Tea-time conversation

Brian (son-in-law): “Is your book finished, Sue?”
Me: “Yes.”
Brian: “Are you happy?”
Me: “No, I’m bereft.”
Tate (8): “What does bereft mean?”
Me: “It means, sad, lost.”
Gil (6), who is currently writing a Jaims (sic) Bond adventure: “Well, why don’t you start writing another book?”
Me: “Because I don’t have an idea for a book right now.”
Tate: “Why don’t you write a children’s book?”
Me: “I’d love to, but I don’t think I could. You have to be very clever to write a good children’s book.”

Meanwhile…and then

I woke up feeling dreary, lay here for ages feeling worse, sat up and and wrote a long email to a dear friend, a litany of problems and complaints, ending with, “Meanwhile it is February.”

Then I had a second mug of Yorkshire tea, two home-made oatcakes with home-made lemon curd, the sun came up, and Dave and I had a chat about the tricky art of translating poetry.

Things felt better.

 

This and that and not very much

I don’t stop thinking about you when I’m not here. If I’m not posting, it’s because I’m too busy, or too busy with things I can’t tell you about, or because I have nothing to say.

I am at present busy with a list of various book-ish/ publisher/writer-y jobs that are confidential, and also tedious, so there’s no blog fodder there.

The thing I can tell you is that Jane and I are wrestling with the blurb for PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS and we’ve been tossing various versions back and forth for several days. Finally, today, I have created a new Word file called Blurb Factory so we have a dedicated working document rather than disparate unmanageable emails littering our inboxes. Maybe this will bring some clarity. Usually clarity is not a problem, but we’ve both been undisciplined lately (for different reasons.)

The other thing to say is that I have been tweeting a lot, and also thinking it’s time to write a post called “Twitter for the Baffled Beginner.” But it takes time to get my thoughts in order on the matter, and I AM SO BUSY!

I should also be writing a submission for our Quaker newsletter on the topic “Financial decisions are the most morally crucial decisions that human beings make.” This feels like an A level philosophy question and horrendously difficult, and every time I sit down and think about it, I just get a stream of ill-disciplined thoughts on the topic. Ill-discipline seems to be the leitmotif running through my intellectual life at the moment. Is this because of the fragmentation of my brain due to too much tweeting and playing drawn out games of Scrabble on the internet which involves checking once an hour to see if the Aging Hippie or my other friend have had their turns? Probably.

A propos of nothing, here are links to my two favourite blogs  - The Scent of Water, and Viva Hodie.

Saturday sunshine

Random

I was sitting on the sofa in front of the fire with a glass of wine at teatime the other day, when Dave told me a quote he’d found (and liked) on the internet -

“Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.’” Radmacher

I liked the quote, too. And suddenly from nowhere I was missing my mother, and in tears.

Where do these waves of sadness come from? Was it because I’d been looking at a photo of the latest addition to the family tree – my newborn great niece – whom my mother will never see? Or was it because when I consider the word encouragement, I think immediately of my mother?

Maybe it was neither. Grief follows no pattern: It can ambush you years after you thought you’d left it behind.

Low-life?

When Dave and I were playing Scrabble yesterday, the word WAZOO popped into my head. It comes from Dr Seuss – some characters called the brothers Wazoo.

And it occurred to me that I would far rather have written Dr Seuss’s oeuvre than any number of Booker winners. (See yesterday’s post where I decided I was a cultural low-life.) Dr Seuss’s children’s books are funny, wise, moral, creative and life-affirming. My favourite is DID I EVER TELL YOU HOW LUCKY YOU ARE? Go on, treat yourself: it’s a Seuss classic. It costs £4.79 on Amazon, and if you’re boycotting Amazon, you can get anywhere else for a fiver.

We quote him all the time at Hepworth Towers.

He did win the Pulitzer prize, but then I’ve always found Pulitzer prize-winners more accessible and enjoyable than Booker winners e.g. The Stone Diaries, Breathing Lessons, A Thousand Acres, Olive Kitteridge, March, all of which I came across with no idea that they had won a prize.….maybe I have an American sensibility when it comes to fiction.

What’s happening?

