Back next week

Feeling rough. I'll be blogging again next week.

And also...

Isaac is usually behind the camera, probably because that's where he's most comfortable. It's hard to get him to say "Cheese" but Lux can usually manage it. This is her photograph:

And something I forgot to show you is one of the regular visitors to the garden:

On Sunday mornings Wendy runs a yoga class on the back patio. This is until her studio space becomes available in October.

I joined in both Sundays and enjoyed it so much I'm thinking of joining a class when I get home. I don't think I'll find an outside class with a view from the mat like this, however:

Nor will a deer come to join us as happened yesterday.

At the end of the class, Wendy says "Place your hands together, then bring your thumbs to your forehead in reminder of true thought, to your lips in reminder of true speech, and to your heart as a reminder of true intention. Namaste."

Namaste.

I fly home tonight.

Half an hour later....

Oh my God! I was just sweeping the grapes off the patio and a neighbor called over the fence "There's a bear back there!" So I rushed Cece inside and told Isaac and he went out and walked with the neighbour to look over the back fence. The bear was just the other side! It growled and shook the tree, and Isaac and the neighbor rushed inside.

Boulder County website says it's a black bear. Just so you know.

Namaste.

Life

OK. Enough of the maudlin navel wrinkle-gazing for now. Thank you so much for all your comments, though. It's helpful to know that other people really understand and share my dismay. 

I think it's time to share some fragments of my life out here.
This is me out for breakfast with Wendy, while Isaac was at work and the girls were at school. I love going out with Wendy and having those mother-in-law - daughter-in-law chats that you have when you love and respect each other. I am so, so lucky.
I fancied a "light" breakfast so I ordered the fruit bowl. This is what I got. It was delicious.

The children used chalk-paints to paint on the garage door and Lux dictated a message for Wendy to write for Daddy when he returned late at night from San Francisco. She was too busy organizing the shoes inside the front door to take part in the photoshoot, but Cece was available:

Lux showing off a newly learned trick:

Wendy clearing the dead plants from the garden:

Lux telling Cece something important (as big sisters do):

The girls after their ballet class, not being able to tear themselves away from looking at the big girls. Cece said "I don't want to be a kid. I want to be a lady and do that!" I felt exactly the same. Still do.

I've just finished reading Anne Tyler's newish A Spool of Blue Thread, and loved it. It may well be my favourite Anne Tyler. So Wendy lent me The Alchemist, and Lux gave me her elephant to cuddle. They take care of my every need. I like it here.

Still pondering

I'm feeling a bit exposed because of what I said on the blog yesterday, but I've decided that being honest is important. So I am still pondering here about why I feel old this week. Yes there's jet lag, and there's the fact that Boulder is one mile high so the air is thinner and it's important to pay attention to drinking lots of water. Less oxygen makes physical work more tiring.

When the kids were younger the childcare needs were relentless - not that I did very much, but I did help. This time around it's their energy which is relentless, which is wonderful but it's also exhausting. 

I haven't been on any bike rides or gone out on my own as I did when they lived in San Francisco. What I've been doing is being a Gran. I'm living the life of my Gran when she came to stay with us as children. The day begins when the kids wake up and patter downstairs to my room in the basement and we chat until it's time to get up. 

They go to nursery school some of the time. And when we're not all out and about, I'm around while they play. It was another wonderfully hot day here yesterday and I sat on the garden bench and knitted (how grandmotherly is that?) while they pottered, making "soup" from leaves, flowers, water and mud, played in their version of sand, swiping things from each other, being admonished and making friends again. 

Then Wendy set up the outdoor dining table on the patio with materials for art work, and they were busy with that. Lux made a family of rabbits from paper plates and lolly sticks, and Cece had a glitterfest. 

My job was to open packs of glitter and make sure the glue stick worked.

It's a different life from my life at home: a two week interlude to be with my family, undiluted by writing or pitching, or all the other stuff that takes my attention at home. But I do have intervals of time on my own to lie in the hammock and think about life and death and aging. And that's what I'm doing. 

Oh, and as a postscript to yesterday's post, Lux said last evening that a woman at her school was like me: she was old. So I asked her how she knew I was old, and she said "Because you have wrinkles."

So there's no getting away from those wrinkles, folks. I'm just going to have to suck it up.

