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.

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.

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.