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NASTY AND NICE

24/4/2017

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Despite plenty of weekend sunshine in this loveliest  of cities in the loveliest of seasons, I have been missing the hills: both the Cumbrian fells (who’d have thought it?) and the Yorkshire Dales, a later discovery. So it’s good to be reminded of the pleasures of being in Cambridge in the spring. Nasty Women is (are?) I think newly arrived here. A few weeks ago a friend winked as she passed me a flyer calling for placards “in the spirit of resistance”. An exhibition of responses, variously humorous, angry, thought-provoking, passionate and engaging opened on Friday with a great buzz at Cambridge Artworks. All pieces are for sale – many sold already – with proceeds going to local women’s charities. The exhibition closes with a spoken word and music event next Sunday. 

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The season also sees Cambridge’s annual spring Literary Festival. I’ve been a volunteer steward for several years now. It’s a great chance for a writer to rub shoulders with others, both well-established and those just starting out on what promises to be a successful career. This year for the first time I was on duty in the Palmerston Room in St John's College, a first chance to wander through the grounds and across the Bridge of Sighs and soak up some of that atmosphere. Of course I’ve always picked out my must-see events beforehand but stewarding often provides an introduction to previously unknowns. This year Turkish writer Elif Shafak was new to me despite her international reputation, highlighted by my encounter with Manal, a young Lebanese student writing a PhD on Shafak's English-language novels. Manal had travelled from Dubai in the hope of a conversation with the writer.  Sitting in on the session, I began to understand why. So impressively articulate on her country and its history and on a range of topics - nationalism, patriotism, politics, feminism, religion, as well as writing. PEN and threats to freedom of expression – Shafak is now on my list of essential reading. 
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My last shift finished on Saturday so yesterday was pure pleasure. I enjoyed hearing about First Light, an anthology edited by Erica Wagner celebrating the life and work of Alan Garner, with contributions from Paul Kingsnorth and Ali Smith. I came to Alan Garner’s books late, as an adult in fact, but I loved them and managed to pass on that love to one friend in particular – Red Shift was our favourite – and to my son. I remember sitting terrified with Jack in front of a vivid television adaptation of Elidor. I was interested also to listen to Dan Kieran talk about the success of the crowd-funding publishing venture Unbound and delighted along with the rest of the audience by Ali Smith’s debut writers. A regular event, it’s a must for me every time but this year’s had the added bonus of providing lots of laughs and one really inspiring anecdote: short story writer Eley Williams was approached by her publisher whilst reading one of her stories in a ‘particularly dank pub’ and invited to submit. The rest, as they say – and absolutely the stuff of dreams for those of us who haven’t made it yet. The event was so successful, in fact, that it led to the longest queues of the weekend at the Heffer's bookstall in the Old Divinity School and a complete sell-out of all three books. 

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The high point of the festival for me, though, was an hour in the company of Sebastian Barry. I’ve only just come to Barry – rather ashamed to admit that I had muddled him with Sebastian Faulkes and so thought I knew who he was. I devoured ‘Days Without End’ – read the first eight chapters so quickly that I had to go back to the beginning and start again because I was loving it so much I was afraid I might have missed something – and felt a keen sense of loss on finishing. I knew that the story at the centre of the novel – the friendship between two young Irish soldiers in mid-nineteenth century America which grows into love, literally, the love of a lifetime – had been inspired by his son – the book is dedicated to him, in fact – but it was even more moving in the telling. Barry read two passages, full of passion, drama, humour, even song – Thomas McNulty’s voice different from how I had imagined it – but an amazing experience. In fact, I teetered on the edge of tears throughout the hour although it was in no way a sad event, and narrowly avoided sobbing all over him when I went to get my book signed. ‘It’s the wrong book, but –’ I said as I offered him The Secret Scripture. ‘Don’t worry – it’s the same author,’ he said. I mumbled some other incoherent stuff about how wonderful the book was and how I wasn’t Irish or gay but I was a mum – what in god’s name makes us capable of such inanities at such precious moments? I would prefer to have said – as one reader wrote on her blog apparently – that Barry had ‘ruined her life’ because now nothing less than this great love would do. But I didn’t. I did come home inspired, though – he spoke about the ‘intoxication’ of writing, and the importance of making stuff up, even if we get it wrong. So I have more things to write, and Days Without End to reread – although I may tackle the Secret Scripture first, along with other purchases that I couldn’t resist.

