Where I read

At the weekend someone asked me when I read short stories - they felt that a short story wasn't satisfying enough when they sat down in an armchair and pulled out a book, so they never read them. I thought about it and here's my answer:

I leave books of short stories and poetry around, so that if I have an urge, or ten minutes spare, I can pick one up and read. I can then carry the poem or story with me in my head.

This seems to me to be the best way of reading such intense and juicy things as poems and short stories. I need space in my head after reading one so that it can soak in, and so that I can think about it. It takes a truly stunning story or poem to stay fresh in my mind if I read another one straight after it.

So here's where I read:


in bed

in the kitchen

on the blue sofa








on my way out of the living room

in my office, when I should be working







no comment







in the living room (this is The Pile of books waiting to be read)

 back in my office

and there's always a book in my bag, just in case there's a nice little gap when I'm out.

A new look for ... February

You've no idea how long it took me to create this new look for my blog. The old one was fine and rather cosy with its jolly picture and bright colours. It did look a bit dated though so I set myself the task this week of creating something a bit more grown up.

Given the title of my blog it seemed obvious that I should take a photo for the header lying on the floor below our wall of bookshelves.

It took ages to get the shelf lined up more or less straight in the picture. And even longer to work out how to stop the template creating a mad tiled effect all over the top of the page.

I also had to resist the temptation to start reading all the books I'd pulled out so that they were visible from below.

All in all it was a pretty pleasant way to spend a wet afternoon. Back to work today though.

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.

Photographers but no photos

I'm definitely an amateur photographer, and not a very good one at that. I use a point and click camera, and can never remember the important things like depth of focus, so my photos are pretty much the result of luck.

Because I sometimes get to work with photographers, I know that a good photo is almost never down to luck. Though being in the right place at the right time helps, you also need to have a great eye, amazing reflexes if things are on the move, and lots of technical knowledge. Good knees are handy too - they all seem to spend a lot of time crawling about on the ground.

It's not about the camera - a decent photographer will take a fabulous shot with my camera phone and I'll take an utterly unmemorable one with the very best equipment.

I tremble whenever an ill-advised editor hands me a camera and asks me to take the photos myself - last time that happened was at a conference, and I was expected to take photos of people chatting over coffee, but the only lens they gave me on the huge and complicated camera was a vast telephoto so I spent the coffee breaks pinned against the back wall of the hotel trying to get far enough away from my targets.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the websites of four photographers I've worked with and whose work I really like. Mike Pinches and I have done lots of work for Sense (the deafblind charity) together, and have just finished a feature which I'll be shouting about here in a few weeks, I hope. He's quiet and calm, perfect attributes in a photographer, I'd say. Just take a look at his portraits.

Mike's assistant on our photo-feature was Mark Cocksedge. He's also just assisted at the The Blue Oblique shoot of David Hockney for the RA - and his own work's great too. I love his Sunday league football refs especially.

Steffi Pusch is a quite different kind of photographer. Where Mike and Mark's work is clean and bright, Steffi likes to muddy the waters. Her shots are moody, full of hidden elements, emotional. She often works with a pinhole camera, making complex images. She and I have been collaborating on an illustrated version of my story The Swimmer which The Old Stile Press is bringing out this year. I love her portraits, but perhaps the photos of hers I love most are her series, Soul Flowers.

Roelof Bakker came to me via The Swimmer too, which he read and liked, so he asked me to write a story to go with one of his photos - a great treat. He has some fabulous photos of Dennis Severs House on his site, which reminds me that I want to go there this year.

It seems a bit strange, talking about photographers, but showing none of their pictures.But there's a reason for that - their photos are their work, and they're all copyright and I wouldn't dream of infringing it. So you'll just have to go to their websites, I'm afraid. Sorry.

David Hockney's purple trees

I went to see the new  David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy last week and in a way all I want to say is, 'Go and see it! It's amazing!'

But that's not terribly thoughtful or reflective. Maybe I find it hard to think of something careful to say because Hockney's new paintings have such an immediate impact - I didn't stand there thinking about them, dissecting his technique, or his repeated symbols of roads and hills, though they're there to be considered. I simply relished the experience of looking - it felt as though Hockney and I had set out on a sunny day on our bikes to explore the East Yorkshire landscape, and whenever we saw something beautiful or surprising, we'd stop, and while I looked at the view, he'd whip out his paints and capture it then and there.

In the exhibition there's one wall of thirty or so pictures, hung en masse - they cover the wall, and they're brilliant, in the sense of shining out at you. The colours are bright, vibrant, and often not at all realistic - but they are what you see when you're out there in a landscape. Hockney has painted the landscape we see, not its photographic image - and that's why I stood and simply grinned in recognition at his painting of Garrowby Hill, with its unfeasible drop and crimson fields - and why the log pile in Winter Timber is perfect in orange, next to its purple tree trunk.

By co-incidence, but proving Hockney's genius perfectly, a couple of days before I saw the Hockney, I took some photos in my own Wealden landscape.
 

