writing, not drowning

To write or not to write…

Packing Case Central

So . . . as many boxes as can be hidden away in a storage unit have been stuffed to the brim and tightly sealed. There has not been enough time to go through every single item in this house and say 'yes', 'no' or 'recycle' but a great deal has already gone, never to return, and, in due course, I will liberate one box at a time from the storage unit. And will then be ruthless; at least that is the plan.

    Meanwhile, the primary plan, to move to the smaller house that means so much to me, is moving on. Slowly but most definitely moving on. My offer to buy the house has been accepted and the house is off the market. The vendor has yet to find the house that they want to buy and my Dear Old House is about to go on the market. So, in terms of pressure, we are just about equally balanced.

    I was doing very, very well until about 10 days ago, after the visit of the first estate agent, who came highly recommended by a good friend who lives nearby and has moved as many times in the past couple of decades as I have in my entire life.  I had worked very hard indeed to get the house looking as I understand a house for sale must look these days - very streamlined and as if no-one actually lives here ie fit to appear on Location, Location, Location. It's quite hard to do that to a 300-year-old house that welcomes many guests, human and canine, and has always had resident dogs and cats, but I was determined to do my best. Said agent has been doing his job for over 40 years, still enjoys what he does, and was a fount of knowledge and valuable information - but was in no doubt that 'a great deal more needed to be done' on the decluttering front.

    And then, the second half of what turned out to be a double whammy, the valuation was rather less than I had hoped, and would not, after purchasing the smaller house, leave quite such a comfortable financial cushion for me to see out my days. (In case anyone thinks that all we baby boomers are having a life of Riley on our great big fat private pensions, I have news for you: if you were a self-employed baby boomer like me for much of your working life, putting absolutely every last penny you could afford into a pension, you may well have ended up with very little to show for it indeed. Or at least very little by the time the pension companies, pension advisers, and various sundry interested parties had all dipped their mitts into your hard-earned pension pot. I think there are regulations in place to stop this happening now; too late for my modest pension though. Lesson learned, at least for the next generation.)

    I went into a bit of a downward spiral; I was exhausted and disappointed and all the packing and lifting and whizzing backwards and forwards to the storage depot and checking on the builders and running up and down the stairs many, many times a day, meant that the sciatica had returned, with a vengeance. And, of course, I do love my home and my garden and the views, and leaving it, after 20 years, almost all of which have been very happy ones, will be a wrench. There were tears. By the time I got to my yoga class, I was a wreck. Please don't anyone say anything nice to me, I thought, or I will start to sob and won't be able to stop. I just about made it through to a very welcome yoga nidra at the end of the class, by which time I barely noticed and no longer cared about the tears flowing onto my yoga mat.

    But, 24 hours later, I bounced back and just Got On With The Stuff and even managed to get quite gung-ho about it, with the words of my Friend in Portugal ringing in my ears: 'There will be another garden, other views.' She is right. And, yesterday, after the very last box had been stored away, I was all prepared when agent number two arrived. He loved the house, said I had done a great job of 'preparing it to go on the market' and that the terrace, with its old wooden table and chairs and the bright pink parasol - all bathed in sunshine, with views of the surrounding countryside - reminded him of France . . . and then gave me an even lower valuation than agent number one. (But I have already forgiven him because half way through going round the house, he remarked, 'How wonderful to see so many books. I LOVE books.' And it was not said in irony, which would have been understandable because there are, in fact, far too many in almost every room, but was quite spontaneous - and genuine. At least, I think it was . . . after all, he didn't suggest that I put them all, or even some of them, in storage. And, anyway, who wants to look at empty bookshelves?)

    Thank goodness, therefore, that I happened to read Corrie Corfield's recent blogpost about selling up and leaving a much loved home. For those of you unfamiliar with BBC Radio 4, Corrie is one of its best newscasters. She also writes an occasional but always excellent blog. This post says it all and it helped to remind me why I am doing this and how much I am looking forward to life in the smaller house - or another smaller house if things don't quite work out (because we all need a Plan B or even a Plan C or D).

    I also needed a reminder of another reason for wanting, needing to move: more time to write - and, ergo, more time to think - as I had almost forgotten how very much I loved writing . . . and all the thinking and reflecting that accompanies the creative process. (Chronic pain for months on end isn't the best stimulus for creativity; well, not for me.) This interview with one of the writers I admire most, Marilynne Robinson, which appeared in Friday's Guardian, was more than timely.

