On the significance of putting on my purple cardigan

I have just put on my Writing Cardigan. I don't really have writing fetishes - I can write anywhere, any time. I like to have coffee, but it's not essential. In the past I've written daily while the potatoes or pasta boil for dinner. I've written a whole scene in a cafe in the half hour before an appointment with a funeral director. I've dictated dialogue into my phone in the middle of the woods. But I do love my Writing Cardigan. It's old, bobbly, purple and growing new holes every year, and it brings me great comfort and warmth on this slightly autumnal late August morning.

It tells me that I am settling in for the long haul, and that I'm not going to leave the house today.

It reminds me that I love writing, and inside my head is a good place to be, even if it's messy and tangled sometimes, and the work is difficult and I may have to try many, many different ways of writing some of this book to make it the best it can be. I'm happy here, and lucky to have my Purple Cardigan, and this work.

I put my Purple Cardigan on today because I'm deep into a big rewrite of my novel. I'm stripping out a major plot element that was right at the time, and now it isn't. The book's going to be massively better off without it

When I look at the manuscript on which I've marked all the changes to make, I'm fine. Every post-it marks a cut, a change, or a scene to write and it's a lot, but it's amazing that I have this chance to make my book even better, knowing that in a year it will be published, and I'm so glad to be separating out the wheat from the chaff.

If you've ever done that for real - separating wheat from its chaff - you'll know that it's really satisfying. It's also ridiculously time consuming if you do it grain by grain, by hand, which is what I'm doing in my novel right now.

But I'm writing every day - from breakfast till lunch - and that's amazing after so many years of cramming it into the edges of my life.

Putting on my Purple Cardigan is a signifier to myself that I'm lucky, and deeply happy to be taking the time I need to do this work.

Slow Medway: finding the river

This, though I'd be amazed if you can tell, is a sketch of the patterns on the surface of the River Medway where the water surges fast just below the weir at Chafford and splits around a small grassy island. It makes so many different shapes and movements in one short stretch of water - I was glad I'd forgotten my phone because it made me really look at what the water was doing. Though I'd no idea what was happening beneath the surface - I was tempted for a moment to jump in and feel it for myself.

I made the sketch last Sunday, huddled against a pillbox out of a searingly bitter wind, in celebration of something truly amazing.

I've been given an Arts Council grant to write a book. I still can't quite believe it. My book's about the River Medway, my slow journey down it from my home to the sea, how my life has been touched by the river ever since I was a baby, and how I'm still not sure whether I have any right to lay claim to it. 

I've been thinking about memory, place, identity and time for a while now. My Dad was the River Engineer, but his memory has flowed away, leaving only faint marks where once he had such deep knowledge and love for the river. 

I've lived near the river for much of my life - sometimes on its banks, sometimes just over the hill. I'm aware of it, always checking its level when I drive over a bridge, noticing the saturation of the soil, swimming in it every summer, paddling up and down it all my adult life, almost drowning in it one January, finding my deepest calm when I slip into its olive, silty waters.

And yet. I'm never sure what the river means to me. I've never been sure if I belong. It was my Dad who was the engineer who had to manage the horrific floods of 1968. My husband is the elite canoeist. Others know far more than I do about the river's ecology. Everywhere I go there are Keep Out signs.

What does it actually mean, to feel you belong somewhere? How would I know if I belong? Does anyone? Can we belong to a place?

I've been very slowly travelling down the Medway for the past year, starting from the cattle pond in the field over the road. It's the source of a tiny tributary and it took me a long time to walk the handful of miles to the main river. We were all locked down, and my ME was bad. I'd walk a mile at a time, then come home to rest.

And once I recovered, I was back to work so my Medway journey had to fit into the gaps in my life, as writing always has. But with one email from the Arts Council, I'm liberated. I'm going to spend the next year exploring the river from my tiny tributary to the estuary. (That's my tributary below, turning fast into a bigger stream.) I'll return to places I think I know well, and on out to the tidal reaches and marshes that feel as exotic as anywhere I've ever been. I'll talk and listen to people whose lives are deeply connected to the river. And I'll wander, and wonder, about rivers and people, time and memory.

Slow water: on writing, swimming and time

This year the world slowed down around me, and I slowed too: my body told me it was time to stay close to home, and by mid-summer I was ill enough that walking half a mile was plenty.

But I was looking far beyond the small fields I could wander in. A piece of luck linked me with the artist Ardyn Halter, 3000 miles away in Israel. Together we were asked to explore the idea of A Common Place,  alongside writers and artists from across the world, brought together by the Eames Gallery and 26.

