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Archived News 2006

December 2006

Two pieces of good news this month:  My friend Kate gave birth to a baby boy, Eric.  And I’ve been commissioned to write a play.

On a more sombre note, I’ve lost the will to drink.  This is a shame as one of the compensations of being a writer is that  it’s acceptable to be drunk quite a lot of the time, even if you are a woman.  You don’t even have to be witty in an Oscar Wilde/Dorothy Parker kind of a way.  In practice, constant quipping while drunk can get on everyone’s nerves.  The best plan is to practice a special sardonic expression and to make sure everyone around you is as drunk as you or more drunk.  When they wake up the next day, they will remember looking over at you and seeing  a wry smile and they will imagine that you were very good company, both witty and intelligent, and that – judging by the hangover – they were merely too oafishly drunk to appreciate your aphorisms, let alone remember them.

Apart from the drinking, there are lots of other reasons to want be a writer, of course – for example,  advancing age is often believed to bring wisdom and is therefore considered an advantage rather than a hindrance.  With writing, there is no biological clock and no body fascism.

November 2006

I just came back from Hong Kong.  I went there for my friend Debi’s wedding.  The wedding was fantastic.It was hot.  I stayed on Lamma Island, where Debi lives.  I walked in the hills.  I went to the beach.  I ate aubergine hotpot and garlicky prawns and minced quail.  I drank too much.  I cried when I left.

I go to Hong Kong often.  I’ve got lots of friends there and I always wonder whether I should live there, too.  But the differences between London and Lamma Island are so great (unsurprisingly, since Lamma is a small rural island in the South China Sea) that it seems the two places can’t both exist; you have to believe in one or the other, relinquishing one reality, the way you relinquish your dreams when you wake up.

There is never a problem about which one to believe in – you believe in whichever place you are in at the time.

Here’s a poem I wrote years ago (right).  It’s a sonnet.

 Neon

You said we’d sit on the hills at night
And write sonnets and look at the neon light
And you took me there, and we looked below,
At Hong Kong Island’s dizzying glow;
Tiny dots, like a code, in yellow and white
And, contemplating leaving home,
I thought that I might
And years later, you told me the light
Was sodium, not neon, and I knew you were right
And as you said it, I also knew
That if I’d sat there on the hills with you
Pen in hand, waiting for the muse
It would have been too dark
To see the page to write

October 2006

It’s autumn, time to start working.  I left school in 1983 but the feeling of the start of a brand new term, a brand new school year is so engrained in me that as soon as the seasons start to change, I start working.*

It also seems like a good time to socialise and invite friends round to dinner.  Whenever I cook, I accidentally find myself serving meals that are chromatically challenged – all beige foods, like roast chicken with mashed potato and parsnips, or all purple foods, or all green.  I’m trying to stop this or at least to stop people noticing this when they come round for dinner.  One trick is to get everyone really drunk.  But that’s an old trick and everyone is wise to it and anyway, I’m usually the only one who is drunk.

Another trick is to distract everyone.  When I lived with my friend Kate, we went through a stage of getting very drunk and rollerblading in the kitchen when people came round. The kitchen was small but our desire to entertain was not.  But now we have Jessie, our new secret weapon and a master of disguise.  All she has to do is appear in the kitchen in one of her wigs and inject a little colour into our lives.

*Then I relax again.

Playing now:
MacArthur Park – Donna Summer

September 2006

Jessie’s trip to join her owner in Thailand – which we’ve been preparing her for by singing ‘One way ticket, one way ticket to the mo-oo-oon’ – (and of course having her vaccinated against rabies as required for her passport) is not to be. She’s just too old. Maybe she’d survive the journey but the vet says the heat would be too much, once she got there.

We’ve embraced her new permanent status in the family by calling her Jessie Smith and planning her funeral so that we are prepared for the inevitable, when it eventually comes. Essentially, she’ll have the same arrangements as me – a brief but touching ceremony featuring the hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (omitting verses two and three) and then her ashes will be tipped into the River Thames from one of the prettier bridges.

Playing now:
Superwoman – Karyn White

Reading:
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew – Bernard Hare
Letters to a Young Poet – Rilke

August 2006

My daughter turned 21 in August.She was born on a palindrome.

I wrote her a poem for her 18th birthday (right).  I was feeling emotional because she hardly spent any time at home.

She’s here all the time now, so I didn’t write her a poem this year.  Anyway, I was too busy transforming the garden into a sort of fairy paradise (below) for her party.

Lauren 21st

Yes, that’s a real fairy you can see in the photo.

Eighteen Years

When you drew pictures of yourself
You drew me
In French homework,
Asked to describe yourself,
You described me
In conversation you mimicked me,
You scolded people who disagreed with me
You quoted me
You laughed at my jokes
I thought life would be like this forever,
Or at any rate, I hoped it would be
When we travelled the world together
When you were young,
When we were both young, actually,
We collected shells on the beach
We shouldn’t have done; it disturbs the ecology
But anyway we collected them and brought them home
And I kept them for the memories

You’re rarely here, these days
But do you remember
That time in November,
When we put up the fairy lights?
And they wouldn’t hang right?
We smashed half the bulbs, by mistake,
And we laughed all night.  Remember?

You came home a few days ago,
And looked for the shells in the shed, where they’re kept
You tipped them in your lap and examined them
Sitting in the sunshine on the back door step
I went and sat next to you
So we could look at the shells together
And when you went away again, I cried
Until it felt like I’d been crying forever