Looking for clues: five days in London, July 2014

I've just spent five glorious days in London seeing friends, visiting galleries and museums, watching plays and films, and walking and cycling all over the city.

I didn't especially plan what I saw, but here are some highlights - and an emerging theme.

At the Serpentine, Marina Abramovic's 152 Hours uses only her body and the bodies of the visitors to create a work of art.

She asks us to explore the work in silence, often eyes shut. We become highly aware of the people with whom we share the space, and of our own bodies. We have left everything else outside. We have only our bodies and our senses here.

We modify our behaviour - one man jigs and bows to the people around him when he arrives, but no one responds, and gradually he too becomes still.

I am strangely comforted to be tucked into a bed alongside maybe twenty others on identical beds - no one has tucked me in since I was a young child. But tucking in brings not only safety but an agreement to lie still. The bed isn't important, but the stranger's hand is.

At Dennis Severs' House in Spitalfields, there are no bodies except our own.

All we have are the objects left behind by a family of 18th century silk merchants and their descendants. They have, it seems, only just left - we see half drunk cups of tea, an overturned chair, hear a ticking clock.

How much of these people is held in the physical space they once inhabited?

Jennifer Haley's play, The Nether has just opened at the Royal Court (this is their image) and it's uncomfortable to watch. The scenes alternate between two locations. The first is an interrogation room - bleak, featureless and grey - where a young officer questions two men about their involvement in an online world. In this world visitors can have virtual experiences that are as rich and real feeling as reality.

The other location is that virtual world, beautiful and carefully detailed, where visitors may indulge their paedophilia without fear of exposure. As watchers, we feel we are taking part in this world too - and feel compromised because we have chosen to visit a place where terrible things happen.

But we also know that this is a created world, a world that only exists in the mind. And for me as a writer, created worlds are what I make. I defend my right to create worlds as strange and uncomfortable as I want. Is there a boundary over which we should not step? What happens when the virtual experiences we create, and live, become as important to our identity as our experiences in the physical world?

Coda
I'm sure there are intellectual giants who can immerse themselves in such wonderful stuff from dawn to dusk, day after day. Lest anyone thinks this is the kind of person I am, here are some other highlights:

lashings of cake (thank you Zoe for introducing me to Princi and their magnificent and enormous slices after a splendid visit to the National Portrait Gallery)

the joy and freedom of a bike (still a pleasure when it's 29 degrees in the shade because it's way better than a bus or tube)

regular views of beautiful buildings (my very lovely friends lent me their flat and this is what I saw each day as I left and came home - thank you, it was wonderful)

and deep breaths of fresh air and the scent of hot plants in the Chelsea Physic Garden. aaaaaaaahhhhh!

Words come when you're not looking

As some of you will know, I've just started spending every Wednesday writing.

It's remarkably productive, because in the six days between Writing Wednesdays (they're so important that they absolutely deserve capitals), I think about the story I'll be writing the following week. Wednesday morning, I'm ready to get going as soon as I've drunk some coffee.

The kitchen is really clean on Thursdays because wiping down drawer fronts, washing up all the cutlery or scrubbing the fridge helps me to think about the knotty problem I've just come up against in the story I'm writing.

I'm getting fitter too. Yesterday I had a revelation about the end of a story while cycling up a particularly vicious hill. I put it down to lack of oxygen in my brain making it see strange connections.

Doing something that's not writing, but while you're writing, is the best way to see a new angle, hear a resonance, or smell a character who's been hiding in the undergrowth.

And here's another thing I've found out.

Last week I finished a story I've been writing since January. Then I looked at another story that I completed a while ago and realised that I needed to cut the first half of the first sentence. I went back to the first story and found that it needed a few teaks that I hadn't been able to see while embedded in it. I made the changes and sent both stories out - the first in ages. Reading another story helped me to step back from the one I was writing. By coincidence, Adam Marek, whose stories I admire hugely, blogged this week about working on two stories at once and how it helps him to see each more clearly - take a look at how it was for him.

Writing without guilt

This is a happy woman.