What I am reading and enjoying  –
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I put this off for ages, as I have a lowbrow antipathy to Booker winners. I tried to read an earlier Booker winner - The Finkler Question - as it was supposed to be funny, and I was delighted that even the Booker judges recognised that comedy can be serious. Sadly, I did not find it funny, just dull. I read another Booker winner - The Sense of an Ending and didn’t know what the fuss was about. I’m a cultural low life – no doubt about it.
What I am listening to –
Paul Simon’s Graceland, over and over in the car, especially the Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes track. I laugh out loud when those big fat drums come in after the quiet start.
What I am writing –
plans for future work. You’ll be hearing more after Easter. I know that’s on the way because I shared a hot cross bun on Monday with Gil my younger grandson.


What I am playing –
Scrabble with Dave, and Words with Friends with the Aging Hippie. But I have gone off WWF in a big way. I hate the fact that it’s based on a US dictionary (e.g. it won’t admit that vire is a word!) and I’ve realised that two thirds of the fun of Scrabble is the chat and the socialising. The other third is the delight in the words. So playing WWF doesn’t fit the bill. I need  a real time game, preferably with both parties in the same room as each other and an up-to-date English dictionary.
What I am practising on my sax –
Here comes the Sun, after seeing that joyous flashmob perform it in the Madrid Unemployment Office.  Every time I watch it, it makes me smile.
What I am making –
the patchwork quilt I started last year (not the one below). I’ve finished the Fair Isle hoodie which I designed myself. I had to have two attempts at the hood, but if unpicking things and redoing them was a problem I’d never have completed a novel.

Here is a bit of knitting geek info – did you know that traditional Fair Isle only has two colours on any one row? Mine is traditional in that sense, but the heart pattern is one I made up.

Finding your writer’s voice

When I started writing creatively about 15 years ago, I read a lot of stuff about “the importance of finding your voice.” I worried about this. What was my writer’s voice? Would I know when I had found it? I didn’t really understand what these people meant. I did what you’re supposed to do and wrote as much as I could – screeds of stuff in my journal, poetry, short pieces, a novel (all right, an attempt at a novel – I shudder to think about it now) – and I thought “Have I found my voice yet? When will I know?”

When I first started trying to get pieces in The Times, I showed them to Dave for his comments, and he would say things like “You need to make it more vivid. How about saying this, and putting it like this, and…”

I listened to him because he’s so clever, and has a huge vocabulary and is an entertaining raconteur.But then when I read the pieces again after his insertions and alterations, I felt uncomfortable. It was then that I had my first inklings about what is meant by a writer’s voice. His suggestions and his writing were sharp and clever and expressive, but they weren’t how I express myself. I am understated, dry(when I’m good)  and minimalist. He is the opposite. He has a wonderful voice, but it’s not my voice. Here, below, is my voice of some years ago – in this piece I had in The Times. I wonder how I would write this now – if my voice would be different. Hmmm….

The continuing story of the empty nest: optimum distance

An empty nest is a place that is heartening to look forward to, in the way that the suffering, in olden times, looked forward to heaven. And now I have achieved nirvana I relish it.

But I still love to spend time with my children. Nor is my caring role redundant.

That ridiculous term "life long parenting" - to describe the phenomenon of adult children returning to live with their parents - must have been coined by a non-parent. Haven't children always been for life, and not just for Christmas? Whatever their offspring's pain - whether it be a trapped finger or a mangled heart - a mother always wishes she could bear it for them. Soppy? It's true.

The very week the 18 year old moved out and left us in peace, the 29 year old rang to inform us he had just spent the night hooked up to monitors after an emergency admission to hospital. The medics insisted his condition only required rest and an early check up, and sent him home, but I was unconvinced, and hopped on a train to go and make my own early check up. Mothers do that.

But even if there is an unbreakable bond, once children grow up there is an optimum distance at which parents and offspring should live: near enough to allow travel of either party for an emergency dash, or for a weekend stay, but far enough away to make it unfeasible for anyone to drop in unexpectedly.

Parents, just like children, have their own lives to lead, and their own need of privacy. If a couple of old fogeys are agile enough to want to make love on the kitchen table, they won't welcome someone with a front door key waltzing in unannounced.

