My sister now thinks I don't love her.
"Don't you love me?" she asked me as soon as she read the last blog post. I should, of course, have seen that coming. The fact that I didn't shows just how stupid I can be.
"Of course I love you," I told her.
"You just said you don't believe in love."
"Not that kind of love. Romantic love. I don't believe in romantic love. But I love you."
"What's the difference?"
I was just about to start explaining the birds and the bees - a little late, given that she's 26 and has been in the same relationship for seven years - when she interrupted.
"I don't mean that kind of difference. I mean: in terms of your argument, what's the difference?"
"Eh?" I succinctly answered.
"Well, you love me, right?"
"Of course. Very much."
"And mum and dad?"
"Of course."
"And grandma and grandad?"
"Of course."
"But, according to your argument, you love us because of a biological urge to protect, presumably? To make the family unit stronger, and thus preserve the species?"
"I guess."
"But it's love you can feel, which makes it real?"
I didn't like where this was going already, because my sister is clearly more intelligent than me, but I grumped a little and then said:
"I guess so."
"Then why is not romantic love given the same allowance? Even if it is a biological instinct."
"Because familial love doesn't go anywhere. It's permanent. And romantic love isn't."
"But it can be."
"But it's not."
"But you can't believe in one kind of love and not another."
"I can. That's what I'm saying: both are biological instincts, and I can choose to believe in the one that lasts and not believe in the one that doesn't."
There was a pause.
"Are you okay?" my sister finally asked.
"I don't know. Maybe not."
"Because you don't sound okay."
"I know."
"You know what I think?"
"Probably."
"I think you're in the fifth stage of heartbreak. First comes denial, then comes pain, then comes anger, then comes general rejoicing."
"You're wrong. I don't feel anything. At all."
"Ask me what the fifth stage is."
"I don't want to."
"Ask me what the fifth stage is, Holly."
"What's the fifth stage."
"Coldness."
"Oh."
"It's the stage where you switch off entirely so that you can heal, and you stop feeling everything completely. You become numb to all love and emotion, and you think that it will last forever."
"Oh."
Considering it, my ex - who has been two steps ahead of me at all stages - told me he didn't believe in love anymore about six weeks ago, which nearly destroyed me because I was still at the 'pain' stage. Maybe I had just caught up.
"And then what?" I asked my all-knowing younger sister.
"Then, when you've had numbness for a while, you love again."
I almost threw my computer out of the window at the thought of it.
"I won't."
"You will."
"I don't want to."
"So? You will. You can't avoid that biological instinct masked by a collectively overactive imagination any more than the rest of us."
"I can."
"You won't. You'll love again and you'll be loved again, even more than before, and there is nothing you can do about it. Whether you believe that now or not."
And - although I don't have to think about that right now, and although I don't have to feel that right now, because I'm in the fifth and final stage of a broken heart, and although an overwhelmingly large part of me just wants to hide in a corner where love can't find or hurt me again - a tiny, tiny part of me hopes that my little sister is right.
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Giraffes
There has been a backlash; a defence of love. It was inevitable, I suppose - nothing in the history of man has as many followers - but it has made me a little cross.
Humans are unique in one respect and one respect only; the ability to forget that we are animals. Take an animal - any animal - and give it intelligence and consciousness of any kind, it will eventually (over a number of years, perhaps thousands) start to behave like a human. Moreover, give more than one of these animals consciousness, and they will form a community that behaves exactly as a community of humans behave. They will believe in the same things, fight for the same things, despair of the same things, die for the same things. And they, too, will forget that they are also animals.
Take an animal; say, a giraffe (I like giraffes). Make the giraffe aware: aware, for the first time, that it will die; aware, for the first time, that it will eventually become nothing; aware that it eats to survive; aware that it is alone, even when it is not alone; aware that it mates to reproduce or because it feels nice; that it has territory to protect and territory to attack; that - to survive - it must ensure its place upon the earth. Then give the giraffe opposable thumbs, sit back and wait for the inevitable to happen.
First; war. The giraffe, to protect itself and the giraffes it has produced and give itself the best opportunities, will want more space. It will want to defend this territory from other giraffes who want exactly the same thing, and so the giraffes will fight; first to expand, and then to protect. Eventually giraffes will form groups - so that they are stronger - which will force the other giraffes to form bigger groups, and so on, until the individual battles become organised wars.
