In which I lose my appendix and find a flurry of flowers (and a chilli)

OK, so this isn't my appendix - when I came round from the anaesthetic a couple of weeks ago and the surgeon thrust a photo in my face of what they'd just chopped out of me, I wasn't entirely with it. All I remember is  something blurry and alarmingly multi-coloured. Various people have expressed their disappointment that I didn't ask to keep the offending gangrenous organ in a jar. I'm sorry. I hope this half-mouldy chilli from the bottom of our fridge is an appropriate substitute.

Since my surprise visit to hospital, I've been convalescing. What a splendid word. For the first time I can remember, I've lain in bed or on the sofa doing absolutely nothing. I didn't really have thoughts either, just vague observations - it's raining again, there's the starling in the roof above my head, I wonder what's for dinner. And once a day I'd walk slowly round the garden, stopping every few steps to gaze at the unfurling leaves on the dog rose, the frog spawn wiggling and then hatching, the blue tit starting its nest in the tree by the kitchen. Then I'd head back to the sofa.

I'm recovering now, and yesterday I went for my first proper walk. I  headed out along Burrswood drive and here's what I found along its verge - spring flowers exploding into action, all at once, an awesome display of what's been waiting all these weeks. They're not great photos - I took them on my phone - but I just had to record finding sixteen different flowers in a few hundred yards.

 

If you're wondering what they all are, here's a list, reading from left to right, top to bottom: wood anemone, cuckoo flower, daisy, violet, daffodil, dandelion, dead nettle, wild strawberry, ground ivy, fritillaries, cuckoo flower again, hawthorn, stitchwort, bluebell, lesser celandine, marsh orchid, primrose, and one final shot of fritillaries, dandelions and violets.

I think I rather fancy being a Victorian lady who reclines on a sofa and sketches wild flowers all day. It won't last, but I'm making the most of this strange and luxurious disconnection from my everyday life.

Writing the London Marathon

I’ve never run a marathon, but I’ve written one and my piece about the finish line of the London Marathon went live at 26 Miles today.

As the crow flies, Greenwich to The Mall is only a few miles. Back in the 17^th century Pepys used to walk it often to do deals in the royal shipyards (and stash a little more cash in his personal coffers). On Sunday, though, thousands of runners will take an all-round-the-houses-pubs-docks-and-offices 26 miles and 385 yards to get from A to B.

Rather them than me. I had way more fun writing the marathon than I would have running it.

As part of the 26 Miles project I’m the last of 27 writers who’ve each examined a mile of the route and, with a collaborator, created something about what they found – a poem, a story, a film, a documentary.

I worked with photographer Mark Cocksedge. We wanted our piece to reflect the constant flow of people, like blood through veins, through and around St James’s Park. Why were they there, in a place with no homes, offices, shops or warehouses? When we didn’t get permission to take photos in the park (though thousands of tourists were snapping away around us), nor to interview people, we knew what we had to do.

Mark created a really great slide show - it's at the end of my piece - so we hope you'll take a look and celebrate the  people we met and the strange place they were passing through.

If you'd like a bit of background history, here's a neat potted version by a London cabbie, and a longer one from British History Online. Poor old lepers, thrown out to make room for Henry VIII’s deer.

New shoes, new story

 

That's me, walking in my new shoes. Exciting, isn't it?

I have to admit that I am excited, because these shoes stand for the start of a new project.

Like pretty much every writer I know, I walk when I write. It's where I think, try out new words and rhythms, and let ideas float about. Walking is essential to writing for me. I don't know if it's the regular pace, the doing of something only slightly distracting, the being away from my desk, but it works every time.

I'm about to start a really big piece of writing, one which I've been thinking about for years. There's going to be a lot of walking involved, so my news shoes are my biggest investment in this story.

I'm not going to say more about it, so instead, here's a link to a beautiful poem, Walking Around, by Pablo Neruda.

We're all northerners

Here's a 15th century world map, from the Nicolaus Germanus Codex, which is based on Ptolemy's second century maps. It only shows the northern hemisphere, but the UK's still perched right up at the top. We look as though we're about to fall off the edge of Europe into a blue emptiness.

From most British people's point of view I'm a southerner. But I lived in France and Spain and that taught me that all of us here on the isles of Britain live a northern life. Anywhere further south and the light's all wrong, especially in the winter. Ptolemy calculated latitude according to hours of daylight, so he saw the world according to light too.

Winter's been hanging on this year, and it's beautiful still. Even on a grey day there are surprises.

And at the end of a sunny day you're almost guaranteed something special, when the light's the lowest  and reveals hidden shapes and textures.

 I may be alone in this, but even after months of wet and cold I still love the winter.

Natural history

Yesterday I dropped in to Tunbridge Wells because I wanted to sketch a Painted Lady butterfly. There aren't any out and about in March, but there's a case of dead ones in the museum. My sketch isn't worth sharing, but I did want to say, isn't a nightingale small?

And doesn't this owl look sad?

I've been visiting the natural history room in our museum since I was small and I don't think the exhibits have ever changed. It's kind of comfortingly spooky, and also interesting, because the exhibits stay handily still while you inspect them at close quarters.

The other rooms of the museum are filled with clothes and dollshouses and endless cabinets of Tunbridge Ware boxes. Are they un-natural history?

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.

A Slice of Tongue

Now here's a strange thing - today I received requests from two English undergraduates in the US for more information about my story, 'A Slice of Tongue'. It appeared in Paraxis in 2011, and it seems they're writing dissertations on it.

I'm honoured and rather fascinated to know what they make of it.

They asked for links to reviews of the story but of course there aren't any, so I can't help there. They also wanted a bit of biographical information and some 'tips' as one of them put it. So I sat down to think about what made me write the story, and though I've no idea if this is helpful, here's what I came up with - simpler to put it here, I thought when the second request came in, than to email people individually.


I live in East Sussex, which is a rural county in south east England, and it's where I grew up - the landscape and places around me often play an important role in my stories.

I wrote my first short story, 'The Swimmer' in the summer of 2010. It was published in The Warwick Review, a UK literary print journal, and spotted there by Nicholas Royle, who picked it for Salt's Best British Short Stories 2011.  'A Slice of Tongue' was one of four stories I wrote in the summer after this (the others being 'All Fall Down', 'The Flotsam Cafe', and 'A Job Worth Doing').

'The Swimmer' was essentially realistic: it's highly descriptive and the river is recognisable to anyone who lives near me; its plot is grounded in reality too. In the stories that followed it, by contrast, I allowed myself to write almost by instinct, and all four have some degree of fantasy in their plots.

I wrote 'A Slice of Tongue' for an issue of Paraxis that had libraries as a theme. (Libraries are a political issue here, as many are threatened with closure through government cuts.) As with almost all my writing, the location was important in the genesis of the story. It began for me with a mental image of the inside of my local library, into which someone introduces an item of food - a forbidden thing in a place where everything is dry and organically dead - but in fact full of life in the stories on the shelves. Both the library and the butcher's are real places - I worked in a butcher's shop at weekends as a teenager, and spent hours in the library directly opposite it, but I gave myself the freedom to follow my gut feelings about both places, rather than the more prosaic reality, and the story is the result.

It feels rather strange to be writing about my own work - I don't think I'll make a habit of it. I'd prefer readers to make up their own minds, to have a personal response to the words on the page. But I'm rather thrilled that people are studying the story, so I hope this has helped a little.