#AmWriting

In my first week as an Eng Lit student at university one of the lecturers eyed us balefully and said, you're here to read and if you don't want to read, fuck off.  Another one told us that most literature was really very boring - just in case we were expecting to enjoy ourselves.  So that was us put straight.  A bit rough, but it was the early eighties, we were mainly women, used to being told like it is by men of a certain age.  As time went on, I could to some extent see where they were coming from.  I had worked for a number of years and was there on a mature student's grant.  This and the fact of no fees to be paid seems almost unthinkable now.  With a little paid work in the summer, I was well able to live on the grant.  And I loved everything about being a student.  The younger ones would often arrive at tutorials smudge-eyed, smelling of last night's party, not having read the text of whatever it was.  I was much sought-after in the ten minutes or so before a class for the quick summary that would allow them to bluff their way through the session.  I was not bored by much, except for The Faerie Queene which sits on my bookshelves unread, the portrait of Gloriana on the front still measuring and finding me wanting.  I thought Tristram Shandy boring too but persevered as everyone (even the hardened party people) seemed to think it was cool.  Later, it would allow me to bluff my way through conversations about post-modernism.

Cut to when I began teaching creative writing classes.  I suppose I could have echoed what my erstwhile tutor said but my preferred way was to give a short reading list, the first item being Dorothea Brande's 'Becoming A Writer'.  I was pleased to see that it was placed at number two of Hilary Mantel's ten rules for writers (the first being to get an accountant).  Brande had the belief that although there were varying degrees of talent, everyone could write.  I believed this too and simply assumed that everyone who came to class - even the man who said he was there because his wife insisted he get himself an interest and the art class was full - was there because they wanted to write.  And everyone did.  We began almost immediately, writing in class and reading it back.  People found that if there was no space to worry or censor, they were more brilliant than they imagined they could be.  I would set a writing task for students to do at home, which they brought back to class the following week.  Mostly they always did.

Being a writer is perhaps subtly different from Becoming - though I think we are always doing that, wherever we are on the writing road.  Being a writer means you have reached that point where you know that this is what you are for, whatever else you have to do to earn money or to meet other commitments; this is what you have to come back to.  It may be that you stop doing it for long periods because of health, lack of time or writers' block (yes, even experienced and famous writers sometimes get it and some have recovered with Dorothea Brande), but the soul is uneasy until you get back to doing it.  And then the time comes when you might have to say to yourself: you're here to write and if you don't want to write, fuck off. 

Dorothea Brande puts it more delicately.  But she does say that if after a period of time you find that the resistance to writing is stronger than the impulse to do it - then it is better, dear reader, to find something else to do. 

One of my favourite Twitter hashtags:  #AmWriting. 

Soap and Philosophy

I've been trying to buy a bar of soap. Anyone else noticed that these are becoming increasingly difficult to find? Apparently what we all now want is liquid soap that can be pumped out of a spout. And if we must have bar soap then what we want is twenty different varieties of Dove. Pootling around the streets of Brighton, I ended up in the enormous Boots chemist on North Street where a shop assistant pointed at the rows of Dove, shook her head and reminisced about the good old days of Palmolive, Lux, Knight's Castile and Camay - especially Camay, with the rich lather and the sillouhette of a gracious lady on the packet. They all want the liquid stuff now, she said, handing me a double-pack from a newly-arrived consignment of Cusson's Imperial Leather as though it were contraband. We reminisced about the old TV adverts for that: the rich couple in their private jet up to their necks in suds as they sat in their marble baths, soaping themselves luxuriously while the rabbling hordes shouted and agitated outside. They want the Imperial Leather, said she; clearly, said he, before giving the pilot instructions to bugger off to Bermuda (best place for them, probably).

But anyway, I'd like to know what the world is coming to when you go into a chemist for a bar of soap and come face to face with a pamphlet called Philosophy, which is all about skin care products on the one hand - but on the other hand seems to be peddling a serious nouveau new-age take on every aspect of your life. Under bath and shower products, for example:

remember to dance in your nightgown, sing in the shower, ride a bike, fly a kite and take an occasional "wind bath" in your bare skin, give those you love big kisses, huge hugs and the words "i love you" often and always.

