Anniversary cogitations

Tomorrow is the anniversary of this blog.

    I’ve slackened off from it recently because it does, I think, take over the same space in my brain as the novel. In other words, I can’t think about both at once. However, after last Tuesday’s post, I wrote a scene that I was pleased with it. It felt real. It moved me. Scenes like that are rare, much too rare.

    The state of mind that I achieved last Tuesday was, I think, emptiness and it was from that emptiness that a scene swam into my consciousness. That is my current theory anyway. I thought I felt empty today but I haven’t been able to write anything for the novel. Perhaps I have to be empty and desperate.

    And writing the blog post last Tuesday put me in touch with how desperate I felt and helped to empty me out. Ironic.   

    Another factor could be confidence. For some reason, I was always confident about my editing and non-fiction writing. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it or wouldn’t get the work. So of course it all went fairly smoothly. In my memory anyway. Would that I could approach novel-writing in the same way. But I don’t.  

    Frog (who is my main confidant in this peculiar process apart from my sister and you) compares my novel-writing to native ceremonies. The participants don’t know what works, what it is that achieves whatever result they’re after – making some foodstuff or drink, healing, changing the weather and so on – so they stick everything in – dancing, singing, touching rabbits’ ears, imbibing, decorating themselves and their houses etc etc.

     He also says that my creative writing muscle is one I have used little up till now, so it needs strengthening and toning. I just need to keep practising.

    It’s great that he’s so encouraging because I don’t encourage myself. I refuse to believe in this inexplicable urge I have towards doing something I find so difficult, whose rewards – at present – are few and far between, and which can be so painful.

    The trouble is, I don’t know what else to do. It’s the only shape I can see the future taking.

    Which brings me back to the blog.

    I’ve toyed with the idea of joining Facebook, ‘putting myself out there’ and maybe getting lots of new readers, but I’m not sure that I’m ready for that yet. I like the blog’s current intimacy. I don’t want to get addicted to feedback and numbers of friends.

    Maybe when I have something to sell . . . like a finished novel . . . I will think differently.

    In the meantime, thank you loyal reader. I love knowing you’re there.

Wild daffodils in our gateway (planted by me)

In Redslinch wood

I am sitting on dead leaves and stones

[Where is Dog?]

I hear birds
chiff-chaff
I hear the stream

The sun shines on my face

The wind blows through the tops of the trees

and on the back of my neck

I watch the water

always the same

always different

like flame

I want to write
but I can't

All my pains cluster around that point

[Dog is barking]

A strip of rusty iron

like a piece of chastity belt

lies on the edge of the stream

one spike up

I will go home

to an empty house

an empty page

That is what I have created for myself

[Dog arrives

and puts her paw on my foot

She radiates heat

Her underside and legs

are dripping grey mud

She is panting]

I stand up

and shoulder my backpack

I am lost

but I step forward

That is all I can do

A frosty afternoon's walk

Iced puddle

                                                          Ice on the tracks

Fishbone ice

Tantrums

On Friday I had a tantrum. I didn’t feel too bad about it as Frog used to have tantrums all the time. I’m not blaming Frog. It takes two to make a situation and, if Frog’s sins were of commission, then mine were of omission.

    Yes, I know, I’m talking in riddles, but that’s all I’m going to say for the moment.

    I wasn’t brought up to be angry. I do remember however losing my temper occasionally with my four younger brothers and sisters. I had taken it upon myself to look after them all and sometimes it all just got too much. I have a vivid memory of one of my sisters barricading herself in her bedroom and me trying to kick the door down. So I do have a temper - and quite a good one at that.

    So, having not been brought up with anger – not with much emotion at all in fact – I didn’t know how to deal with Frog’s anger. I shut myself off. The angrier he got, the more I retreated, until eventually I would go and hide in another part of the house while Frog would rampage around looking for me.

    One day, I’d had enough. I emerged, squared up to Frog and said, ‘Just stop it.’ Amazingly, he did.

    Now, it’s mostly the dog that Frog gets angry with and, for my part, the fact that it’s a dog rather than a person who’s now bullying me must mean that I’m nearly there. (And I will get to grips with that canine monster, I promise.)

   Anyway, Frog and I – with all our practice – retrieved the situation on Friday and on Saturday I woke up feeling good.

    We used to have a friend (she doesn’t like me any more) who had a theory. It wasn’t good to be too healthy all the time. Sometimes your body needed a wake-up call to get it working – too much alcohol, too much chocolate, not enough sleep. A bit like jumping into cold water, I suppose. Maybe anger, or strong emotions in general, are rather like that too – although there are I know far better ways than tantrums of letting them out.

    Part of the problem was that I’d got myself confused. I’d become stuck on the novel and so I’d thought I wasn’t a novel-writer. I’d started exploring other ways of justifying my existence – a job, a non-fiction project. The non-fiction project didn’t work out and I was stranded.

    Recently I was re-reading Roald Dahl’s brilliant autobiography Boy in which there’s a wonderful section about being a writer. Unfortunately I’ve taken the book back to library so I can’t quote it to you, but it begins something like, ‘In comparison with the life of a businessman, the life of a writer is hell’ – and he’d been both. Every day, you have to come up with new ideas, and every day before you sat down to write you didn’t know if you could do it. ‘No wonder we all drink too much whisky,’ he said.

