Living off the fat of the land

It's been my birthday week and I have spent most of it in Wensleydale with my brothers and sisters. This is four of us. 

I don't know what else to say. It's funny how a week away from the blog strikes me dumb. We had fab weather and fab walks and lots of chat and it was lovely.

This is where we stayed, in an old mill:

And here are some other snaps we took this week.

This is Walden Beck:

Walden Beck higher up, at West Burton falls:

Cogden Beck, site of many a family picnic (more fun when the kids are there):

Aysgarth Middle Falls:

And here's one I took in another October:

A pleb goes to the Opera

First, you need to know that I prefer cinema to theatre, but also that I have been to the opera before. I've seen a Mozart opera - I can't recall the name of it - and I've seen Carmen. Two opera-loving friends persuaded me to go. It was over 20 years ago and I haven't been since. That should tell you something.

Since that time, cinemas have started this cool thing of screening live performances from London theatres. I've resisted these since they started but in the summer I went with Chrissie to see a live screening of Hedda Gabler and it was terrific. 

Our local screenings are in a room above a pub in a village five miles away. There are perhaps fifty black plastic moulded chairs squashed into this room and a giant screen taking up the whole of one wall. It's intimate and friendly, and having been to see three things there now - one of which was the film Paterson - I can see it could become addictive.

I like the cinema because I can see the expressions on the actors' faces, and I am unaware of the audience and so I can become completely engrossed in the film. In the theatre I'm too far away from the action. I can't become involved in the same way: I am watching it and not in it. I am not engaged. I want to be taken over by a piece of fiction, whether dramatised or filmed or on the page. If I'm sitting anywhere but the front row of a theatre, it doesn't work for me. Who me? Demanding? Maybe. But that's how it is. 

This all means that if I go to the opera I've got that whole theatre-difficulty going on, and on top of that, the damn thing is in another language. When I went to see the live screening of La Boheme from the Royal Opera House the other night in the pub, I was on the second row in a small dark room in front of a huge screen and I could see the performers up close, expressions and all, and - fanfare! - there were subtitles translating the words. So barriers to my involvement were dealt with, and I enjoyed it. The story was about ordinary people, the music was fabulous, and the performances were terrific. The other key factor is that I recognised the music because it appears in one of my favourite films, Moonstruck.  

Yes, I'm a cultural low-life: I have never pretended otherwise.

First draft of new novel!

Except for the very ending, which I am going to write when I have read it through.

Letter from home

There are so many sorrows in the world - Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Las Vegas, refugees and asylum seekers all over the world - a thousand blog posts wouldn't cover them.

'Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.'

These are the first four lines of a poem called A Brief for the Defence by Jack Gilbert, which I return to every so often, in the same way that I return to this quote from Rohinton Mistry's novel Family Matters:

There’s only one way to defeat the sorrow and sadness of life – with laughter and rejoicing. Bring out the good dishes, put on your good clothes, no sense hoarding them. 

Sometimes for sanity's sake one has to retreat from the bad news and cherish the ordinary everyday things in life. In that spirit, here is a letter from home:

I am going away on Saturday with one brother and two sisters to stay in a cottage in Wensleydale which is five miles from where our other brother lives. We go up en masse, sans partners, and have a jolly good time. We remember what it is we love about each other and we rediscover our petty irritations. To outsiders we appear to be similar - and probably annoying - but within the family we are distinctive. We each have our role. I am the soppy unpractical one. 

But I do make nice cakes, and I emailed the other three to ask them what kind of cake they would like me to take. Please would they vote on the following: a chocolate cake, a coffee and walnut cake, or a moist, tangy lemon drizzle. Guess what? They all chose a different one.

I would love to show you an up-to-date photo of us all, but some of the sibs would object, so here is one from 1958:

The other news from home is that I am within sight of the end of the first draft of my novel. Here is a page from my favourite book about the writing life, The Unstrung Harp (TUH) by Edward Gorey, in which Mr Earbrass is writing a novel:

Last week, last Friday, to be precise, I thought my novel was utter crap. 