I've struggled for years to find time to write my own work. When I've crammed stories and poems into days when other people expected me to be writing copy for them, I felt guilty that I wasn't earning money (or at least probably wasn't - we have to have hope when we write stories that someone might pay to read them). When I wrote in the evenings and weekends I felt guilty that I was ignoring my family.

So I"ve instituted a new thing. On Wednesdays I will write for myself. I'm keeping my diary clear, and I'm being firm with myself and with the people I love. Wednesdays are for me, and I won't spend them cleaning out cupboards or doing the accounts, or soothing anxious brows, or anything except writing or thinking about writing.

Up there, behind the mug, is a woman who's just spent a day thinking and writing, and she feels much better for it.

Reading cure

It's a myth that when you're ill, you catch up on all that reading that's been piling up behind the armchair.

In my book pile there's all sorts of interesting stuff and I've just had a vile cold for three weeks, but I couldn't concentrate at all, so I haven't touched the pile.

On the other hand, I did want to read and I didn't want to read rubbish. I don't lose my critical faculties when I'm ill - I just want to read stuff that's quite straightforward, or so short that I've a chance of staying awake till the end.

So here are some books I'd pick off my shelves for a good friend who's just retreated under their duvet with a nasty bug.

Any Maigret novel by Simenon. They're entirely predictable - everyone assumes the obvious culprit did the crime, but Inspector Maigret sits in bars, watches people, mulls, and then conducts an all-night interrogation in his office, smoking pipe after pipe. It's wonderfully soothing.

This is pure comfort reading - I started reading Maigret when I was at school, and I studied French at university so I could spend a year drinking in ill-lit Parisian bars like Maigret. I never made it to Paris, but I still love the novels.

My comedy comfort-reading equivalent to Simenon is a Jeeves and Wooster novel. I've read them all, and am always happy to tuck myself into one again. It's like eating a bar of milk chocolate in your pyjamas. Sheer indulgence.

Lydia Davis's short stories. 
Short stories are great when you can only stay awake for half an hour, and Lydia Davis's are brilliant - they're hugely varied, though she does have a distinctive deadpan tone, and often surprising. And they're really short, most of them, so you can read one, reread it, and fall asleep thinking about it.

I’ve just reread 'The Cottages', in which the narrator simply describes two old women she knows, and in the gaps between the two descriptions lies some kind of revelation. It's three pages long, and beautiful. Here's the opening:

'She is seventy-nine or so, and on the one hand it's hard to talk to her (she has come to dinner, it's just the two of us; she eats much more than I thought an old lady would ...'

Diaries: when I'm not up to doing anything, it's good to live vicariously and read about what other people have been up to. My ideal diary is one with a bit of self-deprecation, a dry wit, and a seam of anger. Chris Mullins is great for this, and in moments of feeling glum, I also go back to Alan Bennett:

'When I come back from filming - emerge, as Goffman would say, from an intense and prolonged period of social interaction - I feel raw, as if I have in some unspecified way made a fool of myself.' (Filming and Rehearsing, 18 March 1978)

Novels: I've just read Hannah Kent's Burial Rites. What a joy - an old-fashioned novel, with characters you care about and puzzle over, a plot with layers that you never quite know if you're going to understand, and a landscape that I feel I've lived in, so embedded was it in the story. Kent pulled me into 19th century Iceland so entirely that I emerged blinking at the end as if I too had spent a year in the darkness of a turf hut with Agnes. Awesome.

And here's the perfect novel for when you're beginning to feel better, so you can read for several hours without falling asleep. Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency is the huge (738 pages) story of two families in Sheffield over several decades. It has rich characters, a delightful fondness for suburbia in the 70s and 80s, and a wry humour. Here's a joyful snippet from a scene in a supermarket:

'The Tannoy announced a good deal for today only in Gateway, ten pence in the pound off beef mince; a voice so weary with tragedy, it might have presided over the fall and decay of a thousand cities, each of them reducing beef mince by ten pence in the pound as its walls fell.'

Finally, I'd just like to say that Middlemarch is a rubbish book to read when you're ill. I read it recently, because I felt I should, and because I'd given up on it once before. I don't like giving up on books, so I persevered. And when I reached the end I realised that I had read it all the way through before, but had forgotten the whole thing. First time, I was ill with ME, and read it in a brain-dazed state. So now I've read it twice, and don't need to read it again. So there.