They're pretty accurate - it was a cold day, mist was hanging in the bottoms, lining the hillsides. They're not bad pictures - but they in no way capture the joy of being there in the landscape. That's what Hockney does. His paintings are all about that feeling in your gut when you turn a corner and there's the stump of a tree sitting in a flash of sunlight - or when you puff up a hill, turn round at the top and look back down at the vast space laid out below you - or when you walk the same lane every day, and know every bush and every clump of grass, and the day the hazel catkins open, you smile because spring's on its way.

I bought some postcards from the exhibition to remind me of how happy it made me. I could never afford a Hockney for my own wall - I'll just have to look at my postcards and go for a walk instead.

What I'm reading: Titus Groan

I've just decided to keep a list of everything I read this year on a page on this blog - there's the link to it, over on the right. It really is just a list - it could get completely out of hand if I were to try and comment on everything I read. So I'll be strict. A list it is.

But I have to say that I've just finished Titus Groan, which I bought because there was so much written about it last year, and I coveted the new illustrated edition. Having bought it, I persuaded my friends that they should read it too, so that we could discuss it in the pub.

So I owned a new hardback book (a rare event indeed), and had committed to read it by this Saturday, when we're all getting together to talk about it. And I have to admit that had I borrowed the book from the library, and never mentioned it to anyone else, I probably wouldn't have finished it.

It reminds me of those worlds we used to create as children out of mud, and sticks, and leaves - complex landscapes with houses, castles and rivers, through which we would move our little plastic people - cowboys and indians, soldiers, knights - making them fight, track each other, sleep and die, on a whim. Peake's characters feel no more real to me than our plastic knights with their broken swords. He almost entirely reveals their character through their names and physiques (Swelter, the vastly overweight cook; Flay, the dried up twig of a servant) - apart from a joyous and surprising interlude mid-way when several characters are given internal monologues. They're as quickly tidied away again, and we're back to characters being moved about the castle and landscape, their author's fingers only just invisible.

And blimey, it's over-written - here's one small example, from two thirds through the book, as Keda walks through the landscape:

Between the path she walked and the range of mountains was a region or marshland which reflected the voluptuous sky in rich pools, or with a duller glow where choked swamps sucked at the colour and breathed it out again in sluggish vapour. A tract of rushes glimmered, for each sword-shaped leaf was edged with a thread of crimson.

It's magnificent in a way, but there's only so much of this dense, adjective-strewn writing that I can take (or enjoy, at least), and this is the way Peake writes almost all of the time.

And yet I'm glad I perservered. It's been an experience. It was like going back to live again in my childish worlds where the physical landscape had a huge and unknowable strength and power and potential for magic and surprise. Where an earl could perfectly reasonably turn into an owl. Where a tower could be evil. Where a doctor absolutely should be called Prunesquallor. I'm not sure I'm ready for part two yet, though. I've promised myself a nice little short story or two first. Preferably of the lean type.

Mumma's big old cookiebook

I'm not a hoarder (hmm, maybe I am when it comes to books), but I've just spent a peaceful couple of days at the kitchen table with my recipe book and a cardboard crate of loose recipes. Some of them have been there for more than fifteen years - and every time I opened my office cupboard they looked at me accusingly. It was time to sort them out.

The summer before I left for university, I sat at my mum's kitchen table copying my favourite recipes from her handmade book into my own new blank one.


That was thirty years ago, and I still use it all the time - I've added recipes from friends, clippings from the paper, and I've written notes all over it: 'Isobel made these for Mum's birthday - really good.', 'A 17lb turkey took 51/2 hours!', 'half this!'. Almost every recipe is a reminder of a meal, a close friend, or a brief acquaintance. There's elderflower champagne, from someone I worked with for a year or so, with whom I'd admired that spring's frothy crop of flowers. A boyfriend wrote a handy conversion table on the inside back cover. My daughter made a thick cardboard cover to protect the book, and wrote 'Mumma's BIG old cookiebook' on the front. The oldest pages are held together with enough drips of butter and dollops of cake mix to sustain a whole family should we ever get desperate.

This is more than a recipe book - it's a record of my whole adult life, from student (stuffed heart, anyone?), to earnest vegetarian twenty-something (soyabean curry - still not a top favourite, I have to admit), our early years of penniless marriage (lots of potatoes and lentils), small children (Dutch pancakes for after school - though a drink and a biscuit was more likely if I'm honest), family Christmases (just how many potatoes and sausages do fifteen people eat?), increasingly large children (lots of potatoes again, and even more pasta), to today - I've just pasted in a recipe for strawberry meringue roulade, in the optimistic hope that next summer I'll (a) have some strawberries left after the mice have ravished the veg patch and (b) have time to make something so frivolous. There are three blank pages left in the middle, so I've bought a new book - volume two is on its way.

Even better, last summer, my son and I sat down at the kitchen table, and together we began his recipe book. He took it with him to university this September and he tells me he already has a stack of recipes from his flatmates which he'll stick in one day ...