This week, however, this is not how I feel. I really like it. I am not unusual in these flip-flop feelings. Other writers feel the same. It's amazing that anything ever gets published.

The other news is that tonight I am going to see La Boheme with my writer friend, Chrissie (who also loves The Unstrung Harp). I don't like opera, but I keep coming across people in novels talking about La Boheme so I thought for the sake of my cultural education I should go. It will cost £10 and is 5 miles away and is streamed from The Royal Opera House, so what's not to like?

When is a book too long?

I just finished reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. It's a fictionalised account of Laura Bush's life. I bought it on the spur of the moment in Waterstone's, having never heard of it before. This is something I never do.  I also never buy novels that are more than 400 pages long, and this is 636. What was going on? It looked intriguing, it had great reviews on the back, and the writing inside was top notch.

Well... it was well written and I enjoyed it up to 350 pages and then I flagged. I kept going back to it and reading more, but there was so much flab to work though it became tedious, and there were bits that were easily skippable. However, the book is very well written - it just needed pruning - and it's an interesting study of how much someone will compromise because of love, which is a topic that I've been wrestling with the whole of my life, and which is one of the subjects tackled in But I Told You Last Year That I Loved You. The book also looks at personal responsibility in both  private and public spheres.

So now I need another novel to read - a short one. Any suggestions? No sci-fi, fantasy, magic realism or fluff, and nothing with graphic violence either. As Frasier says - "I'm listening..."

Leaves

Canal Bank Walk

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest of the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven 
From green and blue and arguments that cannot be proven.

Patrick Kavanagh

BAT and other characters

Lux and Cece are currently highly amused by a new book called I AM BAT. 

It's a simple book for 2-5 year olds but Lux is 7 now and she loves it. Who cares about age? I love it. They face-timed me on Sunday and Lux held up the book and turned the pages so that I could read it aloud, which in itself was lovely because I so miss reading to them both. 

Lux has been so taken with the character of BAT that she has copied the illustrations:

I suppose this counts as fan-fiction for picture books.

Creating memorable characters is vital when you're writing fiction. I had no trouble creating Fran in BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU, or in dreaming up Sally Howe in PLOTTING FOR BEGINNERS and PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS. Fran is serious and has a social conscience the size of the national debt, but she does have a sense of humour, which is one reason she has put up with Sol for so long. Sally Howe is lightweight and entertaining and can be a bit of a dope, but she is also driven.

My current female lead, Jane, is nearly there in terms of being a fully rounded character, but not quite. Last week, for example, Sally Howe burst into the text and had to be booted out. It was a part of the story where a lot had happened in a short space of time, and I wrote the third person narration like this:

She was desperate to get away. She had to get away! The last week had been one thing after another and who knew what would happen next? She felt as if she was living in a fast moving soap opera that had far too much plot. 

The next day when I was reading back what I had written I realised that the idea in the last sentence was something that Sally Howe would think and not something Jane would think. It's a writer's perspective, and Jane is not a writer. So maintaining the integrity and strength of a fictional character is not just about how a character acts and how they talk, it's also about how they frame things. Well, yes.

I seem to have strayed into writer's blog territory, and I apologise to all non-writers reading this. The thing is...writing is where my head is right now which is why I am not blogging so much.

OK. I have an empty house till 8 o clock tonight, and I am going to write. Target - 3,000 words.

The Sprout

This is Cecilia. On Twitter, she's @thesprouut

Not swanning around

You know that scene I was writing? Where the person turns up after twenty years and I had no idea what was going to happen? I've been engrossed in writing it. It's been huge fun. I was so deep into the world of the novel yesterday that when Dave wanted me to go outside to admire the hedge he'd been trimming and came and banged on my study window, he scared me stupid.