    All this has been going on against a backdrop of the best English summer for years; the thrilling performance of the best English soccer team for years - accompanied by a series of hilarious online exchanges with my Dear Old School Friend (one of the funniest people I know and who has only just embraced social media); a long overdue reunion with a very dear friend - and another, equally special, reunion with a close friend to come - and the prospect of going to the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the V&A before the month is out. Unforgettable, all of it, and every moment to be relished. So, if this does turn out to be the last summer at the Dear Old House, it will have been the very best of summers, unlikely to be surpassed - and the provider of enough good memories to see me through whatever lies ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who by fire?

In 1994, I met someone who was to become - and who remains - one of my closest friends. We had embarked the previous year, but at different colleges, on a demanding and challenging journey of learning - studying homeopathy - and, at the end of the first year, she joined our college. We discovered that we lived near each other, she at the time in Kensington, I in Notting Hill, and, given the enormity of what we had to understand and learn, we decided to get together twice a week for study sessions. We did this for three years . . .

We were very disciplined but rewarded ourselves at the end of each session with the telling of stories: our stories, the stories of our lives. And, despite having grown up in very different circumstances, in different parts of the world, we soon discovered degrees of synchronicity and resonance in those stories and in the way that we had responded to our life experiences. Those study sessions became the crucible in which our friendship was formed. In the ensuing years, we have become ever closer; we have travelled together - journeys of deep significance for each of us - and we have continued to tell our stories, which are now inter-woven.

Hers is extraordinary and it made a great impact on me when I first heard it. But, although I am familiar with that story, to see it written down, as it now is - or as it is beginning to be - the impact is, if anything, even greater. For my friend has now started a blog and is recounting her story, many decades after it began, although the word 'blog' seems hardly to do it justice because it is that rare combination: perfectly crafted words and images. Visual poetry, on a screen.

You will find it at still point, world turning - coming through fire, and I would recommend that you start at the beginning and read on . . .

So, this post is a tribute to my brave, bright, deep-thinking, deep-feeling, and stalwart friend; the photograph is of a place of spiritual and emotional pilgrimage for both of us: the Paradesi Synagogue in Kochi.

To blog or not to blog . . . and a shameless plug

I go round in ever-decreasing, but seemingly never-ending, circles about whether or not to blog and so the weeks go by, with nary a word written. At least not on the blog. Many words written elsewhere, just not on here. So I go back to basics, although not in that John Major way. Heaven forfend; we all know how that particular campaign foundered. No, it is in more or a 'what did I say about this blog when I set it up?' way. And when I do that, I realise that I hardly ever write about the topics that I touched on when I started. Which is fine until I reflect that these days I blog about hardly anything. And there's the rub. I'm no longer sure what I want the blog to be, if anything.

I know that I'm not alone; many of my favourite bloggers write now only occasionally; others have ceased blogging. And then there's the time factor: being a conscientious blogger and blog reader eats into the hours; every day I try to spend less time in front of a computer screen and every day I seem to fail.

Still, after almost eight years of blogging, something has to give, or shift or change. Quite how this should be done, I am unsure . . . I never wanted the blog to become simply an account of 'what I did today' (or 'what I did on my holidays', so please ignore previous post); I never wanted it to become a paean to consumerism ('just look at all my stuff') - unlikely given my post-60 straitened circumstances, nor did I want it to become a one-topic blog - equally unlikely given my butterfly mind.

And then I reflected, whenever my writing students get stuck, I tell them to write anything, anything at all, just keep writing, even if it appears to be nonsense. Keep that pen moving. So I thought I might write a word or two about about the courses and workshops I offer, as well as the individual mentoring sessions, because I absolutely love planning and running these. And my delightful students seem to love them too.

Way, way back in the 1970s, I trained as a teacher but spent far too much time working on things like the college magazine and, in the end, I opted for a career in which I wrote, rather than taught, for a living. Neverthless, I have always believed that no education is ever wasted and, decades later, I can still remember how to construct a lesson plan. This has proved to be rather helpful in the past two years, since I embarked on my brand new post-retirement career.

In case you are wondering, the courses and sessions I run bear very little resemblance to formal creative writing programmes. None of that 'this term we are going to focus on the novel form'. No, we focus instead on firing the creative spark and this means that my writers never quite know what they are going to be working with from week to week. I use all manner of things such as paintings, photographs and music, as well as poems and extracts from a wide variety of books as a starting point. There is intense concentration as pens fly across notebooks but there is also much shared laughter and plenty of lively feedback and discussion.

And that is more or less how I work with the students I mentor online, via Skype. It still amazes me that this technology enables me to work in real time with aspiring writers not just here in the UK but around the world. It also enables people who live nowhere near a writing class or group, or who don't have transport, or who are unable to get out for one reason or another, to explore their creativity through writing. When I started mentoring, this was the group of people I most wanted to reach. I still do.

So, much of my time now goes into background reading and research for session plans and to reading and giving detailed feedback on individual pieces of work, as some of my students like to use all or part of their sessions to discuss writing that they have sent me earlier.