Under antioxidant moisturising is offered the insight that

where there is hope there can be faith - where there is faith miracles can occur.

Would you expect anything less from a manufacturer ("a skin care entrepreneur and visionary") that produces a shampoo called Unconditional Love?

Just take me to Bermuda. Though actually, Brighton pied-à-terre does very nicely for me just now - clear, fresh and bright, as I would like to be, but sans Philosophy. Mr. Signs joining me tomorrow. Another poetry reading on Sunday. Then back to the forest edge.

Ubi Sunt?

Really I would like this to be an intelligent but heartfelt meditation on mortality and life's transcience. But instead I will just say

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?

which, as you undoubtedly already know, means

Where is the horse* gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure?Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall?

Where indeed? And where are the bloggers of yesteryear? You may well ask. For when I first began this game, the blogging I mean, there were many bloggeurs and bloggistes at work whose names I do not see now, or the blogs themselves are there, like monuments to "temps jadis." But the people who wrote the words? Ubi sunt?

On the other hand the blogging itself, as a respectable activity, has now come of age. Everyone who is anyone is at it. Makes you think, doesn't it? Because erstwhile, when we, mes semblables, were young, it was generally sniffed at, not considered a proper pursuit at all for respectable, thinking, artistically-inclined peeps but now those very sniffers are not only blogging for their lives (and to promote their books, obviously) but twitteriing like demented birds, in a cacophony of tweets.

Perhaps not blogging is the new blogging and people who don't do it will be considered a bit, you know. So in order to be cutting edge you have to not do it - but only if you have, already, if you get my drift. If you never did in the first place then you just have to find something else to not do.

And here is the lovely George Brassens, singing about the Dames of Yesteryear. Wait for me George - I'm coming there too!




*you know who you are

Festival

Heavens, where have I been? I mean a week in Edinburgh, yes, and then a poetry week back on home ground in Sussex, but where have I been? Not in my usual place, that’s for sure – a little bit out of the body; and it was great, folks! And me usually so sparing with exclamation marks! Taxis in Edinburgh are cheap compared to down South (£4 a trip, I mean to say) but on the whole I managed with all the walking this year, mostly drug-free. Mr. Signs and I were situated in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh old town, right beneath the castle. Last year we struggled to get beyond the haggis, chips and pies but this year we found all kinds of places, including one that served heavenly oysters and a ‘surf and turf’ combination of perfect steak plus pot of mussels cooked in cream and wine. Sorry to bang on about food before culture, but the importance of such to the general wellbeing and disposition of Signs cannot be overstated, especially as I have been doing (my version of) a Stone Age-type diet that seems to be, if not strengthening, a little less enervating than other kinds, and you can do lots of calories without doing extra weight (they ate crème brulee in Stone Age times, right?). I couldn’t keep that up in poetry week as I ate at the college where it was based – healthy vegetarian, with all the grains and pulses that go with it, but my body registered the difference strengthwise; back on home ground, too, the clay soil does tend to exert a gravitational pull – I should live on granite really, it suits me best.

But anyway, culture: I have been doing it, people – I almost said so you don’t have to but of course everyone has to or we will all go to the dogs. Sometimes one suffers, and it wouldn’t be Edinburgh Festival without a turkey or two, or something really dire. Last year it came in the form of a folk concert and this year it was a one-man show, full of sound and fury that signified nothing that I ccould identify, with a guy who looked as though he had taken one too many acid trips in his mis-spent youth and was therefore, despite all the sound, not quite or even remotely in the body from whence it came. And to boot, the show was in an underground vault of a place that absolutely reeked of mould and made the insides of my nostrils prickle, so I had to make an exit before the end, leaving Mr. Signs and a friend to make the best of it while I sat in a bar wishing that I were still a smoker. Absolutely everyone, it seemed, was smoking, even those of a certain age who should know better. I know better and wish I did not. Still, there was coffee and taiblet (they also ate fudge in Stone Age times, I believe).