Second; religion. The giraffe, suddenly aware of its own mortality and vulnerability and loneliness - and the fact that it will eventually become nothing - becomes terrified and childlike and seeks something that will undo this knowledge; something like a large giraffe that they cannot see but who will act as an all powerful mother that will be with them always - thus removing the loneliness - and will protect them - thus removing the vulnerability - and will make sure that they never disappear entirely from themselves by offering them an alternative; thus removing the terror of mortality. They then - while they`re at it - give the Big Giraffe the ability to see everything, which removes the knowledge that they are alone, and the ability to control them, which removes the fear that they are directionless, and the ability to avenge and reward, which removes the overwhelming realisation that nothing they do means anything or is noticed by anybody.
Third; love. The giraffe, needing to reproduce and simultaneously ensure protection, stability and constancy for its offspring - as well as legitimise a constant desire for sex because it feels good - takes the biological sensations that arise in order to provoke this outcome and intellectualise them into an emotion that will make them stay with another giraffe and reproduce further. This, however, has a second - equally important - effect, because neither giraffe is now alone: which - along with religion - makes sure that there is no longer a fear of loneliness. This made-up emotion thus becomes celebrated; mainly because it allows each giraffe to have both sex and company without ever having to admit what has driven them to want either, and because - by being `loved` by another giraffe - it makes them feel better.
Fourth; art. The giraffe, having created religion, war and love, and - much more importantly - now being aware of them, even if no longer aware of the fact that they created them in the first place, feels a need to express each; first, to reinforce their existence; second, to convince themselves further; third, to show that their existence makes them non-animal; fourth, to show that they have opposable thumbs and nobody else does. So they bang things and draw things and say things to show how very deeply they feel about each topic, and how individual they are; thus quenching the sudden overwhelming awareness that they are all exactly the same.
Thus the giraffe, quite neatly and without knowing it, creates war, religion, love and art, and manages to convince itself that these things are what make them superior to other animals, rather than that they have been created so that they can believe exactly that.
Love will always be defended, just as organised war and religion will always be defended, because to admit that it does not exist is to admit that none of it does; it means admitting that we are animals with a collective overimagination, developed over thousands of years, who simply seek to quench our own self-awareness as completely and as swiftly as possible; who seek to shut out the loneliness, and the fear, and the desire with reasons and stories and excuses. Who seek to deal with the self-destruction that our own intelligence has inevitably bought with it. Who have created an internal culture - regardless of type of religion, or type of war, or type of love (and how else to explain their existence in every culture, in every age?) - to stop them from crumbling under the weight of knowing.
I don`t blame the giraffe, but I can`t believe in something that I don`t think is real; worse, something that I believe causes more pain, more hurt and more destruction in the search for it and belief in it than in the discovery of it, which always comes from a need within ourselves that has been projected outwards. I already write, to believe I am a different type of giraffe when I am tangibly not: I can convince myself of nothing else, no matter how much I desperately want to.
So, please, whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever you believe: defend love, and defend religion, and defend art, and defend war - because you are entitled to - but don`t make me try and defend them too. Don`t be angry with me, or indignant with me, for not thinking the way you think. Don`t be cross with me for attacking them, or sad that I have done so. Life can still be happy, and full, without any of those things. It will just be slightly different.
We each have a private collections of the things we believe in, and the things we cannot. And - for me - love has now joined the second list. I didn`t want it to - and I fought against it - but I have been given no choice; as with religion, I am simply no longer one of its followers.
And, for the record, I still like giraffes: very much. Even if they are just animals.
Humans are unique in one respect and one respect only; the ability to forget that we are animals. Take an animal - any animal - and give it intelligence and consciousness of any kind, it will eventually (over a number of years, perhaps thousands) start to behave like a human. Moreover, give more than one of these animals consciousness, and they will form a community that behaves exactly as a community of humans behave. They will believe in the same things, fight for the same things, despair of the same things, die for the same things. And they, too, will forget that they are also animals.
Take an animal; say, a giraffe (I like giraffes). Make the giraffe aware: aware, for the first time, that it will die; aware, for the first time, that it will eventually become nothing; aware that it eats to survive; aware that it is alone, even when it is not alone; aware that it mates to reproduce or because it feels nice; that it has territory to protect and territory to attack; that - to survive - it must ensure its place upon the earth. Then give the giraffe opposable thumbs, sit back and wait for the inevitable to happen.
First; war. The giraffe, to protect itself and the giraffes it has produced and give itself the best opportunities, will want more space. It will want to defend this territory from other giraffes who want exactly the same thing, and so the giraffes will fight; first to expand, and then to protect. Eventually giraffes will form groups - so that they are stronger - which will force the other giraffes to form bigger groups, and so on, until the individual battles become organised wars.
