Happy New Year!

It's been an odd one, has 2014.  There was a lot of stress and disruption in my life, most of it dropped upon me out of the blue rather than wished-for or chosen by me.  There were troubles for many others, too, and for the world at large.  If I were just a tad more New Age and dippy I would say 2014 had pretty difficult vibrations.  I've often found myself wanting to be able to be a better friend to someone than I actually had the energy for, which is a sad feeling. 

There have been jolts and shocks, and losses, some of them bitter. 

But there have been good things too.  Big ones, like new friends, a new place to live, my mother's bad leg gradually improving (she's not there yet but every bit helps, as someone-or-other's adverts are fond of saying), at last making a little headway on the problems at work...  and little things; the singing wrens, the perfect roses, the fascinating lecture, the afternoon spent making damson jam...  I've written quite a lot, though I could certainly have written more if I were better organised.  I've been to a lovely wedding, and some terrific exhibitions at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the V&A, and I've just about managed to keep up with my friends.  I've been to the coast a few times, and I've seen some very good ballet and contemporary dance and some very good films.  I've had a couple of very pleasant restful holidays, too (though I could have done with both of them being twice as long!). 

But I reach the turning of the year hoping very much that at least some of the drawn-out struggles and miseries of 2014 will be resolved in the coming months.  Here's to a year which really does bring renewed hope and life, and opportunities, and friendship, and love.  Here's to good health, physical, mental and emotional, for all my family and friends; nay, for everyone out there.  Here's to writing and drawing and singing and good books to read, and laughter, and spending time with the people you love. 

Here's to a happy new year.

Reflecting on what reduces a person...

It’s been an odd week. The news has continued to be shocking and depressing in turns – and of course the knee-jerk tone of some of the coverage makes it more depressing straightaway. The rioters and looters have behaved like yobs, yes – but no-one is born a yob. The question of the reactions to the rioting is rapidly becoming one of those subjects where I pipe down fairly quickly, though. There isn’t much point in trying to discuss it with people who have already made their minds up. I’ve heard a lot of folk saying “They’re animals!” and then refusing to think any further about it.

I’ve been towards the poorer end of society, financially speaking, for several chunks of my life (not least, most of my childhood). I’ve been filled with rage at times, at my situation and at the hoops I was expected to jump through, the humiliations I was expected to endure, and so on. I knew how to control the anger, but I can see how someone who couldn’t control it and had no outlet for it could just blow up. Does the fact that when I’ve been pushed around and patronised I’ve kept my cool and told myself things would get better, mean I’m entitled to judge those who cannot keep their tempers in the heat of the moment, in the middle of a yelling mob? It’s easy to judge, after all, and hard to empathise with criminals.

As recently as ten years ago I can remember being almost overwhelmed by anger and frustration as I tried to get through the convoluted, dehumanising, crushingly stupid process involved in getting my council tax reduced while I was out of work. It's a sad memory. At the next counter along, a young couple had been reduced to screaming abuse by the injustice and illogicality of the system they were meant to follow, and the unhelpfulness of the person dealing with them. I remember thinking “There but for the grace of god…” as I listened to them. I knew that I had all the benefits of intelligence, education, a fairly mature and optimistic outlook, a sense of humour and a lot of patience, and I was still having to fight not to lose my temper. They, with none of those advantages, were losing theirs spectacularly. The young man ended up being told that he would be expelled from the building by security if he didn’t calm down. I listened and watched, and I thought “If I wasn’t equipped, in myself, to handle this situation, and all the other cr*p that life is dumping on me at the moment, it could have been me getting that warning”. It was salutary. No-one is born a yob; people get reduced to it. And those who are least well equipped to cope with trouble are the most easily reduced by it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been wrestling again with my pitch letter for “R’s sisters”, with the help of some very useful feedback from a friend. I suddenly realised there was one other revision I needed to make in the text, too, so I’ve been wrestling with that as well. And I’ve been carrying on with the long-short-story fairy tale. I’m very near the end of that, on to the penultimate scene, and wondering what the end will be. I know that end is a version of “they all lived happily ever after” (this is me, after all!), but that isn’t the tone of the story at all, even if it’s what the message boils down to. I’m rather happy with it, though, and will start typing it up as soon as it’s finished. It’s the third alternative fairy tale I’ve done. Perhaps I should collect them together?

