According To Me

I'm back in the room...

2012-01-31T15:02:00.000-08:00

And I can’t believe it’s been so long. For those of you who’ve missed me while I retreated into my hermit’s cave, from now on I will try not to be such a lazy blogger.
I’m here to tell you that, despite a rather prolonged radio silence, it’s all been happening behind the scenes.
The good news is I that have a new two-book deal with Allison & Busby (small publisher of big books is their pleasing tagline), which means my second novel The September Garden will at last see the light of day. Publishing date will be this summer (I will of course let you know the exact time and place as soon as I do!).
My retreat from the world of blogging gave me the time to nurture The September Garden (spending a week in blissful Cornwall - read about this in my blog Return to the Honey Pot), reworking the story and bringing it back to life. The result is a novel set in London during the Blitz, in Occupied France and amid the rolling Chiltern hills of Buckinghamshire. It is the story
of two cousins who, as squabbling rivals, are thrown together by the outbreak of war. And they fall for the same man, with devastating consequences. As I like to say, if you love romantic,
war-time fiction, you have come to the right place.
I am just finishing off the copy editor’s corrections now and this exercise highlighted quite acutely to me my inability to translate English into French properly. As you can guess, it has been a while since I took my French O Level. And the fact it was an O Level gives the game away just that little bit more…

Return to the honey pot

2010-06-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

Childhood holidays are always rose-tinted or, in my case sea-blue-tinted, with a touch of golden sand, sweet green pastures and woolly white lambs.
The Cornish farm and seaside holiday is a classic, and it had been mine all the years of my childhood. I will never forget the unconstrained thrill at the first sight of the sea – that surreal blue triangle between a dip in the land. And this was always after a long journey in the back of the car with two older siblings in pre-seatbelt times on the trunk roads of the early 1970s. In those days, we had to leave the London suburbs at two in the morning to get anywhere fast.
Decades later, I was desperate to go back. Cornwall has always been my promised land. But I wasn’t kidding myself. I knew it would be different this time round: they have theme parks and holiday parks and proper by-passes now. But in need of peace, quiet and time to contemplate, I booked myself into a little cottage near Polperro to see if past memories could still cast their spell.
I felt delighted as I drove over from Devon on the Tamar bridge but then had a moment of doubt. Cornwall was all grown up and, contrary to my dream, seemed at first glance to be no different to any other place.
But this feeling didn’t last too long.
Meticulously following the step-by-step directions, I turned off the A road, turned off the B road and immediately found myself in another world entirely. I journeyed along a tiny unclassified lane, trundling between high hedges from which birds darted quite recklessly in front of me. Every now and then I’d catch glimpses of sublime views through farm gates, driving like a nun out of courtesy to the pure beauty of my surroundings. The air grew sweeter, bird song louder, the 21st century receding with every yard I travelled. The lane narrowed, winding tighter, as if it had been laid out for the little people. I found myself deeper and deeper within a secret wooded valley. Trees embraced the lane, meeting overhead; thick moss, ferns and ivy clothed the dry stone walls that reared up either side, threatening to scrape the paintwork. Yet on I went, plunging through the green darkness of an ancient verdent tunnel.
And then I burst back out into sunlight. I stopped at the crossroads; a tiny settlement of granite-built cottages perched on the valley side. I was looking at a scene that had not changed for centuries. And around the corner, my destination: Old Lanwarnick, a Domesday Book-listed farmhouse and its cluster of converted cottages and barns.
I pulled up outside my cottage, named the Honey Pot, by a patch of wild pink foxgloves and switched off the engine. The first thing I heard, apart from the silence of deep countryside settling down like a comforting quilt, was the gentle buzzing of the bees. Life will be sweet in the honey pot.

Love letter to the city of Sydney

2010-01-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Sydney,

How do I love you? Let me count the ways:

1. Inside your magnificent harbour, your sheltered beaches are shaded by gum trees and shallow waves lick gently at soft sand. Boats bob and set sail in the calm waters of inlets and bays, while ferries chug languidly from point to point.