Second; religion. The giraffe, suddenly aware of its own mortality and vulnerability and loneliness - and the fact that it will eventually become nothing - becomes terrified and childlike and seeks something that will undo this knowledge; something like a large giraffe that they cannot see but who will act as an all powerful mother that will be with them always - thus removing the loneliness - and will protect them - thus removing the vulnerability - and will make sure that they never disappear entirely from themselves by offering them an alternative; thus removing the terror of mortality. They then - while they`re at it - give the Big Giraffe the ability to see everything, which removes the knowledge that they are alone, and the ability to control them, which removes the fear that they are directionless, and the ability to avenge and reward, which removes the overwhelming realisation that nothing they do means anything or is noticed by anybody.
Third; love. The giraffe, needing to reproduce and simultaneously ensure protection, stability and constancy for its offspring - as well as legitimise a constant desire for sex because it feels good - takes the biological sensations that arise in order to provoke this outcome and intellectualise them into an emotion that will make them stay with another giraffe and reproduce further. This, however, has a second - equally important - effect, because neither giraffe is now alone: which - along with religion - makes sure that there is no longer a fear of loneliness. This made-up emotion thus becomes celebrated; mainly because it allows each giraffe to have both sex and company without ever having to admit what has driven them to want either, and because - by being `loved` by another giraffe - it makes them feel better.
Fourth; art. The giraffe, having created religion, war and love, and - much more importantly - now being aware of them, even if no longer aware of the fact that they created them in the first place, feels a need to express each; first, to reinforce their existence; second, to convince themselves further; third, to show that their existence makes them non-animal; fourth, to show that they have opposable thumbs and nobody else does. So they bang things and draw things and say things to show how very deeply they feel about each topic, and how individual they are; thus quenching the sudden overwhelming awareness that they are all exactly the same.
Thus the giraffe, quite neatly and without knowing it, creates war, religion, love and art, and manages to convince itself that these things are what make them superior to other animals, rather than that they have been created so that they can believe exactly that.
Love will always be defended, just as organised war and religion will always be defended, because to admit that it does not exist is to admit that none of it does; it means admitting that we are animals with a collective overimagination, developed over thousands of years, who simply seek to quench our own self-awareness as completely and as swiftly as possible; who seek to shut out the loneliness, and the fear, and the desire with reasons and stories and excuses. Who seek to deal with the self-destruction that our own intelligence has inevitably bought with it. Who have created an internal culture - regardless of type of religion, or type of war, or type of love (and how else to explain their existence in every culture, in every age?) - to stop them from crumbling under the weight of knowing.
I don`t blame the giraffe, but I can`t believe in something that I don`t think is real; worse, something that I believe causes more pain, more hurt and more destruction in the search for it and belief in it than in the discovery of it, which always comes from a need within ourselves that has been projected outwards. I already write, to believe I am a different type of giraffe when I am tangibly not: I can convince myself of nothing else, no matter how much I desperately want to.
So, please, whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever you believe: defend love, and defend religion, and defend art, and defend war - because you are entitled to - but don`t make me try and defend them too. Don`t be angry with me, or indignant with me, for not thinking the way you think. Don`t be cross with me for attacking them, or sad that I have done so. Life can still be happy, and full, without any of those things. It will just be slightly different.
We each have a private collections of the things we believe in, and the things we cannot. And - for me - love has now joined the second list. I didn`t want it to - and I fought against it - but I have been given no choice; as with religion, I am simply no longer one of its followers.
And, for the record, I still like giraffes: very much. Even if they are just animals.
Monday, 17 May 2010
Sonnet 116
When I was seventeen, I fell in love with Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
I adored that poem. I wrote it on a piece of paper, and then I typed it onto another piece of paper, and I carried it with me, and I learnt it by heart; I read it aloud in the bath, and I said it under my breath on trains and I doodled lines from it on my hand during maths class. I even, in later years, drunkenly recited it on a first date to a boy I liked very much, and then - predictably - never saw him again (although he was very impressed, he said, with my intonation and the way I emotionally clutched my fist in a ball by my heart throughout).
For a girl who grew up reading and rereading Wuthering Heights - who stole Pride and Prejudice from the school library when she was 11 and never gave it back (and this was before Colin Firth rendered it quite an attractive read) - this poem told me everything there was to tell: it summarised nearly two decades of reading (or what I had kept with me from two decades of reading, which is the same thing), neatly and succinctly. Love, I knew, finally, did not bend with the remover to remove. O, no (no!) it was an ever fixed mark, that looked on tempests and was never shaken; it was the star to every wandering bark, whose worth was unknown although his height be taken. It was not time's fool - which everybody else seemed to be - although its rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass came, and love altered not with his brief hours and weeks, but beared it out: even to the edge of doom.