The good things were many. We saw Jerry Sadowitz again – not as thrilling an experience as last year, but still worth doing, even if only for the quality insults; the comedian Stuart Lee – fabulous and I’ll see him again if I get the chance; a Mighty Boosh-style comedy group from Melbourne called Simply Fancy – so delightful that one forgets to complain about the airless room they performed in (despite relentless rain outside, many of the smaller venues were stiflingly hot); a Russian folk group called Koleso that we only went to see because one of the women caught the eye of Mr. Signs as she waved a flyer and her cleavage at him, and at first I thought it was going to be another turkey because of all the red lipstick and promise of “Russian heartbeat”, but it was thrilling, and we bought the CD afterwards; extraordinary flamenco dancing and singing – the real, unadorned thing; a foot-stomping Blues Brothers cover show suggested by my friend’s daughter. Just some of the things that come to mind.

But the highlight for me was seeing the performances of the Signs children. True, I’m their mother. Had I not been, I don’t think I’d have gone to see a show like Strippers & Gentlemen, and though the words “physical theatre” and “multi-media” had prepared me for the idea that this was something out of my usual experience, I had no real idea what I would find. We went twice, each time in the company of different friends. It was an astonishing production. The review from Three Weeks called the show “something great” and said “through dance, mime and spot-on dialogue the faultless cast explore ideas of contemporary sexuality, self-respect and morality. Set to a thumping high-octane soundtrack, this perfectly intense promenade performance will have you questioning your own ideals from the word go. Impeccably directed, involving and revealing, this must be one of the secret gems of this year's Fringe.” It had some other sparkling reviews, and a couple that were not quite so enthusiastic, including one by Lyn Gardner in the Guardian who didn’t, to my mind, really get it – but still, three stars in the Guardian for a show devised by people fresh out of drama school is not to be sniffed at. For me, hand on heart, it would have been a highlight whether my daughter had been involved or not. The co-director did wonderful things with sound, lighting and film and at moments I felt as though the experience was like walking into a poem where everything becomes, as it were, illuminated from within. Of course everyone’s experience of a work of art is different. Mine was that it was (in the words of my friend) poignant and beautiful.

We had to leave Edinburgh the day before son’s jazz a cappella group were due to perform because of my poetry week; but we were treated to a special preview performance in the living room of the flat they all shared and it was glorious; not just the music, the arrangements, the fact of all this fabulous sound coming from twelve voices, but the sheer work and discipline, the energy and enthusiasm that went into everything. They performed to full houses most days.

The arts: what would life be like without? I don’t ever want to find out. And so, as my lovely departed Dad might have said at the end of a long letter, here’s hoping that this finds you as it leaves me – in the pink.

More on poetry and stuff anon.

Signs En Route

Yesterday I went for a walk on the forest with my ancient friend. At the age of eighty seven and three quarters, she is not as near ninety as I thought. She has a face that is more carved on than WH Auden’s and is a tiny hobbit of a woman, with a dicky heart and a ridiculous amount of energy. Mr. Signs picked her up from Gatwick airport where she had just arrived from a holiday in Siberia, with a German friend in tow. They were holed up for a couple of nights in Irkutsk en route to St. Petersburg and hadn’t had baths for weeks because there was no hot water in any of the taps. They were high in spirits and in strong body odours, and lovely company as we padded over the beautiful forest terrain with the heather all coming in the meadows and the sun looking down through the trees. She makes eighty seven and three quarters look like a breeze, being almost weightless and of a sunny and tranquil disposition. She is the closest thing I’ve got to a fairy godmother and I reckon she could get me to the ball without a wand, a pumpkin or a coach-and-four. An old refugee, she was with my mother in internment camp in the Isle of Man, those days when the Brits were locking up all the Jewish forriners in case they were spies or in cahoots with Madalf Heatlump. She never married but spent her life looking after special needs children in Camphill communities.

After a lunch of red lentil and vegetable soup, the black Russian bread she brought with her, cream cheese and radishes, I was flat out, literally, on the bed; but agitated by the thought of all I needed and wanted to get done before going away, and immediately on my return. My lilac jacket came back from the dry cleaners clearly untouched (they just hadn’t bothered or forgot to do it) and this threw me into a spin – it just seemed horribly inauspicious that simple thing like that couldn’t be sorted, and I so wanted something for being bright and gay (original meaning) in Edinburgh, where my daughter’s play, Strippers and Gentlemen, has been awarded five stars by the Festival newspaper, Three Weeks and been called “One of the secret gems of this year’s Fringe.” Imminently expecting something to appear in the Guardian, who have been to review it – but one never knows. On account of having to be back for the poetry week, I'll be missing son's gig with his band of jazz singers, as they don't start until the 17th. Will try and catch them in rehearsal.