2. Outside your magnificent harbour, along the rocky Pacific coast, your beaches are crashed by ferocious breakers and surfers float on their boards and wait, wait, long into the sunset for that last, longed-for exhilerating rip curl.

3. Your terraced houses of Paddington and Darlinghurst, with their pretty ironwork balconies, are cute, compact and very desirable. Palm and jacaranda trees line the narrow cobbled streets and trumpet-shaped peachy flowers drop onto pavements.

4. Your Federation houses of Randwick and Clovelly resemble Edwardian villas, slumbering in sleepy suburbs amid parakeet-song, the symphony of cicadas, and the splash of a thousand swimming pools.

5. Your Opera House and Bridge are icons to the world. Back-lit by fireworks exploding with Aussie confidence and optimism on New Year’s Eve, the spectacle brings smiles of wonder all round and tears to my eyes.

6. Your outdoor cinema in Centennial Park forces the film to become the side show. Lying on my bean bag as the sun goes down I watch beyond the screen as the dusky air turns pink and your orange city lights wink to the horizon. Huge fruit bats, black against the sky, flap silently overhead on the balmy evening breeze, becoming temporary citizens as they roost for the night.

7. Your Centennial Park in the dark, where a walk home is scented by fresh, astringent ever-present eucalyptus, the warm air alive with night creatures, their rhythmic chirping and mysterious rustling; and the ponds resounding to the piping, primeval frog chorus.

8. But there’s just one thing… the heat and violence of your sun is like a demon on my shoulder, difficult to cope with and likely to cause an argument. Factor 50 ruins my clothes and makes my face shiny. However, all is forgiven when in the late afternoon, your sun mellows and sinks a degree. Your light turns golden, slants through the leaves and sparkles seductively on the water.

9. Cafes, Cab Sav, markets, parkland, sailing, coastal walks, shops, sushi, swimming, wildlife, bars, Bondi!

Sydney, will our long-distant relationship ever last? No worries!

Love from Catherine

Letter from Australia 1

2009-12-26T00:59:00.000-08:00

Pressing my nose to the window, I took a breath. I was here - transported half a world away from home by a humongous blimp-like Qantas AirBus. I was circling over the brightest city in the southern hemisphere. Night-time Sydney lay below me, sparkling in the darkness of the vast outback like the Promised Land. And I swore I could see Christmas lights blinking in the suburbs.

Day One found Rose and I walking the coastal path past sublime beaches with names such as Bronte and Clovelly, plucked straight from the Old World, interspersed with native Coogee and Tamarama. We didn't wear sunhats because we didn't want hat-hair. Big mistake. In between trying to spot which one was Heath Ledger's house on the cliffs above Bronte beach to insisting on going as far as the headland so we could gaze at Bondi in all its white-wave, white-sand sweeping bonanza, we spent far too long in the sun. Mad dogs and English women? Later, swimming in the sheltered seaweed-streamed lagoon-like waters of Clovelly I was clobbered again by the Sydney sun and paid for it with a day in bed with heatstroke. Heatstroke? But Santa Claus was coming to town!

Christmas Eve found me in better shape, and a trip to the suburb of Matraville where houses in a Ramsay-esque Street compete to Olympic levels to display the flashiest, trashiest of festive lights, from roofline to garden gate. And, streuth, does it draw the crowds. Some families settle for a cruise-by to stare at the spectacle; others stroll amid the chattering, good-spirited mayhem of excited rug rats and indulgent parents in shorts, thongs and t-shirts. How incongruous it felt as tropical winds ripped at the jacaranda trees in the humid dusk, threatening to uproot a big-blow-up Santa emerging from inside a big-blow-up chimney anchored to someone's lawn. It was a fairyland of tackiness where silver reindeer and fake snowmen were there to prompt us - if indeed we had forgotten: Do We Know It's Christmas Time At All?

Christmas morning roused me with chirping cicadas sounding like rice shaken in a cup, and the on-off shriek of a parakeet dawn chorus under balmy skies. I remembered the years I woke as a child in a cold, dark bedroom with brother or sister or even the cat at the foot of the bed but never a wily cockroach zipping about across the floorboards. I was half a world away.

