we're all making our own sense of things
I get this email from this mister, and it’s the best email he’s ever written me, and I email back and say, ‘I hate to make hay from your misery, but can I blog that?’ To which there has, so far, been no reply.
But I suspect that’s only because he’s sleeping. Stay tuned for a guest post from the mister.
I was trying to think, while I was reading Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, what it was that kept taking me back to the years (wonderful years) that I spent in New Zealand.
The Piano connection was easy. Look at the cover. The sand is not black, but in so many other ways it evokes The Piano to me. (Coincidentally, the first movie that my father and I sat through together after my mother died).
But there was something else, and everytime I picked the book up, this feeling sat there with me, but I couldn’t pinpoint where this feeling came from. Until finally, just this morning as I finished the book, the connection clicked. Heavenly Creatures of course.
And now I have a hankering to see that film again. I know in a general sense what it is that keeps me thinking about this book and then that film and then this book again. The friendship between two women, two girls, a girl and a woman. But I must see the film again before I comment too much. Though goodness knows when that might be, not sure the Abu Dhabi Virgin Megastore stocks such things.
I lost myself in Remarkable Creatures in so many ways. It reminds me that I should have told you about my visit to Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicans where the librarian showed us all sorts of treasures and we went to the library and I just breathed in those books, and there was a first edition of Darwin. I should write more of that day and I shall.
Anyway, my copy of Remarkable Creatures is filled with marginalia and passages with asterisks, but none so asterisked as this, Elizabeth Philpot’s solitary walk ‘along Great Russell Street past the British Museum’:
While I did so often enough in Lyme, I had never actually walked down a London street alone; I had always been with my sisters or brother or friends or a servant. In Lyme there was less concern over such conventions, but here a lady of my station was expected to be accompanied. I found myself being stared at by men and women alike, as the odd one out. Suddenly I felt exposed, the air around me cold and still and empty, as if I were walking with my eyes shut and might bump into something.
Because just two weeks ago, I walked that very stretch of road and I remember that as I walked my brain felt refreshed, my body liberated for the very reason, that I have, just recently, felt the way that she describes.
Is it a mistake, or is it just a period of time that is deeply unsettling but worth it in the end?
Tied like that, the curtains remind me of the even ponytails I never quite had, because I was the only girl at school whose mother never did her hair.
One thing I am working on at the moment is a series of essays on such fascinating subects as me and the things that I think while I’m busy being me (Oh, so you mean you’re writing a blog? No, I do not mean that, please shut up brain and let me write).
Partly because of that, and partly because of other reasons, I have been reading a lot of memoir and autobiography. I’ve always loved that kind of writing, that kind of book (Do you think maybe that’s why you like blogging so much? Look, I don’t know who you are, but please do shut up and let me get on with saying whatever it is I’m about to say).
Last year, I started a short course in ethics, and did lots of research and writing about ethics and life writing. I find this an endlessly fascinating area to explore, particularly because I think there are almost as many answers as there are writers. More answers than that even, because each person who reads that writer creates another answer and so on. I think that if I’d done as my teachers had suggested and paid (why do I want to write payed?) more attention to that statistics stuff in Maths I that I would be better equipped to explain to you how many answers I think there are in the questions of ethics and life writing and so forth. Though of course, I do think there are some broad and general conclusions about how we should or should not approach life writing.
One specific area I have been looking at while I’ve been doing that research is performance comedy as life writing. I was messing around with that research a bit more at the end of last week, which led me, by various circuitous paths to be comparing Craig Sherborne’s Muck with Judith Lucy’s The Lucy Family Alphabet. No, comparing isn’t the right word, but looking at them in the context of each other and in the context of the other forms that each uses and has used to say the same and different things.
This led me to wonder once again about which form/platform/format I should use for saying what it is I want to say. You see, some of it is firmly rooted in the essays, some of it is sneaking into my fiction, and some of it is leaking into my show as I rewrite and tweak it for possible production in Adelaide.
So now I’m back where I so often seem to be. In a pickle, and I find pickles paralysing, and it’s no coincidence that we now have a nicely vacuumed floor and probably by tonight I’ll have the kitchen sorted.
(So, look, I don’t mean to bother, but this ‘right form’ you’re looking for, it wouldn’t be blogging, would it? Oh, don’t bother me now, I’ve got vacuuming to do).
‘You should have been here in August,’ people say. It was hotter then. More humid (one hundred percent humidity). I stand in the school corridor recovering from the walk, the sweat so thick it is a second skin.
When we first moved to Port Pirie my Mum would say, ‘There’s only two degrees of hot…there’s hot and bloody hot’. She was wrong. There is this.
Later, at the intersection, one of the mums I recognise but do not know calls from her 4-wheel drive window, ‘Hop in.’
‘It’s okay,’ I call back, ‘We’re nearly home. But thank you…thanks so much, that’s really kind.’