Why I keep all my theatre programmes

In my office, I have boxes of programmes - I buy one every time I go to the theatre or an event, and have never thrown any away.

In these boxes are some of the first plays and films I saw as a child 

(The same local panto has been running for at least thirty years and I've been most years. The jokes haven't changed, and it's one of the most immersive theatre experiences I've ever been part of.)



  
and some that still send shivers down my spine years later 

(Willard White's deep, beautiful, ravaged bass voice and the fateful lines, 'Put out the light, and then put out the light' - no one else has ever made me weep so much in this scene.)





 




or which I've seen many times 

(Because the play transformed my understanding of what a writer could say about the meaning of life in two short acts where nothing happens, but everything does.)








as well as some more nights that I can't believe I'll ever forget


(because they were simply breathtaking and exhilarating






or because the writer had created some something truly surprising and beautiful).








Despite my heap of programmes, I quickly forget when I saw a play or a film, and often retain only a vague impression of it, or perhaps a single scene or image.

So to jog my memory, I thought I'd list the plays and films I see on my blog, starting now. Then I thought, why stop there? There's often a strange communication between the books, films, plays and galleries I spend time in, so I'm going to keep a record of all of them.

A key to the images above
The pantomime, every year, the Royal Vic in Southborough
Othello, 1989, Young Vic
Waiting for Godot, 1997, Old Vic
Jerusalem, Royal Court, 2011 (photo, Royal Court website)
London Road, National Theatre, 2011 (photo by Mark Douet)

Retreating to Brisons Veor

Last week I turned away from my world for seven days. For the first time in my life, I took myself from family, home and work purely with the aim of writing. I was allowed to stay at Brisons Veor, a house perched on the very tip of Cape Cornwall, where writers and artists can spend time alone or in small groups. I went alone, and it was wonderful.

It was strange, too. Thirty years ago I lived alone for one year in France and since then I've always lived with other people. At Brisons Veor in December there is no one else around after dark: the coast watchers from the lookout post drove away at 4.00 pm, and the sun set at 4.30, and all I could see from my windows was the red light flashing off Land's End. All I could hear was the waves below, rushing up the rocks and into the cove.

It felt very empty.

But after a few days, it felt right. Each day I walked on the cliffs, I thought, I ate cake, and I let the ideas which have been piling up in the corners of my mind for years come together.

I've wanted to write a long story for a long time. I've had plot, characters, situation and setting jigging about in my mind, all disconnected and jumping out of reach in the short moments I've had to try and pull them towards me.

This week they came together. It will take me months or maybe years to write them into being, but I've started, and I'm very happy.

Thank you Brisons Veor. I hope I'll be back.

On Harrison Stickle I lifted up mine eyes

A couple of weeks ago, we sat on Harrison Stickle and looked out across the Langdale valley towards the south. Beyond the fells of the Lake District we could see a glimmer of sea at Morecambe. It was my birthday, my fiftieth birthday, and it was the right place to be.

I've been climbing the Langdale Pikes since I was a teenager with my parents and brother. I returned with university friends the week after our finals.  My husband and I have climbed them many times, before and after we were married, and then we brought our children.

So here we were again, sitting in a gap in the clouds, without children for the first time in 20 years, eating egg sandwiches, and feeling the wind on our backs, full of rain that would, wonderfully, twist past us and on to the heights of Bow Fell, leaving us in warm October sunshine.

Nothing has changed, though of course much has changed. The same something pulls me back to the fells time and again, and I'm not sure what it is. The getting up a hill is all sweat and aching muscles. There's no way round it. Why do I keep on climbing?

A few years ago we went pony-trekking in the Welsh borders. Just over the road from the stables was a chapel, and inside we found a beautiful window through which we could see a green hillside, and inscribed on it words from Psalm 121: I shall lift up mine eyes to the hills whence cometh my salvation. We had stumbled upon Capel-y-Ffin, where Eric Gill had lived and worked, and on his celebration of the power of the hills to restore.

Gill and God had a complicated relationship, and God and I don't have one, but I know what he meant.