So I haven't been swanning around with no excuse not to blog. Yesterday, however, I did go out for the afternoon to Chatsworth House with Liz and we walked round the gardens to take in the views and the trees and the fountain, and also to look at the modern sculpture exhibition. They have one every September, but the last time I went was with the aging hippie 4 years ago. I don't understand a lot of modern sculpture, even when I read the interpretations. Some of the exhibits we saw yesterday looked like giant cast iron blobs, ugly, lumpish, incomprehensible. Here is one we saw that I didn't find objectionable even if I wouldn't want it in my garden:

Do you like it? Get it?

Here is what the label said:

JOEL SHAPIRO (b. 1941)
Untitled
bronze
104 by 193 by 130cm
Executed in 2013. This work is unique.

Shapiro's work is intended to communicate something of the artist's emotional state, retaining both an abstract and scaled-down aesthetic, and achieves a suggestive, often athropomorphised figuration. Although suggestive of a reclining figure, Untitled evades such precisions; the work is predicated by an inherent instability, a sense of flux, shifting under the eye into ever-changing patterns and arrangements and constantly eliding the gap between configuration and disfiguration.

Do you get it now? I don't. I understand the individual words (apart from 'disfiguration') but not when you put them all together. To me, it reads like something from Pseud's Corner in Private Eye.  I am not averse to modern art in general. I like a lot of abstract modern paintings, whether or not I understand what the artist is saying. But when I saw the sculptures yesterday it made me feel like an uncultured philistine.

My favourite strands of the lovely afternoon were talking to Liz, being outdoors on a fine September afternoon in a Capability Brown-landscaped park, and sitting for half an hour before we came home with my back to the stables in the strong sunshine, basking. I need to soak up as much sun as possible to see me through the winter. There has been more rain than sunshine this summer. This has been the typical state of our table tennis table, i.e. with a glazing of rain:

This is the first September for eight years I have not been to stay with the US Hepworths, and I am missing the sunshine, as well as missing them.

What happens next?

I'm loving writing this unplanned novel. 

When I started it I knew the theme and the setting and not much else. I'm seven eighths of the way through now and I've got to know the characters along the way, as well as how the plot works out. Until three weeks ago I didn't know how it was going to end, but one day it came to me in a flash. And when this conclusion arrived it was all so obvious, because hints had been dropped in the text much earlier on.

Right now, a character from twenty years before the novel started has turned up on somebody's doorstep and I have no idea what is going to happen. I'm just waiting to hear what these two characters say to each other and then I'll know where to take it next. It's so exciting! 

Where is the hope?

I know that some of you come here for light relief and others (don't laugh, it's true because they've told me so) for a burst of sanity.

But it's hard to think of a blog post when your mind is consumed with subjects such as these:

The 800 plus people who were killed and the 24 million who were affected by widespread floods across south Asia. This did not make the headlines with as much brouhaha as the devastating hurricane in the Caribbean and Florida and the flooding before that in Houston. But it was just as much a disaster for the people concerned.

The people threatened by Hurricane Irma who did not have the means to evacuate when they were told to do so.

The people who did evacuate and are now returning to find out how much they have lost.

The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people by Myanmar.

A new United Nations report which found that the living conditions for two million people in Gaza are deteriorating “further and faster” than the prediction made in 2012 that the enclave would become “unlivable” by 2020. "When you're down to two hours of power a day and you have 60 percent youth unemployment rates ... that unlivability threshold has been passed quite a long time ago," said Robert Piper the UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Development Activities. 

The constitutional changes voted in by the UK parliament this week.

The whole Brexit disaster and the hopeless, puerile and combative way the negotiations are being handled by Tory politicians.

Trump.

I won't go on. You know it all well enough. I am sure many of you feel the same. At my Quaker meeting recently many of us wrote (in our bimonthly newsletter) our responses  to the question: 
How do you maintain hope for the future? 

Quakers are a bunch of idealists whose guiding principles are peace, simplicity, equality, justice, integrity, and care for the environment. Maintaining hope in the current world political climate is a struggle.

I like this piece on Hopelessness  by Andrew Boyd that I have mentioned on the blog before.

Bakewell churches have this year held three hospitality days for refugees, asylum seekers, and survivors of human trafficking. We pay for transport out from Sheffield for our guests, we provide activities for adults and children, and we cook them a delicious lunch. These days have been wonderful days of warmth, friendship and hope. 

