inherit the hall and now seeks to take it by other means.
This story stands alone and is of a family tragedy. During the second world war my father's sister, who lived in London, died when the house was hit by a bomb. She was in the kitchen and died, her husband, two children and the dog were in the living room and survived. I badly wanted to write about this because her two children came to the live in the north with their grandparents and I wanted to find out what that was like for them and for the family. I couldn't write the book at first, I couldn't get it to work so I changed it around so that the man died and the woman and her two children came back to their roots and what happened after that. I do like the young people in the story.This is the third of the Black family series, which was set around a steelworks in Durham City. The steelworks was actually in Tow Law and was owned and run by my father. The books revolve around his wife in Swan Island, his sister in Silver Street and his secretary which is the final story. I took the name from a farm in Weardale where the girl lives. My father's secretary actually lived in Stanhope and was well ahead of her time. She would trundle down the dale every day to run my father's office. She was the only woman in the works. Obviously the stories are at least half fictitious and this one especially. I called the little town Sweet Wells and like to think that when I drive up the dale to my caravan the town and the story are waiting there for me.Sunday, 27 March 2016
Bank holidays. Bah humbug and all that other unmitigated shit
Why is it that I dread bank holidays? Especially at this time of the year when they come with appalling frequency. It can't be that the road to Sainsburys is full of other people, that Marks and Spencer's is awash with daffodils. I hate daffodils. Bloody pathetic. All they need is a good wind and down they go.
Our expectations are huge. And now the government thinks we should all get on our bikes. Well all I can say is you try getting to St John's chapel on a bank holiday Sunday without knocking some daft bugger off his bike because there are three or four them in line around a bend. There should be a law against it.
And they want us to start walking. When did we stop walking? I certainly didn't.
Living on your own is hell at bank holidays. Actually it's hell all the time. Why do you think I drink so much but bank holidays are the worst.
Christmas is six weeks of people sending you cards with pictures of their grandchildren you have never met and in my case hope never to meet. Buying presents for people who don't need anything but don't want a share in a goat. Worrying whether the car will slide into another, hoping for snow which does not turn to dirty slush too quickly and whether the heating will go off in January.
January is that most awful of months when we have no bank holiday and people don't drink and don't eat and become even more miserable than they were when they were stuffing themselves with Thorntons and cheap champagne behind the kitchen door because Auntie Mary was regaling them with stories of how good things used to be.
Dry turkey and tv cooks showing you how it should be done,
New Year? Who thought that was a good idea. Let's really cook our livers. And the cost, dear God. Do you remember that saying 'it can't be Christmas. I haven't finished paying for last year's.'
Easter then is upon us. We've got through Valentine's Day without socking somebody in the chops because they have someone else to hold, Mother's Day without saying yet again to our children 'please don't buy me anything' and now we have Easter.
Deep breaths everybody. I have gastric flu. I have spent my weekend watching Inspector Lynley patronising his female partner and playing Angry Birds, Star Wars. I was supposed to go and visit my children. Left to themselves they can't get through it without throwing peanut butter at one another. I wish I had somebody to throw peanut butter at. No, actually amend that. I don't. I keep telling my daughter how other people fight. One of my aunties used to throw whole dinner services at my uncle.Another aunt threw a frying pan at my dad. I don't think it was on a bank holiday but it probably was. I used to fall out spectacularly with my husband on Christmas Day because he liked shooting the following day and I thought it should be family.
May should be stay in bed month. It's full of bank holidays. By then I shall be taking the road more or less travelled by every bloody cyclist in creation up the dale and there I will hide in my caravan and read on my balcony and ignore everybody and drink lovely wine and read great big books that I can't see past and that nobody can see me over my sun glasses and my foul temper and my hopefully soon to be finished novel. That's the thing really. I have worked. I have got myself together and put my characters into awful situations. They even have to face bank holidays but those days, in 1820, people didn't have holidays really and they didn't have decent medicine, or good housing for the most. They had poverty and no contraception and no good education.
So there, I feel much better now and will go back to Inspector Lynley and on the way I will turn on my little laptop and kill a few pigs and I will open the bottle of champagne in my fridge and be glad for all my blessings. Wishing you all a very happy Easter.