She furrows her brow as she winds the window up.
We are nearly home. If it is thirty degrees. Even if it is thirty five. But it is forty degrees. Humid. And two o’clock in the afternoon. I am carrying all of our bags. Those ten minutes are long.
‘It’s all right,’ I tell the boys, ‘we’ll have the car tomorrow, or maybe the day after that at the latest and then we’ll drive until the weather cools down again.’
Like everything here, the car is taped in red. The buyer and the seller must be present at the buyer’s bank, the seller’s bank, there is a valuation not more than 5 days old, a trip to a government department, forms, more forms, photocopies of forms. But it all goes smoothly and we take possession of the car. No, not ‘we’, the mister.
Our car is a humble one. It is not gold-plated. It is not a Lexus or a VW Golf. It will spend its nights parked next to a Hummer. Again, not gold-plated.
I have always preferred to walk or bus or tram. Here, that I am trapped without a car makes me feel twice as trapped. It is an odd kind of claustrophobia.
But my google reader brings hope. Look, it’s spring at Cristy’s and at Pav’s While you spring, we will cool down, and in a month or so, we will be out of the car again. And in the meantime, I can enjoy an Australian spring, without getting hayfever.
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| From 13th street |
We did indeed move the lounge, and it looks much better over there under the window. Funny thing I hadn’t realised is just how many photos of my Dad I brought with me. No teaspoons, not enough clothes and barely any books, but photographs everywhere. There he is: there and there and there. I might put one or two of them away. Not because I love him less, but because it’s too much. It’s just too much.
The lads have gone back to school today. Nervous, they were in their own different ways. They didn’t know which class they were in or which friends they would have. One of them worries his shoes will pinch, the other realises that he has outgrown Lightning McQueen and gratefully accepts my black backpack.
I remember those nerves, don’t you? And it’s not so much the nerves, but the fact that when you are six, you have no idea that everyone feels this way. In that respect, it’s easier being forty than it is being six.
Nerves wore off quickly, and excitement settled in. They hugged their friends, made bunny ears behind each other’s backs, then started thumb wars. And in that respect, it’s better being six than it is being nearly forty one.
So, here I am, alone for just a few hours in the house, about to get my butcher’s paper and textas out and get to novel work, bouyed as I am by this rather lovely review.
And when, after an early morning and a not-bad plane journey, we arrived back at this place, he followed me as I walked around looking at the house I had only ever seen unfurnished, and he said, ‘Of course we can move the lounge,’ (an enormous blue thing that we snaffled for free) and then he said, ‘And we can rearrange the clothes’.
Until, in the end I said, ‘It’s okay. I’m not going to cry.’
One night after the show, walking home, I turned around and this is how things looked:
And this is how I expect things will be in the next month or so:
One day to go. The end of the holidays always has to arrive. I know that. But when it does arrive, don’t you always wish it hadn’t?
Finished my show Saturday; got on an Edinburgh-London train Sunday (we had half a mind to go to the Ashes on Monday, but didn’t book tickets just in case and we all know how that ended up, don’t we); and not tomorrow (that being Thursday) but the next day (that being Friday) we’re boarding a plane to Abu Dhabi at 6.30 am. Which means we have to be there at 4.30 which means we have to get up almost before we go to bed, so we’re going out to one of those hotels which charges cheap rates because they know you’ll only be there a few hours at most.
Tomorrow (that being Thursday) we’ll need to move our things from this extraordinarily expensive accommodation (I’m trying not to spend too much time converting the pounds to dollars, but oh my goodness, I don’t think we’ve ever spent more on a holiday than we have during these four days in London – how on Earth do people afford to live here) out to the airport hotel and then we’ll come back in and spend the day at the Natural History Museum, before back to the hotel for an early night and a few hours’ sleep before the sound of the many alarms that we will set just to be sure we don’t sleep in, though of course we won’t sleep in, because we won’t sleep at all, too worried will we be that we will sleep through our alarms.
What a time this has been.
I loved every single moment of Spain, even the moments I didn’t. My show was awesome, Edinburgh was gorgeous and I saw Carol Ann Duffy at the Storytelling Centre. Also, it has rained as much as I hoped it would, and if only I could teach my body to bank the cool.
The lads are looking forward to going back to school and have spent hours discussing their respective birthday parties and who will come and what they will do (two or perhaps three friends each for sleepovers). The mister will go back to work. And I will: try to push my second novel into shape; rewrite the back end of my script because I’ve over-used most of that in Adelaide already; and polish off a few essays that I’ve written on topics such as adult orphan-age, grief and art, grief and comedy, middle-aged creativity and other things, and then I will not send them anywhere because I just can’t stand the thought of them being rejected. I will also drink less and exercise more and that will not be such a bad thing.
Talk to you soon.