Home truths

I come to the States twice a year to see Isaac, Wendy, Lux and Cece. Each time I come, Isaac has a little more grey hair, and the girls are taller and more grown-up. (Wendy doesn't seem to change.) And I was wondering what I looked like to them. So I asked Isaac if he thought I looked older every time he met me at the airport.

"It's not that I think you look older, you do look older."
(He's his father's boy.)

This is what I look like to me:

This is what I look like to Isaac:

When I was little and went to stay with my Gran, I never thought about what she looked like. She was my Gran. She was old, she was lame (that's what we said back then when someone had had polio and couldn't walk without sticks) and she was huge fun. I loved her, and I loved staying with her. She always looked the same to me, through the years, from when she was 65 to when she died at 92. Or maybe I just didn't think about what she looked like, just as Lux and Cece love me for who I am, not what I look like.

Isaac loves me, of course, even though he notices my wrinkles. Lux and Cece just love me.

The thing is - my wrinkles make me feel less confident, and I'm disappointed that they do. I'm going to the London Screenwriters' Festival at the end of October, where I'm hoping to get someone interested in producing my script. There will be crowds of young vibrant people there with screenwriting careers ahead of them, and then there'll be me. Ten years ago I'd be excited. How do I drum up some confidence and enthusiasm for the coming fray?

Away with the fairies

I have stepped so far back from struggling to write my pitch that whereas at home I was having nightmares about my mentor visiting me to help, and my not being able to find my pitch papers...last night, by contrast, I had a dream in which I couldn't even remember the name of my mentor. 

Life is good in Colorado.

Off!

I am flying away to Boulder today. Whooppee!

I’ll keep in touch, if I can tear myself away from this:

Anam cara

If Mary was still here, I’d be talking to her about the UK government’s inadequate response to the refugees’ crisis (punctuation intended) and what we could do about it. And how if I wasn’t going to be in Colorado, I might go on the London demo.

I’d be telling her that Dave has gone to Coventry for the day, and I have an undisturbed day to think, write, cycle, garden, paint my toenails and pack, and we’d laugh about the glories of an empty house. I’d tell her about this jumper I bought from mail order that’s a disappointment, and about how Tate got on in his first week at secondary school, and how Lux (5) said to Isaac “Daddy, I organised these hibernating caterpillars. The blue one is the queen” –

And I’d tell her all the things I can’t share with you.

I recently came across a Celtic concept anam cara, which I really liked.  John O’Donoghue explains it in his book on Celtic wisdom thus:

“In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.” In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the “friend of your soul.””

That’s what she was: a friend of my soul.

Nothing to say

The only thing I want to say today involves David Cameron, refugees, and the open arms of Germany. And as my regular readers know, I don’t do politics on the blog, so you’ll have to read between the lines.

And if you live in the UK, perhaps you’d like to email your MP, and sign this petition.

How you can help

I have a list of things to do before I fly away to Colorado, and on it, below the

buy Hobnobs for Wendy

and

buy Bovril for Ise

is an item which reads

BLOG POST – REFUGEES RESOURCES.

Today’s the day to cross it off the list.

I’ve already told you about a couple of charities helping refugees, here and here, but I was going to collect all the charities I’ve found that are supporting refugees and list them for you.

Last night I found that someone has done the job for me, namely, the Guardian. So, if you’re wondering what you can do to help the people living surviving in the Jungle in Calais, and the people arriving on the shores of Greece, and those kept out of Europe by razor wire fences, and those people languishing in refugee camps on the borders of Syria, read this.  There will be something on it that you can do. And I know you’ll want to, because I know you’re all out and out sweeties.

Calming down

I’m sorry I’ve been over the top just lately.  Sally Howe (from my Plotting novels) seems to have been writing some of my posts. I mean! Just look at Not writing but pitching
Remember when she went to see the doctor about various symptoms and he said it was psychosomatic, a result of strain, and she was reacting like that because she had an artistic sensibility? And she said…
I am going back to bed. I may be missing the best spring weather in a century, but at least I have an artistic sensibility. Yah boo, world!
I was over-excited about being on someone else’s blog. I’m better now. It’s wonderfully calming playing castle Lego and then snoozing in a deckchair in the sunshine for an hour and a half while my grandsons play lifeboats in a neighbour’s swimming pool, even if the older one is applying to join the RNLI and the younger one makes him have three work trials before he makes the grade. (They’ve just come home from the Scillies where they saw a lot of lifeboats.)