Our expectations are huge. And now the government thinks we should all get on our bikes. Well all I can say is you try getting to St John's chapel on a bank holiday Sunday without knocking some daft bugger off his bike because there are three or four them in line around a bend. There should be a law against it.
And they want us to start walking. When did we stop walking? I certainly didn't.
Living on your own is hell at bank holidays. Actually it's hell all the time. Why do you think I drink so much but bank holidays are the worst.
Christmas is six weeks of people sending you cards with pictures of their grandchildren you have never met and in my case hope never to meet. Buying presents for people who don't need anything but don't want a share in a goat. Worrying whether the car will slide into another, hoping for snow which does not turn to dirty slush too quickly and whether the heating will go off in January.
January is that most awful of months when we have no bank holiday and people don't drink and don't eat and become even more miserable than they were when they were stuffing themselves with Thorntons and cheap champagne behind the kitchen door because Auntie Mary was regaling them with stories of how good things used to be.
Dry turkey and tv cooks showing you how it should be done,
New Year? Who thought that was a good idea. Let's really cook our livers. And the cost, dear God. Do you remember that saying 'it can't be Christmas. I haven't finished paying for last year's.'
Easter then is upon us. We've got through Valentine's Day without socking somebody in the chops because they have someone else to hold, Mother's Day without saying yet again to our children 'please don't buy me anything' and now we have Easter.
Deep breaths everybody. I have gastric flu. I have spent my weekend watching Inspector Lynley patronising his female partner and playing Angry Birds, Star Wars. I was supposed to go and visit my children. Left to themselves they can't get through it without throwing peanut butter at one another. I wish I had somebody to throw peanut butter at. No, actually amend that. I don't. I keep telling my daughter how other people fight. One of my aunties used to throw whole dinner services at my uncle.Another aunt threw a frying pan at my dad. I don't think it was on a bank holiday but it probably was. I used to fall out spectacularly with my husband on Christmas Day because he liked shooting the following day and I thought it should be family.
May should be stay in bed month. It's full of bank holidays. By then I shall be taking the road more or less travelled by every bloody cyclist in creation up the dale and there I will hide in my caravan and read on my balcony and ignore everybody and drink lovely wine and read great big books that I can't see past and that nobody can see me over my sun glasses and my foul temper and my hopefully soon to be finished novel. That's the thing really. I have worked. I have got myself together and put my characters into awful situations. They even have to face bank holidays but those days, in 1820, people didn't have holidays really and they didn't have decent medicine, or good housing for the most. They had poverty and no contraception and no good education.
So there, I feel much better now and will go back to Inspector Lynley and on the way I will turn on my little laptop and kill a few pigs and I will open the bottle of champagne in my fridge and be glad for all my blessings. Wishing you all a very happy Easter.
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
My Backlist
The first one is about men returning from the first world war, trying to pick up the lives they had left behind them, probably not knowing at that point that you can only live your life forwards. It's also about the families they left and how people managed and didn't manage. I tend to write more about the beginning of wars and the result of wars rather than the war itself. The main male character - I don't call them heroes, they are just people - Allan Jamieson, a barrister, comes home to find that his wife no longer seems to want him. He ends up defending the woman he is having an affair with. She is accused of killing her husband. In those days the chances of her getting off would be less than slight.
One of my few shots at a fairly modern novel. This is set in 1970 when footballing turned into glamour and money. The lad, Ruari Gallagher wants to be a top footballer, the girl, Jemma Duncan, wants to get married and have a child and live in a little terraced house across town from her parents. Her dream is so small. His dream is so big. When Ruari lets her down everything begins to go wrong and when he asks her to go with him when he leaves for stardom, it's too late. So, what have you left when you sacrifice a person you say you love for your dream?
This is my aunt's story to begin with. She was a nurse in the second world war and came back to her hometown and tried to pull her life together. This is also one of three, the Black Family trilogy. Very close to home this book is because my father had the foundry and I've put a lot of him in the books. My mother had her own story, Swan Island and his secretary had her story, Sweet Wells and this is the story of what might have happened to his sister. They are all fiction of course but underneath them lie the facts of what war costs and how people try to get beyond it.