Odd echoes and reminders, and dream-casts, and day-dreams...

I've just been given a free smoothie - apparently Innocent Smoothies are trying to smarm up to Kew, or Kew is trying to smarm up to them (it wasn't clear which from the cheerful colleague who brought them round). It's Mango and Passion Fruit and is cold and delicious. But the taste conjures all sorts of odd memories, running in loops and swirls through my mind, their many different colours and nuances twining like oil-paint on water, floating over one another, blending into queer new combinations...

The tang of passion fruit takes me back with enormous intensity to a winter holiday in Madeira a few years ago. I had been quite unwell the preceding summer and autumn and was awaiting an operation; I got tired very easily, slept to all hours and did very little except stroll through the beautiful streets of Funchal, sit in the sun, and eat too much (Madeiran cooking was uniformly superb, even in quite touristy places). I became hooked on freshly-pressed passion-fruit purée and probably drank several glasses a day, and also on the gorgeous pudim de maracuja, something like passion-fruit blancmange only delicious in a way that the term 'blancmange' would seem to render pretty unlikely, which my favourite rather scruffy neighbourhood restaurant, the "Tangerina", served. Now the sweet yet sour flavour always takes me straight back to Funchal, sitting on the pebble-mosaic'ed terrace of a café in the cathedral square, shaded by huge acacias.

The taste of mango, on the other hand, brings me back to making my own smoothies, two years ago, and that is a weirdly but acutely painful memory, for all sorts of reasons I am not proud of or happy about; reasons, in fact, that I probably shouldn't be writing about here. When something you have been very, very happy about goes belly-up in a really unpleasant and irretrievable way, it is an altogether different kind of sweet-yet-sour experience looking back on it - as in, it was (or seemed to be) so good, and then it All Went Wrong. And two years later the taste of mango conjures all the delight and excitement, and all the grief and loss and the pain of rejection.

The colours and blurs that that memory conjures are too complex, and too self-indulgently unhappy, to write about, even obliquely; even now.

Let's put it aside, then, since it is still too raw to contemplate. One has the right to make one's way through any grieving process at one's own pace and in one's own way, after all. Let's think about beauty again: Today's number one beautiful sight was a single orange-yellow flower petal, slightly dried and creased, swinging from a thread of spider silk beneath a tree. It looked like a fairy, for a moment, dancing before me in mid-air as I came up the path.

One other thing; I have a bad habit of playing "Dream Cast My Novel" - do all tyro writers do this, I wonder? Characters come to me in a very visual way, and there is a certain mad fun in trying subsequantly to spot actors who have, if not literally the right looks, then something of the right quality, so that one can picture them conveying the character as a person rather than a performance of a person. So I have a mental list of actors who'd be good as my protagonist Simon, actors who'd be good as Anne, actors who'd be good as Gabriel Yeats and actors who'd be good as Rose. Only one name on the latter list, actually, that of the wonderfully-named Honeysuckle Weeks, who is so nearly perfect-for-Rose as to be slightly uncanny.

Anyway, last night I was tired and sleepy and I slummocked in front of the tele, channel-hopping (we have freeview - yay, more than five channels, at last channel-hopping really means exactly that). I found myself watching a show called "The Mentalist" - rather good in the way of US tele series with lightweight content skilfully done, and better actors than the material needs giving it backbone and humanity and a powerful illusion of substance. The leading man, an Australian called Simon Baker, is almost indecently good-looking, and manages to convey a mixture of insoucience and bottled-up tension that is oddly powerful. He's not tall enough, his eyes are blue not grey, and he's an Aussie, but he'd be a great Gabriel Yeats, because he is seriously handsome and can do both charm and inwardness.

My Dream Cast list gets slowly but surely more ambitious!