The other thing that’s helped has been the family member who declines to be named coming home from his hols in Croatia and telling me I need to forget about the pitch for a while: only with some distance will I ever get it right. It just happens that next week I’m going to Colorado to see Lux and Cece.




That should be sufficiently far away to get a new perspective.

Today’s post

Today I am honoured to be a guest blogger on the poet Anthony Wilson’s wonderful blog. I came across his blog in February when I googled “reading poems to the dying.” Then I discovered his Lifesaving Poems project and ordered the book. Since it was published in June it has been on my bedside table with my other indispensable books.

You can read my guest post here. The subject is Writing my way through bereavement.

Not writing but pitching

I’ve just been making lemon curd to take my mind off the bloody pitch that’s been screwing up my brain for the past week month forever. On Friday night I even had a nightmare in which my mentor (who’s a screenwriter’s screenwriter) called in unannounced and said “I have five minutes to spare. Let’s get your pitch sorted out.” And I couldn’t find the papers.
The other reason I haven’t blogged since Friday is because tomorrow I am a guest blogger on a poet’s blog. A real poet. The one who edited that anthology Lifesaving Poems that I’ve been going on at you about. We’d been having an interchange on Twitter and he asked me to write a guest post and I was bowled over and said “Yes.”
But it’s not the fact that I will be a guest blogger on a classy blog that’s been freaking me out, it’s what he said in today’s post, flagging mine up -
To mark the start of this new season I am posting a brand new guest blog post here tomorrow morning. It is by the wonderful Sue Hepworth, whose blog is essential reading.
Do stop by and read it.
How can I write a blog post on my OWN blog after that? People who don’t usually read my blog will visit. Poets will come. The kind of people who understand every one of the allusions in The Waste Land will come. The kind of people who take A Little Life to bed, in the same way that I would take a hot water bottle and Garrison Keillor. My regular readers know what an intellectual low-life I am. Visitors don’t.
I’m a humble blogger. Sometimes my posts stand re-reading. Sometimes they don’t. So if you’re new here, and what you’ve read so far is rubbish, you could try my post on Perfectionism and all its faults. That was well received.

At the limit

This week I’ve felt like one of those unfortunate teenagers who keep taking and failing GCSE Maths.

I never had trouble with school. I was one of those annoying girls who got prizes for English and Maths and other things besides. Now, for the first time in my life, I am at the limit of my capabilities. I keep writing a pitch for my screenplay, and my mentor keeps sending it back with another bunch of criticisms. Over and over.

Do you know that quote about writing? “It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.” That is how I felt yesterday. I kid you not. I was so frustrated, I cycled to the end of the Monsal Trail and beyond, when usually I only go half way along.

I have to write a half page pitch to accompany episode one, a story outline, brief character descriptions, and my CV, to send them off to a TV producer. It’s the pitch that is driving me bananas.

It starts with what they call the logline. That is a one sentence description of what the film/TV series is about that will grab the attention of a jaded professional.

 I CAN’T DO IT !

I can write a tweet, a blog, a broadsheet article, an academic paper, a novel, a screenplay, and a bereavement card, but trying to sum up BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU in one sentence, which shows why it is different from any other story about a marriage under threat – and that includes why it’s funny as well as sad – well. It’s beyond me.

Do any of you want to have a go?

In the meantime, the world turns and the season is changing. This morning I took the dying sweet peas from the vase on my desk to the compost heap and found the first conker.

Stalkers and sweet peas

Sometimes people tell me they like reading my blog, but it makes them feel as though they’re stalking me. And I usually say: “But I don’t put the whole of my life on there” and “I only share what I feel comfortable sharing” and “There is so much of my life and my family that I don’t write about.”

I don’t know whether or not they are reassured, but at last I understand what they mean, because now I am reading someone’s very personal memoir and I feel as though I am stalking him.

Do you remember I told you about that poetry anthology Lifesaving Poems, edited by Anthony Wilson and published by Bloodaxe? I’ve been reading Anthony Wilson’s blog, and now I’m reading his memoir of being diagnosed and treated for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It’s called Love for Now and I’m gripped.

But I also feel uncomfortable. It’s a very personal memoir that he wrote at the time it happened, and I feel as though I am reading stuff I shouldn’t be reading, because it describes the daily fabric of his life, and his family and friends, and what they did and what they said. I feel as though I am hiding outside his house and peeping in through an open window. But I can’t stop reading. The author published this memoir because he wanted to tell people the truth about what it is like being treated for cancer, and to share his thoughts on love, family and mortality, but I still feel vaguely uncomfortable.