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Other reverberations from the weekend: I was mistaken for Madeleine Bunting. Two women stopped me for a photograph of my ‘amazing’ hair. I was reminded, courtesy of Rose Tremain, of the horror that the idea of exile can mean, and that the past is not simply past but lives on with us – to ‘entwine’ us was Paul Kingsnorth’s phrase I think. I was reminded, too, that we must write without fear – or was it to feel the fear and do it anyway? Meanwhile the sun is not far away and the avenue of bird cherry is prettily and fragrantly in flower across Jesus Green. So thank you Cambridge – on balance, it’s good to be here.

First Light, edited by Erica Wagner, was published by Unbound in 2016.
Ali's 3 debut writers this year were Luke Kennard for The Transition, Sally Rooney for Conversations with Friends and Eley Williams for Attrib. and other stories
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry was published by Faber and Faber in 2016

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To Have and to Hold

11/4/2017

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Today is World Parkinson’s Day. A friend sends a link for a news story on brain cell therapy. Trials in mice suggest that replacement cells can be coaxed to take over the dopamine-producing work of the damaged neurons. There are many such promising stories – another is the topic of this evening’s Gretchen Amphlet Memorial Lecture at Fitzwilliam College, where Doctor Alistair Noyce from University College London will speak about his study Predicting Parkinson’s. I have a ticket but the venue is a bit of a stretch for me at that end of the day, particularly since it eats into tango time and will then entail getting across to the other side of town so I’m unlikely to make it. My personal money is on Deep Brain Stimulation: since it was first mooted almost 18 months ago I’ve been lost and then found in the system and the next stage of my assessment – to check if I am suitable – is due at the end of the month. It can’t come too soon. I am more tired more of the time and suddenly a prey to severe dyskinesias, those all-consuming writhings and twitchings which are a side-effect of the medication. How sweet it would feel to be still!

I’ve been thinking about the term ‘grounded’, the way it’s migrated from the negative connotation of being prevented from flying or run aground, high and dry to the now more familiar sense of being mentally or emotionally stable: to have your feet on the ground; to be in the here-and-now. There are apparently techniques to help manage intense anxiety, and responses to feeling knocked for six by life’s vicissitudes which involve building, or rebuilding, a relationship with the earth. Whilst emotionally I find myself on fairly secure ground just now, the literal sense of trusting the earth beneath my feet is lost to me. I don’t want to make too much of this. Remembering my mum’s propensity for falls in her last year or two, her face more often than not a spectacular array of livid colours, or watching the elderly and infirm clutching the rails of the Jesus Green footbridge as they inch their way across, I recognise that by comparison I’m a model of equilibrium. It’s provisional, though. ‘Postural instability’, one of those cumbersome terms that have attached themselves to Parkinson’s – as if the clumsiness of the condition weren’t annoyance enough! – is a fact of life now. I’m careful not to look up or turn quickly in the shower. I watch out for anything which might trip me up when I’m out and about. Increasingly, I’m prone to falling over my own feet. Cycling must be timed to coincide with periods when the medication is likely to make me relatively safe; it doesn’t always work.  

