A difficult time of year, I find myself repeating to various friends, in what I fancy is an attempt at empathy. Or perhaps I’m projecting my own disquiets? There’s aftermath, of course, and the weight of expectation: all those resolutions – this was the year we were going to be healthier, kinder, more environmentally friendly, more focused, less time-wasting, assertive when it matters, better writers, better dancers, better people… Then there’s the weather, similarly all over the place but with a prevailing impression of blank white skies. The world news continues laughable and appalling by turns. The weeks seem to race by, but spring is a long time coming.
A couple of things have given me pause for thought. I have been a little unwell. Not in any major way; in fact, the DBS has lived up to its reputation of being a life-changer. Since I was ‘switched on’ in mid-November, thanks to the wonders of medical science and the amazing NHS, my newly-stimulated deep brain seems to work fairly normally. The rigidity has melted away, the exhausting involuntary movements a thing of the past. I seem to have boundless energy. Dancing is interesting: much freer, certainly, but some recalibrating is needed! Also swimming is not straightforward. I’d heard of one individual who ‘couldn’t swim’ after the surgery. I found I could manage breast stroke without too much difficulty but, flip me onto my back and I struggled to stay afloat! When a friend found an academic paper reporting several instances of drowning post-DBS, I now swim switched off. The current illness, though, so minor it barely deserves the name, is a variant of my constant struggles with my tum. A low-level unease which has been rumbling on since before Christmas erupted this week into a feverish couple of days when I finally had to admit defeat and go to ground. One of our cats – Whiskas, I think – years ago, went missing and was found eventually fast asleep on the top floor of the tower block in which we lived. So, Whiskas-like, I have slept a lot, have drunk a great deal of water and, when a throbbing head makes reading hard work, have found myself reaching for stitching.
I’ve never thought of myself as much of a fan of crafts. There's something too homely, too domestic about the whole thing which doesn't quite square with my image of myself as – well, smart? Edgy, even? Still, there is the Aran sweater which I have been labouring over for more than three years – I had to take it back to the shop once when I lost track of the pattern completely, and in the final throes there was a good deal of unpicking needed – but which is finished, and warm, its many mistakes instantly forgiven. Yesterday, confined to quarters, I dug out the tapestry kit which I embarked on more than ten years ago I should think. It’s a beautiful design, one of several produced by my artist friend Raymond for Ehrman Tapestry. It’s fiddly work but, as I sew, I think of Raymond at work in his studio, painstakingly painting each individual stitch. And last year there was the upholstery project, completed in an unlikely eight weeks due largely to the immense generosity and kindness of the class tutor Hong. I am reminded how activities like these are satisfying in quite a different way from reading, or writing, as they allow – encourage, even – the mind to wander. Craft work. Kraftwerk: I remember the name from the 70s and 80s – the same era as Whiskas the cat – although I don’t think I ever heard them perform live, but I’m surprised to discover they are still a force to be reckoned with in electronic music.
The wandering takes me to writing, and the various new starts and old edits I’d promised myself would be my main focus this year. In fact, not surprisingly, much of my energy has been taken up with the tango and Parkinson’s book and its funding. It’s hard not to become preoccupied with percentages and targets and, whilst I believe that this little book is worth the read, the whole crowd-funding thing is variously nerve-wracking, exposing and generally uncomfortable. I did agonise for some weeks before committing. A friend this morning suggested he felt some of his friends were ‘bruised’ by his appeals for support with a recent project which is at the heart of it I think. I have been overwhelmed sometimes by generosity in recent months, both from friends and strangers. But what matters in the end, of course, are the friendships, which I have to hope will come through the process unscathed; and the writing. By this time I no longer have any clear sense of how good it is. What I am absolutely sure of is that it is in essentially the right place: where the personal encounters the general and art meets science. With my friend Tim to a fascinating exhibition of art-science collaborations by Cambridge-based Spanish researchers just before Christmas. The programme quoted writer and science historian Arthur I. Miller on the emergence of a third culture ‘artsci’ where both nurture each other, boundaries dissolve, the results ‘changing forever the way we perceive the world’.
In the run-up to Christmas I was absorbed in the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries although I wouldn’t have wished to be viewed with her lens: Freda Major is dismissed as ‘merely a toy dog enveloped in human flesh’ whilst novelist Mrs Humphry Ward was ‘as great a menace to the health of mind as influenza to the body’! Aside from her ruthless pen, though, I was inspired by the discipline of the journal, which I have flirted with in the past but never quite kept at it. VW is clear about the pay-offs: writing for ‘my own eye’ she believes ‘loosens the ligaments’. More than this, though. She is aiming, she says, for something ‘loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, & found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time…’ According to my friend the historian David Kynaston, when we met for a cup of tea after his event at the last Cambridge Literary festival, she is the greatest English writer of the twentieth century and her diaries are her finest achievement. All of which you would think would surely be persuasion enough for my lazy fingers?
One very exciting spin off from the crowd-funding process has been the way doors have opened unexpectedly: an invitation from a neighbour, an opportunity to apply for a position as adviser to the Foundation for Community Dance’s Dance for Parkinson’s Practice Groups and an email from a friend about a project for a dance-centred ‘provocation’ which moves on from binary divisions of abled and disabled towards a ‘third space’. A key aspect of the healing power of tango for me has always been the opportunity to dance with others in a mixed community rather than in a group specially created for people with Parkinson’s – indeed, that was the reason behind my initial suspicion of the English National Ballet’s Dance for Parkinson’s programme. Although I will hang on to my place in tango’s mainstream for as long as it will have me, my involvement with the Dance for Parkinson’s classes in Ipswich has taught me that specialist provision isn’t necessarily a bad thing; that it can be quite a profound experience to be part of a community based on commonality. It’s something about identity – what we share, as well as what separates us. When I switch off my ‘stimulator’ to swim, is this the ‘real’ me? Is the raw state of Parkinson’s always a bad thing, or can it ever be something to celebrate? I have to admit that the well-intentioned cheeriness of much of the Parkinson’s-related web content makes me cringe. But I stumbled upon something rather different recently which made me howl, and simultaneously made me proud to be that clumsy acronym, a PWP: https://youtu.be/TDGNkXNowIA
Also pre-Christmas I devoured Ali Smith’s Winter, almost in a single sitting, was intrigued by Fiona Mozley’s strange Elmet and reread and enjoyed B.K.Duncan’s Foul Trade. On the last Saturday in December I saw The Jungle at the Young Vic. The play, written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, recreated an uncannily realistic version of the Calais camp and the history of its last days, by turns (and sometimes all at once) shocking, hilarious and heart-breaking. There were moments when it didn’t quite work. In the main, though, I liked it best for its complexities, for the many questions it raised without trying to answer them. I cried a lot. A very sobering moment at the end when a video from one of the Help Refugees team reminded us that the ‘crisis’ was still very much with us. Into January and my enticing pile of new reads: so far I have been both baffled and engrossed by Joanna Kavenna’s A Field Guide to Reality, been charmed by the early stages of Judith Ellis’s Two Points East and entertained by the opening chapters of Edward St Aubyn’s Dunbar. Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work needs more time, whilst Sarah Winman’s Tin Man, Nicola Barker’s Happy, Ann Bronte’s Agnes Grey and Jenni Diski’s The Sixties remain waiting to be opened along with a copy of Jonathan Taylor’s collection Musicolepsy… No flowers on the balcony yet and the weather expecially grim. But the bulbs are showing. There are buds a-plenty. And a robin sang as I walked home from yoga. What larks, Pip!
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