Week 1 In the Maternity Leave House

**tap tap** 

Hello. I went away for a little while. Soz about that. Reasons? Allow me to bore you with the deets:

1) Finishing at work, including the English Department All-Singing-All-Dancing Biennial Showpiece Book Week in my penultimate week (enough to bring on an early delivery notevenajoke), took up every last nanosecond of the last few weeks. The marking, my God. Clearing out all of the stockpiled ricecakes and emergency tights from my desk drawer alone took forever.

2) We moved house. Remember Sexy Neighbours? Well, finding repeated 4am teary arguments somewhat wearisome after being woken for a third time by energetic rutting ("BUT *sniff* I HATE THEM *snort* SO MUCH!"), Bedders took on the challenge of finding somewhere new to live. We went to view a house in The 'Burbs - no longer were we interested in being the kind of parents who might take our monochrome-clad kids to hipster coffee bars in Ixelles at the weekend amongst the jumbo ginger beards and sailor tats - ummed and ahhed about the garden and the open fire and the DELICIOUS QUIET, decided we'd go for it, missed out narrowly, were bitterly, bitterly disappointed and then viewed another one on the outskirts of the city and FELL ABSOLUTELY HEAD OVER HEELS IN LOVE WITH IT. And we got it. Photos to follow. 

Oh, and by the way, moving house when 8 months pregnant is definitely a life-affirming experience which you simply must try. My favourite part was the bit where Adam went to Africa and my parents came out to help/be on standby in case of premature labour for a week. A week is a Long Time. 

3) As mentioned above, Adam went to Africa - Tanzania, to be exact - and there was a LOT of sorting out to be done, lucky lady that I am. How did you spend your half-term? Oh, you know, unpacking boxes labelled 'crap' and 'stuff' and 'crap stuff' and going to IKEA (twice, obviously, because once is just not enough to fully appreciate the retail experience from hell) and having a little private cry on discovering that the huge box we'd brought home 20 stops on the Metro was actually a changing table and not a fecking cot at all. Buuuuuh. 

(PS Want to see some beautiful photos of Tanzania accompanied by beautiful words? Miss Pickering does it better. Want to donate to a worthy cause that helps African farmers feed Africa's people, prevents deforestation and empowers women gimme-a-girl-power-raaaaahhh all at the same time? Go here.) 

***

Ergo no time for any frivolity at ALL, including blogging - no time, no headspace, ensuing crisis of blogfidence and it just had to get gone for a while. But hey. Now I'm back with lots of scintillating updates about, err, doing the ironing and filling out commune paperwork. Oo, and the books that I'm reading! I've polished off two mega Irish Catholic Tomes of Misery of late, both of which come highly recommended:

A History of Loneliness - John Boyne

Odran Yates is talked into the priesthood by his dear old Mammy. Not an unusual tale. And, hey, he's happy enough with his lot. He's a good man. But is it enough to stand by and be good when all around you is evil? Told against the backdrop of the unfolding clerical child abuse scandal in Ireland. Fine stuff.

The Gathering - Anne Enright

Liam Hegarty - alcoholic wastrel brother of narrator Vee and one of the North Dublin Hegarty clan - is found drowned in Brighton in a high-vis jacket and with stones in his pockets. Vee has to piece together what exactly happened to Liam in their grandmother's house in 1968 - what wheels were set in motion that would see him end up in a British morgue thirty years later?

It's about the unpredictability of love and memory, about grief and big families and secrets and all that jazz. 

Disclaimer - people on Goodreads seem to hate it for all the reasons I loved it - all of its blurred lines between reality and memory and imaginings and life and death. But if you liked A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (and by God, I did), I think it's safe to say you'll love this. 



I'll read something less Irish and maudlin soon. I promise. Mebbes. 

In the meantime, here is a picture of what happened moments after tweeting that I'd just enjoyed breakfast in bed on Monday morning (maternity leave ftw!):

FFS. Pride comes before a fall, as my Grandma used to say. 

Holiday Reading and a Massive Babybel

Howdy. We're not long back from The Isle of Romance and Magic and Backfiring Scooters, a.k.a. Capri, ah me. What did I do, you ask? Um, well, I sat on my backside by the pool and read, mainly. Sometimes I got a bit too hot and sweaty and moved under the trees choosing either a hammock or occasionally a deckchair just to mix things up a bit. Ten days, five books; I tell ya, I was like a Trojan. 

So I'm back in Belgy, baby, and it's good (sort of) to be back. Well, if you try to ignore the rain, the itchy mosquito bites, the fact that the cleaner isn't back from holiday until September and the impending fear of being weighed at my next antenatal appointment. I swear to God, weighing pregnant women is a medical fixation here, along with taps on the bottom and comments like 'Not too much on here, hmm?' (true story, happened to someone I know) and blood tests at every possible juncture. Oh, and the fact that Bedders is on my brother's stag do at Galway Races which will blatantly be mega and I'm here trying not to eat the massive Babybel that's in the fridge.   

Massive Babybel. Two euro coin for scale.

I'll post some obligatory holiday photos of sun-soaked Italian wonderment soon enough. For now, though, here are my holiday reads in order from best (utterly mega) to worst (still totes readable). 