So, you’re asking, where do the sweet peas come in?  Nowhere. They are not connected in any way. I just wanted to tell you that after last year’s complete failure in the sweet pea department, this year they’re wonderful.

Perfectionism and all its faults

I was reading an interview with the CEO of an up-and-coming American company in Forbes magazine this week (as you do when your son has just started to work for them) and it made me think.

The CEO said this:

“Even of the things we’ve done thus far, they’re only a tenth as good as they should be.”

and also

“What we talk about internally is continual improvement and perpetual dissatisfaction.”

And the two comments sounded exactly how I feel about my garden. They also made me feel uncomfortable, because I got an insight into how I must come across to Dave, who finds my perfectionism challenging, and sometimes unbearable.

Even this week we touched on the subject when he said how much he hates painting (as in decorating), and I said the pleasure in painting is in trying to do it perfectly, and he said: “I’m not interested in perfection.”

A long time ago I wrote a piece for the Times about perfection. I just read it again and decided it stands the test of time, so I’m posting it below.

But before that, here is an imperfect photo of two pieces of Dave’s stained glass, to show you how his scorn of perfectionism never dents the fabulousness of the things he makes:

The idea of perfection

Reading this year’s Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection has made me consider the thorniness of liking things just so. I loved the book, but in my Picador copy there were no quotation marks used to enclose the direct speech. And I hated that.

Popular culture abounds with characters with fine discrimination, or obsessive pickiness, depending on your point of view. Remember Meg Ryan as Sally in When Harry Met Sally ? “I’d like apple pie a la mode. But I’d like the pie heated and I don’t want the ice cream on top I want it on the side. And I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it. If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it’s real. If it’s out of a can, then nothing.” You could say she was picky.

But if there were a team event for pickiness in the Olympics, my family would get the Gold medal. At fifteen my brother was ironing his own shirts, because my mother didn’t do it well enough. Now if you wash up for him he will tell you to turn the teaspoons upside down on the draining board so that they drain efficiently. I am picky about everything. So picky that last time I had breakfast in bed, my husband - who can never remember precisely what I like, but who wanted me to enjoy the treat - brought me three different mugs for my tea, three spreads, and three different types of jam. My father, a Grand Master of pickiness, will spurn every kipper that isn’t from Craster. But if you send him one from that blessed haven you give him exquisite pleasure, and he will be sweet for days.

At least you can be sure of giving great pleasure to high maintenance types if you make the effort and get it right. Those people who say “I’m easy,” or “I don’t mind,” can be impossible to please. How can you possibly know how to delight those colourless children who come round to tea, and who “don’t mind” whether they have fish fingers or pizza or baked beans on toast ?

Pickiness becomes truly unbearable, though, when it extends to a delusion that other people want to know your opinion about everything on every occasion even when you haven’t been asked. This week I am dreading my father coming to stay, and casting his critical eye over my treasured garden, because I know he will make derogatory comments about how I have pruned the blackcurrants or let blackspot infest my roses. When someone picks at an expression of your creativity, that’s when it hurts the most.

So if someone actually asks your opinion about something which they care deeply, and in which you can see an imperfection, what do you tell them ? If they have just spent three months stitching a tapestry and they ask you if you think that it matters that they ran out of blue and had to use another dye lot and can you see the difference, and does it matter ? If you can, and it does, what do you say ?

When planting our new garden my husband asked exactly where I wanted him to place the silver birch tree, so I marked the spot in the ground with a stick. “We work to fine tolerances here,” he said. When I viewed the tree later from the kitchen, I thought it was nine inches too far to the right, but I bit my tongue and said nothing. I was rewarded for this uncharacteristic forbearance when in the evening he looked through the window and decided that the tree needed moving, about nine inches to the left. Such miracles are rare.

I know I’m difficult. But being the picker can be just as uncomfortable as being the pickee. It is not easy when someone you love has just sanded and varnished a wooden floor for you, and every time you sit down on the sofa you notice a white paint stain under the varnish.

I do find it helps to remind myself that in some cultures craftsmen deliberately include a mistake in their work, because only God can create things perfect. It also helps to read the motto my husband gave me “Perfection is our aim. We must learn to tolerate excellence.”