The other advantage of having children easily accessible but at a distance is that a weekend visit provides a chance to get away from middle aged cosiness. For several years my eldest two children have lived in London, thus providing me with comfortable bolt-holes from which they could take me out to sample the delights of young urban chic entertainment.

How else would I - a country bumpkin who has led a sheltered life - have the chance to sample tequila slammers in an ex-engineering-workshop bar in Hoxton, with décor so uncompromisingly industrial I expected the ladies loos to consist of a row of galvanised buckets? My last exciting foray into their lives led to cocktails in a private bar with a secret Soho location, which, when I entered the blacked out frontage, made me feel as if I was time travelling back to the prohibition.

But now one of these children has moved to live within half an hour of here (Derbyshire) closing one of my bolt-holes; and the second child is threatening not just to leave London, but to flee the country. Last week he told us of his plans to stop teleworking for his American employer and to move out to Denver to work on site.

I wanted to scream "Don't do it - I'll miss you too much!" but I didn't. I was well behaved and breezy. I couldn't quite squeeze out "What a great idea," as the old man did (with no apparent effort, incidentally), but I did manage some intelligent questions about living in lofts.

Vacating the nest is one thing: leaving the continent is another. What is the point of having children if you can't spend time with them and enjoy their company? And how can you do this if they live a ten hour flight away?

What is troubling me now is the thought that because I voiced no protest he might think I don't care about his going, and that I really shall not miss him. It's the same kind of bind you get into when young adult offspring hint, for the first time, that they might not come back for Christmas. You wish they would come home but genuinely don't want to apply any pressure; but then you worry that if you don't sound disappointed they might think you don't want to see them. And then there is the Christmas when you long for a quiet time a deux with your spouse, but don't want to offend the offspring by suggesting they stay away.

It's a tricky skill to master, this next stage of parenting.

Also, the caring role has started to hover between the generations before it finally settles on the younger one. It was my adult children who were looking after me on our nights out in London. But on one occasion when waiting for the midnight tube, I wondered how safe we were, and if my children ever got nervous, and I heard myself ask “If I weren’t here, would you be scared?”

But we are getting there. On a recent protest march with my children my elder son left early, with the words (to me) "Take care. Have fun." Then, pointing to the other two, he said "Make sure you stay with them."

A woman walking alongside me overheard and laughed.

"That," she said, "must be your son."

© Sue Hepworth 2013/Times Newspapers

reproduced here with kind permission of Times Newspapers.

I’m back!

Get out the champagne!

It’s been a bad week, but this is a new week and things have just got better.

On Wednesday night my Twitter account was hacked, with the result that I was tweeting links to a fat-busting product. How embarrassing.

Then I discovered that my blog had disappeared. No-one could see it online, not even me. My blog is on Blogger, run by Google, and after four exasperating days, Isaac and I found out that Google had changed something their end and not thought to tell anyone. So there are probably thousands of other people out there wringing their hands and swearing profusely and wondering whether to switch to a blog that you pay for, but which has a department of real people whom you can contact and ask for help when there are problems. I contacted an online user group where you post your problem. Someone called Nitecruzr gave me some helpful advice, and Isaac fixed it. Who is the mysterious Nitecruzr? A kindly insomniac geek who spends his time cruising the user group, helping people out? Does he get a small stipend from Google? I will never know.

The photo of me with the cycling helmet isn’t relevant, except for the celebratory drink, the Californian connection (Google), and Isaac. It was taken on one of the best days of my life. I cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge with Isaac and we stopped in Sausalito for lunch. I’m a lucky person: I’ve had a lot of best days. This last Christmas Day was another one.

Onward and upward!

Cabin fever

I am trying to stay cheerful.

Dave is trying to stay cheerful.

We are trying to stay cheerful.

The truth is – we have cabin fever. He wants to go out on his bike and he can’t. I want to drive to my sax lesson and can’t. I have a day trip train ticket to London for tomorrow and no idea if I’ll be able to get to the station, let alone London, get home again, etc, etc, etc. 

The days are filled with long, long tramps through the snow so our bodies don’t atrophy at home.Yesterday even Hassop Station Cafe was closed on account of the snowy roads, so we walked in the other direction.

 

I am also playing my sax a lot. Since I heard that flashmob singing and playing Here Comes the Sun so beautifully, I’ve been trying to nail it myself.