Our pairings were random - our names literally pulled from two hats and called out over Zoom in late June as the heat rose outside and the roads stayed empty. Though the world beyond our doors was closed we were making connections - and the next day Ardyn and I spoke for the first time.

Ardyn lives in Israel and I'm East Sussex, and we didn't know each other's work before that first conversation. How did we begin to find our common place? I'm not sure I remember exactly, but my notes are scattered across the page ... 

WATER

        read the water

strong waves

                            fear of below

different person each time

                                            LAYERS

coming home

what colour is feeling?

maps

memories

joy and chemistry

                        never entering same water twice

Some current had pulled our conversation to the water we share - my local, silty river Medway, and the Mediterranean where Ardyn swims daily before dawn. Since the beginning of this year I've been slowly travelling down the Medway towards the sea - swimming, walking, canoeing my way down the river I've known intimately since I was a baby, to a sea I barely know. That sea is connected to all sea, just as the land beneath my feet here, miles inland, flows into the river and on to the sea. This time of year - mid-December - I can clearly hear the water in the soil trickling into the tiny tributaries that gather over the fields and carry this morning's rain all the way to Israel, maybe, if it doesn't get distracted.

Water is slow, even when it moves fast - the rivers are filling and moving quickly after a week of rain here, but on every bend, there's an eddy, a nook where water pauses. Early sun lifts mist from the fields, carrying the water back into the air. Air, earth, water, all one.

My route down the river has slowed right down. I'm getting stronger and can walk a handful of miles now, but the world outside is closed again - I've almost reached Rochester, but it's out of bounds. So, like the water beneath my feet, I'm trickling slowly, wandering almost at random in the fields, up the hills and down the valleys where the streams gather.

But just look at the painting that Ardyn made, Sea Swim. Isn't it utterly gorgeous? It has all the emotion and sensation of the moment swimmer and sea come together. I love it.

And I have a poem, Flow, written after a summer of slow swimming in cool water on searingly hot days. My one constraint was that it must be 62 words exactly. It grew from rough notes made on a day after a walk along a tiny stream, thinking about tides, and from every swim I've ever slipped into:

A Common Place is at the Eames Fine Art Gallery until 24 December 2020.

On finishing my novel (spoiler: it's set during a pandemic)

Last week I finished the novel that I started in December 2013. Six and a bit years of ups and downs, loss of confidence, moments of great happiness in writing, and finally a manuscript that I've placed in a folder called FINAL.

Trigger warning: this isn't one of my blogs about walking in the fields. My novel is set during a modern viral pandemic.

Seven years ago I had my appendix out and was pretty ill for a while. I was thoughtful about mortality. I read Pepys's diaries in bed each night and was mesmerised by his telling of living through the Plague in London in 1665.  It first appears there on 7 June:

"This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord have mercy upon us' writ there - which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw."

I'd read Camus's La Peste as a student and the diary brought it back. Camus's telling of a town locked down in desperation sits deep in my subconscious even if I no longer remember it in detail. It's one of those books that changes you invisibly.

How would we respond now to such a plague, I wondered?

My characters were clear in my mind from the start: a mother and her 19-year-old daughter who live on the road in their van. The mother is absolutely sure in her convictions, fuelled by anger about modern society. She rejects it all, refuses to engage with anyone except her daughter. I find such people mesmerising and terrifying: I don't know how to handle such righteous rage and tend to hide from it. I wondered what it would be like to be her daughter, trapped in a van in a wood in winter with love and anger.

I read Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and my heart travelled with the people who had nowhere to go but were forced to wander from town to town hoping that someone would leave supplies out for them: no one would let them in.

If such an infectious and fatal illness struck us now, how would the people I live among behave? Would they allow my child to come home, possibly bringing sickness and death? Who would I open my door to?

What would happen to my characters, out on the road? So free and yet so vulnerable?

I began to research plagues and pandemics. I filled notebooks and folders. My shelves filled with jolly titles like The New Plagues.

By 2016 I was wading through papers by virologists and epidemiologists.

They had titles like, 'World invests too little and is underprepared for disease outbreak' (BMJ, 2016; 352: i225).

And, 'Seven reasons we're at more risk than ever of a global pandemic' (CNN, 2016).

And, 'The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready?' (National Academies Press, 2005). (The answer is a resounding no.)

I downloaded the UK's public health plans for a flu pandemic. They never seemed to consider a non-flu pandemic in their planning.