And I remembered my flight in. It must have been the gaudy lights of Matraville I'd seen from the plane, like a great landing strip. It must be impossible for Santa to take a wrong turn Down Under.

Some nice things happened on the way to the Forum

2009-07-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

Someone told me: the first thing you do when you get to Naples… is leave. A bit harsh, I thought. Yes, it’s as hot as hell there in June: smelly, dirty and the traffic is awful [the advice being: just walk with confidence across the road, and they won’t run you down].
Yes, I agree, it’s all a bit of a shock to the senses. But once I was sat in the shade, up a narrow side street in the old town, eating the most divine pasta outside a non-assuming little restaurant, the bad side of this enigmatic city drifted away. And I relaxed then, as soon as I looked up the Italian for: Can I have the bill please?
What a chattering, noisy, moped-menaced labyrinth Naples is. An intriguing, maze-like medley of streets unravelled before us: ancient, crumbling walls, balcony upon balcony above tight alleyways that revealed hidden bars and cake shops: the best coffee, the best pasta. And there was always time for ice cream.
We took a boat across the huge sweeping bay towards Sorrento, around the rocky and ruggedly beautiful Amalfi coast, watched, as always, by sleeping Vesuvius presiding grumpily over the entire populace. We headed up the giddy heights of Capri where the scent of flowers reached us on warm, silent air and we stared down vertigo-provoking cliffs, far above the azure waves, way above the circling seagulls.
And, next, to Pompeii, which was miraculously devoid of hoards of tourists. We were lucky: it was almost as if we had the place to ourselves. We walked the hushed, eerie streets, and unearthed the way of life of these ancient, ordinary, obliterated people: their order, their law, their desire for bathing, shopping, marketing, theatre and living the high life. They had shops for olive oil, shops for wine. They even had a – very well organised, I must say – brothel. Yes, the Pompeiians had needs, too.

The lazy blog - it's the 8 Things thing

2009-05-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

8 Things I Like
Talking bunnies, cats and baby birds with Amy and Charlotte.
Ritter Sport chocolate. Scrub that, all chocolate.
Cycling through the Chess valley – sublimely beautiful – even when a fly goes up my nose.
Curry with Jane, Terry and Kane.
Planting my garden.
Sharing wine with friends and family.
Coming home.
Waking up from a good deep sleep with Noodle next to me.

8 Things I Did Yesterday
Went for my twice weekly session with my shrink. Hey, analyse that.
Went to local hardware store – love the smell – for drain cleaner.
Bought some fresh crusty bread from the bakers. Yes, really - I know it sounds like Miss Marple.
Phoned the cycle shop about a much-needed new tyres for my bike.
Ate some strawberries.
Popped into DIY store to browse for garden benches, and found a good offer on some box plants.
Wrote 1,500 words of novel number two, Tides of the Moon. We're getting there.
Shooed the neighbour’s cat out of my house - twice.

8 Things I Wish I Could Do
Sing (and I think everyone else wishes I could do this too).
Concentrate.
Stop worrying.
Run further.
Not be quite so addicted to Earl Grey.
Not have to have the house spotlessly clean before I can start writing.
Impressions.
Know a little bit more about computers.

8 Things I Don’t Like
Losing my mojo.
People treading on the back of my flip-flops while I’m walking – how close do they want to get?
Bad service in restaurants and pubs.
Smelly commuters.
Big hairy spiders.
Running out of tea.
Not getting any post.
Jumpers slung casually around shoulders.