1) Other People's Countries, Patrick McGuinness. Frigging marvellous. The peculiarities of Belgian Walloons encountered by this quarter Geordie/quarter Irish/half Belgian hybrid of a writer. A memoir of times and places and people long gone during boarding school holidays and short breaks from trailing the world with his diplomat parents, but also a memoir of memory itself - why do we feel the need to pin down the mundane, the inconsequential figures and details of our lives? The whole thing is a mishmash of different forms and styles, slipping from poetry to inane trivia (did you know that Kevin is a disproportionately popular name in the Ardennes thanks to Kevin Keegan, Newcastle's manager when Phillippe Albert was playing for them?) and, oh, the Afterword is just sublime. Read it now. *****

2) The Easter Parade, Richard Yates. Emily is pretty and promising.; so's her sister Sarah. Sarah marries, has three boys and dies of liver disease/at the end of her husband's fist, take your pick. Emily shacks up with disastrous bloke after disastrous bloke (tortured poet, anyone?) and, sob, is incapable of real intimacy with anyone. Yates generously dishes out generational fuck-up after fuck-up and the morale seems to be 'you might think you've escaped, but you haven't.' 

Horribly miserable. Bloody well-written, though. 
****

3) The Last Hundred Days, Patrick McGuinness. DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about Romania except what I might have gleaned from Challenge Anneka in the early 90s (orphanages? That's it). The context is important, though, and McGuinness is desperate that we GET IT by including FACTUAL INFORMATION MASQUERADING AS NARRATIVE at every feasible opportunity so I might have to, I dunno, watch some YouTube videos or something.

ANYHOO. Jeez, Romania in 1989 sounds horrible (although there seems to be a big debate raging on Goodreads as to whether he's representing it accurately). And it's hard to believe it happened in our lifetimes. I would have found it a whole lot more enjoyable, though, if the narrator hadn't a) lacked credibility and b) been so annoying. Twenty one, a University lecturer, maddeningly sulky, inexplicably attractive to every woman he comes across, involved simultaneously in revolutionary plans and shady ministerial double-deals despite having no apparent charisma or relevant skills-base? Oh, and the sex scenes are gross. 
*** (but in third place thanks to it being new and interesting, whereas The History Boys is old ground)

4) The History Boys, Alan Bennett. Education, Literature, wisecracks in French, what's not to like?

As an aside, it was strange to read this in the current Operation Yewtree/Notarise climate of hysteria and come across exchanges like this:

Dakin (re: being groped by teacher Hector while riding on the back of his scooter): Are we scarred for life, do you think?
Scripps: We must hope so. Perhaps it will turn me into Proust.
****

5) Trumpet, Jackie Kay. Excellent premise: a black woman born in Scotland in the early 20th century grows up and becomes a famous trumpet player. And, somewhere along the way, redefines herself as a man calling his new self Joss Moody (what a name!) and guarding his secret at all costs. It got me down a bit, though, that the roving 1st person didn't give more away about his wife Millie, the only other person complicit in the coverup, and instead focused more on the view of his bitter adopted son Colman and avaricious journo Sophie, both of whom were a bit thinly sketched.
***

All a bit on the heavy side, I suppose, but marvellous nevertheless and up to press I'm working through a few of the Booker nominees starting with this. It's a kooky delight written by Phoebe from Friends Karen Joy Fowler.

What are your holiday reading plans? Recommendations gratefully received. 

The Story of Furniture

"After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and lustre of different woods, their colours, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents - "sometimes, when you're not sure what you have, it's easiest just to take a sniff" - spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood..."

"Downstairs - weak light, wood shavings on the floor - there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of the pieces as 'he' and 'she', in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he'd taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands."

"To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries - lives longer and gentler than human life - sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the glare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was." 

***

I'm still reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

On the morning that Theo Decker is due to have a meeting with his school Principal, possibly about to be excluded for standing with his friend Tom Cable as he smoked a cigarette on school premises, an explosive device tears apart a New York art gallery. For the second time that week, Theo find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He escapes unscathed; his mother is killed. 

At his feet in the ruins of the gallery, he spots a painting his mother admired: Fabritius' The Goldfinch. Miraculously, it's completely intact. Dazed, shaking, he slips it into his bag and picks his way through the debris to the outside world. 

The good stuff thus far: well, the description of the blast is bloody impressive; and written before 9/11, h'apparently. And the grief of a teenage boy - the injustice and impossibility of it - "there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently" - is beautifully rendered. Some days his whole body rings like a tuning fork and he watches film after film, numb. Other days, he turns the shower up to full power, gets in and howls. 

And I mean, who couldn't love passages like the above? 

Buuuut - and I'm resisting the urge to say that there IS a but, but there is - look, there it is, just there, three of them, in fact - I'm now just about 300 pages in and things are getting a bit strange. Theo, having been reunited with his dear old Pa and shipped out to Vegas to live with him, seems to have hooked up with a new friend, Boris, and is turning into a bit of a wastrel. There's been a lot of bloody fist fights and throwing up in swimming pools. 

Anyway. I shall persevere and let you know. 

***

In other news, the furniture passages above reminded me of a kiddies' book I bought ages ago in Sedbergh and inspired me to dig it out and make a framed print a bit like my Swimming, Swimming, In The Swimming Pool project. Guess what I'm doing this weekend? Apart from watching series 2 of The West Wing and making a voodoo doll of Donna/Dana, obvs. And Mandy, if I have the time.  

Staring at Lakes by Michael Harding

Depression. Not exactly a topic to get people racing to the Amazon check-out button, eh? However the subtitle of Michael Harding's Staring at Lakes is 'A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking', which sounds less oppressive and a fair bit more New Age-y and, if I'm honest, probably made me linger a little longer when I first spotted it in The Gutter Bookshop in Dublin a few weeks ago. Make no mistake, though, this is definitely a book about depression: about its physical manifestations and the way it cuts a mind to ribbons; about a life spent searching for a solution in the sanitary life of the Catholic priesthood and years later in the slums of India. A pretty nasty physical illness, some fairly 'out there' therapy methods and a significant amount of navel-gazing later and Harding has his answer to the depression conundrum. 