Simon Cenarth: William Houston. Or, at a pinch, Damian Lewis, another very fine ginger British actor of about the right age.
Anne Hope: Naomi Watts, provided she would dye her hair for it (I said I was ambitious). Or, if only time travel were possible, the young Eleanor Bron.
Gabriel Yeats: JJ Feild, or Simon Baker, or Tom Hiddlestone.
Rose Leland: Honeysuckle Weeks.

What one does about the casting of Felix Angus or Thomas Rosenau I don't know. Fun with CGI, anyone?

well, a girl can dream...

Slowly coming out of shock on Thursday

I’ve done nothing creative all week, and nothing much else either, except go to work, go home, eat some food, drink some cider and go to sleep. Sound nasty? I suppose it is. Basically I have been in a state of shock since Monday, when I had an email telling me someone had died and I am due to inherit some money. I don’t even know the figures involved, but it has brought up a huge mass of mixed emotions and memories. I’m already tense and emotional and dealing with painful unresolved memories as I try to gear myself up to find a new place to live – reliving as I do all the misery of my last house-move and the bitter circumstances in which that took place. And now this comes up.

It’s a long-standing arrangement – my late godmother Joyce left a Trust to pay an income to her only living relative, an elderly cousin – her cousin has just died, and I am one of the residual beneficiaries. Because my eventual receipt of the money was dependent on Cousin Pearl’s death I have always refused to think about it – it felt uncomfortably like wishing her into her grave, and I was very ill at ease with that. It must, realistically, be a large enough sum that the arrangement was worth doing in the first place, but I have no idea what I am going to receive. I am suddenly reminded of Joyce and of how bitterly I missed her when she died, and of the shock of her death – she had been in remission from cancer and had seemed to be doing well, then suddenly had a relapse and was gone, bang…

Anyway, I am now struggling with solicitor’s letters and legal terminology to do with the administration of Trusts, and feeling upset and shaken, and wondering what on earth I will do with this money, and whether it will be enough to do something concrete, and how long it will take to resolve the matter and wind up the Trust… My mind feels as if it is boiling all the time. I’m fairly pissed-off with the combined smugness and inefficiency of the solicitors involved, who have simply assumed they will step in and act on my behalf, unrequested, despite the fact they are based in Axminster and I live in Ealing, barely five miles from the solicitors administering the Trust, who are in Teddington… If I have to have a solicitor act for me, I’d prefer to choose my own!

I’m supposed to be going down to my mother’s in Kent for the weekend and I’m hoping to be able to switch off and relax – but I fear Mum will not let me rest until matters are resolved to her satisfaction. She dislikes uncertainty even more than I do…

It’s extraordinary how something like this can throw one. My mind is constantly returning to the subject, turning it over as one forks over compost, as if adequate aeration will sort the problem out. I’m startled at how quickly I have been able to put more then twenty years of saying “I won’t think about that!” straight out of my head. Now I am thinking about it all the time.

I find myself veering between the hope that I will find I have come into enough money to take some real steps towards realising some of my dreams, and the reflection that I will probably get very much less, and that less solicitors’ fees, and then I will not know what to do with it. I am astonished at the feeling of buoyancy and relief that accompanies the thought of receiving a solid chunk of capital. But I have to remember that in 1983, when Joyce, not yet ill and probably never imagining her cousin (who was twenty years her senior) would outlive her, made her will, the economy was in a very different state from now, and one could buy a pleasant small house in Canterbury (where I was living at the time) for around £60,000. It’s quite possible that that is the sort of sum that was invested; and if that were the case then a share of the capital, in today’s terms, would not be worth very much. But I just don’t know what I’m dealing with. I don’t know the figures. And I feel so morbid, brooding over this.

I won’t wallow in emotion for Pearl, beyond the general feeling one has of regret and sadness about a death. I didn’t know her well, but she was a nice old lady; and she was in her late nineties and had had a good innings. I hope I reach the same age in similar good health. I hope when I go people say “She was a nice old woman, and she had a good innings” – there are worse epitaphs, after all. Next time I lay my hands on some champagne I’ll drink a toast to her.