My Fair Isle hoodie is almost finished. I had to design the hood myself, having no pattern, and the first attempt was a failure, but this second try is working well and I should be sewing the whole thing up this afternoon. Yay!

Meanwhile, Dave has been keeping himself occupied with baking batch after batch of oatcakes, blogging, and yesterday he went down the Monsal Trail to Bakewell in search of fresh fruit, on his scooter. Yep, his scooter. He is totally nuts. But also rather wonderful.

When the sun comes out, the landscape looks pretty.

But we still wish the snow would melt.

To cheer you up

Here’s something to cheer up all those snow-haters out there.

Our morning excursion (in pictures)

 

We were the first customers of the day. ..

In the mood

I have been scratting around for a book to read for a week. We have a house full of books, which includes a shelf full of novels I have garnered from secondhand shops and sales for “reading later,” and yet whatever I’ve picked up and opened, and read a few lines of, I’ve thought: “Nah…”

Then I remembered reading a book by Elinor Lipman that I loved – The Way Men Act – and I asked the local bookshop (trying to live without Amazon) if they could get me Lipman's The Pursuit of Alice Thrift. Normally they can get things the next day, but Elinor Lipman is obviously not popular in the UK and the warehouse didn’t stock the book, so I have to wait two weeks. So then I went to see a friend who also has a houseful of books (50% non-fiction – not what I was after) and roamed her extensive shelving but only came up with a book I read 6 years ago – Graham Swift’s Light of Day. It could certainly bear re-reading, so I borrowed it.

Then yesterday an old friend came for the day and brought us two books as presents. She always comes laden with books and we don’t seem able to persuade her not to. (Thank you again, D!)
I picked up one after she left and read the first paragraph and was hooked. Lovely evocative writing, and I was drawn immediately into the world and the head of the main protagonist. It’s called The Snow Child and is by Eowen Ivey. It’s exactly what I want to read right now.

My reaction to that first paragraph made me think about PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS again. Jane and I have finished the book except that we keep returning to the first part of the first chapter and tweaking and re-tweaking. Last week we thought we had sorted it out definitively, but then yesterday I looked at it again (after a few days off) and saw that it was wrong. It WOULD NOT DO. Oddly, I could also see immediately what the solution was.  I emailed Jane and she agreed. Everything was quickly sorted bar the very first, very short line. We discussed this at length. In the end we went with her gut feeling, not mine. My reasoning on this is that no-one is going to be put off by the first (short) line unless it has swear words in it. (And it doesn’t.) Now I look forward to hearing what you all think about that first chapter, when you eventually get to read it.

Deep and crisp and annoying

My big sister sends me excited emails during the winter -

“Have you got any snow yet?”

“Has it got there yet?”

She lives 50 miles east of here, in flat, flat Lincolnshire, where snow is a rarity. I live in the hills of Derbyshire, where snow is frequent and deep and annoying. I am so over snow. Yes, it is pretty, yes, it lights up the landscape when it is dingy and dirty and the sky is grey, but boy does it get in the way. When the roads are dangerously icy, I am stranded out here in the sticks, missing my sax lessons, missing the cinema, missing everything.

I loved playing in it when the children were young – sledging, snowballing, building snowmen and igloos. If they were here now, I’d love it again.

At least I’m not fretting about fuel bills as so many people are, though our woodpile is diminishing fast. Jane has kindly offered us the felled tree in her garden, and that’s great. We’ll fetch it as soon as the ice has melted on the 1 in 4 lane to her house.

The non-exploding laptop

You have no idea how serene I feel, writing on a laptop that isn’t threatening to explode. I’ve spent the last three weeks working with the background noise of a hyperactive laptop fan, which got even louder when you ventured out of Word into the apparently scary environment of emailing and surfing. I was frenetic with worry all the time I was writing, that this time the thing was going to crash for the last time. My new machine is so quiet I have to keep checking it’s still breathing (like I did with my firstborn when she was new.)

