This morning, feeling sad, I googled “Poems to read to the dying” and in a couple of links arrived at Anthony Wilson’s wonderful Lifesaving Poems Blog. I have been sitting in bed reading the poems on his list. Now, I’m ordering the anthology which is to published in June by Bloodaxe.
Then as I was eating my porridge I got to wondering how you, dear readers, came across my blog. I am always amazed how many people get here via an old post of mine called It is possible to have too many tables.
Because I had that wretched virus, because of the snow and the bitter cold, and because the quieter section of the Monsal Trail has been covered with a thick sheet of dimpled ice, I’ve not been cycling. And I’ve missed the Trail.
I got to feel like that bit at the end of The Railway Children:
They seemed to be hardly Railway children at all in those days, and as the days went on each had an uneasy feeling about this which Phyllis expressed one day.
“I wonder if the Railway misses us,” she said plaintively. “We never go to see it now.”
Yesterday I cycled up it for the first time in three weeks, and most of the ice had gone. And I can confirm that an hour’s brisk walk around the village does not use the same muscles as an hour’s brisk ride up the Trail.
At teatime we drove up above the village, onto the edge, to see if the starlings were murmurating in the same place as last year. But we saw no starlings, just some lovely sunset clouds.
The other news is that I had some professional feedback on episode one of my TV adaptation of BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU. Guess what? It’s not dramatic enough. There were other valid criticisms too, such as the suggestion that there were too many montages, and there was too much talking. I was upset for a day, and then I got excited again at the prospect of making it work the second time around.
So here’s the thing: I now understand why people who adapt novels for film sometimes have to tweak the plot, because I am tweaking my plot in order to add that extra drama. No, Fran is not going to murder Sol when he washes the duvet in the bath, but I am injecting more conflict commensurate with the existing tone and characters. Once I got over the resistance to change anything at all, it became easier. The trouble is that when something changes in episode one, it is likely there will have to be other changes in episodes two, three, and four.
In case you wondered, I am not hating the rewriting. I am loving the challenge of trying to get it to work. And my good friend Chrissie (crime writer extraordinaire) who understands plot, is being a wonderful help.
p.s. I have waited until now to have snowdrops on my header, because in my garden they only just came out. (That’s our cat, by the way.)
My dearest friend and confidante is gravely ill and my concern for her is having a weird effect: it’s making me sensitive to all kinds of exaggerated anxieties and sadnesses which are focussed on my family.
I’m not usually like that.
I expect it will pass.
And there’s a helpful quote from Rohinton Mistry which I found in that book I recently read twice in one week, Kate Gross’s Late Fragments. It especially speaks to my condition:
To that end, I am having pancakes for breakfast.
And I’m enjoying photographs of the girls in Colorado (come on, I haven’t had pics of the grandchildren on here for ages):
And Dave is going out for the day which means I can get on with the rewrite of episode one of the screenplay undisturbed. Yay!
Photographs by @isaach
All of Dave’s jeans (four pairs) - which I bought in a January sale 5 years ago - have worn out at the same time. This is an emergency. He wears jeans 99.9% of the time, and owns just one pair of smart trousers (Hugo Boss, no less) that were hand-me-downs from Isaac when he moved to the USA in 2003. As a stop gap I have given him my over-sized dungarees that I bought in Colorado last autumn.
You know I hate shopping, don’t you? It isn’t that Dave hates shopping, it’s that he doesn’t know how it works. He thinks that if he sits on the sofa by the fire in the evening and says his clothing is at crisis point, and he really has to get some new jeans organised, they will materialise in the chest of drawers upstairs.
He has the same problem with his underpants. I used to shop for Dave’s clothes, but it is a dispiriting sport. Where do you think all the jokes about jeans and pants spring from in Plotting for Grown-ups?
exhibit 1: the problem with jeans
Richard called at lunchtime and I showed him a pair of jeans I’d bought in the Scouts jumble sale. They are just Richard’s size, and they look quite hip to me.
He tried them on and said precisely what I expected: “The waist is far too low.” Richard spends the entire day hitching whatever pair of trousers he is wearing up round his waist, and these wouldn't go high enough for his liking. They weren't the kind that exposes your pants, they were merely an inch lower than the M&S seconds he bought off Bakewell market five years ago. “I want something more robust,” he said.
“They are robust!”