Another one of a trilogy. This is the first of three books set in Durham and is the tale of an upper middle class London girl who comes north to find out about her mother. She meets with a young man who owns a newspaper and together they go on this quest to find out where Annabelle's mother is, if she is still alive.
So these are my first four books which come out in March. There are another four in April and then another four in May. I love the covers. I hope those who haven't read them will like the stories.
One of my few shots at a fairly modern novel. This is set in 1970 when footballing turned into glamour and money. The lad, Ruari Gallagher wants to be a top footballer, the girl, Jemma Duncan, wants to get married and have a child and live in a little terraced house across town from her parents. Her dream is so small. His dream is so big. When Ruari lets her down everything begins to go wrong and when he asks her to go with him when he leaves for stardom, it's too late. So, what have you left when you sacrifice a person you say you love for your dream?
This is my aunt's story to begin with. She was a nurse in the second world war and came back to her hometown and tried to pull her life together. This is also one of three, the Black Family trilogy. Very close to home this book is because my father had the foundry and I've put a lot of him in the books. My mother had her own story, Swan Island and his secretary had her story, Sweet Wells and this is the story of what might have happened to his sister. They are all fiction of course but underneath them lie the facts of what war costs and how people try to get beyond it.
Another one of a trilogy. This is the first of three books set in Durham and is the tale of an upper middle class London girl who comes north to find out about her mother. She meets with a young man who owns a newspaper and together they go on this quest to find out where Annabelle's mother is, if she is still alive.
So these are my first four books which come out in March. There are another four in April and then another four in May. I love the covers. I hope those who haven't read them will like the stories.
Wednesday, 10 February 2016
Robert Hale, publisher
Sorry to hear from one of my writing friends that Robert Hale, publisher has closed. I have very fond memories of being published by them and can honestly say that if it hadn't been for them I would never have made it as a writer.
My first book was published by them in 1981, three weeks before my daughter was born. I was thirty and so excited. I found a copy of it in Chilton library a couple of years back and it was the copy I had given to my husband. I could have cried. He has been dead for twenty seven years. How it got there I have no idea but it was the most wonderful time of my life when I was being published by them, I had a lovely husband and a little girl. We lived in the country and the house had a paddock and I remember when they sent the letter saying they were going to publish my book I ran round and round the paddock screaming,
'I'm a writer, I'm a writer.' It was the fulfilment of my dreams. I'd wanted to publish a book all my life. They gave me a hundred and fifty pounds for it and nothing was ever the same again. Talk about making a woman's dreams come true.
I made a lot of mistakes but they put up with me and if I misunderstood John Hale would write me polite letters. I did make the mistake of telling them about one book that I didn't want to alter it and then I got desperate and offered to alter it but they wouldn't take it. I was never that precious again!
They published twenty books and I learned a lot. The first ones were awful, dreadful historicals in the main but somebody must have read them. The libraries, God save those that are left, where would I ever have been without the libraries. Since then I've written and written through despair and grief and huge loss and happy times watching my little girl grow up and although I have done other things with my life my writing saved me from ever having to do work I didn't want to do. I didn't have to go out into the snow to work, I was always there for the sports days and the school garden parties. I was always there for my kiddie and my animals. It was the perfect job for a stay at home single mother.
They published fourteen Rainbow Romances and six short dreadful historicals. I did my apprenticeship with them.
I used to get letters from Betty Weston, lovely letters telling me that she had sold one of my books to France or to Germany or Italy and as a paperback for Woman's Library stories. I still have copies of all these. Her letters meant we could go on holiday or afford a better Christmas. Times were tough but I felt I was really contributing. I would walk the dogs up the old dismantled railway line to the village of Ramshaw and sort out my writing problems.
When my husband died I was in the middle of writing a Rainbow Romance. I can remember a year later, when we were living in a caravan in Weardale, sitting down at my portable typewriter and finishing it and after that I wrote my first big book for Hodder and I found an agent and moved on. There were no more Rainbow Romances but Robert Hale had done it for me and I will always remain very grateful to them for giving me the chance and fulfilling my dreams.