It was all I needed to know. All, I thought, anybody needed to know. I didn't know quite what the edge of doom was, and I didn't know what a wandering bark was, and I certainly didn't know what a sickle's compass was, but I knew what it meant to never be shaken, and to never be altered, and to never be removed. I knew that it meant simply: that I might change, and I might fade, and I might alter and weaken and fail, but love - when it found me, which of course it would because it found everybody, just as death and taxes did - would not. Because otherwise it was not love.
I'm not seventeen anymore, and another ten years of reading has done nothing to prepare me for my experience of what love is and should be; another ten years of carrying that poem around in my pocket - of reciting it to myself in the bath and in bed when it's dark - has done nothing to make any of it even slightly true. And, just as my view of love has changed now, so - too - has Sonnet 116. Just as I have now altered, so - too - has the poem I grew up holding on to.
Where it used to be an affirmation of love, now it is a question. Where it used to be a celebration, now it is a mourning. Far from being about what love is, Sonnet 116 is more about what love should be: what, in short, it is not. And the doubt and the insecurity in Shakespeare's voice - the doubt I didn't see at seventeen, and now see too clearly - are everywhere. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; impediments that he can see, too clearly, or they would not need admitting and he would not need to struggle against seeing them and voicing them. Love is not love which alters; it is alteration that undoes the love, instead of being love that wins against the alteration. The worth of that wandering bark is unknown - for worse, as well as for better - and it stands, unsuccessfully, against the sickle that cuts down the beauty that he accuses it of creating to start with.
It is - perhaps - not a cry for love at all; rather, it is a cry against the difference between the love we hope for, and the love we get. For, in the final two lines -
And if this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved -
maybe he means: if love does not exist in the only way it can - permanently, inflexibly, infallibly - then his writing doesn't exist either, because it has all - every last word of it, from Othello to King Lear to Hamlet to Much Ado About Nothing - been built on the hope that it does, and the fear that it does not. And - for all the apparent positivity - at the very end the only thing left hanging in the air - the part that still echoes when the poem has finished - are the final four words, which undo everything else;
no man ever loved.
The meaning of my favourite Sonnet has changed, for me, along with how I now see love. I have stopped reading those books; I have stopped loving Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice, or anything else that makes love the point of it. I have stopped assuming that it will find me: I have stopped assuming that it exists at all. My love of love has finished; my hope of it has totally gone. I don't believe that it exists, anymore, the only way it can: the only love I have seen is temporary, and fluctuating, and cruel, and painful, and changing, and brief, and I have seen nothing to prove otherwise. I have seen nothing to turn that poem back into an affirmation, or to answer that question. And so, finally - after nearly thirty years - I have stopped believing in it, or wanting it, or wanting to have anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from the pretense of love as I can, for as long as I can, and have a life without it, and without the hope of it.
But I still carry the poem with me, and I still recite it in the bath and in the dark when everybody else is asleep. Because the poem is real and permanent, even if the love hoped for within it is not. And although love may not exist - and I'm not at all sure that it does - I believe that it should do.
And, if it does, it should exist exactly as it is in Sonnet 116.
I adored that poem. I wrote it on a piece of paper, and then I typed it onto another piece of paper, and I carried it with me, and I learnt it by heart; I read it aloud in the bath, and I said it under my breath on trains and I doodled lines from it on my hand during maths class. I even, in later years, drunkenly recited it on a first date to a boy I liked very much, and then - predictably - never saw him again (although he was very impressed, he said, with my intonation and the way I emotionally clutched my fist in a ball by my heart throughout).
For a girl who grew up reading and rereading Wuthering Heights - who stole Pride and Prejudice from the school library when she was 11 and never gave it back (and this was before Colin Firth rendered it quite an attractive read) - this poem told me everything there was to tell: it summarised nearly two decades of reading (or what I had kept with me from two decades of reading, which is the same thing), neatly and succinctly. Love, I knew, finally, did not bend with the remover to remove. O, no (no!) it was an ever fixed mark, that looked on tempests and was never shaken; it was the star to every wandering bark, whose worth was unknown although his height be taken. It was not time's fool - which everybody else seemed to be - although its rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass came, and love altered not with his brief hours and weeks, but beared it out: even to the edge of doom.
It was all I needed to know. All, I thought, anybody needed to know. I didn't know quite what the edge of doom was, and I didn't know what a wandering bark was, and I certainly didn't know what a sickle's compass was, but I knew what it meant to never be shaken, and to never be altered, and to never be removed. I knew that it meant simply: that I might change, and I might fade, and I might alter and weaken and fail, but love - when it found me, which of course it would because it found everybody, just as death and taxes did - would not. Because otherwise it was not love.
I'm not seventeen anymore, and another ten years of reading has done nothing to prepare me for my experience of what love is and should be; another ten years of carrying that poem around in my pocket - of reciting it to myself in the bath and in bed when it's dark - has done nothing to make any of it even slightly true. And, just as my view of love has changed now, so - too - has Sonnet 116. Just as I have now altered, so - too - has the poem I grew up holding on to.