The sound of the suburbs

2009-03-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

I heard the cheerfully innocent tune from an ice cream van today – the first of the year. And it hit me with a juggernaut of memories: of summer in the suburbs when avenues were leafy, when people had front gardens instead of concrete parking bays and we could still play tennis up and down the road because there were hardly any cars. I was Sue Barker, my best friend was Chris Evert. What can I say? She was the sporty one. We’d spend all day up the park making dens in the bushes or flying so hard and high on the French swing that our skulls would creak. There was hopscotch on the tarmac and jacks on the pavement, and I’d ride pillion on the back of my best friend’s bike, both of us clad head to toe in denim. The parky would tell us when it was time to go home for tea.
Nowadays, there is no parky, and any man who watches children play from the doorway of his hut under the trees would most certainly be arrested.
So am I bemoaning the loss of childhood halcyon days? Of course I am, but I also feel that my generation is to blame for all this. We’re responsible for a fast and furious trajectory into a modern age so mind boggingly alien to those balmy days back in the seventies/eighties that it beggars belief. I’m talkin ’bout those of us in our early 40s.
We never had it so good, but then, we wanted it even better. Along the way, granted, we had a lot to put up with. We were the ones who had a computer plonked on the desk at work, circa 1988, and told to get on with it. (RSI was poo-pooed and thrown out of court). We were the ones who had to replace our entire vinyl LP collection with CDs, and throw away our cassette players, only to have to upload it all, within a mere decade it seems, onto a laptop. {I bet you there many of us who still have those back-breakingly heavy LP boxes in the attic stuffed with the first Madonna album, some Big Country and a complete set of Police singles in blue vinyl.}
But we all wanted the new stuff, we all wanted a car -although how I was able to run my Fiat Panda on £4,175 per annum is anyone’s guess. We became three-car families. It was the late 80s and we wanted the latest thing cos MTV drummed it into us. And so the front lawns were cemented over, ready meals were invented and it all went wrong from there.
Oh well, never mind. I think the ice cream van’s just come back round the block and I want a ninety nine.

Probably the worse temp in the world

2009-03-14T04:38:00.000-07:00

Let me take you back to a time when it was okay to wear jacquard jumpers with shoulder pads, pencil skirts made out of sweatshirt material and navy ribbed tights with flatties… yes, that’s right: January 1988.
Nine months before I was due to start at journalism college I recklessly gave up my job as a secretary at the Beeb to try my hand at temping. The masterplan was to secure a variety of exciting jobs at magazines and newspapers to get an insight into the world of print media before I started my course. I ended up at Bovis, a construction company in South Harrow.
Working for one of the directors – straight to the top, impressive huh? – I found myself in a deathly quiet, deathly boring office with glass partitions and beige carpet, reminiscent of David Brent’s but without the stapler captured in jelly.
Within the first hour I knew I’d not be counting the days, nor the hours, or the minutes until I could leave - but the actual milli-seconds. During my first lunch break, I dashed out to a phone box on the corner to call my old boss and beg for my job back.
Back at Bovis, when I had finished taking shorthand dictation, I had to ask the director (a very patient, very nice man, actually) if he’d say it all over again, only this time more slowly. My typing was good, however, as I had been taught to touch-type at the BBC and can do it with my eyes closed. And perhaps for this reason, I ended up working at Bovis for a four painfully long weeks (killing time until I could slope back to the Beeb with my tail between my legs).
Someone must have taken a shine to me. My money is on one of the bosses who crept up behind me one day as I was bashing away on my electric typewriter and massaged my neck – I don’t think sexual harrassment was so much of a buzz word in the late 80s.
In the meantime, I made coffee – in time-honoured secretarial fashion - for some Very Important visitors and was so nervous that my hand shook as I spooned coffee grains into the perculating machine, scattering grains all over the formica. I walked in to the conference room with the tray like Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. I was advised, once the visitors had gone, that I really should have used the fine china from the special cupboard and not the plastic cups from the vending machine.
My parting shot was to take a telephone message from a client of Bovis last thing on the Friday before I scuttled off into night. The message was simply nothing more and nothing less than this: "Terence Conran is hopping mad." [This strikes a cord with me now as I work on Homes & Gardens magazine, the pages of which are dripping with Conran products. Back then, Sir Terence must have been building his empire of restaurants and shops with the assistance of Bovis Construction.]
What on earth could have befallen Sir Terence to make him so cross? A Very Important report mis-typed perhaps, leading to a vertiable catalogue of disasters? Perhaps I did have my eyes closed after all.

Nurse! The screens!

2009-03-07T08:22:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001 I contracted bacterial pneumonia. This is what happened…

My husband wanted to go to Leeds to watch the football so we planned a weekend trip north. Fare enough, I thought, I fancy hitting the shops in the city centre.