My first book was published by them in 1981, three weeks before my daughter was born. I was thirty and so excited. I found a copy of it in Chilton library a couple of years back and it was the copy I had given to my husband. I could have cried. He has been dead for twenty seven years. How it got there I have no idea but it was the most wonderful time of my life when I was being published by them, I had a lovely husband and a little girl. We lived in the country and the house had a paddock and I remember when they sent the letter saying they were going to publish my book I ran round and round the paddock screaming,
'I'm a writer, I'm a writer.' It was the fulfilment of my dreams. I'd wanted to publish a book all my life. They gave me a hundred and fifty pounds for it and nothing was ever the same again. Talk about making a woman's dreams come true.
I made a lot of mistakes but they put up with me and if I misunderstood John Hale would write me polite letters. I did make the mistake of telling them about one book that I didn't want to alter it and then I got desperate and offered to alter it but they wouldn't take it. I was never that precious again!
They published twenty books and I learned a lot. The first ones were awful, dreadful historicals in the main but somebody must have read them. The libraries, God save those that are left, where would I ever have been without the libraries. Since then I've written and written through despair and grief and huge loss and happy times watching my little girl grow up and although I have done other things with my life my writing saved me from ever having to do work I didn't want to do. I didn't have to go out into the snow to work, I was always there for the sports days and the school garden parties. I was always there for my kiddie and my animals. It was the perfect job for a stay at home single mother.
They published fourteen Rainbow Romances and six short dreadful historicals. I did my apprenticeship with them.
I used to get letters from Betty Weston, lovely letters telling me that she had sold one of my books to France or to Germany or Italy and as a paperback for Woman's Library stories. I still have copies of all these. Her letters meant we could go on holiday or afford a better Christmas. Times were tough but I felt I was really contributing. I would walk the dogs up the old dismantled railway line to the village of Ramshaw and sort out my writing problems.
When my husband died I was in the middle of writing a Rainbow Romance. I can remember a year later, when we were living in a caravan in Weardale, sitting down at my portable typewriter and finishing it and after that I wrote my first big book for Hodder and I found an agent and moved on. There were no more Rainbow Romances but Robert Hale had done it for me and I will always remain very grateful to them for giving me the chance and fulfilling my dreams.
Monday, 1 February 2016
Olive Oil
Since I began writing for Quercus I am making more money than before. At one point it was getting to be difficult. I needed a loan. If you do need a loan go to Tesco. I got my loan free. Anyway, it wasn't much and I paid it off and kept the purse strings tightly clasped. I still managed the things I wanted most but when you are a bit tight money wise there are so many things that you really would like if only you could afford it.
So for the past two or three years I've started making a bit more and thinking I really can afford certain things. I love olive oil and good olive oil is mind blowing, it tastes and smells amazing and different areas produce different kinds. M&S do beautiful olive oil. It comes in different shaped bottles. It comes in different colours. It comes from Greece and it comes from France and it comes from Spain and it's all very exciting for those of us who are addicted.
I blithely went into M&S and bought the most exquisite bottle I could find. When I got to the check out the lady looked at it and then she looked at me and then she leaned forward and she said,
'Eh, love, are you sure you want it? It's awfully dear.'
So, I look like I can't afford expensive olive oil. I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or not.
I did notice, the last time I went to a wine merchant, that I was with my daughter and she drives one of these git flashy cars, all new and white and Mercedes and it was big and brash and wow! It filled most of the window. Now my little car, Pumphrey the Panda, was very cheap and is sort of cream mucky coloured since his colour has faded and he's little and narrow and ordinary and I swear to you that I never had the same attention when I came in Pumphrey as we did when we turned up in this giant white splodge.
So I look like I can't afford Moet. This unfortunately is true but I will keep you up to date.
I have been thinking lately that I would like a new bathroom. I have been wanting a new bathroom for a very long time and imagining what it would be like when I had a separate shower room and how much easier when there were two bathrooms, so to speak.