More of that in a minute.

You see, Harding - novelist, playwright, Irish Times columnist - is depressed, and has been for a lifetime. Late in the book he comments drily that this is perhaps literally true; he started crying from the moment he exited the womb and was a maungy kid whose constant bawling cut short the family holiday in Enniscrone one year. 

But forget the crying - the crying isn't important. Unlike so many people who write about depression, Harding isn't into describing the minutiae of the chemical cocktails he's required to take or construct pages and pages of extended metaphors of the drowning/dark veil/black dog variety. Like he says on the back cover, this started out as a book about depression, but it's not a bloated, self-important work, nor - and this is important - is it actually depressing itself. Somehow along the way, everything else in Harding's life wound its way into it: his childhood, his early vocation, his writing, his marriage, his travels,  his humour, the ever-present figure of Father Fingers, the priest of his youth who called his young charges 'asses' - they're all there in a ramshackle orderlessness, popping up wherever Harding sees fit. I suppose his point might be that these things 'drop in' to the narrative in much the same way as thoughts - welcome or unwelcome, happy or depressive - sneak up on the unwitting human mind in real life.

Let me state an obvious point that struck me about Staring at Lakes: Harding is a man. He thinks like a man and he writes like a man. Sometimes his man-ness is a perhaps a bit too much (his description of his rock-hard erection as he lies in a chaste Buddhist monk's cell in Mongolia...erm, yeah. Insert eyes-popping-straight-mouthed emoticon here). But overall I found it refreshing to get a male perspective. So much of writing that is openly and honestly (and famously) about depression is by women, it seems. There's a whole litany of wearying and teenagey Girl, Interrupteds and Prozac Nations out there, and it pisses me of a bit that some of my favourite writers - Woolf and Plath - are pigeon-holed as the poster-girls of literary misery to the extent that it dominates everything we know and think of them. But that's a discussion for another day.

So Harding takes us on a wander through the years and a wander through his mind. We see the little boy who dressed up in his mother's clothes and shoes in imitation of the Child of Prague on the mantelpiece; a step that not-so-illogically led him to the frocks and fripperies of the Catholic priesthood in his 20s. He writes of the Church as being an exciting institution in the 70s, post-Vatican II and led by Paul VI ('a cross between Hamlet and Danny la Rue' - that just about wins the Best Description Of A Pope Ever competition for me) and the arrival of John Paul with his face 'like a rock carved into love' and a voice not of doubt but of certainty and authority, under whose rule Harding had to leave.  He's critical of Catholicism without being malicious or poisonous, and acknowledges the trauma involved in losing any faith - whether an individual's or in wider society - no matter how disillusioned or corrupt it may have become at the upper echelons of the hierarchy.

He recalls his joy in meeting his wife (sculptor Cathy Carman), but how the marriage started to stagnate - 'time sucked the freshness out of it, as it sucks from everything' - and how the birth of his daughter and his never-questioned love for 'the artist' was set against his restlessness, his nagging desire to be something new or something more than what he was - he loved them, but needed to be apart from them. Hence his dabbling in meditation, his years as a Buddhist, his treks to India and Mongolia and his experimentation with New Age therapies. And somewhere along the way - perhaps after being rebirthed on a therapist's couch in innercity Dublin, or perhaps by playing a corpse in a film and, yes, both incidents are as bizarre as they sound; or perhaps after the deaths of his father and mother, and the inevitability of transience and the importance of living rather than worrying in the moment is laid out in front of him - he found the answer. Fear, or more specifically fear of death. It paralyses, it instills feelings of failure and frustration and, at the other end of the scale, it encourages crazy behaviour - the likes of which Harding indulges in on a couple of occasions narrated here and his wife deserves a medal for putting up with. His debt of gratitude to Carman is obvious, for continuing to reassure him stoically that 'it will end', but also for giving him 'time to mourn and cry for all the lives (he) had never lived.' Harding, though, by the end of the book is done with clinging on to dogmas and practices and disguises and is ready to 'begin all over again.' 

I loved it: I loved the way it was written and the ideas it explored. I loved the anecdotes and the Irishness and the truths and the humour and the beauty. Read, read, read.

****

What's been your read of the summer? I'd love to hear about the books that've made you fold corners and kept you up till all hours.

NW - Zadie Smith

Oh, Zadie. I bow to your impossible coolness.

1) You use street language in your writing and don't sound like a dick (I, on the other hand, said that something was a bit of a 'saucy read' in front of some students recently and one of them urged me to never say anything like it again).

Exhibit A:

"Annie man. You give me jokes, for real."

"But is it your business, though?"

"Is it." (no question mark. Very important.)

2) You are married to a beautiful, beautiful Irishman. A beautiful Irishman who writes poetry.

He's probably doing it right now, probably in the middle of writing something really beautiful, something about families who "speak in code of what we love." Swoon.

3) You live in Brooklyn (I think. Or you used to). You teach the brightest of the bright. You wrote for the New Yorker. You are impossibly beautiful. You have a string of freckles across your nose. You can wear a Fashion Turban and get away with it. 

Must I go on?

I should like your writing. I really should. Or, more specifically and honestly, I should enjoy your books, but be intensely envious of you at the same time.

Let's do the hype first. So it's her latest novel since On Beauty in 2005 (2005! How did that happen?) and was published to rave reviews. The Observer called it 'Undeniably brilliant.' Spectator went a step further by calling it 'a lyrical fiction for our times.' A N Wilson got very excited and forgot how to use complete sentences: 'Amazing, dazzling. Really - without exaggeration - not since Dickens has there been a better observer of London scenes. Zadie Smith is a genius.'

Dickens? Crikey. Them's big boots to fill.

