Writing displacement activity #99

This is a wobbly photo of my homemade (can you tell?) poster for Wednesday's storytelling.

It's not as wonky in real life (the edges curled up and made it look lopsided when I took the photo) and the colours are much much lovelier, I hope. Indeed, if I squint and turn the lights off I can almost persuade myself it has a touch of sub sub sub Rothko about it.

That's an accident - it's actually supposed to be a picture of something in the story.


The poster's to take the place of costume, trumpets, props and general loud announcements that if you step into the Duke of Cumberland between 3 and 7pm, I'll tell you a ghost story.

Both poster and story are low key, but rather scary, I hope.

I practised telling the story today as I cycled into town, gathering some strange looks from the waiters smoking outside the High Rocks inn, and the old lady on the path by the fair ground. Sorry guys - hope I didn't give you nightmares.

I'm telling stories live this summer

If you're anywhere near Whitstable, Gillingham or Forest Row this summer, you can come and hear me telling stories. I've put links up on my new 'Where you can see me' page over there on the right.

Next week I'm telling a kind of ghost story at the Oyster Festival. I've completely rethought it after ten days away on holiday - same story, new way of telling it. I tried out my original on my family as we sat over drinks. Reading to them made me realise that I'd written something that works on the page, but was really slow as a live story.

So I'm going to be brave. I'll let go of the comfort of reading and tell the story as I would if I met you in the pub. Which is, after all, what I'm doing.

See you in the Duke of Cumberland

The ghost of a story

Where do stories come from? It's something people often ask writers, and mostly our answer is that we don't know - which is probably rather frustrating to the questioner.


I've been writing a ghost story over the last couple of weeks. I used to be terribly afraid of ghosts when I was a child, and though I would read any book, every book, I learnt to avoid ghost stories. I still do - even the thought of re-reading The Turn of the Screw makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

I'm not sure, then, why I wanted to write one. But I think it simply seemed the best way to tell the story which had been preoccupying me. I've a life-long fascination with floods. My father was the river engineer when I was a child, and one of my earliest clear memories is of driving through the 1968 flood as it swept through Tonbridge. For years I lived near rivers, and being cut off by floodwater was part of the rhythm of my life. But I always lived above the river, up hill, beyond the hundred year flood line. I've never been flooded or in danger. (Though I have been cut off, and the Medway did swill around the rusty floor pan of my car most winters for years - it's most unpleasant when water swooshes from the rear footwell to the front and up your legs because you've driven through a flood, and the water hasn't had time to drain back out through the rust holes before you go down hill. Just saying.)

This new story is about the 1287 flood which wiped out much of the coastline of eastern England. It was caused by a storm surge - opposing winds drove down the North Sea from Scotland, and up from the Channel, pushing its shallow waters before them. The water had nowhere to go but the low-lying land of East Anglia and north Kent.

That flood moved the coastline inland. That's a dry statement for something so dramatic. There were people living on the land that vanished.

I wondered what happened to those people, and I couldn't find any mention of them. So I wrote a story. I don't know why I wanted to tell it, but it's been itching at me for ages and I'm glad it's out there on the page now.

I'll be reading my story at the Whitstable Oyster Festival on 25 July, more or less where it's set so if you're in the area, come along and say hello. I'm part of the ReAuthoring Project so we'll be a whole bunch of writers bringing you Whitstable-flavoured treats.

Oh, and if you look closely at the map above, you'll see a place where the sea and the estuary meet marked 'The Spit'. It's neither sea nor land, and is, I think, now only visible at the lowest tide. That 'I think' is crucial  - I'm not sure because I've only been to Whitstable once, and I don't know its sea or tides. The story I've told is fiction. I made it up.  (But here's a rather nice video by Henrietta Williams of people fishing on the Spit - it's a magical place, where I'm pretty sure there's a ghost or two when the light and the tides are right.)

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.

Jubilee

Here's what remains to me of the jubilee - one slice of strawberry macaroon cake going soft in the fridge.

I imagine the Queen's kitchens are heaving with leftovers - what do they do with them? Or do the servants chew on cucumber sandwiches for weeks, until they're so dry only the swans will eat them?


I wonder if the Queen's ever wanted to blend in with the rest of us. Would she be freaked out to find herself in the park in my village, sitting on a blanket next to me and my neighbours, drinking Pimms, and watching the world go by with no one noticing her?

I wonder if I had more fun than she did?

Buttercups for all on the no 9 bus to Hammersmith

Here's a shaky experimental video from my iPod, taken early this morning in the field above Ashurst. Apologies for the quality - it's my first video. I've edited it, in as much as I've worked out how to cut the section where I peer into the lens wondering if it's filming, and I eventually figured out how to turn the picture the right way up too. That's quite enough for today.

My walk was a joy after a hot day in London yesterday, which was fun but didn't involve any buttercups - there was, however, lunch with my photographer friend Steffi as we watched the world go by outside Southwark cathedral, followed by a visit to the very strange Antiquarian Bookfair at Olympia. It's full of stunning ancient maps and books, smart suits and money. It also gives a corner to people who make beautiful books today, and we were there to see Frances from Old Stile Press - it was a real pleasure. I'm also deeply honoured to find that The Swimmer sits alongside poetry by Ted Hughes and Philip Gross.

Anyway, London was hellishly hot yesterday, especially the no 9 bus from Green Park to Kensington Olympia. For all those who have to travel on her daily, here are some buttercups.

Hand-written landscapes

Last weekend I went down to Hastings, to make some sound recordings of the sea

but when I got home I found that despite getting drenched in spray, all I managed to record was the wind blasting across the microphone - no trace of the crashing waves, gulls, or crunching feet on pebbles.

If I sit by the sea for long enough, its size begins to overwhelm me. At Hastings, the boats set to sea from the beach as there is no harbour, so when the sea's too much I look instead at the boats pulled up on the shingle. How can something this human, this fragile, survive in the waves?

I've been going down to Hastings since I was a small child, and it has found its way into my writing - both as the almost setting for my short story, The Flotsam Cafe - and as something more subtle. Perhaps it's become part of my character. Down on the Strade I'm reminded how close to the edge we live in Britain - of land, and familiarity, of safety.

I'm glad the British Library has decided to recognise literature and place in its new exhibition, Writing Britain. I spent a happy afternoon there this week, and it confirmed my strong feeling that place is central to our writing, from the Green Man and John Barleycorn through the vast body of writing inspired by industrial energy and wastelands and cities, to Ted Hughes' eel poem 'Catadrome' - new to me, and a joyful discovery. I was there for almost three hours and could have spent longer easily - though it was frustrating that the light had to be so low over many of the manuscripts, and that so many authors treasured paper so much that they wrote in minuscule script which I simply couldn't read.

And scripts abounded - right up to Graham Swift's handwritten Waterland, and McEwan's manuscript for On Chesil Beach. No typewriters or PCs for them - there were the words as they flowed from their hands, their inky hills and valleys mapped out on the page.

I write with a pen when I'm beginning a piece - but can't imagine writing a whole novel by hand. I'm too impatient once I get going. Maybe I should experiment with resisting my impatience, writing at my hand's speed?