Writing rubbish



Can you see the rainbow?


Last week I was talking to one of my sisters on the phone. (I have two, sisters that is - and two brothers.) Although she is a few years younger than me, she has been writing children’s books for many years (published under the names Emma Fischel and Lottie Stride) and I tend to look on her as an expert in creative writing. I imagine her sitting at her desk churning out perfect prose by the bucket-load.

    ‘I’m so stuck on The Novel,’ I moaned. ‘And when I do write all that comes out is rubbish.’

    ‘But that’s perfectly normal,’ she said. ‘Getting stuck and writing rubbish are all part of the process. That’s all I do most of the time.’

    Since then I’ve written two and a half new scenes, discovered something huge about one of my characters that I hadn’t suspected, and come up with a whole new twist to the plot. The fact that it’s OK to write rubbish has completely freed me up.

    At this stage, it appears, it’s the fact of writing that’s important, not what you write. I was confusing the process of writing novels with the process of writing blogs. The words for blog posts appear more or less in their final form, but the final form of my novel is many drafts away. Many of the scenes I’m writing now may not even appear, but I know they’re there. They’ve told me something. They’ve unravelled a bit more of the story.

    I did know that. Why do I keep forgetting it?

Today is Ellie’s day with the dogminder, the day she spends haring to and fro with a gang of other dogs and comes home exhausted and the day I get to myself to do exactly what I want. I planned to do a little walking, a little meditating, and lots of writing. Instead I woke up with a migraine and I know I won’t be good for much. It’s God’s way of telling me to take a break, I suppose.

    Oh dear, I have so much to learn.

Back to bed, and sorry if I’ve been writing rubbish again. My brain’s a little addled today.

Same rainbow, different time.
(Does that make it a different rainbow?)

Making do and mending

A few years ago I dropped a pair of woollen gloves while out walking Dog. A neighbour found them and brought them back.

    ‘I knew they were yours’, she said, ‘because the fingers were darned.’

    Frog and I were brought up in the fifties, a time of austerity and ‘make do and mend’. We both take great satisfaction in adapting, repairing, tracking down in unusual places and prolonging the life of – in his case technology and in my case clothes.

    Frog has sheds full of broken-down machinery chucked out by other people. He can’t bear to see it go to waste and, whenever he has a spare moment, tries to nurture it back to life. (What he does with it then is another question and a small bone of contention between us.)

    I don’t exactly have sheds full of clothes but I do have the aforementioned chest - of bits of material, sewing gone wrong, and worn-out garments that could conceivably be reused in some other guise . . .

. . . not to mention a drawer full of bits of cord cut from posh shopping bags (that I use in projects such as the caftans I make for Frog), a ragbag, two crates of  old bed-linen, curtains, rugs and tablecloths that live under the spare-room bunks, and a suitcase of clothes I’ll never wear again but can’t bear to move on such as the psychedelic-patterned orange-and-pink trouser suit I made in my teens . . .

and the purple-and-black-striped lurex dress and jacket I wore in my twenties.

    I may also have mentioned that I’m tall. This means that I can hardly ever get clothes to fit. Either I have to buy men’s clothes which is depressing or I buy women’s and adapt them.

    One of my ruses is to combine two short t-shirts to make one long one. As you can see from the picture at the beginning of this post, the top and the bottom don’t usually match, but no one has ever commented on this particular eccentricity in my dress. Perhaps I am abetted by the current (or maybe not so current) fashion for wearing two or more t-shirts on top of each other. As you can also see, I sometimes extend arms as well.

       Mostly I use up old t-shirts for the extra bits, but I didn’t have anything appropriate for my current project, a white shirt. Luckily I found a size 20 white t-shirt in Sainsbury’s sale rail for £1.12p. More than enough material. What a find! (Even if non-PC.)

The work-in-progress

   
You might think from these pictures that pink and purple are my favourite colours. Actually, they're my second-favourite colours. Emerald green is my first but it's hard to find. I do have a lovely emerald-green t-shirt but sadly it's starting to go into holes now. It's a man's t-shirt so I took in the chest and the arms, and it has the word 'bollocks' on the back so I have to wear it inside out. I acquired it when I was helping my sister-in-law clear out her wardrobe. It was one of her chuck-outs. Another lucky find!