At the top of one set of plans I scribbled: 'BUT IS THIS AN UNDERESTIMATE?'

It was utterly plain to me - with my O level in Biology and a degree in French - that our government was horrifically unprepared for a pandemic, even though it identified a flu pandemic as the number one threat to our country, far above terrorism.

Politics kept winning over science. Our politicians didn't want to invest in public health, or strong infrastructure, or relieving poverty so that people and communities were healthier. They shouted about crime and foreigners and scroungers, and they cut funding to hospitals and social care, and they pushed more and more people into poverty.

Pandemic? Who cares, they effectively said. They ignored what scientists had been telling them for years because it would have meant spending money on things they didn't value.

So when the news came from Wuhan at the start of this year, I knew what was coming. I couldn't do anything about it. I felt helpless. Weeks before widespread panic buying I bought flour, pasta, coffee, oil, tinned tomatoes and chocolate and put them in a box under the stairs. I remembered reading a US epidemiologist who said he had two months' supplies at home and was planning to hide out with his family for as long as it took. Now, of course, two months seems laughable.

I watched the news and kept writing. I was in the revisions by now, sorting out plot quirks and clunky dialogue.

By the time we were locked down, I had an almost final version. One of my lovely readers sat with it in the middle of the night while feeding his baby, waking each morning unsure what was real - my book or the news on the radio.

Last week I read it through one last time.

'My' virus is far nastier than COVID-19. It spreads faster and kills more people. It's carried initially by domestic cats, and it starts right here in the UK. It's entirely plausible and judging by the way our government has responded to COVID-19 - and is still responding right now - we'd be utterly devastated by it.

I'm angry. We knew this was coming. No one can 'beat' a virus, but we could have been prepared. We could have saved so many lives and we still need to.

I'm afraid too. My parents are in their 80s. Their domiciliary carers have no PPE (not necessary, says government advice, though one of the carers is off sick with COVID-19). My son is in the shielded group because he has an underlying health condition. It doesn't make him any less my son, any less valuable. If he catches COVID-19 I may never see him again.

This has been such a strange time. People keep saying that, and it has become a cliche, but it is no less true. I have been happy writing and I am proud of my novel. It's about so much more than the facts of pandemics and viruses: it's about people and how they live together even in the strangest times, and it's about trust and hope.

Hope isn't enough to keep us safe, but it's so important. Here's hoping for better times.

Solitude and writing in Paris

I've just spent a week in Paris, alone, writing and not-writing, and it was difficult and wonderful in equal measure.

I normally write pretty much anywhere I happen to be: I write in my office and in my kitchen, on trains and planes, in libraries and cafés. I'm not bothered by noise much, and I've written stuff I'm proud of while sat alongside my family watching television. So I don't need silence or solitude to write.


But Paris gave me a whole week alone, and I'd been longing for it. It felt wantonly extravagant, and essential.

It was harder than I remembered to be so alone. I spoke to almost no one except to buy coffee and food and one day I didn't speak at all. For a week I had no meaningful conversations: there was no emotional weight to anything that I said or that was said to me.

I missed my family and friends. It was strange and discombobulating to be in a city full of people, not one of whom knew or cared about me.

It might be easy to wonder if you exist if you have to live in such solitude for long.

I can see how appalling loneliness must be.

But for me, this was a brief interlude. And while no one in Paris cared about me, I equally didn't care about them, except in a general kind of way. And it was a huge relief, once I settled into my solitude, to have no responsibility except to myself. How often can any of us say that?

It was a luxury, and I took it seriously. I read, walked, looked at people and buildings and art. I walked more. It felt vital to be out, letting whatever I came across come in.

The very difficulty of being alone seemed to strip the wires of my mind of their usual insulation. I was alert and vulnerable. And being exposed emotionally made me open to the hidden currents of the story I was writing.

I'd been worrying at the story for ages. I knew something was missing, and I even knew what but I didn't know how I was going to write it. On the fourth morning in Paris I woke at five o'clock knowing exactly what to do - an idea came into my mind out of nowhere that transforms and completes the story in just the way I'd been looking for.

I'm sure that extended time alone allows me to find things I don't know are there.

There are small pleasures too that I only see when alone: the rhythms of a café as day turns to night, wisps of song coming down the stairwell as the snow falls in the dark outside, the golden sandals my neighbour left outside his front door.

When I was young, I dreamed of being a poet living in a Parisian garret. I'd have friends, of course, and we'd sit in cafés and laugh and argue about life and poems and friendship, but mostly I'd stare moodily out of my tiny window and write.