“I'm looking for something more workaday. I need something that genuflects less to fashion and more to safety and comfort.”
“But you’re trying to look attractive to women, aren’t you?” I said.
He pulled up his sweatshirt and exposed the flesh above the waistband. “This low waistband is an outrageous ploy to dupe the consumer. Dickies don't skimp on material like this.” (Richard worships Dickies work clothes because “they are commodious, they shrug off stains, and they have wonderful pocketry.”)
“These jeans make you look ten years younger, Richard.”
“I don't think I'll be wearing them,” he said, vainly trying to hitch them up high again. “They look like a high risk trouser. Edgy.”
exhibit 2: the problem with pants
He got up from his chair (we were sitting in the kitchen) and tugged at the seat of his trousers. Then he sat down again and said, “Some of my underpants are terrible. It’s as if they’re alive – I can feel them creeping down my thighs. I need to cull them.”
“What you need to do when you get home is get them all out of your drawer, and lay them all out on the bed and go through them, one by–”
“I am going through them! That’s the trouble! But where can I get some decent ones? I have had it up to here with M&S Y-fronts. They’re hopeless!”
What is it about men and their underpants?
“You need to get something that isn’t a standard Y-front, something a bit more 2011-ish. Especially now you’re on the pull. I mean – what would Ms Fuchsia Pink think of them?”
“This is where Dickies could pounce,” he said. “They ought to be calling in their top designers, even as we speak.”
“So what do you think the perfect underpant needs?”
“Security, material that shrugs off stains, adequate ventilation – possibly assisted – and a reliable fastening. It’s about time persons of quality gave their attention to the comfort and protection of the nation’s manhood. Paxman tried a few years ago – do you remember all that kerfuffle on the Today programme? Nothing happened. Next thing you know, Prince Charles will be muscling in with the Poundbury Pant and the Prince’s Truss.”
There are several problems – as you can see - but the main one is that he thinks good quality jeans and woollen jumpers cost under £10. You, dear readers, may be able to source such prizes, but out in the sticks the discount stores are few. I have brought home too many items in the past that have been rejected on grounds of cost.
I’m waiting to see who will crack first – him or me.
Dave: “You’re in a an odd mood today. You’re not yourself.”
Sue: “No. I’m being uncharacteristically stoical.”
And here – totally unrelated, except that trees embody stoicism - are some trees I encountered on an icy afternoon walk around the village.
My favourite sycamore:
My favourite Scots pines:
My favourite oak:
Did you ever emerge from an absorption with a personal pain or sadness which is not objectively inconsequential, and then looked abroad and saw suffering on such a scale as to make you resolve to be less complaining?
My Twitter feed is full of bad news from Gaza.
Life there is as arduous and awful now as it was at the height of the Israeli bombing last July, but in a different way. Wrecked houses are still wrecked, homeless families are still sheltering in UN premises, there is a restriction on power and the import of materials for reconstruction as well as on medicines, and a multitude of other things that make ordinary life supportable.
The UN has had to suspend payments to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for repairs to homes damaged in last summer's war, because they have received only £88.8m of the £474m pledged by donors.
Here, Palestinian children look out through holes in a sheet at their family's house in the east of Gaza City (photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Here, a Palestinian woman washes clothes at her damaged house in the east of Gaza City (photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Read this piece in the Chicago Tribune and you will get the picture.
If you would like to help, you can donate to the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians here.
This is what they will do with your money.
Thank you.
I had three possible topics in my head this morning for a post:
1/ a Pollyanna-ish post, Five good things about snow, plus pretty local snowy photographs (as it has snowed, and is snowing, and I am going to have to go to Sheffield on the train and stay overnight, assuming we can make it to the station)
2/ a discussion about writers breaking the fictive dream with references to the current disintegration of The Archers (longest running radio soap in the world, which has been captured by an evil Script Editor who is alienating listeners like me, a fan of 43 years) and also with references to the current series (series 3) of Last Tango in Halifax, which has lost me. I am still watching it but I am outside of it now, detached. And it’s not just me…my sax teacher says she was gripped by it, but isn’t any more. There’s a lot to say about this.