© Sue Hepworth/Times newspapers 2001

Grief attacks

I was talking to a spunky 80 Year old after Quaker meeting yesterday about grief. Her adult son died four years ago in very sad circumstances. She said that the grief doesn’t go away but sometimes it feels much worse. It swoops in and takes her over: she calls this a “grief attack.” It’s an interesting expression.

I think it’s what I’ve had lately. It’s been like depression – waking up with a black cloud hovering over my head, a cloud that follows me around all day. I can be distracted for a few happy hours, but then it returns. It seems to have gone for now, thank goodness.

The only other news is that I have a verruca. Who ever heard of a pensioner with a verruca? 

(which sounds very like one of Daise’s one line diary entries in Plotting for Grown-ups.)

How to buy my books

It’s an inconvenient truth that the wholesaler has stopped stocking my books because it’s several years after publication and the sales have dwindled to a steady trickle. (Of course it’ll be different when BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU is televised, but that is in the future, and the wholesaler needs room on the shelves now for all the new books published this autumn.)

The upshot of this is that new copies are not available on Amazon but you can order them from an independent bookshop. Ebooks are available on Amazon, but you may not want an ebook.

So, what to do if you don’t have a neighbourhood bookshop?

You can buy them from me, that’s what!

Contact me at infoATdelicatelynuancedDOTcom and tell me what you want and where you live and I will post them to you in return for a cheque. PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS and BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU each cost £7.99 and the postage within the UK is free. If you’d like me to sign them and/or write an inscription, I’d be delighted.

I am holding my breath.

 

Growing up

Grand Tour

You may or may not have noticed that I've been a bit down the last two weeks, and Dave, concerned, suggested I go on a six week tour of my four siblings to see if that would cheer me up. I only had a three day window, however, so I am staying with my sister Jen near Winchester till tomorrow. Dave, meanwhile, is trying and failing to find the decorators caulk that I have tidied away at home. Sorry, Dave.

I've been having a wonderful time as I always do. And I AM cheered up. Jen is the most wonderful hostess. I've also expanded my culinary education by eating a heritage tomato ( not done before) and seeing what uncooked prawns look like ( disgusting and grey.) We've been walking in the water meadows by the river, eating out, catching up on family gossip, drinking too much wine (well I did) and arguing about which of us has eyebrows that are most like Ma's. (As you do when you're with your sister.)

Day off

Blessing

The Monsal Trail has been a blessing lately. When the world feels as if it is falling apart, it’s good to get on my bike and go.

And I saw something new. I was sitting on the edge of the Trail looking out at the valley and then I looked up and saw unripe hazel nuts, something I’ve never seen before. They were beautiful.

I’ve had two rainy rides on the Trail this week, and both were pleasant. Yes I came home soaked, but it was warm rain, and light.

One time I stood under the tall trees and felt so comfortable out there in nature with no-one else close by and tried to remember a snatch from a Mary Oliver poem. It plagued me all day. I checked with Megan later what it was and she knew straight off…the last lines of a poem called Black Oaks:

…Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a

little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from

one boot to another -- why don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists

of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Hope-less

Today I’d like to share with you a quote I found exactly a year ago and put on the blog last August…

This is an excerpt from Andrew Boyd’s piece Hopelessness can change the world.

You are faced with a stark choice: do you dedicate yourself to an impossible cause? or do you look after your own, making do as best you can?

The choice is clear: You must dedicate yourself to an impossible cause. Why? Because we are all incurable. Because solidarity is a form of tenderness. Because the simple act of caring for the world is itself a victory. Take a stand – not because it will lead to anything, but because it is the right thing to do. We never know what can or can’t be done; only what must be done. Let us do it.

Heartening news

This is an addendum to yesterday’s post: good news about the many people – ordinary people, not politicians – supporting migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. It’s a story in The Guardian today – here.

What’s concerning me

I could write a chirrupping post about how many jars of blackcurrant jam we’ve made (50) and how we’ve had to stop because we’ve run out of jam jars. Or I could write a sad post about how I miss Mary. Both of them would be true.

But what’s eating away at me is the UK government’s callous attitude towards the refugees in Calais, who are desperate to get into the UK to settle and work. These are people fleeing from war, starvation and much, much worse.

I’ve just found a charity in Calais that does great work with them. It’s here. If you would like to donate, follow my link and then click on ‘Contact.’

And the United Nations High Council for Refugees also helps refugees. Here’s a link to their website.