Where it used to be an affirmation of love, now it is a question. Where it used to be a celebration, now it is a mourning. Far from being about what love is, Sonnet 116 is more about what love should be: what, in short, it is not. And the doubt and the insecurity in Shakespeare's voice - the doubt I didn't see at seventeen, and now see too clearly - are everywhere. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; impediments that he can see, too clearly, or they would not need admitting and he would not need to struggle against seeing them and voicing them. Love is not love which alters; it is alteration that undoes the love, instead of being love that wins against the alteration. The worth of that wandering bark is unknown - for worse, as well as for better - and it stands, unsuccessfully, against the sickle that cuts down the beauty that he accuses it of creating to start with.
It is - perhaps - not a cry for love at all; rather, it is a cry against the difference between the love we hope for, and the love we get. For, in the final two lines -
And if this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved -
maybe he means: if love does not exist in the only way it can - permanently, inflexibly, infallibly - then his writing doesn't exist either, because it has all - every last word of it, from Othello to King Lear to Hamlet to Much Ado About Nothing - been built on the hope that it does, and the fear that it does not. And - for all the apparent positivity - at the very end the only thing left hanging in the air - the part that still echoes when the poem has finished - are the final four words, which undo everything else;
no man ever loved.
The meaning of my favourite Sonnet has changed, for me, along with how I now see love. I have stopped reading those books; I have stopped loving Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice, or anything else that makes love the point of it. I have stopped assuming that it will find me: I have stopped assuming that it exists at all. My love of love has finished; my hope of it has totally gone. I don't believe that it exists, anymore, the only way it can: the only love I have seen is temporary, and fluctuating, and cruel, and painful, and changing, and brief, and I have seen nothing to prove otherwise. I have seen nothing to turn that poem back into an affirmation, or to answer that question. And so, finally - after nearly thirty years - I have stopped believing in it, or wanting it, or wanting to have anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from the pretense of love as I can, for as long as I can, and have a life without it, and without the hope of it.
But I still carry the poem with me, and I still recite it in the bath and in the dark when everybody else is asleep. Because the poem is real and permanent, even if the love hoped for within it is not. And although love may not exist - and I'm not at all sure that it does - I believe that it should do.
And, if it does, it should exist exactly as it is in Sonnet 116.
Procrastination.
My new computer keyboard has turned up already. I'm using it to type at this very moment.
I'm a bit cross, actually. They said five working days, and it's been less than eighteen hours and here it is: willy nilly arriving at my flat when I have no other excuses to procrastinate with. I blame Apple Mac. You'd never catch a Windows company delivering your goods before you expected them to, on a Sunday morning to boot. Frankly, it's just bad manners.
I have no other excuses now. I'm all run out. The keyboard is perfect, beautiful and a technological phenomenon - smooth, easy to write on, not sticky or hard work in the slightest - my computer screen is big and the right height, my chair has been adjusted appropriately and my butt is totally cushioned. My frantic interior designing has come, reluctantly, to an end because I can't fit anything else in my house, and I have cleaned every inch of the flat to within an inch of its life (because you can't write a bestselling novel in a dirty house: everyone knows that). I have nothing else to fight myself with. I have to write the book.
My agent will be both thrilled and surprised, I'd imagine. She agreed to look after me while I was still in England, and - as since leaving England I haven't written a single word - I haven't really lived up to my side of the bargain. I've been an agent's worse nightmare, frankly: the flakiest, most emotional writer you could hope to work with. To start with I lied: I told her when I initially submitted the manuscript for consideration that it was finished, when it was actually only six chapters in. Then, when she told me she was still interested, I told her I knew what was going to happen in the rest of the novel. Then, when we had a two hour, incredibly detailed meeting and I confessed that I didn't have a clue what happened in the rest of the novel, she told me that she still loved it and "believed in the characters" and wanted to represent it, and would help me finish it: unheard of for any agent, let alone one who represents Booker Prize winning authors. To which I said thankyou, that I would finish it in Japan, and then promptly ran away and didn't do a single bloody thing because I was too busy getting my heart broken by a pretty boy, thankyou very much.
I have always told myself - from the age of three, when I decided that all I really wanted to do was write - that if I was ever lucky enough to get a good agent, I would make sure that the relationship was sophisticated and creative and rather profound: that we both wore black as often as possible and discussed works of great authors - past, present and future - over coffee, and I referred to them in the 'thanks' page of all my books in terms that totally transgressed the boundaries of author and agent ("to my darling Kate... to my friend and agent, Kate, without whom this would not be possible").