3/ a quote from the writer Neil Gaiman on what to do when disaster strikes. I like this, and this is the one I am going with – and for the literal-minded amongst you, when he talks about “art” I am sure he means anything creative, which includes all manner of things….whether it be making a fruit cake, knitting a jumper, taking a photograph, painting a picture, building a snowman, or writing a poem.
take it away, Maestro…
When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too. – Neil Gaiman
People often ask me if I find it hard to make myself sit down and write every day: does it take a lot of self discipline? Well, it doesn’t when I’m in the middle of a piece of fiction – novel or screenplay. But at the planning stage, the stage when I’m wrestling with plots and story arcs, the place where I am right now, it’s hard. And it’s exacerbated by a lack of hope and of courage: am I kidding myself? can I do it? am I wasting my time? Yesterday I couldn’t concentrate and gave up, and got out my patchwork instead.
Another thing is that more heavy snow is forecast for Thursday so for the second week running, it looks as if I shan’t be able to help Zoe out by driving into Sheffield and picking up the boys from school, etc. etc.
image copyright of Grimupnorth.com
Last week I was tweeting about that inspirational book Late Fragments in which the author who is dying of cancer can still see the beauty of the everyday. At the same time, I was having a Twitter conversation with someone in London about snow. He was wishing he got snow as often as we do and I was telling him that, yes, yes, I can appreciate its aesthetic qualities, but I still loath it because it cramps my life. That’s how crap I am at playing the glad game.
January this year is turning out to be a sister to February: a month of practising determined cheerfulness, resolutions not to complain, stiff upper lips and gritted teeth. So….I am thankful for my warm house, my kindly and chatty companion, my loving family, good friends, good books, and technology. The latter means I can have a messaging chat with Isaac in Colorado when a cough wakes me up at 4.30 a.m. and I can also send loving texts to my dear friend M who is seriously ill, and whom I have still not been able to visit because of worries I will give her this tiresome virus.
I’m trying to be a Pollyanna, but I am obviously in the remedial class and need a personal trainer in cheerfulness.
You know what?
It isn’t any of the above. It’s whittling about my friend that’s the problem. It colours everything.
Here’s a January view (sans snow) from the limestone edge behind the village:
My closest friend, my friend for thirty years, is seriously ill in hospital with cancer, just half an hour’s drive from here, and I can’t go to see her because of this snotty virus. I can text and I can write, and I do. She has her loving and stalwart husband and kids around her, and that’s what matters in the end. She knows I love her and am thinking about her, but I’m sad I can’t visit and hold her hand for a while.
This is for you, M, not that you’ll see it…but I’ve told you before. It’s a quote from the Victorian writer Dinah Craik…
“But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely.
Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
There are a lot of vile bugs swanning around in north Derbyshire and Sheffield this winter, and on Tuesday I came down with one. I am not complaining: I am just explaining why I haven’t posted. My head’s been too thick with snot to think.
This was the view from the bedroom window on Tuesday:
Yesterday I managed to work, despite the ever-present snot. And I also read Late Fragments by Kate Gross. I read it in one sitting, something that is rare for me, especially when the book is non-fiction. It’s the beautifully written memoir of a 36 year old woman who died of cancer a month ago. It is sad but not gloomy. It is moving, inspiring, and above all, life-affirming. It is honest, not cheesy. It is more about living, and how to live, than it is about dying.
The sub-title of the book is Everything I want to tell you (about this magnificent life) – which should give you a clue about the general tenor. If you read just one book this year make it this one. It’s about love and friendship and the importance of paying attention to the wonder all around you; and the last paragraph of the book is the Raymond Carver poem Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
Dave has been working in the attic for two weeks, which seems a long time, but there was lots of clearing and dismantling to do before he could start on the actual insulation. The upside is that as well as achieving lower future heating bills, we’ve sorted out the stored junk – at least half of which has been dumped on us by offspring. And we’ve found things that were lost, and things that were forgotten about, such as this cartoon which Kate Charlesworth gave me. She drew it to illustrate a piece I had in The Times years ago.
This is the piece…
Just as every newly married couple should have a shed on their wedding list if they want their marriage to survive, so there is something every older couple needs, and I know what it is.
It’s not just retired people who need it, such as those poor wives whose husbands – bereft of work - follow them around all day asking “What are you doing? What are you doing now? Where are you going? What time will you be back?”
It can also be couples who work from home, like my husband and I, who have a room and a computer each and who have, you would think, no need to argue.
Our problem is our different styles of working. He works in short bursts, sharp and efficient, sure footed and sound. He cuts through work like a man with a machete hacking through brambles.