Well I may be gone some time, folks, but hopefully the blog’s loss will be the notebook’s gain. I gotta write more pomes and, well – I just gotta write more. Sick of competition judges who do not seem to recognise my towering genius, I’ve started to send things out to poetry magazines, beginning with The Rialto. Apparently they take forever to get back, but hey – I got all the time in the world.

This time tomorrow I’ll be on the train reading Nasim Marie Jafry’s novel, The State of Me, which is not just good – it’s M.E. brain-friendly.

Keep rockin, people.

Coming of Age

I have had M.E. for twenty one years. So it is perhaps particularly appropriate for me to write something to mark M.E./CFS International Awareness Day. You could say that we have now come of age, M.E. and I together. I do not feel like celebrating. But still, it is something perhaps worth honouring – the fact that I and so many others like me carry on and live our lives, that we are, in spite of everything that the illness brings with it, alive. What does this mean to be alive when so much of life has been compromised or brought to a standstill? I am, it should be said, one of the lucky ones. I can walk a bit, write and read a bit, travel a bit and am not wholly confined to bed or wheelchair. I would like on this day to honour those, especially any who might be reading this now, for whom life has become a very small space in which to live and have one’s being.

Recently we have read or heard on the news the terrible things that happened to a woman living in Austria, locked up in a cellar by her father for many years, forced to bear his children, some of whom never saw daylight. We heard last year of the imprisonment of Natascha Kampusch, now free after ten years confined to a small space. I am not intending to compare my situation with theirs. The reason I mention them in this context is that I am always freshly astonished at the capacity that people have to survive, not just in body but in soul – particularly that. When one interviewer suggested to Ms Kampusch that she couldn’t have had any life at all, she had to explain to him that she did of course, but not in the way that others did. Where we have many rooms, she divided her small space up into areas and created for herself an environment, waiting for the time she would be free.

I do not think it likely that I will be free of M.E. I spent years, money, strength, looking for a cure, thinking that one day I would have my life back, hearing about people with Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome who recovered. In early days I did not distinguish between that and M.E. I was unable to read the signs of an increasingly malfunctioning immune system, didn’t know that recovery, as I pictured it, would be unlikely. Perhaps that was just as well because I don’t know how I would have stood it. I have a memory of cycling along a country road in Germany with my baby daughter in a basket at the front, she holding her hand out to feel the wind rush past; another of us in the sea in Hove, me with my small son in my arms, waist-deep, jumping the waves. I already had M.E. at that point but was able on occasions to override it, something which would (I learned over and again) lead to worsening symptoms. Neither children will remember those occasions because they were too young, but those moments are written into me – precious because they were the last moments of their kind. I had to move, as it were, to another country, the land of a particular kind of chronic illness – to learn its ways and find my way around.

There is the temptation to be glib about a life as constrained as ours must be. As everyone (who knows anything at all about M.E.) is aware, one of the strategies we are advised to employ is that of “pacing” ourselves. Perhaps what is imagined is a well-ordered day where life is punctuated by well-timed rests in between bouts of productive activity. The problem is that for many the illness is characterised by lack of rhythm and unpredictability. Even for those who have had M.E. a long time, it is easy to look at others who have it and imagine that they a) somehow manage things much better or b) they don’t have the illness as badly, if at all. It is easily, especially in the blogging world, to misinterpret. To complicate matters, there is wide misunderstanding about what M.E. actually is. People who are going through a temporary bout of post-viral fatigue, or those who are tired and debilitated, announce that they have it and probably actually believe that they do. Then, when they get better, we hear about so-and-so who recovered after a year and there is the implied suggestion that we could too if only we did the right thing or changed our attitude. But the truth that isn’t easily spoken is that M.E., unlike some other fatigue-related illnesses, is not likely to go away. And though there may be improvement, it remains unpredictable and volatile and the falling back after a period of relative wellness is terrible.