My satisfaction, as a teacher, comes from watching each of my students as they grow in confidence and develop their own, distinct, writer's voice. This summer one of my groups was invited to stage a platform performance of some of their work at the café-bistro where we meet weekly (in a private room that has become something of a writing sanctuary for them). They rose to the challenge and read superbly to a packed house; I went straight into proud mother hen mode.

Meanwhile, some of my students are now confidently writing blogs or submitting their stories to literary competitions. Others are using their newly polished skills to write memoirs or family histories for their children and grandchildren, or poems. They've all got the writing bug.

So, if you are interested in discovering your inner writer, wherever you are in the world, just let me know. We can always make adjustments for time differences . . .

And if you live in or near Mid Devon and are frustrated by the lack of local creative writing classes or groups, let me know and I'll see what I can do. We need only five people to get a class up and running. Just email me via the link in the right-hand sidebar and we'll take it from there.

All you need is a pen or pencil and a notebook. And the urge to write.

A writing prompt

It was the first day of term this week; at least it was for the delightful group of women who gathered on Wednesday morning for the opening session of my 10-week writing course here in Mid Devon. They had all attended at least one introductory workshop in the summer, so had some idea of what to expect, at least in terms of approach, although they don't know, until each session starts, quite what they will be writing. So, anticipation  is always tinged with a little apprehension. And, given that this is the first extended course that I have led, I too was balancing these twin feelings.

But, as the morning unfolds, pens begin to speed across the page, pages are filled and writing shared, and we begin to sense that growing satisfaction of a passion shared. I am already feeling immensely proud of them for their energy and commitment and, if this first session is anything to go by, we have a term of inspirational writing ahead.

Although I have already mapped out each session plan, I'm conscious that every member of the group will have their own writing aspirations, so there is some flexibility in the structure. And it turns out that what several members would welcome is - a session on blogging. 

Well, how could I presume to guide people through the whys and wherefores of blogging, when my own blog had lain fallow for such extended periods of time? It was a silent prod; each week I send a writing prompt to my students, those in the group and those whom I mentor individually, via Skype. Now, here, in the room where we gather each week, I was receiving a writing prompt for myself.

So that's it. Must try harder. Must return to regular blogging and responding to thoughtful comments and and to blog visiting, because that it what a polite, conscientious blogger does. Must remember why I started writing this blog almost seven years ago and consider what, if anything, had changed in that time. Quite a lot, as it happens, but not, I think, the desire to communicate. It's just that life, including the challenging and potentially scary stuff, has a habit of getting in the way at times . . . which is what I tell myself until I remember that habits are simply learned behaviour and can therefore be changed.

A few years ago, when I was working on one of my last professional contracts, before I threw in the towel to concentrate on other things (ie writing for myself rather than for other people), I was attending an education awards evening at the Science Museum and chatting to a colleague. He had commissioned work from me when he had been a vice-principal of one of London's leading further education colleges and subseqently principal at two others. Somehow the phrase 'a passion for education' or maybe it was 'a passion for learning' came into the conversation and it turned out to be a thorny subject for him. 'I can't bear that phrase,' he said. It was, in fact, the word 'passion' to which he objected. I can't remember why, although I'm sure - given his impressive intellect - that he had a sound reason for this but I do remember feeling rather puzzled and a little sad about it at the time.

I don't think there is anything wrong in having a passion for something, well, certainly not something as worthwhile as learning. Because, if you do have a specific passion, it frequently goes hand in hand with wanting to share that passion and this is how I feel about writing. It's what I do and what I love and although writing this blog is just one of the outlets I have for that passion, it has always had a particular significance for me as it has enabled me to write anything I wish about anything I wish, from the personal to the political, from the seemingly inconsequential to the rather bigger stuff.

Meanwhile, I had one of those demi-milestone birthdays last weekend and, while I don't exactly leap up and down with unalloyed joy as yet another year is added to the tally, I do tend to take stock on my birthday. And, if appropriate, I make a quiet resolution, and sometimes several, for the coming year. As it happens, my birthday also coincides with having undergone that first, surgical step to vanquishing breast cancer (AKA on this blog as the Massive Inconvenience) two years ago.

As far as I know - because I haven't yet had my second annual check-up as the hospital is behind with appointments again - I remain happily cancer-free, fit and well, which pushes concerns, such as a much diminished income in my third age, into the shade. I learned a good deal on my journey to recovery and one of the things I have learned and now understand more fully, having always just nodded in its direction, is the importance of doing what you love and loving what you do. So I had better get on with it, the writing that is, and the blogging and, above all, encouraging others to write.

Come on in, the water is lovely.