I am slow and woolly headed. I need to go to my room and shut the door and be left alone for hours at a time. I am like the author who, when she was asked if there were words she tended to overuse, said “Yes - two words: go away.”
But machete man does half an hour here, and gets up for a drink; half an hour there, and gets up to stroke the cat. Then as he’s on his feet he will come and ask if I remembered to ring the plumber. He’ll do ten minute’s writing, then look outside the door to see if there’s enough blue sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers, so he can go out cycling later. But then as there’s only enough blue sky for one leg, he will come and ask if I think it’s going to rain. Then it’s fifteen minutes on the phone, and a shout to ask where his stapler is. He does half an hour of planning, then feels peckish and slopes into the kitchen for a bowl of yoghurt, and while he’s there he may as well listen to the headlines. Then he comes up to rage about what he’s just heard. Aarghh !
This was all true until a month ago. That’s when he bought the router, which (for the uninitiated) is a power tool used for precise cutting and shaping of timber.
Routers are wonderful. Every couple should have one. The router has revolutionised our lives, which I now divide up into BR and AR ( Before Router and After Router ). Now, in the AR epoch, I have no excuse not to get on with my work, because he sits in his room as if nailed to his chair until all of his work is done: the sooner it’s done, the sooner he can play with his router.
He started with picture frames. Everything in the house that’s vaguely rectangular has now been framed. Luckily, a router isn’t just useful for framing. It can do decorative edging for shelves, cupboard doors, engraved wooden signs, etched patterns and pictures, dovetails – anything in wood that needs shaping or grooving, cutting or profiling.
And in the evening when his back aches from bending over the workbench, and his fingers are numb with vibration, he sits and flicks through his catalogues of router attachments and cutters. All is quiet except for occasional exclamations, such as “I’m going to get some pronged teenuts. They’re a joy.” Or he may read one of his routing magazines - the sort of publication that features in the missing words round on Have I got news for you - with headlines like “Power up!” or “Beautiful Beast! The new big Bosch router is here.”
It’s not just my husband who is besotted with his router. Believe me, there is a routing fraternity, with ramifications way beyond woodwork. Last week my brother ( who has a “tasty” Elu router ) asked my husband’s view on some abstruse etymological question and on hearing the reply said “Yes, of course. Anyone with a router talks sense.”
As well as improving domestic harmony, the router has solved the Christmas present problem: from now on I’ll buy presents for his router. There is an infinite variety of cutters: no man could live long enough to try them all. I’ve just been down to get his catalogue to count them, but my husband had gone, and on his study door was a new wooden sign “Gone routing.”
© Sue Hepworth/Times Newspapers 2002
published here with kind permission of Times Newspapers
I am sitting in bed swathed in my worn and patched - and yet still holey - eau de nil cashmere hoodie (circa 2007) trying – after a week off – to remember how I write a post. It’s 6.53 a.m. Now I am compos mentis, Dave has put on his bib and brace and is up in the loft working on his huge insulation project.
I’ve been awake for hours with stuff going round in my head, one of which was the job with a six figure salary (with my own driver) that I was offered last night. Yes it was a dream, but I always like to understand my dreams. I turned the job down, by the way. I wouldn’t take any kind of salary to swap my current life for a corporate one.
I like living here and being free to decide how I spend my time, even if it does mean my cashmere hoodie is beyond any kind of repair that would make it wearable in polite society.
For one thing I have time to pick up the boys from school and play Monopoly with Tate for an hour and a half before tea.
And I have time to have them in bed in the morning and get to know what they like playing when they have their rationed “screen time.”
You probably think I’ve been lounging around doing nothing for a week, apart from taking a few photos. Well, I’ve been ill, and then busy. And then exhausted. So this last photo is from @Sky1Ron whom I follow on Twitter. He’s a news and traffic reporter for KCBS in the San Francisco Bay Area. He goes up in a plane and takes the most amazing aerial views. This is one he tweeted this week. I love San Francisco. I miss San Francisco. And who knows when I’ll see it again now the West Coast Hepworths live in Colorado.
Winter sunshine in my study
Winter view from our gate
Winter sunshine on our lane
My snowdrops yesterday
My snowdrops today
Snowdrops along the lane, in the lee of the wall – today
I was going to write a post about how the photo of me at the side of the blog is out of date and how I might be committing fraud by having it there, and how I should find a new one that doesn’t make me look too awful. That photo was taken in April 2008, so it’s out of date by seven summers of sitting in the sun sans sun screen - get a load of that alliteration that just popped out - ten trips to sunny California, the stress of self-publishing two books, and the grief of losing my mother. I aged five years when my mother died.