Brindle

The following is a slightly edited extract from my autobiography. It's about Brindle, our first dog, a spaniel/labrador cross ruled by her stomach and virtually untrainable.

    I’m not sure why I’m publishing it here, now, but it came to me while I was showering this morning, perhaps as a result of yesterday’s post (in which I mentioned the words that arrive in the head, seemingly automatically).

    Anyway, for what it’s worth, here it is.

 ‘In front of you,’ said Cheryl, ‘you will see some stairs. Climb the stairs and you will see a door. Your spirit guide is waiting for you the other side of the door. Go through the door . . .’

    Cheryl was leading half a dozen of us through a visualisation in order for us to meet our spirit guide for the first time.

    Nothing much happened to me that evening but the next day when I was out walking and sat down for my usual meditation I decided to try the visualisation again on my own.

    To my astonishment, even though I had no vision of a person, information flooded into my mind in response to my questions. I asked questions about everybody – Frog, me, my parents, friends, relatives – and about Brindle.

    ‘She was human in her previous life,’ said my informant, ‘but reincarnated this time in dog form in order to learn continence and obedience.’

    I couldn’t keep up with the information, I started to doubt it, I grew a little alarmed at what was going on, and the communication stopped. When I got home however I passed on to Frog the news about Brindle. I wasn’t quite sure how he would take it, whether he would scoff, but he surprised me, accepting it without question and summing up the situation in his usual pithy way.

    ‘Well, she hasn’t learnt much of either,’ he said.
    The year before Brin died I was working frantically on New Age Encyclopaedia. The project was much bigger than I had anticipated and I’d had to ask the publisher to extend the deadline by three months. Even so, I was still pushed. Then Brin fell ill. She looked drunk. She couldn’t walk straight and she kept being sick.

    ‘A stroke,’ said the vet.

    'Please, please, don't let her die,' I prayed.
    I didn’t have the time or the energy to deal with her death at that moment.
    She rallied, climbing the stairs with her legs collapsing underneath her, getting back to her normal routine within a few days.

    Her last few months coincided with a foot and mouth outbreak when the countryside was out of bounds. She and I trudged the lanes. She was deaf now as well as disobedient so I had to keep her on a lead. If she had run into a field I wouldn’t have had a hope of getting her back and she might have been shot.
    She didn’t like the situation any more than I did. She would stop in the middle of the road and look at me.

    ‘Why are we doing this?’ her eyes said. ‘I’m an old lady now. I’d much rather be at home.’

    ‘I’m sorry,’ I would reply. ‘We’ve got to get our exercise and it’s as far now to go home as it is to go on.’

    Frog and I went on holiday to a Greek island, leaving Brindle with neighbours. Because of a storm we couldn't get off the island at the end of our holiday and it looked like our return was going to be delayed at least three days. Ben, our neighbour, sounded worried when I phoned him.
    'I just hope Brindle will last,' he said.
    Eventually we made it home and the next day Frog and I took Brindle out for a walk. This was most unusual as normally I went out alone.

    Halfway up the steep lane behind the house, she collapsed. She couldn’t move, her tongue was hanging out and she was panting. Frog raced back down the hill to get the car so that we could take her home, while I waited with her by the side of the road.

    Thank goodness Frog had been there, I thought. What would I have done on my own? I had no phone. I couldn’t carry her. I would have had to leave her alone in order to go and get help.

    Back home we laid her on her bed and called the vet. Because of the panting we thought she was hot so we put a fan on her while we waited.

    When the vet arrived he looked serious.

    ‘It’s a pulmonary embolism, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘There’s no hope. She’s slowly suffocating.’

    Brin got up and staggered outside only to collapse again on the grass. We followed her and watched the vet administer the injection. As the plunger went in I saw her spirit burst from her body like a puff of steam and streak away northwards over the shed. It couldn’t wait to leave.

She had waited for me to finish my book. During the foot and mouth crisis she had walked round the lanes with me even though she hadn’t wanted to. She’d waited for Frog and me to get back from holiday. She’d made sure we were both there when she collapsed.

    Perhaps, in the end, she did what she came here to do.
    