Everyone can do something to make the world a better place, and doing something positive, however small, is better than giving in to hopelessness.

I will leave you with this quote from Jan Eliasson, former deputy UN secretary general:

"Where is the hope?  You are the hope."

Warning: Novelist at Work

This little interchange happened years ago...

"So what is it like, living with a writer?" someone asked Dave.

"Very difficult," he said. "I looked in the cupboard last week for something to eat and found nothing but spaghetti hoops."

"But you like spaghetti hoops," I said. "That's why I bought them."

"I don't like spaghetti hoops. I've never liked spaghetti hoops." 

"Oh no…sorry," I said. "It's Gus who likes spaghetti hoops."

Gus is a character in Plotting for Beginners, and I'd obviously been living the fictive dream in the Co-op.

My most recent male character - in the new (quiet) novel is called Joe. And Joe has a penchant for Werther's Originals and after some firsthand research, and unfortunately for my teeth, so now do I. 

Books that make you cry

Can you think of any books that made you cry?

I asked my writer friend this yesterday and she said Life and Fate and she described the scene to me that made her cry. It would have made me cry too. I asked for any others and she said there were some, but she couldn't quite - 'Oh! I cried at the end of The Railway Children!'

'That doesn't count!' I said. 'Everyone cries at the end of The Railway Children. And I'm not talking about films.'

'No,' she said, 'I cried at the end of the book as well.'

Fair enough.

Books that have made me cry are:

Homestead

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The Age of Innocence

which also happen to be three of my favourite books.

Another book that makes me cry is my own But I Told You Last Year That I Loved You. I was reading part of that the other day to check how I had dealt with a particular emotion, and I came to the bit about the fire, and that made me cry. I am not sure that counts, though, because it was about something that happened to me, so you'd kind of expect it.

Anyway, the point is, I like a small contained cry when I'm reading. 

What books have made you cry?

Don't read this post if swearing offends you

Do you swear when you are

1. alone?
2. with close (adult) family?
3. with your children or grandchildren?
4. with close friends?
5. with acquaintances ?

I am a grandmother, and a liberal Quaker and I would tick 1, 2 and 4.

When I was a religious born-again evangelical Christian teenager - in my former life - I thought swearing was a sin. Now I think the issues are about good taste, and whether your swearing offends other people.

The TV programme The Thick of It has been recommended to me more than once by people whose opinion I value, but when I tried watching it, there was so much distasteful swearing on it that it spoiled my enjoyment and I switched it off. It was partly about the quantity of swearing but it was also about the words they used - ones I would never say.

I am currently watching a comedy drama series in which the word fuck appears fairly often. It is not used gratuitously and it doesn't offend me. Does it offend you?

The word seems particularly effective in the impatient injunctions: 'Shut the fuck up' and 'Sit the fuck down.' I don't just find it effective, I actually like it.

In my current quiet work-in-progress, someone who doesn't swear much is in a situation where she is shocked and very angry and she says 
‘Yes I fucking saw and I fucking heard. Who is she?’ and it seems entirely appropriate, and the thing is...I can't think of another way in which this character would express herself so effectively in this particular situation. 

I'd love to hear your views on all of this.

(p.s. the swallows will be back next week)

A post in two parts

Do you read quiet novels? 

I think the last two books I read that could be described as quiet were Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock, and Kent Haruf's Our Souls at Night. I am very happy to read a quiet book if it is short and beautifully written. ( I don't always like them...I hated the much-lauded  My Name is Lucy Barton.) But I can't think of a commercially successful quiet book by a previously unknown writer. Can you?

I recently saw the film Paterson which I adored. It's about a bus driver who is an aspiring poet. It's such a lovely film that when it came to the end, I could have sat and watched it all over again, straight away. And it is so quiet that I sat puzzling how it came to be made. How on earth did it get financial backing? I read up about it and discovered that the writer and director is Jim Jarmusch, a famous and successful director. That's how it came to be made. An ordinary screenwriter would never get the backing for such a quiet film.