I like this photo a lot that Isaac took in Sausalito
but it was October 2008 so it’s also out of date.
The hunt is on for a replacement photo.
Meanwhile, I’m wrestling with all kinds of darkness - global, local, seasonal. And yet I live in a house with views that are wide and lovely, I have enough to eat, the house is cosy (and becoming cosier by the day, as Dave installs insulation up against the puny post-war utility rafters) and I love my family and my friends. I don’t want to moan, so I’m taking a short break. I might decide to post just a photo of something domestic every day. You could check in. Otherwise, I’ll see you in ten days.
With love.
The first time I sat next to Dave in the university library 46 years ago this month (are we really that ancient?) I was appalled at his behaviour. I’d peeked inside his T S Eliot Selected Poems, that he carried around with him like a talisman, and saw marginalia on every page. Except does marginalia include stuff scribbled between stanzas and verses, as well as in the margins?
I was brought up not to write in books. Apart from that stricture – which I mostly observe - a book is a book, and is there for my enjoyment.
My good friend Chrissie reads five times as many books as I do and has a library to match, but I stopped borrowing books from her when I realised she is one of those people who won’t bend the spine of a paperback: she has it open 90 degrees or less and peers inside it. Like my big brother.
Listen. I take care of my books. I am not a hoodlum. I like to keep their covers pristine, I don’t bend down corners of pages, I try not to drop them in the bath, but I am not going to put a book’s comfort before my own. I open my books. I want to be comfortable when I’m reading, and I am not comfortable if I am worrying about getting a crease in the spine.
Now I must go. I need to check on Abe Books, the second hand books site, to see if they have a copy of my favourite book in the same edition - Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor, paperback, publication date 1989, ISBN – 0-571-15240-6 – because this one has been read so often it’s falling apart.
Note to regular readers of the blog – the header is my photo of the new year full moon, setting behind the village, January 2010, taken from the attic.
I decided I wasn’t being fair to Joanna Trollope in my last post by making something up as an example of her fractured dialogue. So here is an example from her Sense and Sensibility…
“I seem,” Elinor said, “to be just as bad at reading people as I ever was.”
and here’s another -
“John and Fanny,” Elinor said firmly, “are family. We had to come.”
and one more -
“But,” said Elinor quietly, “that’s what Fanny wants.”
Enough!
I am currently trying to develop the voice of one of my male characters before I begin to actually write the screenplay (up to now I’ve been planning it.) As research, I turned to About a Boy by Nick Hornby (whose dialogue, and its appearance on the page, is immaculate). I opened it in the middle, because I saw the film and know the story, and before I knew it I’d finished the thing and no notes taken. Then I went back to the start and read to the middle. Excellent stuff. Now I need to look further afield and continue to ponder on my character’s voice.
Another thing is that Episode 2 of the third series of Last Tango in Halifax was on last night, and this morning (time currently 6.55 a.m.) it is available for people with no tellies (such as me) to watch on iPlayer, and yet here I am, writing my blog. That’s how much I love you guys.
Actually…to be truthful….it’s how strong my work ethic is. (But I do love you guys.)
I tried again to capture the full moon at teatime yesterday and realise now that I need a tripod to do this effectively, and I’m not going to buy a tripod, so the moon will always be out of reach.
Whereas an ON Christmas will be back in two years…
I’ve just read Joanna Trollope’s reworking of Sense and Sensibility – written as part of a current project to bring all of Jane Austen’s novels into the 21st Century. My verdict: well-written, but it doesn’t work. The social norms about marriage and wealth prevailing at the time Austen wrote do not still hold today.
But then I wondered if they do still hold in the world which Joanna T inhabits. In her world people wear gumboots, not wellies, and they have supper, not tea, so maybe the whole marriage thing is different too (tongue in cheek here.)
The other thing to say about the novel is that although I have read and enjoyed – no, been positively gripped by - several of Trollope’s earlier novels, every time I read a new one, her voice ends up irritating me. She’s obviously a stonkingly good novelist, and she writes well about families and emotions, but – and this is my own peculiar, personal reaction – her writer’s voice gets on my nerves.