Rewind further. This is the woman who got a £250,000 advance on, publishing legend has it, the basis of the pretty sketchy outline of White Teeth. Who was catapulted to the status of Literary Celebrity before she was in her mid-20s. Who wrote a refreshing collection of essays (Changing My Mind - heck, even the title was refreshing: a writer who doesn't claim to be irrefutable) in which she honestly summed up her 'art' or, rather, the lack thereof. Turns out that once she gets past the intro of a new novel - which can take her a number of painstaking, drafting-riddled years - she's onto it. She doesn't plan the whole narrative (hence why that White Teeth legend rings true, I suppose), but rather lets the novel take her on its journey. Then she bashes the rest of it out and, once published, seems to try her hardest to forget about it, hating to re-read, dwell or discuss it further. Her recent Q&A with PenguinBooksUK on Twitter would seem to support this: the 140 character limit couldn't disguise her reluctance to elaborate on her 'favourite' or 'least favourite' aspects of her writing, the challenges she faces or what she considers her successes. Like Kate Moss (minus the 'e'), she seems to have cracked the interview thing, realising that the less you say the more impressive your few, carefully-chosen words become.

And so the story. Four friends, or rather two friends - Leah and Natalie (formerly Keisha, but she reinvents herself Madonna-style with a name more appropriate to her middle-class barrister adulthood) - and two associates, Felix and Nathan - grow up on an estate in NW London JUST LIKE ZADIE (formerly Sadie) did. They reach their late teens and, on a superficial level at least, branch off in wildly different directions. After a promising start Leah becomes an idle drifter, reluctant to fall pregnant on account that would mean the glorious 90s and all their thrills, pills and hangovers are very definitely in the past. Nathan becomes a nocturnal junkie depressingly familiar with the closures and relocation of North West police cells. Felix has managed to right himself after a piss poor upbringing and years of addiction only to become a depressing murder statistic. Natalie seems to fare best, making it to Uni, marrying 'well' and procreating but, despite her comfortable semi-detached existence, she can't leave NW and her sense of what she could or should have been behind. She finds straddling her old and new lives impossible and ends up no happier than the others, exploring dark avenues of drugs and anonymous sex websites. The ending is abrupt, inconclusive, unsatisfying - I'll expand on that in a second.  

But hang on: in some ways I enjoyed NW - like, really enjoyed it. Smith's fantastic at capturing speech and details of character; it's an unquestionable strength of her writing. She makes ordinary vernacular sound tragic and a touch poetic without tipping the scales into mawkish ("I was, man! I was good! You remember. Most people don't know me from then. You remember. Got them gold stars all day long," says Nathan Bogle in full-on mournful junkie mode). She chances upon occasional nail-on-the-head truths: 'At ten she would have done anything, anything! Now she sees ten-year-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age.' That's just perfectly expressed. And what about conversations with people you used to go to school with? 'Shar is impatient with chronology. She wants to know if Leah remembers when the science wing flooded, the time Jake Fowler had his head placed in a vice. In relation to these coordinates, like moon landings and the death of presidents, they position their own times.' I guarantee that anyone who went to a UK state school in the 80s or 90s knows exactly where Smith's coming from with that one. There's also a fantastic leap of imagination in her description of what it must feel like to be stabbed: 'Warm liquid reversed up his throat. Over his lips. Yet it couldn't be oblivion as long as he could name it, and with this in mind he said aloud what had been done to him, what was being done to him, he tried to say it, he said nothing. Grace!' It's almost cinematically beautiful, that scene. But why wouldn't it be? This is Smith writing about what she knows, and all good advice about writing centres on that simple principle: write what you know. From that comes the impossible-to-imitate self-assuredness on the minutiae of NW life: the characters, the phrases, those aforementioned stunning cinematic-quality images. The difference between Camden and Kilburn? Not much, to an outsider. But give Smith the topic and she's all over it. Camden is more North than North West, and that's what matters. 'Camden things' include Baudelaire, Bukowski, Nick Drake, Sonic Youth, Joy Division, boys who look like girls....the list goes on. My grandma lived in Camden and this made me smile. She's keeping it real. 

But here's the rub. Of all the reviews I've read, a couple of words come up pretty persistently. 'Vignette' is one. 'Sketch' is another. 'Portrait' appears here and there. All shorthand for saying that we shouldn't expect a coherent plot. This is how Smith does things - experimentally, pushing boundaries, while keeping her subject matter things that she knows intimately: her beloved (?) NW London. Think Mrs Dalloway - there are numerous similarities in the content (women! marriage! control!) but the disjointed, acutely modern construction is another area where Smith's debt to Woolf is apparent. Just take a look at some of the kerrrrazy modern storytelling tools she employs. Messenger conversations. A website's bland directions from point A to point B, then the same directions rewritten in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness babble of the senses. Complete abandonment of cohesion when she starts to number individual, sometimes only vaguely connected scenes or exchanges. Scene upon scene upon scene, and the links - there are links - aren't necessarily immediately apparent (I have to admit - SPOILER KLAXON - I had to Google whether Nathan was responsible for Felix's death, and whether Shar was somehow involved. They were. Phew.) Now this is the thing: I can appreciate all of this as someone who teaches students how to deconstruct texts on a daily basis, but as a grassroots reader I generally look for more structural signposts in my 'stories'. And Smith doesn't provide. She's too keen, I think, on a) painting her sketch of London and b) pushing the limitations of the contemporary novel format than telling us what happens to the characters and why these events are important, significant. Plot becomes secondary to her Mad Scientist structural experimentation. What is this book ultimately about? Speech? Language? Technology? Relationships? Class? Don't expect to fathom it. It ain't there, man (as someone like Nathan might say). 