Now I am thinking that if I'm careful this year I can afford to have new bathrooms. For a few hours I was all ready to go and look at these, I got quite excited. And then I remembered what it was like having men in the house day after day pulling furniture out and the idea of having my beautiful cast ir on bath lugged down the stairs. I thought of the mess, the dust, the way that I wouldn't be able to write and how I would have to buy new carpets and possibly after that I would need to have the inside of the house painted and then I would need new towels and I certainly need new bedlinen. It was like a nightmare.
So, I am not having a new bathroom, or new bathrooms or anything beyond the expense of good soap and well laundered towels. I have almost everything a woman could want money wise. They say that if you think money can't buy happiness you are going to the wrong shops and I'm sure it's true. I wouldn't change my Apple computers, my recently restored diamond ring or my library of Trollope novels which enrich my days.
If I could have things otherwise I would like to be able to feed the birds in the garden without the crows running off with everything. I would have the mice there sufficient to eat over the winter so that they don't chomp on my crocuses. But I feel lucky, I have the spring and my caravan to look forward to and my afternoons on my balcony there with Anthony Trollope to keep me company.
If I make a lot of money I think I will probably give it to Water Aid, my favourite charity. I'd like to think I was doing some good. And Guide Dogs for the Blind which is my local favourite charity. In the meanwhile I did go to the Co op earlier and buy some very nice wine which was in clearance and I shall enjoy that and my chicken dinner and my writing and my back garden, where the sun sets and the moon puts in an appearance. Lucky me.
So for the past two or three years I've started making a bit more and thinking I really can afford certain things. I love olive oil and good olive oil is mind blowing, it tastes and smells amazing and different areas produce different kinds. M&S do beautiful olive oil. It comes in different shaped bottles. It comes in different colours. It comes from Greece and it comes from France and it comes from Spain and it's all very exciting for those of us who are addicted.
I blithely went into M&S and bought the most exquisite bottle I could find. When I got to the check out the lady looked at it and then she looked at me and then she leaned forward and she said,
'Eh, love, are you sure you want it? It's awfully dear.'
So, I look like I can't afford expensive olive oil. I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or not.
I did notice, the last time I went to a wine merchant, that I was with my daughter and she drives one of these git flashy cars, all new and white and Mercedes and it was big and brash and wow! It filled most of the window. Now my little car, Pumphrey the Panda, was very cheap and is sort of cream mucky coloured since his colour has faded and he's little and narrow and ordinary and I swear to you that I never had the same attention when I came in Pumphrey as we did when we turned up in this giant white splodge.
So I look like I can't afford Moet. This unfortunately is true but I will keep you up to date.
I have been thinking lately that I would like a new bathroom. I have been wanting a new bathroom for a very long time and imagining what it would be like when I had a separate shower room and how much easier when there were two bathrooms, so to speak.
Now I am thinking that if I'm careful this year I can afford to have new bathrooms. For a few hours I was all ready to go and look at these, I got quite excited. And then I remembered what it was like having men in the house day after day pulling furniture out and the idea of having my beautiful cast ir on bath lugged down the stairs. I thought of the mess, the dust, the way that I wouldn't be able to write and how I would have to buy new carpets and possibly after that I would need to have the inside of the house painted and then I would need new towels and I certainly need new bedlinen. It was like a nightmare.
So, I am not having a new bathroom, or new bathrooms or anything beyond the expense of good soap and well laundered towels. I have almost everything a woman could want money wise. They say that if you think money can't buy happiness you are going to the wrong shops and I'm sure it's true. I wouldn't change my Apple computers, my recently restored diamond ring or my library of Trollope novels which enrich my days.
If I could have things otherwise I would like to be able to feed the birds in the garden without the crows running off with everything. I would have the mice there sufficient to eat over the winter so that they don't chomp on my crocuses. But I feel lucky, I have the spring and my caravan to look forward to and my afternoons on my balcony there with Anthony Trollope to keep me company.
If I make a lot of money I think I will probably give it to Water Aid, my favourite charity. I'd like to think I was doing some good. And Guide Dogs for the Blind which is my local favourite charity. In the meanwhile I did go to the Co op earlier and buy some very nice wine which was in clearance and I shall enjoy that and my chicken dinner and my writing and my back garden, where the sun sets and the moon puts in an appearance. Lucky me.