So, yes. I have a new laptop. And thanks to every one of you who gave me advice and suggestions (mostly to get an Apple) but I plumped for a PC. Not because I don’t think Apples look lovely, and behave reasonably, ingeniously and in a friendly way (and I am sure they are just as wonderful as you say they are) but because I couldn’t justify spending an extra £1000, which is the difference in price between this HP and the Apple with the same size screen. That £1000 will pay for another trip to see Lux and Cece in San Francisco. Which would you choose? A fancy tool, or these little sweeties?

So thanks to Adrian of 121 IT services, who found me a brand new HP Pavilion Series 6 (old model with Windows 7, because Windows 8 is reputedly APPALLING). And to Dereje (also of 121) who transferred everything over so smoothly. They took most of the stress out of a potentially traumatic time.

This last week, while waiting for the HP to arrive, I played around on the iPad that lives in the house, and discovered it is ace for tweeting, playing Scrabble with the Aging Hippie in Redwood City, and catching up on the blogs I follow. I am still – even after years of surfing - amazed and delighted that I can sit in bed here in Derbyshire (in the UK) at 10 p.m. and read and comment on a blog in New Zealand (written by someone I have never met) and get a reply from her within five minutes, and then type goodnight to the Aging Hippie, 5,000 miles away in the other direction. If you could remember having a party line like we used to have, I bet you’d feel the same.

Twitter and Me – Part 3

Dear readers, I am taking a short break from the blog until I get a new computer. This one keeps crashing. I need to put the book  -  PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS - to bed, and I need to do it before this computer croaks for the last time.

I will be back as soon as I can. In the meantime you could follow me on Twitter. My tag is @suehepworth

I have tried to get along with Twitter for a couple of years – see this post, and this post, and although I’ve learned to use it to follow my interests (by following useful links on there) I have not found it a friendly environment because all my friends disdain it. The ones who only check their email twice a week (OMG) don’t understand it, and even those who do have some inkling about Twitter want no truck with it.

I don’t want to follow people tweeting rubbish or telling me they have just eaten a Thornton’s chocolate, which means that I generally follow serious people and websites (e.g. Palestine Today and Mondoweiss) though I am getting a lot of laughs from following @TheTweetofGod. I also get to see new photos of my Californian granddaughters on there when Isaac tweets them.

Because I have no friends on Twitter, and all but three of my followers are serious geezers (or live in a different time zone so when I am tweeting, they are asleep) it means that when I ask for help on there – such as “How do you do a hashtag on an iPad?” no-one answers me. If you were there, YOU could answer me!

I wish you would join me. We could chat. I feel lonely in the Twitterverse. Go on. Give it a whirl. Otherwise, I’ll see you when I have a new computer, which I hope won’t be too long.

And here’s a photo of Monsaldale in the Derbyshire Peak District to keep you going until the summer.

 

Targets for 2013

I gave up telling people my new year resolutions years ago. I do them in secret and then peeps can’t say - “But you resolved never to nag me again about wiping my feet on the front door mat!” (Although if said peeps would have some resolutions of their own, I wouldn’t have to break mine…)

But… I do have six new targets for 2013:

• get out on my bike three times a week (to stay fit, and to deal with the problem identified by Nora Ephron)
• be outside under the sky for an hour every day, no matter what the weather (because I always feel better in the fresh air, and in the winter, it should keep seasonal affective disorder at bay)
• work harder to get to grips with music theory so when Dave says he is playing in G on his guitar, I know what key I should be in on my sax to jam with him
• sort out  my filing cabinets so I don’t need to have a pile of folders 10 inches high at the left hand back corner of my desk (which I imagine must be very bad Feng Shui)
• grow up, and finally get a mobile phone contract in order to save money
• tweet five times a day. More on this tomorrow.

 

Happy New Year!

This is what we do at New Year. We don’t stay up late, we get up early and go to Bakewell and feed the ducks and geese before anyone else is awake. This is our new year ritual. It’s quiet and real and hopeful.

I wish you a 2013 that contains love and hope, both quiet, everyday things that make this harsh world bearable, often beautiful, and certainly easier to navigate and survive.

(Gosh, I am in a serious mood, today.)