And this leads me to a sad conclusion: perhaps I'm just not edgy enough. In fact, I'd say that's my ultimate problem with Zadie Smith: she makes me feel deeply uncool. She's like one of those girls at school who claimed to be geeky and an outcast but was actually the most amazing social all-rounder ever - someone who could sit upstairs and smoke with the bad girls on the bus and still score straight As. While all the genuine geeks looked on wistfully wishing that they were more like Zadie/Sadie but knowing they'd be worrying about cancer and what their mums would say.

Damn you, Zadie. 

****

I've started reviewing more books on Goodreads; I intend to write at least a couple of sentences about everything I read and perhaps expand on a few of them in more detail here. Do you use Goodreads? If so, let me know in the comments and I'll follow you. I'm always interested in what people are reading. 

Anyone else read NW? What were your thoughts?

All Quiet On The Belgian Front

Except it’s not all quiet, is it? It’s bloody mental - hence the disappearing act. 

Firstly, WE NO SPEAK NO HALF-TERM. I know; an unthinkable outrage. School continues slouching towards the 28th June (yes I know, we break up in June, for two magnificent months; I need to put the ‘unthinkable outrage’ into perspective before some Gove-toady points it out). And despite missing out on my usual time-celebrated half-term traditions like, you know, watching an entire series of America’s Next Top Model in one go, I should probably acknowledge the fact that we have had forty-four billion bank holidays in May alone (hurray for Pentecost and all its friends). 

Plus things can’t be that bad because it’s May, and that means only one thing: the season of the street festival is upon us. I can barely step outside of the door without hearing the jolly rump-pump-rump of a marching band, and that kindles a certain pseudo-holiday-feeling in the soul. It was the birthday party of a local street (?) a couple of weekends ago and there was a veritable bonanza of food, drink and inflatable-related fun. There was even a medieval market at Montgomery. Apparently it’s an annual occurrence and a Bit of A Big Deal, so Bedders and I headed up there on a Friday evening to find a graveyard of sad Monk and Merry Maiden stallholders peering through the drizzle. The air was full of the smell of leather goods at highly-inflated prices and there were some quite, err, specialist stalls selling bows and arrows and mead. 

Anyway, back to contemporary Europe. So today Bedders was on his way to work - minding his own business, dragging his Ryanair-approved trolleybag - and, somewhere between Montgomery and Maelbeek, was relieved of his wallet. Several phonecalls and one frantic bank visit later and our joint Belgian account was three thousand euros lighter (thanks, guys). PLUS our HSBC account had been stripped of a grand (most of which belongs to HSBC, who didn’t seem to think it strange that we were out spending hundreds of pounds of an overdraft we don’t even have at quarter to nine on a wet Thursday morning). 

(NB If we sound we have enormous amounts of cash, we really don't. We're burrowing money away for a sickeningly enormous tax bill that'll land sometime in December) 

Parental Reaction:

My mum (she’s definitely what I’d call Crime Aware) is currently waiting for a lift to her knitting group somewhere in South Wales and muttering furiously about how she saw an episode of Crimewatch or somesuch recently that said thieves in London use flick knives to slash handbags and then buy FUR COATS and CROWNS with their ill-gotten gains. 

My dad rang me (he never rings me) and was rendered inarticulate with rage: “How in the name of Jaysus....the bastards.”

Quite a crime wave going on at the minute in Brux, it would seem. Some friends of mine from home were here for a mini stag do early this week and saw a literal and actual DIAMOND HEIST taking place. Well, they saw some plain-clothes police wrestling a bloke to the floor and extracting a gun from his back pocket, then blindfolding him in the Grand Place. Sheesh. 

But enough of this seedy underbelly of society stuff and onto more pleasant Brussels craic. Oh, I did the 20K! And didn’t die! Good, eh? I made it in a relatively comfortable 2 hours and 4 minutes and I’m now feeling all sorts of uncharacteristic and unwelcome pressure to go ‘sub-2 hours’ at the Great North Run (that’s a nauseating running phrase and I promise to never, ever use it again). And I saw Freddy Thielemans, Mayor of Brussels, at the starting line who waved us off and for one glorious moment I thought he was smoking a fag even though the whole event was heavily-sponsored by the European Commission and their ‘Ex-Smokers Are Unstoppable’ initiative that meant that there were sinister-looking black balloons everywhere (ugh, black balloons. Just ugh.) But alas no, it was merely the angle of his hand. So anyway, the race began, I successfully avoided the Brussels TV cameras (oo yeah, interview me, I look particularly beautiful today with my scraped-back hair and five hours sleep!), the open manhole (no joke) and the slippery cobbles. And afterwards I used a sweaty 10 euro note that Bedders had secreted in a pocket to satisfy a perverse post-run desire for a waffle and a Martini. Oh, it was a tremendous moment. 

So, what else has been happening? Well, a new tramp has started hanging out across the road from our apartment, and what a fine fellow he is. He has a paper cup and a brass neck and expertly weaves in and out of the cars while the traffic lights are turned to red gesturing mournfully at car windows. Then the lights flick back to green and he stands to one side, drinking a beer and occasionally pissing against a tree. 

So that’s been interesting. 

I’ve also been busy indulging my inner angst-ridden teen by reading age-inappropriate books. Despite that fact I’m hurtling at alarming speed towards a milestone birthday (clue: it starts with ‘thir’ and ends in ‘ty’), for some unfathomable reason I’ve been indulging in the latest Year 9 craze: namely, John Green. I read The Fault In Our Stars in two days on the tram and this was only because I just about managed to prise it out of the clammy hands of a thirteen-year-old girl who declared that it was THE MOST AMAZING BOOK OF ALL TIME OH MY GOD LAURA I JUST WANT TO MARRY AUGUSTUS WATERS HE IS LIKE A DREAMBOAT. Or something like that (as IF teenage girls today use the term ‘dreamboat’). Let it be known that my Year 9s are, quite literally, wetting themselves about it (ha, that’s an in-joke. The narrator of the book can’t abide it when people mis-use literality. I feel similarly). 