Photograph by Sam Baker http://www.sambakerphotography.co.uk/

Dreamtime

I wake as it gets light, feeling refreshed and relaxed. I have nothing planned for today, nothing I have to do. I didn’t have to lie awake in the night making lists. I don’t have to leap out of bed, already worried about how I’m going to fit everything in. Daytime doesn't stamp on Dreamtime and tell it it's worthless. Instead, it wraps itself around Dreamtime, keeping Dreamtime’s riches safe.
    I put on my fluffy pink dressing-gown and go down to the kitchen, Dreamtime's secret warmth inside me. Something good is going to happen today but I can’t remember what it is.

    Frog and I have breakfast in bed as usual but today we take our time, chatting about Life past, present and future.

    Ellie is now perfectly trained. She doesn’t whine at the bottom of the stairs, impatient to be off out, expecting me to entertain her every moment of the day. She doesn’t chase sheep either or jump up at people and cover them in muddy paw prints. I can walk where I like and meditate while I walk and think about my writing rather than about her and the mischief she might be up to.

    The wind is westerly today so I don’t hear or smell the motorway. Actually, now I come to think of it, the motor car is defunct. Vanished. Gone to meet its maker in the sky. Silence reigns and the air smells sweet.

    Much of the countryside has reverted to nature and Ellie and I ramble freely through woods, beside streams, along overgrown hedgerows, across heaths and moorland, past ruined cottages covered in ivy. We meet plenty of animals but none of the human variety.

    My mind takes off, a hot-air balloon released from its moorings, and words start to clatter into it like telex messages. I get out my notebook and pencil and write them down as I walk. I don’t judge them and I don’t panic when they stop. I know that I only have to take a few more steps and the next lot will be ready.

   Because I myself am creating, I feel part of the creativity all around. The Great Spirit is speaking to us all. I can hear it in the birdsong, see it in the wind that moves the grass. I am not an alien any longer, an interloper who can only destroy. I belong. I am good.

    When I get home it is dusk. Frog has lit a fire in the sitting-room. We sit beside it and watch the sun setting behind the hill. We know that we will live forever.



Me (right) and two friends, all dressed up.
(Thanks to Chris for unearthing the picture.)



My big fat Greek cardigan

This post is for Nina (http://www.ninafenner.blogspot.com/ ) – and of course for anyone else interested in the minutiae of customising clothes.

    About fifteen years ago while on holiday in Greece I bought a cardigan, hand knitted in wool from Greek mountain sheep with wooden – olive wood? – buttons.

I loved its colours – bright purple with emerald green – but not its shape. It stopped in tight ribbing just below stomach and bum, and made me look as if I was about to give birth. Never mind. I could probably alter it.

    If I’d been my sister or my mother I would have unpicked the bottom and reknitted it but knitting is not my forté and I didn’t have the confidence. I could see at best an awful ridge where I’d tried to pick up the stitches or at worst the entire garment unravelling. Over the next few years I tried various other solutions, like stretching the ribbing or knitting an insert for the sides, but nothing worked. I was going to have to be brave.

    All the way round the cardigan above the ribbing I sewed a piece of tape, and above that I sewed another piece. I then cut between the tapes all the way round. Phew. The ribbing was off.

    I then folded up the bottom of the cardigan, using the tape to make a neat(ish) hem, and tried the cardigan on. Wonderful. It fitted much better.

It was still lacking around the neck area however. I like interest in the neck area. It disguises the fact I have no bust. And I still had a long strip of ribbing that I didn’t want to waste. Brainwave. I would use the ribbing to make a collar.

    I did, and it worked. The tape already along one edge of the ribbing disguised the join. I used the whole length of ribbing and it fitted around the neck perfectly so you can see how tight it was around the hips.

I wore the cardigan every day during the cold spells of the last two winters. As well as being wonderfully warm and cheering, it felt just right, like mine now, and every time I put it on I admired my handiwork.

Afraid I'm not going to pose with the cardigan on.
I haven't got the hang of self-portraiture yet and my hair needs washing.

   

Sorry, I’m sounding smug. Perhaps I’d better tell you about the chest I have of sewing that didn’t work. But at least the material can be cannibalised and used to adapt other garments.