She is amazing, of course - still at the other end of email, still waiting, still positive, still patient (considering that she is representing a writer who has nothing to represent) - but I'm not nearly as sophisticated and professional as I should be, and I procrastinate more than any other writer in the history of procrastinating writers (which is most of them).
"I've got wrrriiitttterrrs blloooooccck," I whined after one month in Japan.
"Just relax, have some tea, and let the juices flow," she said sympathetically.
"I'm tooo tiiiirred after work," I moaned after two months in Japan.
"Of course you are: it must be such hard work. Just get lots of sleep and do it a little at a time."
"I'm confuussed about the ploootttttt," I exhaled at her after three months in Japan.
"Let's work on it together, then."
"I'm so upset, my boyfriend is cheating on me and I'm trying to forgive him and it's really hard and I'm so miserable and I'm just crying all the time and I want to ddiiiiie," I moaned after four, five, six and seven months in Japan (at weekly intervals).
"You poor thing, take a break and all the time you need."
"Now I don't know what I'm doing with my liiifffe," I admitted after nine.
"You're going to be a great writer, you just have to have faith."
"I don't have faith," I confessed eventually.
"Yes, I can see that."
At no stage has this amazing, high profile, successful agent said: "Holly. I took a chance on you because I thought you had something sellable. My time and advice is precious and I am giving it to you for free. In the year since I last met with you, you have so far proven me wrong. Get off your arse and write the goddamn book before somebody writes something similar but better and we no longer have anything to sell, ok? And please stop treating me like your agony aunt, because - frankly - I'm trained to represent your book, not to put your messy and chaotic life back together again."
Which, if I was an agent, is exactly what I would have said. About nine months ago, actually.
So: no more excuses. I gave up my life in PR to write; I have no other career options. Everything I have done has been to allow me to write; teaching, living by the sea, moving away from England. I have already done the hard bit; all I have to do now is sit down and finish it. I have a main character I love, an agent who has stuck by me, a family who has stood by me, and the time and weather and house and seaside activities to keep me happy in the process. I have everything I need to sit down and bang out the novel. I now even have the perfect keyboard.
Procrastination can be fun, sometimes, and sometimes it is necessary. The last year of procrastination - when I put my book down and failed to pick it up again - helped me to really use my heart for the first time and have it broken for the first time and heal and grow up properly because of it (I'm not the person I was when I left England: the last year has changed me more than the ten years before that put together). It changed me for the better, though - it made me a little wiser, and a little less childish, and a little less blindly optimistic - and I think the person I am now will write a better book than the person I was then ever could have. A book with more thought, and more heart, and the knowledge needed to be truly innocent. So it was procrastination that will become - in one way or another - a part of the book it was there to delay.
It has been long enough, now. My agent deserves the rest of the novel. And so - much more importantly - do I.
The time for procrastination has finally come to an end. And the time for writing has finally started.
I'm a bit cross, actually. They said five working days, and it's been less than eighteen hours and here it is: willy nilly arriving at my flat when I have no other excuses to procrastinate with. I blame Apple Mac. You'd never catch a Windows company delivering your goods before you expected them to, on a Sunday morning to boot. Frankly, it's just bad manners.
I have no other excuses now. I'm all run out. The keyboard is perfect, beautiful and a technological phenomenon - smooth, easy to write on, not sticky or hard work in the slightest - my computer screen is big and the right height, my chair has been adjusted appropriately and my butt is totally cushioned. My frantic interior designing has come, reluctantly, to an end because I can't fit anything else in my house, and I have cleaned every inch of the flat to within an inch of its life (because you can't write a bestselling novel in a dirty house: everyone knows that). I have nothing else to fight myself with. I have to write the book.
My agent will be both thrilled and surprised, I'd imagine. She agreed to look after me while I was still in England, and - as since leaving England I haven't written a single word - I haven't really lived up to my side of the bargain. I've been an agent's worse nightmare, frankly: the flakiest, most emotional writer you could hope to work with. To start with I lied: I told her when I initially submitted the manuscript for consideration that it was finished, when it was actually only six chapters in. Then, when she told me she was still interested, I told her I knew what was going to happen in the rest of the novel. Then, when we had a two hour, incredibly detailed meeting and I confessed that I didn't have a clue what happened in the rest of the novel, she told me that she still loved it and "believed in the characters" and wanted to represent it, and would help me finish it: unheard of for any agent, let alone one who represents Booker Prize winning authors. To which I said thankyou, that I would finish it in Japan, and then promptly ran away and didn't do a single bloody thing because I was too busy getting my heart broken by a pretty boy, thankyou very much.