The night before we left, in the small hours, I had a stomach upset. Rather annoying I thought, but I’ll get over it. And then I felt cold, so intensely cold that extra socks, jumper and another duvet would not stop the shivering – the chill was coming from my core. A sharp pain deepened under my shoulder blade. In the morning I thought, oh, I’ve got a bad back and I’m sick but I’ll get over it. We can’t miss the football match. At least I can rest at the posh hotel.

While he packed the car I tried to eat some cereal, but unsuccessfully: I could not hold my head up, I had to prop up my head with my hand, resting my elbow on the table. I lay down on the back seat for the 250-mile journey and then bedded down in linen sheets at the hotel to sleep it off. I had no idea I was desperately ill.

It was a different story the next morning when I could barely breath and began to cough up blood. My husband called a GP to the hotel – at great expense – and he said I must go to A&E. Now.

Inside the cubicle I overheard the doctor on the phone to a cardiac specialist. He thought I was having a heart attack. ‘Where did that come from?’ I thought, ‘I’m only 35.’ They gave me oxygen. A nurse tried to take blood from an artery deep in my wrist – ineffectively – I hit the ceiling. Then the doctor tried. They had to hold me down. Such was his expertise, I didn’t feel a thing. And yet the pain in my chest intensified. There was not enough oxygen in my body. The minutes were ticking down to kick off. Three o’clock came and went.

After long stretches of time, waiting for x-rays, a full body CT scan, and sitting next to the token Saturday night drunk, I wondered why I was in a wheel chair hooked up to a drip. Then I realised: I could not walk.

At 1am I was admitted to an enormous old-fashioned ward full of the cries of the elderly and a teenage delinquent who kept getting out of bed. The charge nurse, a stout man, was in control but I did not feel safe. I woke in the morning to the sight of the yellow fluid oozing from the catheter of the man in the bed next to mine. My chest felt as if all my ribs were broken, caving in, stabbing me. I cried out; tried to get someone’s attention. I screamed with the pain. Inexplicably, a nurse offered me ibruprofen but was mercifully over-ruled by the charge nurse who gave me some pink pills. The ward began to change shape: it lengthened, it widened. I saw kaleidoscopes of colour. I might have even giggled.

The consultant swooped round the ward followed by a posse of students. Pneumonia, he told me, and I was pushed up to a respiratory ward - all elderly patients, bedpans and phlegm pots. The rattle of the drugs trolley coming round was enough to make me sit up in expectation of more pain control. An antibiotic drip was administered every 12 hours, but my veins kept breaking and the liquid oozed under my flesh, so that I could not bend my swollen arms. My tongue was green, my skin was yellow and blotched with red, but the pain began to fade and, a nurse commented, my face was not so twisted in agony.

And then, the low point. The doctor pulled the screen round the bed and told me to lean over the table so he could extract the pint of pus that had collected in my pleural cavity. The local anaesthetic did not work the first time the needle went through my ribs. I tried to put myself in a different place while I listened to whatever had invaded my body sluicing into a bucket.
But then I turned a corner. It was someone’s birthday on the ward and eating my slice of cake was an incredibly new and beautiful sensation. At night, nurses like silent angels, continued to find unbroken veins where they could inject me with the antibiotics that were saving my life. I got better.

Released into a fresh, bright world after ten days of confinement I was shocked, weak and humbled. What strange and cathartic places hospitals are. Fifty years ago, I would have been dead. And I never did find out who won the football.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner

2009-02-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

I am a Londoner. Yes I am. Not in the gor blimey, strike a light sense of the word for I wasn’t born within the sound of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, but within the sound of the bells of St Mary’s, Harrow-on-the-Hill. Even so, the city is my home. I will always return. I never grow tired of it, just like Samuel Johnson used to say, even though I commute every working day. Don’t get me wrong: sometimes it’s vile: the tube, the smells, the jostling, the back packs. But at those rare times when I’m free of work and off somewhere nice, I relax and greet London like a well-known friend (who I know like the back of me 'and).
I love it, whether I’m turning my ankle on the cobbles of Borough Market, or sitting in the back of a cab at dusk being driven up Piccadilly (I once changed out of a skirt and into trousers in the back of a cab going past Buckingham Palace. It was dark, I was very quick and the cabbie didn’t notice). I love it when I’m walking north of Bond Street past stupendous West End mansions, or glimpsing inside a lamp-light gentleman’s club on Pall Mall. I enjoy the many faces of London. I walk a few paces north of St Paul’s to get lost in the shadows of the alleyways that lead to eerily Medieval Charterhouse and Smithfield. Or I step off the kerb on Bishopsgate, leave the City behind and enter the confined, contrasting, emigre world of the East End.
I’ve certainly been in less savoury places: chucking out time after gigs at the Mean Fiddler, Harlesden, or Brixton Academy (even good old Wembley Arena) but have never felt threatened, or frightened. London is my friend. The obvious places go without saying: the rose gardens of Regent’s Park in June, Hampstead heath on an autumn morning and Highgate cemetary during a crisp December dusk. I’ve even been known to find a fleeting slice of happiness on the terraces at White Hart Lane.
But my favourite place? Now there’s a question. How about crossing Waterloo Bridge, heading north and taking in the panorama of the slick city of London to my right and the golden city of Westminster to my left. There they sit, both hugging the great curve of that grey, murky river. There they precide, both silent and unbreakable.

What is it about the smell of…

2009-01-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

...my local hardware store? Must be something to do with all the rubber hoses, the furniture polish and the beeswax. Breathing deeply on it, I love rummaging among screws in little compartments, the cleaning materials, the mop heads and bristly brooms, to find things I don’t think I want, but know I need. Last week, I bought a tightly wound ball of string for the hell of it, thinking I’ve got to support the little shop where the man in the brown apron knows exactly where to find the thingummy for the whatsit in the depths of the store that will make my house an even lovlier place to live. You don’t get that at Wilkinsons: the service, or the smell.

The name of the rose

2009-01-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

Readers of my first novel A Season of Leaves will know that the main thrust of the story is based on my great auntie Ginge’s extraordinary experiences during and after the Second World War. (She met a Czech soldier while working as a Land Girl and followed him to Prague once peace was declared, only to escape from the Communist regime within a few years.)
But during the writing of the novel, I was also inspired by another story, that of Eva Melichar, a Czech lady who also escaped Prague with her husband and child in the late forties. She told me how they put their trust in a complete stranger they were told to meet on the edge of wood, who would lead them through the vast countryside, and across the border. They lived in a series of refugee camps before finally coming to settle in the safety of England.
I interviewed Eva in the summer of 2006, to hear her amazing story: how, while still in Prague, her husband disappeared one day while he was fixing their door bell; how he was imprisoned and tortured; how his foot was broken by Red Guards stamping on it and how they eventually released him.
In A Season of Leaves I based my character Rose’s lover Krystof’s experience on this traumatic episode, and Eva helped me with the Czech language that I used in the book; the translation of Rose’s name into Ruzena.
Last week, I had the sad news of Eva’s death, at the age of 86. Her daughter described her as quietly courageous, curious and enthusiastic about the world, and I’d like to express my gratitude to Eva once more for the time she spent with me, her kindness and her hospitality. And her enthusiasm for my little project, which eventually became the realisation of my dream.
It was only when I heard that she’d died that I learned that her full name was Ruzena Eva Melichar; her name was Rose. It seems so fitting that this dignified lady had let the co-incidence drift by as just one more of those wonderfully wistful but thought-provoking mysteries of life.

Back in the room

2009-01-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while. During the dark days of December and January I may have been hibernating – and neglecting my blog – but I have been productive in other ways. Apart from completing my tax return (or having my accountant do it: note to self, I owe Alistair Darling 94 pence), I have finished my second novel.
They’re right about "second album/novel" syndrome. Yes, Tides of the Moon (working title) has been harder to write, because expectations are that much higher all round.
However, let me get three things straight: this second novel is not:
a) a sequel to A Season of Leaves (although it is also set during the Second World War; there is so much scope for drama, I find, in a time of crisis).
b) autobiographical (although, one would argue, all that angst must come from somewhere and my therapist would certainly agree).
c) a walk in the park (in fact, completing it has been one of the hardest things I have ever done).