My hold on life feels especially precarious at the moment since I’ve set myself in motion, pulling up my Cumbrian roots and then, as if that weren’t enough of a destabilizer, my Cambridge roots too. Yes I know I’m only moving round the corner but the time factor has confounded me rather. I’m not sure how long it is since I packed my first box of books but I’ve become so used to living surrounded by the things that somehow this state of impermanence has become the new permanent. It feels as if I’m on hold, caught up in one of those interminable telephone conversations interrupted at intervals with the hollow assurance that ‘your call is important to us’, unable to settle to anything productive, forever marking time. When I do eventually receive the keys to the flat, most of a year will have gone by.
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Not surprisingly, perhaps, I’ve been drawn to reflect on what endures. I’ve recently discovered Sebastian Barry. How have I missed him for so long?! This from the sequence in his latest novel which gives it its title, Days Without End:

       Time was not something then that we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but               something that would go on forever… The heart rising, and the soul singing. Fully alive in life              and content as the house-martins under the eaves of the house.

I trawl my memories for such moments of joy. Grief lasts too, I suppose, the awareness of loss persisting like a drip of water on stone, always eroding, never done. Hurts can linger too although may be susceptible to the desire to forgive, or be forgiven. What we try to have and hold for the safety and security of ourselves and our children, though, these are the things which most elude or defeat us. A house can soak up all our resources, literal and emotional, and be destroyed in an instant. Health? A given, until it’s taken away. Careers we build our lives around are lost overnight. Trees planted, lawns laid, investments made, plans drawn up, money saved, partners and friends claimed – all ephemeral, the more we invest emotionally in these things the more vulnerable we make ourselves to despair. Hope can sustain us until it disappears without warning: ‘I have of late,’ Hamlet says, ‘– but wherefore I know not, – lost all my mirth...’ Life itself can be ripped from us just when we feel it will last for ever. So where should we lodge our hearts? What game is worth the candle?

The process of packing has rendered the past very present for me. My dad was an inveterate record-keeper, taking photographs of every family occasion and, strangely it seemed at the time, every new house or car, as if these material acquisitions were markers of our purchase on or progress through the world. He filled album after album of such snaps and produced laboriously typed lists – antique furniture bought, classical music tapes recorded. In his last years, the digital revolution only took him as far as transferring the lists to his computer – he still printed out the results. Our piano, the biggest challenge in my many moves, was his piano, bought, so the story goes, by his dad for half a crown from a man they saw pushing it on a bogie up the road in Aspull. It bears the scars of its many journeys and is irrevocably out of tune but I have to find a way for it to accompany me to my fifth-floor flat. I have been pretty ruthless with other leavings: a clock presented to him on his retirement has gone to my friend’s brother, one of his watches to my son, another to an old boyfriend. But other relics still surface, in particular the trappings of a railway life. When he died, we rashly got rid of the thousands of slides, though the memory of stifling Sunday evening slide shows still lingers, one locomotive after another appearing on the screen as we yawned and fidgeted our way through the sequence, lulled almost to unconsciousness by the hum of the projector and the sound of his voice. On the shelf above my desk there is a tray with a teapot and hot water jug, silver-plated and much tarnished, from the old railway restaurant cars which my dad brought home one day from a sale. I’ll never use them, but I can’t bear to throw them away. 

The first anniversary of our mother’s death will be just after Easter. My dad died almost 15 years ago, the day after my birthday, which this year falls on Maundy Thursday. And then Good Friday and what has become a family tradition of queuing for the annual Ante-Communion and Veneration of the Cross in King’s College Chapel. On Saturday, also at King’s, tenor Mark Padmore leads the Britten Sinfonia in Bach’s St John Passion. Writing in Saturday’s Guardian, Padmore contrasts what he describes as our ‘age of anxiety for preserving things’ with Bach’s world, where 11 of his 20 children died before he did and all his four performances of the St John Passion had to accommodate changes according to availability of instruments or players, or changes in theological fashion.

Last week I saw ‘The Olive Tree’, an absorbing exploration of family and friendship, what we need to keep and what we can afford to let go. The thousand-year-old tree of the title has been sold. The film traces the effects of the loss on the grandfather and its repercussions on the rest of the family. Granddaughter Alma’s hare-brained scheme to recover the tree is never going to succeed – or perhaps the way the story unfolds encourages us to reconsider notions of success and failure. It’s told with a lightness of touch and lots of humour, and a reminder that uprooting is not necessarily the end of growth.  


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