I have always told myself - from the age of three, when I decided that all I really wanted to do was write - that if I was ever lucky enough to get a good agent, I would make sure that the relationship was sophisticated and creative and rather profound: that we both wore black as often as possible and discussed works of great authors - past, present and future - over coffee, and I referred to them in the 'thanks' page of all my books in terms that totally transgressed the boundaries of author and agent ("to my darling Kate... to my friend and agent, Kate, without whom this would not be possible").
She is amazing, of course - still at the other end of email, still waiting, still positive, still patient (considering that she is representing a writer who has nothing to represent) - but I'm not nearly as sophisticated and professional as I should be, and I procrastinate more than any other writer in the history of procrastinating writers (which is most of them).
"I've got wrrriiitttterrrs blloooooccck," I whined after one month in Japan.
"Just relax, have some tea, and let the juices flow," she said sympathetically.
"I'm tooo tiiiirred after work," I moaned after two months in Japan.
"Of course you are: it must be such hard work. Just get lots of sleep and do it a little at a time."
"I'm confuussed about the ploootttttt," I exhaled at her after three months in Japan.
"Let's work on it together, then."
"I'm so upset, my boyfriend is cheating on me and I'm trying to forgive him and it's really hard and I'm so miserable and I'm just crying all the time and I want to ddiiiiie," I moaned after four, five, six and seven months in Japan (at weekly intervals).
"You poor thing, take a break and all the time you need."
"Now I don't know what I'm doing with my liiifffe," I admitted after nine.
"You're going to be a great writer, you just have to have faith."
"I don't have faith," I confessed eventually.
"Yes, I can see that."
At no stage has this amazing, high profile, successful agent said: "Holly. I took a chance on you because I thought you had something sellable. My time and advice is precious and I am giving it to you for free. In the year since I last met with you, you have so far proven me wrong. Get off your arse and write the goddamn book before somebody writes something similar but better and we no longer have anything to sell, ok? And please stop treating me like your agony aunt, because - frankly - I'm trained to represent your book, not to put your messy and chaotic life back together again."
Which, if I was an agent, is exactly what I would have said. About nine months ago, actually.
So: no more excuses. I gave up my life in PR to write; I have no other career options. Everything I have done has been to allow me to write; teaching, living by the sea, moving away from England. I have already done the hard bit; all I have to do now is sit down and finish it. I have a main character I love, an agent who has stuck by me, a family who has stood by me, and the time and weather and house and seaside activities to keep me happy in the process. I have everything I need to sit down and bang out the novel. I now even have the perfect keyboard.
Procrastination can be fun, sometimes, and sometimes it is necessary. The last year of procrastination - when I put my book down and failed to pick it up again - helped me to really use my heart for the first time and have it broken for the first time and heal and grow up properly because of it (I'm not the person I was when I left England: the last year has changed me more than the ten years before that put together). It changed me for the better, though - it made me a little wiser, and a little less childish, and a little less blindly optimistic - and I think the person I am now will write a better book than the person I was then ever could have. A book with more thought, and more heart, and the knowledge needed to be truly innocent. So it was procrastination that will become - in one way or another - a part of the book it was there to delay.
It has been long enough, now. My agent deserves the rest of the novel. And so - much more importantly - do I.
The time for procrastination has finally come to an end. And the time for writing has finally started.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Catwalk.
I've seen many funny things during my time in Japan. I've seen three hundred children brushing their teeth at the same time; I've seen karaoke lyrics so badly translated that they are unidentifiable; I've seen t-shirts that are entirely inappropriate because the wearer can't read them; I've seen families camping with full steel stoves and full sized mattresses; I've seen noodle sandwiches and bread sushi; I've seen the kind of dancing that everybody should see at some stage of their lives. But I have never - and I mean ever - seen anything as funny as a man walking a cat.
Two cats, actually. A black one, and a white one. Both attached to the end of a lead, and both enjoying a nice stroll along the beach front with their owner.
Except that "enjoying" isn't really the right word, in this case. Where a dog will happily be attached to a lead and led at a swift pace - stopping now and then to pee or sniff or poo - a cat is not quite as happy about it. First of all, they're not really in it for the exercise: these cats were clearly absolutely indignant that they were being forced to use their legs on a perfectly nice weekend afternoon when they could be sleeping on a windowsill somewhere. Second of all, they had one idea of where they wanted to go, and the owner had an entirely different one: the result being that it was less of a walk, and more of a dragging session as each cat made a bid for a different direction and then dug their heels in. Third of all, the cats clearly couldn't decide which they liked least: walking, their owner, or each other, and thus they were trying to pull away from him, and the walking, and the other cat, as far as they could. None of which is conducive to a particularly elegant or productive exercise session.