There is one particular thing I can’t stand, and that’s the way she breaks up her dialogue. Here is an example of something that might have occurred in one of my Plotting books, but written a la Trollope…
“I want,” said Richard fiercely, “a new pair of underpants. Not just one pair, but a whole fleet of them. I want to enter a new underpant era.”
He was, Sally thought as she nursed her mug of tea, rather nuts.
People in Trollope novels nurse their tea and their coffee mugs. They also often say things fiercely. But it’s that cutting into what a character says or thinks, with a subordinate clause, that gets up my nose.
And then I wondered what there is about my voice that gets up readers’ noses.
Feel free, dear readers.
This picture post is for all of you but especially for M, because she’s not well, and reading a long post is hard work.
Winter sunset behind a piece of Dave’s stained glass:
I hope you have a good day and I love you.
And I want to take care of you.
I want you to have a star of good luck and many good things.
You are my Sue and I love you,
Lux.
This post is in two parts – first the pictures, and then a piece for those of you who are interested in plot and story.
This was our lane the morning after Boxing day when we went out for a walk…
And here is the gate on the next lane…the one we used to lean on, on summer evenings, and wonder what Isaac and family were up to way out west…
You may as well know that I hate the snow. Yes, it’s pretty, but it interferes with my life.
Part 2:
Wanting to write another screenplay, I got out my notes for a novel I started a couple of years ago. I have the three main characters fully developed, I have the main trajectory worked out, and I have the first three chapters written. But.
What is the but? The agent who was very keen on BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU, but who in the end decided not to take it on, said “it won't be easy to sell this quiet, delicately nuanced novel in which nothing much (other than Life!) happens in our current horrible publishing landscape.”
The same could be said of my current work in progress. I feel as though I need some big big big things to happen to make it acceptable as a popular TV serial. The trouble is that my brain does not produce BIG things. It produces reflections, insights, interesting characters, quiet everyday emotional dilemmas, funny dialogue.
I’m wondering if story-telling genre is genetic. Neither Gil(8) my grandson, nor his cousin Lux(4) my granddaughter, like watching films with baddies in. They don’t like being scared. And I’m talking about age-appropriate films here. e.g. Gil went to see Paddington with the family at Christmas, and he had to leave in the middle because he didn’t like the baddie. Zoë (his mother) tried to explain to him that it’s just a story and a story needs a baddie, and why it needs a baddie and how it all works out happily in the end. Gil is a boy who likes to write stories (his last two works were Jaims Bond [sic] and The Zooming Chickin!!! [sic] ) but he was not convinced. He said the film didn’t need a baddie because it was bad enough that the bear didn’t have a home.
When I was on the screenwriting course in August I secretly wrote on the kitchen blackboard “Plot is a necessary evil” and the next morning, someone had written underneath “Evil is necessary to a plot.”
Seeking inspiration, I just googled “dramatic plot ideas” which produced an entry on Wikipedia called The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, and listed things like Crime pursued by vengeance, Vengeance taken for kin upon kin, Pursuit, Disaster, Falling prey to cruelty/misfortune, Revolt, Abduction.
Could you see any of these in a Sue Hepworth production? Thoughts, anyone?
Yes, we have snow – hence the new header.
I felt very proud of myself on Christmas Day. I got all the fourteen items ready at the same time, there was no cross-contamination between carnivore and veggie food, and the roast free-range chicken was wonderfully moist. I can cook just fine, but roasting meat is a mystery because I so rarely do it - having no-one to share it with, and living with someone who finds the smell abhorrent. So every ON Christmas, I try very hard to GET IT RIGHT. This year I did. Go, me!
In the midst of the last minute flurry of serving up all the different dishes, the family member who declines to be named asked me why I always do so many things. Why don’t I keep it simple? The answer is that I am trying to recreate the Christmas dinners we had when I was little. This means that one of the most important items for me are weird things called force meat balls which are balls of a kind of stuffing made – in our family - from fresh white breadcrumbs, vegetable suet, lemon, parsley and egg. My mother would prepare them on Christmas Eve and the fragrant smell would pervade the house.
Such delights are not shared by the person who lives here and doesn’t like Christmas and especially doesn’t like Christmas dinner, and who keeps his Christmas supplies in the water trough because there is no room for them in the fridge.
But that is OK. It’s really OK. Each to his own.