Pollyanna

I’ve got my sinus problem back, and I’m sick to death of the dark grey wet Derbyshire winter, so I’m trying to be cheerful, and to think of all the things I’m thankful for. So here are the first blessings that come to mind…

my warm bed

my morning shower

the log burning stove

Dave’s oatcakes

Dave

the lemon curd I made yesterday

my grandchildren

my children

the fact that the two married ones have lovely partners

my techie guy Adrian for diagnosing a knackered fan on my laptop and fixing a new one, which means, I hope, that I don’t have to buy a replacement yet. (The decisions required are as bad as the money.)

the fact we don’t live on a flood plain

the chest of drawers my mother left me. It’s right beside me now as I write, and is a huge comfort, reminding me as it does of her.

It even has a strip from an old pair of tights still tied round one of the handles. She used to cut up old tights and use them for tying up parcels and raspberry canes and anything else you can think of. If you cut them into loops, they are great for bundling up small packets. My mother was so well known in the family for her tights fetish, that at her funeral someone said we should have let her coffin down into the grave with ropes woven from old tights. Ma would have loved the joke.

my parents and sibs

You can see why ‘Pollyanna’ could be a term of derision – it’s so easy to get mushy when you count up your blessings.

What Oscar Wilde did not say

When I was last in San Francisco I bought a birthday card for someone because I loved the caption on it:

“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

On the back of the card, the quote was ascribed to Oscar Wilde. Piffle!  As soon as i got home, I googled the quote to see if I could find out who really came up with it and all over the net people were saying that Oscar Wilde had said it. HE DID NOT SAY IT. It is not his voice. Accusing Oscar Wilde of saying Be yourself. Everyone else is taken  is the equivalent of saying that Sue Hepworth wrote “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (a text from Hebrews, King James version).

But everywhere you look – on T shirts, on posters, on the net – clever, pithy epigrams are ascribed to Oscar Wilde, willy-nilly. I love Oscar Wilde. And of course he was clever and funny and witty. But he is not the only person in the history of the world who could turn a clever phrase.

You really can’t rely on the net to give you an accurate answer. Not only are there wrong ascriptions, people misquote poetry all the time. They don’t bother to go back to the original poem, they find what they think is the correct version on the net and then they copy and paste. One of my favourite Ezra Pound poems is

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

                      Not shaking the grass.

Ezra Pound

All over the net, people misquote it as:

And the days are not long enough

And the nights are not long enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

                      Not shaking the grass.

Ezra Pound

It matters if you change a word in someone else’s poem. Words and the precise choice of them are important. And I have posted on this before, because rather than go downstairs and find our copy of Pound in order to check the exact wording of the poem, I googled Sue Hepworth Ezra Pound and found a post entitled ‘Pet Peeve,’ where I was ranting along similar lines. So I copied and pasted.

Nora Ephron was right (as usual)

It’s mid-October, after your narrowboat holiday, and you’re gloating because you’ve lost half a stone through all the opening and closing of heavy lock gates and traipsing up and down the tow path, and your tight jeans finally fit you with moving room, and you are ecstatic.

And you sail through November feeling great. But as the days pass, and it rains and rains, you cycle less and less, and you also start thinking things like, “I am sick of Ryvita, wouldn’t just one real sandwich be nice?” And you’re still in that land where your jeans fit and your partner actually comments favourably on your size. You read something by Nora Ephron where she says - “At the age of 55 you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin,”and you want to ring her up and say “Hey, Nora! Not me!” but you can’t, because she recently died (sadly.)

And then December comes and you have just 4 mince pies in the whole of the month, and when you go to Sainsbury’s for the Christmas shop, you treat yourself to one of those clingy T shirts in a colour that suits you, and you like it so much you wear it with your jeans on Christmas Day with your silver necklace and silver earrings and you feel very glam.

And the family member who declines to be named arrives and sits in the kitchen to chat to you while you’re cooking, and he says, “Those jeans are very tight” and you think to yourself Yes, well, they were clean on today and they haven’t stretched yet, and you carry on shoving more and more food items into the cooker, unperturbed about said jeans, but bamboozled as to how you are going to find room in the cooker for every damn thing…

At lunchtime, the OFF Christmas Elf decides (uncharacteristically) to take some unposed photos of the assembled hordes enjoying their Christmas lunch, and he takes several from behind you.