Thursday, 14 January 2016
Performance
Talking to my daughter first thing this morning we started discussing how people often don't understand how much work goes into a project, especially when you have to do do it all by yourself. As somebody who feels she has been holding up the world single handedly forever I agreed that nobody understands the sweat, hours, solitude, boredom, sheer bloody hell of doing what my writing friend, Leah Fleming calls, 'turning up at the page. The terror of the computer screen, those nights when you wait for an idea to end up with sleeplessness. That morning when you know that you may have 80,000 words but as James Joyce said 'I have no idea which order they should be in.' He was talking about a single sentence but you get the drift.
My daughter was organising a huge party at work and in typical family fashion she wanted it to be perfect and had knocked her socks off for it. This on top of her usual work.
And people won't appreciate or even see the effort and then I realised that that is the point. You don't want to watch Andy Murray practising. What you want is the performance, not even to think how easy it was for the person involved, you want to see the shine and the polish, when it is so well done that it's a treat to watch, to listen to, to read, to view, that every polished performance is those years and years of sheer unadulterated work brought to a fine hone has nothing to do with you.
I always admired the effortless performance of Jimmy Connors, or watching McEnroe serve, seeing Stephen Hendry or Ronnie O'Sullivan making snooker look like a child's game.
It's for all of us to strive, to want to be the best, to dazzle with our brilliance or as my agent says, 'to write the book that only you can write.'
It's the only way to perfect performance though we are all very slightly short of perfection and even though we know that Shakespeare is the most brilliant writer who ever lived he didn't always get it right. i.e. at the end of The Winter's Tale everything appears to be all jolly hockey sticks but you can't think beyond the fact that the king had his young son murdered. I know Will used other people's plots but I think if he had looked at it again, beautiful though the language is and choice the characters, the plot doesn't quite work and even if the original story ended that way he could have changed it suit himself.
Is there another way to look at this? It's nice to know that none of us is perfect, that even Will's work could be improved or is it that, like the monks who wrote the Lindisfarne Gospels and left a deliberate mistake on each page because only God is perfect, William Shakespeare deliberately did that sometimes so that forgetting the work and sweat we would be able to say afterwards, perhaps smugly, that even Shakespeare didn't get it right all the time, that even Ronnie O'Sullican has bad days and the joy of it is when you see him on a good day. That is when you marvel and rightly so at the performance.
My daughter was organising a huge party at work and in typical family fashion she wanted it to be perfect and had knocked her socks off for it. This on top of her usual work.
And people won't appreciate or even see the effort and then I realised that that is the point. You don't want to watch Andy Murray practising. What you want is the performance, not even to think how easy it was for the person involved, you want to see the shine and the polish, when it is so well done that it's a treat to watch, to listen to, to read, to view, that every polished performance is those years and years of sheer unadulterated work brought to a fine hone has nothing to do with you.
I always admired the effortless performance of Jimmy Connors, or watching McEnroe serve, seeing Stephen Hendry or Ronnie O'Sullivan making snooker look like a child's game.
It's for all of us to strive, to want to be the best, to dazzle with our brilliance or as my agent says, 'to write the book that only you can write.'
It's the only way to perfect performance though we are all very slightly short of perfection and even though we know that Shakespeare is the most brilliant writer who ever lived he didn't always get it right. i.e. at the end of The Winter's Tale everything appears to be all jolly hockey sticks but you can't think beyond the fact that the king had his young son murdered. I know Will used other people's plots but I think if he had looked at it again, beautiful though the language is and choice the characters, the plot doesn't quite work and even if the original story ended that way he could have changed it suit himself.
Is there another way to look at this? It's nice to know that none of us is perfect, that even Will's work could be improved or is it that, like the monks who wrote the Lindisfarne Gospels and left a deliberate mistake on each page because only God is perfect, William Shakespeare deliberately did that sometimes so that forgetting the work and sweat we would be able to say afterwards, perhaps smugly, that even Shakespeare didn't get it right all the time, that even Ronnie O'Sullican has bad days and the joy of it is when you see him on a good day. That is when you marvel and rightly so at the performance.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)