Seriously, though, it’s good. And miles better for a thirteen-year-old than the likes of Twilight and Bella Bloody Whatsherface who’s moody for no good reason (unlike, say, the good reason of Having Cancer) and just CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHY ALL THE WORLD FANCIES HER. The key to Hazel’s attractiveness is that she’s mad into Literature and she quotes T S Eliot at will. And the pair of them - Hazel and Augustus - are actually quite witty; although I should warn you, they do occasionally sip into Dawson's Creek philosophical-analytical territory. But back to the plusses: the title comes from an expertly-deployed Julius Caesar quote. Ultimate kudos. 

Picture

So I read it and my review to them was, ‘Well, I like it very much. But if I was thirteen I would freakin’ LOVE IT.’ Which went down rather well, I must admit. I declined to mention that if I was thirteen I would have been paralysed by awkwardness and been forced to smuggle it out of the school library because it has a cover that alludes to a romantic relationship. It reminds me of the time I went on holiday to Ireland with my parents and was reading an Irvine Welsh novel. 

Picture

Had to keep that bad boy on the Down Low.  

And finally, as I mentioned last time, I saw Gatsby. If anyone’s been waiting for a review of Luhrmann’s Ode to Excess, here’s my mother’s verdict which I received via stream-of-consciousness-style text messgae:

“Saw that Great Gatsby film it was a bit strange at the start but then it was quite good. X” (sic)

Get her Caitlin Moran’s job, people!

Read/seen/done owt good recently? 

Recommended Reading: The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible has been speaking to me from bookshelves for years. You need to read me, it would whisper seductively. I’m everything you love in a book. I’m published by Faber, and I know how much you love your Fabers. Barbara Kingsolver’s just your kind of writer. She’s said things like ‘Perfectionism is my disease‘ - I mean, come on! I was made for you. You know you’ll love me. But despite all of its pouting and hip-wiggling, I continued to snub it. 

Moment of surrealism over, I picked up TPB from the work library a couple of months ago. Its seductive voice was even more powerful on account of my recent move to Belgium, and the initial setting of the book being the Belgian-run Congo in the late 1950s. It’s the story of the four Price sisters, their mother Orleanna and ‘Our Father’ Nathan, who move from the US to a remote jungle village. Nathan Price, a fearsome preacher of the fire-and-brimstone variety, is on a mission in the truest sense of the word: a spiritual quest to save the souls of the primitive and pagan Congolese. 

The eldest of the Price girls is Rachel, a vacuous beauty queen who spends most of her time in the jungle dreaming of prom. Next are Leah and Adah; twins but un-twins due to random injustice in utero. The youngest is Ruth May who, in the words of another key character, Anatole, has ‘the heart of a mongoose - clever and brave.’ Between the four girls and Orleanna, the story is unravelled in chapters headed by alternating character names and told in five very different narrative voices. These voices - constantly shifting but each distinct, each poetic in its own way - support the narrative arc in a way that’s both utterly convincing and yet seemingly uncontrived. 

It’s very, very difficult to write a convincing, uncontrived child narrator, don’t you think? Kingsolver pulls it off with masterful skill. “My monkey sock monkey was named Saint Matthew,” Ruth May ponders sadly after Saint Matthew’s disappearance. Sentences later she tells the reader about the family’s domestic help, “...Mama Tataba, our cooking lady. Rachel calls her Mama Tater Tots. But she won’t cook those. I wish she would.”

Elsewhere the writing style is sumptuous, lyrical, to-die-for; paragraphs and passages of lush verdant prose that defies my usual trick of ‘fold the corner when you see a bit you like for scrawling-down-later purposes’. I could have turned almost every page. The girls’ descriptions are suffused with Biblical imagery, ranging from the hilarious (“my sisters ran out screaming like the first free pigs off the ark”) to the stunning (the inexplicable presence of a beautiful blue and white plate in their shambolic jungle hovel is likened to that of the “Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock”). And, oh, the colours. “It is early morning now, rooster-pink sky smoky air morning,” Adah tells us. Is that not utterly alive-in-your-head deliciousness? Orleanna describes a fleeting moment of pleasure away from her husband and children: “A kiss of flesh-coloured sunrise as I hung out the wash.” 

And so the women tell the story - their own, and the Congo’s. When the family eventually disband for South Africa, for the US and elsewhere, one of the girls is left behind in the red soil of Kilanga in an unmarked grave. Orleanna spends the rest of her life atoning for her non-crime and the three girls that are left to grow into womanhood have to make their own reckoning of their past. As their mother says, “To live is to be marked...to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.”

Kingsolver has complained of being pigeon-holed as a ‘political writer’, whatever that might mean (she seems to think the label is lazy, covering everything from ‘This is about the world’ to ‘This makes me feel uncomfortable’). But, true to her reputation, there are some big questions being asked in The Poisonwood Bible. How does one atone for a sin that isn’t one’s own? Those sins could be personal - whether it be a lack of action that leads to the death of your beloved child, for example, or gorging yourself on too many minerals in the womb, leaving your twin stunted and deformed - but also political - as an American, or even a white person, how can an inidividual atone for the gross abuse of one nation by another? And in terms of Kingsolver’s Big Questions this is barely scratching the surface. Is God a veangeful God, she wants to know? Is morality relative? In the materially comfortable Western world, can we really make a judgement about life in 1960s Africa? “The loss of a life: unwelcome. Immoral?” asks Adah. In a society where we have so much left-over protein we feed it to our pets then yes, for a child to die from hunger is probably immoral. “But this is just one place. I have seen a world.” The moral debate lingered long after I finished the book, but one thing is certain: The Poisonwood Bible is at least as much the true story of the Congo’s war-torn past as it is the story of the fictional Prices.

