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| photograph by Tania |
Here is my day.
I wake to raging sunshine. I check my mental state. My father died eight months ago, and the echoes of that still fall about me. I feel it, viscerally, but I also examine it. This is the writer at work; it’s like a disease, I can’t help it. How interesting, I think, as I prod myself for unexpected symptoms and curious ramifications. How surprising, I think. And often, how maddening. I always want to write it, and, as my own Dear Readers know to their cost, I often do.
Today, it turns out, I am in Come Along mode. As in: come along, at least you are not living in The Congo. I think about the women of The Congo a lot; it is one of my enduring concerns.
Come along, come along, I say to myself. The dog, whose blog name is The Pigeon (for some reason I give everyone pseudonyms, even the dog) decides that she will encourage the Come Along spirit by being particularly sweet. She is the most glorious canine I have ever met, but occasionally she ratchets up the adorableness to new heights, just because she can. This morning, she has decided to give me her Grace Kelly gaze, which is so potent that I actually have to stop cleaning my teeth and get down on the floor of the bathroom to play with her. (Should I really be telling you this?)
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| The Pigeon |
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| photograph by Tania |
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| photograph by Tania |
Research is always hard because it feels as if one is not really working. I want to be tap tap tapping on the keyboard, watching the word count go up. Instead, I am making a few notes, but mostly reading and thinking. (It’s such an odd job, really; most of it is just thinking.)
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| 'The Burn |
As I do this, I think of how some people imagine a writer’s life to be filled with mystery and glamour. When I started, that was what I thought. I imagined that I would be going to parties with Martin Amis, and yacking it up with Salman Rushdie. (I did once meet Salman Rushdie, and he was quite polite, but he had a slightly baffled look on his face, as if to say: who is this woman?)
To reward myself, I make a huge pastrami sandwich, with rocket and tomato and mayonnaise, and eat it whilst listening to a riveting programme on Radio Four about the black arts movement in the seventies. Radio Four is my love and delight. It is how I know I am officially middle-aged. Each time I go into the kitchen, I automatically switch it on. Sometimes I am in a hurry, so I hear five minute snatches of programmes, and all the different subjects have blurred together in my mind by the end of the day.
Today, there was: Jenni Murray saying, in amazement, ‘Would you really want an implant made of mattress material in your breasts?’ There was the lovely Edward Stourton giggling hopelessly as he acts as referee in a spirited discussion about the future of the apostrophe. There was a government official from Kurdistan threatening a newspaper editor: ‘Do you know what I am going to do to him, that bastard? I’m a peshmerga.’
I have to go and look up peshmerga, because I do not know what it means. It turns out peshmerga is a name for armed Kurdish fighters who formed in the early 20th century, just after the break up of the Ottoman Empire. It literally means: those who face death. So that is my fact of the day. I do not like a day which does not have a fact in it.
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| photograph by Tania |
I call my mother, for one quick question. Twenty minutes later we have discussed: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the drunkenness of Brendan Behan, and my grandmother’s third husband, who was not entirely heterosexual. For some reason, we get onto President Kennedy’s priapism. ‘I always wondered,’ my mother says delicately, ‘how he managed all those ladies, with his bad back.’ She pauses. ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it can’t be very good for your back, all that.’
I take The Pigeon for her afternoon walk. The early dazzle has gone, the sun has set, the gloaming is gentling the hills. Everything is still and blue.
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| The Hill |
When I come in, I take a final wander round the internets. It is fashionable now to deride the Internet as arid and anti-social. It’s just sad people, sitting alone in their rooms, staring at flickering screens. I love it. It means that I may live in this distant part of Scotland and still be in touch with the world.
I am slightly obsessed with the mysterious assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. No one knows who is doing it – the CIA, Mossad, some rogue black ops? It has been oddly under reported, but now the story is starting to explode. The blogosphere has got its teeth into the matter, and is shaking it like a terrier with a bone. I read all about it . Then I watch a sweet stop-go animation about books. This is the life of the internet; there is nothing arid about it.
The dark comes, and a luminous hunter’s moon rises over the horizon. I have, as always, not done quite enough. It’s strange, writing my day for you like this. It is a small day, a small life. I used to have dreams of living a huge life. Now, I like the smallness. I feel profoundly lucky that I may sit in a warm room in a beautiful country, and think thoughts.
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| The Pigeon side view! |