Then in the evening, when the family have departed and you collapse on the sofa and look at said photos, you realise with horror that Nora was right, and you go back to her original quote and find her next paragraph - “This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts,” and you want to ring her up and say, “It’s not a roll, it’s a wodge!” and you know that the game is up, and it’s back on the treadmill of NO BREAD, NO CAKES, NO PUDDINGS, forever and ever, Amen.

And if you think I am going to show you one of the aforementioned photos, you’re nuts.

 

The OFF Christmas Elf

Look what he made for me – the nicest Christmas card ever -

Happy Christmas!

Dear faithful readers, if you have enjoyed reading my blog this year, I’d be honoured if you would make a donation to Save the Children. This is their home page, from which you can follow a link to donate to their worldwide work, and this is a link if you want to donate specifically to their Gaza appeal.

I hope that whatever you’re doing this coming week, there will be things to enjoy and be thankful for. I am thankful that this ON Christmas has so far been lovely, and Dave (the one who likes OFF Christmases) has behaved impeccably.

I hate OFF Christmases, but I try to behave with restraint, and sometimes some good comes out of them. Last year (when Christmas was OFF) I had a bad cold and sat in my study (where the tree and all the decorations were corralled) and read PLOTTING FOR BEGINNERS to cheer myself up. And it worked. So I emailed Jane and asked her if she was ready to write the sequel – PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS – and she said “Yes!” which meant I had a really fun year.

I have been revising the text for the last three weeks following our editorial meeting at the beginning of the month, and have just now emailed Jane the finished article so she can read it over Christmas (her idea!) So there is a nice kind of symmetry about the whole endeavour, book-ended as it is by OFF and ON Christmases.

And if you still have no idea what ON and OFF Christmases are, you need to get up to speed and read Plotting for Beginners, or even this.

The Winner, and the Answers

The winner of the Christmas Quiz is Barbara C. Well done, Barbara! She didn’t get all the answers right but she did get more points than anyone else.
Here are the answers:
1. What are the names of my four grandchildren?
Tate, Gil, Lux and Cece (Cecilia).

2. What is the identity of the Little Red Hen? And what do you know about him/her?
The Little Red Hen is my fun-loving daughter-in-law, Wendy Hepworth, who lives in San Francisco.

3. What is the name of the person responsible for the landscaping work on our garden, done in the last 18 months?
Dave Hepworth.
4. Who is AH? What does AH stand for, and what do you know about him/her?
AH is the Aging Hippie, whom I first met on a peace demo in San Francisco. She features as a similar fictional character in BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU. Her name is Karen and she lives in Redwood City. She goes to a book club on Sundays where they have to take food mentioned in the book under discussion.

5. What is my familial relationship to “the family member who declines to be named”?
This is a hard one as I have never told you, so you had to guess. I did once say “the fraternal family member who declines to be named” of one of my brothers, but this was to distinguish him from  the plain “family member who declines to be named” who is my younger son.
6. Where was my mother born?
Near Bedale, North Yorkshire.
7. List my hobbies. (Drinking Yorkshire tea does not count.)
In no particular order, and these are just things mentioned on my blog – patchwork, playing the sax, knitting, walking, cycling, reading, gardening, slacklining, playing Scrabble, messing around with my grandchildren, cinema, and watching comedy. The winner, Barbara, also said watching Neighbours, for which she got a point, though I’m not sure that it’s a significantly dignified occupation to be called a hobby…
8. Who is “Jane”?
Jane Linfoot, co-author of PLOTTING FOR BEGINNERS and PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS, and totally brilliant editor who never lets me get away with anything. (Sometimes I hate her for this.)
9. Which of my heroines really, really likes Jon Snow?
Frances Suskind, in BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU.
10. Which professor said the following of BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU ? 
“it…presents Asperger's as a normal, if idiosyncratic, part of everyday life that elicits frustration, comedy and tenderness all at the same time. Hepworth's achievement in making the condition both distinctive and unspectacular, and weaving this into a narrative of romantic and family life, displays a genuinely subtle understanding of how autism - this most contemporary of conditions – works.”
Professor Stuart Murray, Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film at Leeds University.

Phew!

That header’s better. That bright Christmas card header I’ve had on here for the last week was becoming a bit much, a bit loud, a bit OTT, even for an ON Christmas.