I don't know where I am going with this, except that this week I found myself writing to someone that I no longer expect anything to happen with my writing, but I keep writing because I am horribly bad tempered if I don't. And I am well aware that for PR purposes I shouldn't be saying this on a blog, but there you are. I've said it.

And I am still enjoying working on my quiet novel, working and reworking it to make it the best I can. And when it's done, which I hope will be the spring, you will get to see it.

The second part of this post is a return to the Antony Gormley figures on Crosby Beach, called Another Place. My hesitancy about these figures stems from my basic dislike for non-ephemeral art installations in the natural world. But after reading my post on Tuesday about Liverpool, Rosemary Mann sent me some photographs of the iron men which she said I could share with you. I found the pictures very affecting, and it's made me want to go back to see the figures at sunset when the beach is quiet and when the sand is wet.

one of those nights

Did you ever have one of those nights where you go to bed tired and at a reasonable hour and you wake up at 1.30 a.m. after disturbing dreams and go to the loo and then you can't get back to sleep because your brain won't stop flitting about so you listen to an episode of Book of the Week on iPlayer and then another and another because it's so good and then you go to the loo again and try to go back to sleep and can't, and you spend the rest of the night in alternating bouts of dreadful dreams and trips to the loo and when you finally open your eyes to see the pale morning light of 6.25 creeping round the blinds and feel like death and need more sleep you decide to wake up because you can't stand any more appalling dreams. I just had one of those nights. It was hateful.

I have wondered about having a blog post on pet hates but have felt uncomfortable about it because this is my profile on Twitter:

But now I've started with last night, I will just tell you a couple of other things. I hate seeing people wasting champagne by making it fizz and squirting it. I hate it at any time, but I particularly hate seeing those lottery ads where they do it. I love champagne. If they don't want to drink it they should send it round here.

I hate those flowers called red hot pokers. 

I hate going in a cafe and seeing an amazing cake and persuading myself I can afford the calories and having a slice and finding it is dry and that the icing isn't butter icing and that my home made cakes are so much nicer.

I hate the grammatical construction that I think came over from the USA and which is now so embedded in UK usage that even the best journalists use it - the use of "like" instead of "as if."

e.g. "He was jumping up and down on the thing like he wanted to break it."
instead of
"He was jumping up and down on the thing as if he wanted to break it."

But the one I hate most is the use of "literally" as an intensifier, so that when I said to someone recently that I literally fell over, the person did not grasp that what I said had actually happened. 

I have other pet hates. They are written on a tiny pink post-it which is somewhere on my desk for just such a blog post as this, but I can't find it so I am going to stop with the hate. I'm sure that after a third mug of sugared tea I'll feel better.

Start of the new term

Hello! It's time to get back to the blog, and to work. 

I just had the loveliest long weekend staying near Liverpool with some new friends - the parents of the fiancée of the family member who declines to be named. I'm wondering if when Jaine and mystery man get married next summer I'll be showing you half of each of the wedding pictures so he doesn't appear - just Jaine and the bridesmaids (two of which you'll recognise, incidentally.)

e.g.

On Saturday Jaine's parents kindly took me to see Liverpool, a place I haven't visited since my first term at Uni (1968). Imagine being old enough to say you haven't been somewhere for 49 years. And how weird, anyway...we live just 2 hours drive away from Liverpool. If I'd known what an interesting, funky and impressive place it is, I wouldn't have left it that long. I could definitely get attached to the place. 

Here is the Liver building with the Liver birds on top, one looking out to sea and one looking inland to see if the pubs are open. The clock face is larger than the clock face of Big Ben.

I liked spotting the Liver Birds from places all over the city.

It was hot and sunny so we didn't spend time in the museums. We walked around and looked at the grand buildings, and other places I'd gleaned from a list in a super guide book, which omitted the most obvious attractions, because you'd be going there anyway  e.g. the two cathedrals. 

This is the Anglican one..