And yet the impulse to seize the day is – can be – quite overpowering. For me, at any rate it is so. A day when I am suddenly, inexplicably, without symptoms is as terrifying as it is ecstatic, for I am caught up in a euphoria that won’t be resisted, as though all the life that has been waiting to be lived rushes in to that day, that moment, and clamours for release. No matter that I know how terrible is the comedown one or (at most) two days later, I fall for it. This is the time when one is most likely to do things that bring on bad relapse and commit to impossible projects. This is the time when people look at you and think: surely she can’t really be ill. But I am, and have been, and probably will be.

In this acceptance lies my strength. In this small space I must create a way of living that keeps soul alive and thriving, and I do and will, because life is precious, no less because I am disabled, not on the main road or the fast lane. We all learn this, I think. You could say that it’s a path of initiation. We didn’t choose it but since we are obliged to walk it we learn how to.

Coming of age now, having had this for twenty-one years, I know that there are still no answers. We are moving slowly towards a better understanding; it is possible, or I like to imagine, that by listening to what gives us strength we learn more about what is essential for everyone: that we require food with the life force still in it, that spending long hours under strip lighting or around formaldehyde-treated furnishings makes us ill; that music, art, poetry, kindness, laughter (you can add to this list) are not optional extras but essential; that the heart is not just an organ for pumping blood around our bodies; that even in dark places there is a light in everyone that won’t be extinguished; that this may be something we can believe in.

New Leaf

You know that feeling when there is an itch and you would scratch it if you could only locate it; nothing serious, you just can’t concentrate on anything else until you’ve found it. Or, as one of Charles Dickens’ ladies of a certain age (but I can’t remember which one) remarked: there is a pain somewhere in the room, if only I could find where it is – or words to that effect. There is something skewed, and it surely isn’t to do with the apples that have passed their prime and are dropping to the ground in disconsolate fashion and then just lying there waiting for the worms, or me to gather them into harvest home. And it surely isn’t to do with the the season’s turning and the nights coming on us, it seems to me, unseasonably early. Go to, in any case, and read your Manley Hopkins, or at least Spring and Fall – no, no, I am autumn’s child and do not suffer from seasonal affective disorder – unless – but no, this isn’t that. I am, though, it has to be said, uneasy. I make a mental checklist:

Kids’medical and dental things being sorted.
Cat – ditto.
My health as usual and certainly not the worst for which one is always thankful.
Him Outdoors’ work situation ditto.
Finances – obviously overspending but ostrich mode ok for now.
House – might have another stab at selling the old girl.
Extended family – nothing particularly nasty brewing (or at least nothing new) in the dysfunctional quarter, though one musn’t get complacent.
Writing – ouch, oh.

I haven’t done any since before Edinburgh and it is like playing a musical instrument or dancing or anything that requires you to turn up and do the thing regularly; the days, hours and minutes begin to stack up and turn against you. I offer no coy excuses about not being able to get down to it – there are, as always, practical reasons why not and these have to do, as usual, with available energy. I have also, since my return, been experimenting with walks, seeing what happens if I take myself on a more demanding than usual stretch. I know from experience that this is a complicated negotiation with no clear victory and damned if I do or if I don’t – but I am driven to try following a period where I have walked more than usual with no long-term (for the moment at least) bad effects. Trouble is if I do that, the energy ration is used up. Added to this, I have been doing some proper cooking again. This kind of thing really falls away when I am at all focussed on writing. I could never quite bring myself to kill the angel in the house, though that is, as Virginia Woolf said, one of the tasks of a woman writer. But I’ve never been much of a domestic angel. Cooking, though, is something I do that belongs to me in a way that other domestic tasks do not. It’s something I do well that I can offer and enjoy at the same time. Yesterday I made ratatouille, the slow-cook way. Today I will make lamb curry and tarka dhall with cucumber and onion raita. The apples that “ben ripe in my gardayne” are asking me to make a crumble or a pie tomorrow, perhaps.

And the words and stories, dear reader, press on me with purposeful intent. Quia amore langueo. Begin again, as always, a new leaf.