Kingsolver strikes me as a real, for want of a more flattering word, swot of a writer. The novel begins with a disclaimer citing the impossibilities of her getting into Zaire while researching and writing the novel but details some of the meticulous background reading and interviews she conducted nevertheless. Moreover, she ends with a detailed bibliography of novels and non-fiction texts she devoured in her preparation. I love that breed of transparency. I suppose it’s unsurprising, though, from a woman who quotes Samuel Johnson in response to a question about how she became a writer: “A man can turn over a whole library to write a single book.” She’s done an awful lot of reading and an awful lot of waiting - 30 years, apparently - to gain the ‘maturity and wisdom’ she felt she needed to write this. Believe me, it's worth the wait. 


Photos taken in the Afrika Museum in Tervuren, Brussels - I wrote something about it here. 

Salivating at the Very Thought

It would be wrong to say that my entire Christmas was RUINED at the news that Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby's been postponed to May. But close.

I know, I know. Have patience. Good things come to those who wait. 

And in the meantime, look at these beauties. How glossy? How slick? How oh-so-sexy? Oh, and what I said about Leo? I TOTALLY take it back. 

It would have taken way more seagulls than Roald Dahl said...

...to lift James' Giant Peach. You can read about it here, if you like. A friend sent me it knowing I'd appreciate it. And I did. 

And aren't the illustrations lovely? 

I'm trying to read the bugger in French at the minute (it's 'grosse peche' in French, which is a bit of an troubling translation for me - like fat? Fat peach? Big fatty peach? Hmm). 

Well, I say trying. I mean looking up every second word. 

Apparently, it will IMPROVE MY FRENCH. And my resolve to stick at these New Year's Resolutions isn't fading. Oh no. Not yet. 15 days in (well, I started on the 6th, so technically, it's 9 days, but who's being a technical bore?) and I'm going strong. Like a trooper. 

Don't even want a beer. Wouldn't have it if you offered me one. Not even THINKING about a beer. A lovely Belgian beer. Nah. 

Advice for Writers

my pinterest

It is Book Week at school, people. Cue my moaning on Twitter about having to find a literature-related fancy dress costume for Friday (I'm toying with plaits and a sign hanging around my neck reading THIS GIRL TELLS LIES). 

I could get a bit evangelical here, but I won't - suffice to say that it's a real pleasure to work in a school that sincerely values reading as opposed to to tagging it onto the bottom of a whole-school agenda to satiate an Ofsted inspector who's been told to look out for some literacy. Oo, a poster with a book on it! In a room that used to be a library but is now full of computers! Ahem. 

Liz Lochhead was the surprise guest speaker today for Key Stage 5 students. Needless to say they were studious and thoughtful and appreciative and asked some intelligent questions.

One boy who asked if she'd written her poetry with the intention of twenty students in a classroom somewhere poring over every detail of it. "Och, no!" she said. "I didn't write it to mek you suffer!" Cue laughter. But then she said, "I wrote it because some people might like it. Some people won't. And you have to find something that you like in whatever you're studying and enjoy. Within the constraints of exam board requirements and all that crap." Cue more laughter. 

She read some of her poems and talked about them. She started with Bairnsang and the male patriarchy in Literature ("The way it had to be said/was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead.") and finished on patriarchy, too, with Men Talk ("Women natter, women nag/women niggle niggle niggle") - which I didn't realise she'd written after reading a book by Dale Spender.

And I was in heaven. And she signed my book (nerd). 

And then she gave out some advice for writers. It's reproduced below. 

This woman speaks the truth. Enjoy. 

***

All the good advice about writing is very simple.

So straightforward it's all been said before, but it's probably worth reminding ourselves of. I know I have to tell myself all this, and I have to do this every time I get going on something new.

1. Write what really interests you, not what you think you ought to be interested in.

2. The old five senses. See it, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it. Turn yourself into it, said Ted Hughes, and the words will look after themselves. Well, certainly I have to turn all my censors, inhibitors and ego, and false sense of myself as a writer, and certainly any attempts at cleverness off - in the first draft at least.

See, it's only when you read back what you have written down, tasting and testing the words as words and sounds you can see where you have captured a bit of life in the language, an image, a wee detail - and that won't necessarily be in the bit that felt like it flowed or had the fancy words, but often in the bit that you struggled over and in the end, och, just put down what would have to do for now....

3. Throw away all the bits that don't have bits of life in them, keep these surprisingly honest and vivid bits, the bits that, to tell the truth, surprised you - mibbe by their simplicity - and start again with them.

4. Don't explain. You don't have to give the reasons for going there or the co-ordinates on a map. Consider cutting off the beginning and the end paragraph or stanza of what you have written - and do this once you think it's finished and cut down to the bone already. No 'vamping till ready', no summing up. Just trust your reader to be right there with you in the middle of the place you are writing about. Get in, get out and don't linger said Raymond Carver. 

5. Don't try and describe your feelings. An emotion named is an emotion obliterated from any text. Stick to those five sound senses, stick to objects and actions, what's done, what's said. Get this right and all the feeling in the world will be in this. 

6. It's all in the details, in the particular. Small things. Plain words, probably, But which ones? Ah, I said the advice was simple, I didn't say it was easy...