The pink neon writing is by Tracey Emin. It says 'I felt you and I know you loved me.'  The panoramic views from the top of the tower were stupendous. We could see Snowdonia, the Peak District and where the Lake District should be, though it was shrouded in clouds.

But I liked the modernist Catholic cathedral best. It was beautiful and peaceful and on a human scale. This view of the roof is the best of a poor bunch of photos:

On Sunday we went to Another Place, where there are 100 life sized iron men spread out on a 2 mile stretch along Crosby Beach. They were made by Antony Gormley. 

I am still thinking about this installation. I can't decide if I like it or not. And I am also puzzled as to why Gormley always uses himself as a model. Is it because he is narcissistic, or because having a cast made of your body is such an unpleasant thing to do that he doesn't want to ask someone else to go through it? 

Then we went to Formby beach and walked through the pinewoods where there are a lot of red squirrels.

This beautiful photo of sand and sky was taken by Jaine's mother.

It's a fine thing

It's a fine thing to have a sister. It's even finer to have one who cares about you and puts sweet peas in your bedroom and cooks you roast lamb and fish pie and who has a summerhouse where you can sit and write, and a kitchen where the afternoon sun shines through the stable door 

and onto the wall

as you talk about everything and nothing, and then slope through to the sitting room to watch Neighbours. I am enjoying this convalescence lark.

Apology

I'm sorry I've been absent. When I've not been busy, I've been ill. I'm currently resting and recovering for the third time this month. I'll be blogging again when I can.

Various

It's good to be well again. Antibiotics are wonderful, even if reading the list of possible side effects sends you witless, and you have to forego your one glass of wine a day at teatime* because alcohol is not allowed. 

I had a great idea for a blog post on Tuesday morning but Dave was out for the day and I put it on one side to write the novel instead. Guess what? I wrote for 5 hours and produced 3000 words. It was amazing. Dave came home and laughed and said maybe I'd open my laptop the next day and find everything I'd written was drug-induced gibberish. Also he said it was like the scene in The Mighty Wind when Mitch gets his Mojo back and starts writing at 200 words per minute.

Fortunately the words weren't gibberish. They were a pretty good shitty first draft (that's a technical term used by writers.) You know I said I am writing this book in a different way from all the others? Usually I plan the whole thing out and this time I am flying by the seat of my pants.

Well, I've got to the stage now where I have to decide how it ends - happy or sad. It's a momentous decision. I have never before made an ending sad. Comments welcome. Hey, maybe I'd stand a better chance of having a best seller if it was sad - you know how darkness rules these days...

* Teatime -
When I was in the States I had an interesting conversation about tea and teatime. A native I was talking to was puzzled by the double use of the word - tea meaning the drink and tea meaning the meal. Then we got onto the fact that there is afternoon tea and high tea, and then I explained that people in the midlands and north don't have dinner in the evening, they have tea, and that a relation in the south calls her evening meal supper. By the end of the conversation, the American was more bamboozled than enlightened, and I hadn't even explained that in our house at midday the terms lunch and dinner are interchangable.

I have other stuff to say about all kinds of things, but it's time to go to my sax lesson.

Afternoon drama

I'm not well at the moment and I'm doing a lot of lying in bed listening to the radio, and this afternoon I heard for the second time a radio play that was so moving it made me cry. It was on BBC Radio 4 and you can listen to it on BBC iPlayer if you're interested - wherever you are in the world (I believe.) It's called Frank and the Bear.

And on another tack, because I am bereft of things to say.... here's a photo of our crocosmia lucifer in the evening sunshine last week.

Birthday girl

I've checked, and it's over six weeks since I put anything on the blog about Lux and Cece, so I feel entitled.

This was Lux the first time I visited and saw her in the flesh. She was eight weeks old and the family lived in San Francisco then.

Last weekend she was 7. She wanted a purple and green skateboard for her birthday:

And here is a recent picture of Cece and Lux out on the town in Boulder. Can't you just imagine them in 10 years time?

I miss them.

That's all, folks, because it's raining and I have an empty house for the day and I'm going to write. 

Bliss.