The story is darker than A Season of Leaves, perhaps more personal to me. And there are certainly some moments where the only way for my characters has to be up.
When I am writing a low period for my characters, when they are experiencing a traumatic episode, I tend to set these chapters in the winter time. This happens unconsciously, naturally, almost without me realising. But when their fortunes improve, and they emerge from depression or general muddle, it happens as spring unfolds and summer is opening out before them.

Ever the optimist, I am now looking for the black mornings to lighten by degrees and am waiting eagerly for my indoor hyacinths to release their perfume. I am wondering how matted my long-haired fluffy cat’s winter coat will become before I can take him to the vet for a clipping. Last year he emerged looking a little bit like a poodle. I can’t wait for birdsong, and the new buds that poke out miraculously from seemingly dead wood on the grapevine outside my back door. Now is the time to sweep up the metaphoric fallen leaves from last year, use them as a nourishing mulch and start afresh. I can’t wait for inspiration to strike. I’m waiting….

Novel number three is lurking in there somewhere. And when the characters walk out of the dark and introduce themselves to me, when the story begins to turn corners in my mind, it’s like greeting a long lost friend. So watch this blog.

Computer says no

2008-10-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

They’re supposed to make our lives easier, aren’t they? But ever since mere mortals have been let loose in the world of IT there’s never been a bigger time waster. Tried internet banking yet? In the old days, the nice bank clerk would take my cash deposit and write my balance on a slip of paper. And smile at me. They’d set up my standing order, direct debit, whatever I like. They’d even give me a receipt for my records. Now, I have to do it all myself. Print the damn thing off using my own paper (and not, I might add, nicked from work). I am transferring this, transferring that. I am the banker in my spare, precious time.
Log on, remember the correct login name, password, keyword, passcode. I write them all down – sharp intake of breath – because how am I supposed to remember when I have ebay, paypall, facebook, egg card, googlemail, yahoo all on the go?
And as for my new best friend Norton. When he works, he’s brilliant. That little friendly green tick that tells me I am safe from ‘bad men’ on the web. But when he gets a cob on and a red tick appears – I’m terrified. What can this mean? How long have I got before my precious hard drive begins to self-destruct? And the emails from ‘support’ are no good. Every single step they tell me to take is not what appears on my screen. IT support bods must be continually rolling their eyes at the likes of me who whine: ‘I can’t work the key, you know the tab, the button, the thingy.’ Computer bods mostly just tell me to switch it off and on again. Usually does it.
But then, when it works and the whole of the web is laid before me, how great is that? Must be the best invention, ever. Sharing info, reaching people in an instant, checking the weather, checking the form. Having a bit of a nose.
As a writer, my lap top is an absolute miracle. Imagine having to type and retype every time there’s so much as a typo, messing around with carbon paper, dabbing on oceans of Tippex. I learnt to touch-type on a cranky old metal manual more years ago I care to remember right now (in the year BM - before mobiles). Blind carbon copy, anyone? I wouldn’t go back.
Computer says, all right then.

Feels like home

2008-10-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Two years ago – remember that long hot summer we had? – I cursed the Metropolitan line. The weather was blistering and, because the tracks were melting, the trains had to go at snail’s pace through the boiling suburbs. The only ‘air-con’ on those creaking old carriages are the pull-down windows. If I was lucky and the train got up a bit of ‘lick’ a breath of air might just puff through the throng of passengers. But now – good news – Mayor Boris is going to gift us Metroland folk with brand new air-conditioned trains. And I’m feeling a little bit put-out.
Born and bred in Harrow and commuting for twenty-three (count them) years, I have a love-hate relationship with the Tube. Missing a train by seconds due to signal/points malfunction has me spitting with rage, but sometimes, seeing that familiar silver-grey train rumbling in to the platform exactly in synch with my travel plans, it’s like greeting a long lost friend.
The pleasingly retro maroon livery and the high-backed seats get me all misty-eyed; they are trapped in another era. Think between the wars, Brief Encounter and Betjeman. I love the way I can start my journey on the Met Line in the deepest rural Chilterns, stay on all the way to Liverpool Street and emerge where the city meets the East End and plunge straight down Petticoat Lane. Whether chugging through leafy Bucks, past the semis and back gardens of Harrow or over the high Kilburn viaduct where it seems the whole of London is laid before me, I feel comforted. I’m either on my way somewhere exciting (well, most often work, but then again my work is in London, the finest city in the world) or I am on my way home.
Thing is, I feel at home on the Metropolitan Line. Air-con comfort or not, I fear Boris’s new carriages will change all that.