7. Enjoy yourself. Struggle with not enjoying yourself until you begin to, very much. 

(If I can't, or won't, it's usually because I'm not obeying Rule Number One.) 

Recommended Reading - In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

When I was showing you around my snazzy new apartment, I promised you a book more addictive than crack cocaine.

And here it is - In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. 

In theory, this is not a book that I should like. It is well-documented that I am not a person who is All About The Facts. I don't like logic puzzles. Sudoko is not my thing. I thought, therefore, it would follow that 'true crime' writing, or 'murder mystery' type stuff, wouldn't appeal to me. 

Turns out I was wrong. 

The premise of the book is a bit like those tasks that you'd find in an ancient English textbook. 'Find a story in the newspaper that interests you. Rewrite it in the style of a short story, with yourself as one of the characters'. 

Which is pretty much what Capote did. Except he only wrote himself into the book very subtly. 

Forgive my ignorance, but I didn't know too much about Truman Capote before I read this. I had 'A Capote Reader', and I'd dipped in and out of it. I knew he was a bit of a New York socialite who mated around with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. I remember a beautiful description from a short piece he wrote about them - he said that the sight of Burton illuminated Taylor's eyes like a chain of Japanese lanterns. I thought that was lovely. 

I also knew he was pretty much abandoned as a child, and grew up with his aunts in Alabama where he met (Nelle) Harper Lee and was written into To Kill a Mockingbird as Dill. 

Well, let me tell you some more. With In Cold Blood, Capote wrote the original non-fiction novel. The process started when he read in the New York Times about a brutal killing of a wealthy wheat farmer and his family in Holcombe, Kansas. Apparently, he'd been looking for some inspiration for a non-fiction piece for some time, and it was a toss-up between the Holcombe murder and shadowing a maid working in a fancy New York hotel. He chose the murder and the rest, as they say, is the birth of an entirely new genre of writing.

You see, my initial assumption - that it was a 'murder mystery' of sorts - was actually wrong. Tom Wolfe summed it up ideally - this book isn't a 'who-dunnit' or a question of 'will they be caught?' The reader know from the outset that "four shot-gun blasts...ended six human lives" - four in the murder, and two at the hands of the penitentiary service by hanging. Instead, Wolfe insists, the suspense relies on the promise of gory details. 

I paraphrase, but that's the gist. 

So, Capote travelled with Nelle - Harper Lee, that is - to Kansas to begin to investigate the crime. Initially, doors were closed in his face - he was too pompous, too effete for the plain-talking people of Holcombe. But it seems he won their trust - or perhaps it was Nelle's soft Southern manner that encouraged them to open up to him. Whichever way, the opening Acknowledgements thanks certain persons for allowing Capote access to interviews and crucial documents, many of which are reproduced fully or in part in the book. The book took almost 7 years to write, and was only published after the execution of both murderers. 

This is what really appealed to my inner voyeur, I think. When Capote quotes from 16-year-old Nancy Clutter's diary, it's represented accurately. When the nature of Perry Smith's childhood and upbringing is slowly unfurled (the murderer with whom Capote developed a questionable degree of empathy), it's done so through various documents and personal accounts: a grammatically-clumsy letter from his father to a parole board; an interview with his one surviving sibling.

It's real. 

This hard-working, God-fearing family that Capote brings alive before the reader's eyes really existed. Herb Clutter, the staunch Methodist who had a policy of not employing men who drank. Bonnie Clutter, the matriarch of the family afflicted terribly with a nervous condition, had raised four children in the house her husband had designed and built. Two had flown the nest and two, Nancy and Kenyon, remained at home. Although it sounds like the most archetypal of American stereotypes, Nancy really did have a boyfriend called Bobby; they were 'going steady'. Kenyon was good with his hands; at the time of the murders, he was in the process of finishing a wooden trunk for one of his older sisters. It was to be her wedding present. And somehow their wholesome, All-American lives crossed paths with those of two criminals - one of whom had overheard in jail that there was a wealthy farmer out West by the name of Clutter who had $10,000 in a safe at home. 

There was no safe. Herb Clutter didn't carry money on his person. Smith and his partner in crime took somewhere between forty and fifty dollars from the house. 

This - the reality of it all - is probably the reason I ended up googling images of the crime scene as soon as I'd finished it. 

It was midnight. The pictures were pretty gory. Probably not my brightest idea. 

I had to watch the film, too - I'll be teaching this book alongside the film for one of the International Baccalaureate modules. Needless to say, it's nowhere near as good as the book - it simply can't hope to convey in an hour and three quarters the depth of detail that Capote does in the novel. Unsurprisingly, given the title 'Capote', the director's chosen direction is to probe the man behind the writer's flamboyant persona. It's undoubtedly worth a watch, but if you choose to watch it before reading the book (how very dare you), be aware that it makes far more of Capote's apparent infatuation with Smith, and only scratches the surface of Smith's background or the Clutter family.

At one point, however, it illuminates an interesting point about Capote's possible motivation for writing the book - and the reason he's become so consumed by the case and by Perry. At one point, Capote is questioned about his interest in Smith. He answers matter-of-factly about his own 'lost' childhood - being passed from relative to relative, being misunderstood, feeling 'different'. 'It's as if,' he says, 'we grew up in the same house. And one day he got up and went out the back door, whereas I went out the front.'

This has a big, fat 'RECOMMENDED' stamp on it. Just don't google the murder scene pictures. Or at least don't do it at midnight. 


** Do, however, have a look at the chilling photoshoot Capote arranged with of the two murderers with a known fashion photographer. Just two murderers looking eerily normal; showing their tattoos, smoking, smirking.