    I would agree. Maybe hell is going a bit far, but trying to write and not being able to is just about the worst feeling I know. Whether it’s worse than not even trying I’m not sure – and certainly the effect on me of not trying (viz tantrums) is pretty unpleasant. On the other hand, when writing works the feeling is amazing – like love.

    So one of the things we resolved on Friday night was that I was actually a writer after all. I couldn’t escape it. I had to keep trying with the novel.

    And, as were driving to Glastonbury on Saturday morning, I had an idea. The main character of my novel was going to have a tantrum too.

    Yesterday, I manoeuvred her into position. Today I have to send her into the attack.

    Wish me luck.

Nature in the almost-raw

Twenty-four years ago Frog and I were on a train from Exeter to London. As I looked out of the window I saw a mysterious waterway snaking its way alongside and underneath the railway track. It meandered like a river and yet it didn’t sparkle and ripple like a river. It stared back at me, a flat grey mirror almost hidden by an unruly fringe of trees and bushes.

    ‘That looks interesting,’ I said, pointing it out to Frog. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to explore.’

    I was remembering my favourite childhood holiday, when we’d visited the Norfolk Broads and my brother and I had been allowed to go out on our own in canoes and explore the vast deserted network of pools and creeks.

    ‘It’s a canal,’ said Frog excitedly. ‘I’ve always wanted to have a canal boat holiday.’

    We’d been married ten years and yet here was something I didn’t know about him.

    A few months later Frog, Dog (Brindle) and I were ensconced on Eliza Jane, a private boat we’d hired for the week on the Kennet and Avon Canal, which runs from Bristol to London.

    The canal had only just been restored and we were the only boat around. We forged a track through weed-green water like an icebreaker, frequently going aground, partly through our lack of experience and partly because the canal was imperfectly dredged. Leaping ashore was a major operation, involving calculating just where the reeds ended and dry land began, more than often than not ending in soaking wet feet. Once that was accomplished, there was four foot or so of slippery wobbly gangplank to negotiate, something Brindle never really got the hang of. Luckily she enjoyed swimming. At night we could moor up in the middle of nowhere in bulrushes taller than the boat and listen to the calls of the wild.



The canal towpath in wilder times. (Frog and Brindle, 1988.)



On the outskirts of Devizes - only a swan to make a trail through the weed

    Since then we’ve had at least a dozen more holidays on the K & A. We all loved canal-boating. Frog loved the human-sized technology – the steam-powered pumping stations, the hand-cranked locks, the swing-bridges you pushed with your bottom, the boat’s diesel engine that you could fiddle with through a hatch in the deck. I loved being close to nature and being able to walk all day along the towpath more than keeping pace with a boat that only went at two miles an hour. Brindle had a particular penchant for eating anglers’ bait and chasing ducks. Penny loved being with us twenty-four hours a day.

    Year by year however the canal has become busier and more civilised. The shrubs and trees have been tamed. ‘Live-aboards’ (permanently occupied boats) line the banks, with designated concreted or decked stretches for ‘temporary moorings’ (holiday boats). The towpath has become full of litter, and crowds of ‘gongoozlers’ hang around watching the boaters work. Our holiday last year with Ellie was anything but relaxing. Perhaps we needed a new canal.

    On Saturday, we decided to explore the recently re-opened Taunton and Bridgwater. After an excellent lunch at our favourite vegetarian restaurant in Glastonbury (Rainbows End – go through a yellow doorway and up a passage) and a quick dart into Sainsbury’s at Street to check for some emerald green trousers I’d seen in Exeter but not in my size (they didn’t have them), we parked next to a lock and set off up the towpath.

    We had a good walk – Frog only lost his temper with Ellie once – and although the countryside was a little dreary and we could hear the drone of the M5 the canal itself was suitably empty. When we got home I checked the internet for boat hire. Google directed me to a company at King’s Bromley in Staffordshire. Not much good, but I started thinking about the place-name ‘Bromley’, partly because of the suffix ‘ley’ (for more on the intriguing subject of ‘leys’, see my post of 3 July last year) and partly because there was another Bromley near where I was brought up in Kent.

    I looked the name up in my Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names and discovered that it meant ‘the clearing in the wood where broom (gorse) or brambles grow’. Bromley-near-where-I-was-brought-up is now part of Greater London. I don’t remember it as containing even a flash of green. What a lovely name but what a hideous place. I felt a familiar pang. How much we have lost.

     I try not to get on my soapbox in this blog. With a few exceptions, I find it boring when other people do so. I’ve had my fill of protestation (as also explained in a previous post – ‘New age genesis’, 12 April last year) and these days think that positive examples are so much more effective. But I do agree with the speaker on last Wednesday’s ‘4thought.tv’ on Channel 4 that population growth is what we really need to be tackling. Worrying about global warming and biodiversity are luxury-liner-deckchair-rearranging exercises. Governments should be taxing people for having children, not paying them.

    I realise however that this is dangerous ground and that, as someone who never really wanted children, who finds the company of other humans (with the exception of Frog) almost unbearably tiring, and who likes nature in the raw, I could be biased.