This last week, I lived a little of that dream. I didn't look moodily out of the window, because I was enjoying writing so much: that's what I didn't know when I was young. I enjoy writing, as well as finding it terrifying and hard work.

And that's the thing. Last week I felt disconnected from the people around me and alone. It wasn't easy. But I'm glad I didn't spend it in a cosy writer's retreat where I could chat to other writers in the evening - though I've been on retreats like these, and I love them, and would gladly go again. But writing, for me, is also about fear, and risk, and exploration so sometimes I have to get a bit uncomfortable and look at things that aren't beautiful, and to feel a little fear.

As a coda, I found this poem, 'Bryant Park at Dusk', by Geoffrey Brock, which  catches the pleasure of solitude perfectly in his description of a lone woman reading in the park as night falls:  

And what I loved was this:
The way, when dusk had darkened her pages,
              As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,
              Book open on her lap.
Perhaps she was thinking about her story,
              Or the fall air, or a nap.

The whole poem's up on the Poetry Foundation website.

Passing the ball: football, music and writing

 Yesterday I loaded my cello into the car and set off to play Haydn trios for an hour or so with a couple of friends.

That's not us in the picture - we were too busy playing to take a picture. It's the Duke trio, and they're playing Hadyn too.

Anyone who plays this kind of music will realise that my friends were being kind by choosing Haydn - they picked the simplest, most predictable music, the kind where if you get lost it's entirely possible to guess your way back.

Haydn's perfect for me because I'm not much of a musician - but even with my skills we could make good music together.

 I love making music with other people because of its immediacy. You sit down, tune up, and play, and there it is - music!

I remember talking to a wonderful cellist about creativity - and he said that he wasn't creative in the way that a writer is, because he simply plays the notes that someone else has written.

What he said is true, but there's more to it. When he plays, he stirs my soul - he brings his own tone, phrasing and understanding to the piece. When I play with others, it makes me happy to follow that route through the music together. We're creating something that wouldn't exist if we didn't pick up our bows and make a noise.

In lots of ways, playing music with others is a bit like playing football. You need technical skills, you need to understand the rules, you follow a pattern, and you have to play as a team - there's some room for stars, but mostly it's down to collaboration. Great teams have a sixth sense that tells them exactly what the others are doing and what they're about to do.

A game of football or a Haydn trio can be a mess of indivuduals failing to pass, or it can be a beautiful synergy - wonderful to play inside, and almost as good to watch. And it's a thing of the moment: when the players leave the pitch, it's over.

Writing, though, is different. I spent yesterday morning editing one story and beginning another. I'll spend weeks on each before I send them out. I  choose every word on the page afresh, one by one, every time I begin a new story. There are patterns, yes, and there are games I can play, but there's no one there to bounce the ball back, or play the harmony. I'm on my own. But when I've finished, there's a story. It's still in the room after I leave.

That's why I like playing trios, but it's also why I love to write.

Running in the rain

Can you tell? This is a picture of a very happy woman.

I'm soaking wet after running through the woods in the pouring rain and I loved it so much that when I got home I stayed out in the garden - once you're wet, you're wet, after all, and it was delicious to feel the rain running down my scalp as I squelched across the grass.

What a luxury the rain is - I had the woods all to myself. Not even one hardy dog walker was out. Maybe I shouldn't say this in case you all rush to join me in my glorious sodden solitude, but it's beautiful out there - green and juicy, streams running in surprising places, the earth exhaling that special scent of tiny things growing...

... and setting off new ideas in my mind. I'm off now. A story came to me as I ran in the rain this morning, so I'm going to start writing it now.

Hands

I've just finished a story in which hands are important. I'm superstitious about my stories so won't reveal more until (unless) it's published. Sorry about that.

To celebrate, I went into Tunbridge Wells to see Snowdon's In Camera exhibition. It's a collection of his portraits of artists, and what struck me most was the state of the sculptors' hands. I'm quite jealous.

That's my right hand above, squashed into my scanner. If you look closely, you can see two small burns where I caught myself while loading the woodburner.Otherwise, it's pretty much just a hand that's been around for a few years. Writing doesn't scar your hands.

Why am I jealous?


Because the artists gained their scars by pursuing their work unflinchingly. That's how I'd like always to work but if I'm honest, sometimes I do flinch. I always regret it - a story where I've flinched is never as good as one where I've faced up to the sticky messy insides of what made me write it in the first place.


So, from now on, no flinching, no matter what it does to my metaphorical hands.