End of Part One

2008-09-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

I am feeling mildly pleased with myself: 44,ooo words are in the bag and Part One of my new novel is in the post to my agent. I want feedback, of course. I want to know I’m on the right track. I also want a reward; a pat on the back. I'm nearly halfway through the new book and am going to treat myself to a break from staring at my lap top screen.
The morning is too beautiful to ignore. This is it, everyone, our Indian summer. I haul my rusty, trusty old bike out of the shed, brush off the spider webs and hope nothing eight-legged and sinister is lurking under the seat. I pump up the tyres, fill my water bottle, put on all the gear… it takes so long! Nearly give up and think I’ll just go for a run instead. But at last I am whizzing, wheezing, out of my little home town into deep Chiltern countryside. The thing about "round here" is that it is very hilly. I have to plan my route with care to keep the tally low. Without going all "Country File" on you, it really is exquisitely beautiful. Towering hedgerows, shaded copses, glittering meadows. Scarlet rosehips, glowing blackberries, leaves on the turn.
Whenever I set out early on a Sunday morning, there are always joggers, dog walkers and horse riders who all nod and say "morning". It’s like a little smug gang up and about so early, not a hangover in sight. And, as I heave my way up a particularly brutal slope, I am guaranteed to be lapped by an old boy in his sixties, thin as a whippet, clad head to toe in lycra, zipping past on his racer like a streak of lightning.
I know I’ve probably gone too far when, instead of enjoying my surroundings, I start thinking about getting home for a cup of tea and a slice of cake. But, I keep telling myself, all this peddling is good for the mind as well as the body. When I finally reach the brow of a hill and see the lane falling away into the valley below, I know this is my reward. I lift up my feet and free wheel, whooping like a little girl. As I pick up speed and hurtle down the slope, ideas and imagination flow, and writer’s block is blown clean away, just like all those cobwebs and the odd lurking spider that decided to hitch a lift.

A Season of Leaves, week one

2008-09-08T10:09:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to my first-ever blog. How exciting is this? Well, it is for me, so please bear with me. As the description on the title page of my blog explains, I am a budding author and my first novel, A Season of Leaves, has hit the shelves. How hard, is difficult to assess, and I think, as a first-time, little-known writer, it's going to be a slow burner. Let's be realistic here.
When I finally pull myself away from checking it out on Amazon, I will get on with writing novel #2. I am 31,000 words in, and counting, and have taken this week off work (ie my day job, which I shouldn't give up yet) to try to increase the amount of words to satisfy my agent, my deadline - and indeed myself.
I pull myself out of bed, make a cup of tea, and force myself to sit at the computer before day to day worryings get in the way of creative flow. Sometimes, the words and phrases - and plotlines and characters having conversations all on their own - are there, like a tenuous, barely remembered dream, just within my grasp. If I think about anything, like putting the washing on or feeding my cat, they've gone. But I write, therefore I am. So I have to do it. And it can be lonely. Joanna Trollope has said that writers often feel they are outsiders, and I agree. I sit back and absorb and remember. And scribble unintelligable notes in notebooks that invariably get left on Tube station platforms. And then, there is that moment when it all slips away. I think that's called writer's block and normally hits me around 5pm, when I save everything, put it on my 'memory stick' and go downstairs for a glass of wine. I wish I could give up my day job for this.