The best bit, however, was when the cats saw me. Terrified by the big white girl, they immediately flattened themselves to the floor; ears down, legs spread, tails between their legs. And they were not moving for hell or high water; these little cats flattened themselves out and started hissing as the old gentleman - with absolutely no sentimentality or affection whatsoever - continued to drag them along the surface of the path with their eight stiffened little legs scraping lines in the dirt behind them. What ultimately resulted was a kind of strange cat dance: a combination of flattened heel digging - a tug of war between two cats and their owner - and then, as the tension became too much, a sort of quick step in the direction of the lead while they struggled to get a grip on the sand again.
As they got nearer to me, both cats simultaneously decided that the best possible course of action would be to stop resisting the approach, and - instead - to get as far away on the other side as they could. So what was a heel digging dance now became another waltz entirely as each cat zigazagged as fast as they could and strained with all their might to go past me, in utterly different directions: stopping and starting as they reached the end of the leash and had to wait for their owner to catch up. And never - ever - looking at me at all: shiftily racing past me with the whites of their eyes on full display.
All of which was dealt with intense irritation by their owner, who clearly had been forced to take them out and thought they were tiresome animals and also quite wanted to be back in a seat in the sunshine, asleep, and not walking the damned cats. And - more specifically, from the way he glared at me - thought that I was making a bad job worse, and that none of it was funny in the slightest.
As I sat on the kerb and I laughed until I started making piggy noises at the back of my throat and had to use my sleeve to wipe my face dry, I decided that I was going to have to politely disagree with him.
Two cats, actually. A black one, and a white one. Both attached to the end of a lead, and both enjoying a nice stroll along the beach front with their owner.
Except that "enjoying" isn't really the right word, in this case. Where a dog will happily be attached to a lead and led at a swift pace - stopping now and then to pee or sniff or poo - a cat is not quite as happy about it. First of all, they're not really in it for the exercise: these cats were clearly absolutely indignant that they were being forced to use their legs on a perfectly nice weekend afternoon when they could be sleeping on a windowsill somewhere. Second of all, they had one idea of where they wanted to go, and the owner had an entirely different one: the result being that it was less of a walk, and more of a dragging session as each cat made a bid for a different direction and then dug their heels in. Third of all, the cats clearly couldn't decide which they liked least: walking, their owner, or each other, and thus they were trying to pull away from him, and the walking, and the other cat, as far as they could. None of which is conducive to a particularly elegant or productive exercise session.
The best bit, however, was when the cats saw me. Terrified by the big white girl, they immediately flattened themselves to the floor; ears down, legs spread, tails between their legs. And they were not moving for hell or high water; these little cats flattened themselves out and started hissing as the old gentleman - with absolutely no sentimentality or affection whatsoever - continued to drag them along the surface of the path with their eight stiffened little legs scraping lines in the dirt behind them. What ultimately resulted was a kind of strange cat dance: a combination of flattened heel digging - a tug of war between two cats and their owner - and then, as the tension became too much, a sort of quick step in the direction of the lead while they struggled to get a grip on the sand again.
As they got nearer to me, both cats simultaneously decided that the best possible course of action would be to stop resisting the approach, and - instead - to get as far away on the other side as they could. So what was a heel digging dance now became another waltz entirely as each cat zigazagged as fast as they could and strained with all their might to go past me, in utterly different directions: stopping and starting as they reached the end of the leash and had to wait for their owner to catch up. And never - ever - looking at me at all: shiftily racing past me with the whites of their eyes on full display.
All of which was dealt with intense irritation by their owner, who clearly had been forced to take them out and thought they were tiresome animals and also quite wanted to be back in a seat in the sunshine, asleep, and not walking the damned cats. And - more specifically, from the way he glared at me - thought that I was making a bad job worse, and that none of it was funny in the slightest.
As I sat on the kerb and I laughed until I started making piggy noises at the back of my throat and had to use my sleeve to wipe my face dry, I decided that I was going to have to politely disagree with him.
Two weeks later
My sister's birthday is thirteen days before mine. I don't know what my parents were doing, frankly; organising it like that. In fact, they had aimed for both of us to be born on the same day - two years apart - but she was pigheaded even as a foetus, and decided to show up before they had even fully explained to me that I was no longer going to be the centre of attention anymore: that there would be someone smaller, cuter and - unfortunately - prettier to distract everyone from what I saw (at two years old, but - let's be honest - much longer than that) as The Point Of It All. That being: me.
I quite liked my little sister, what with her being tiny and fat tummied and quite capable of fitting neatly into all of my teddy bear's clothes; a fact that immediately rendered every single of one of them utterly naked (and my sister rather jaunty in a navy sailor outfit and Paddington's hat). She was pretty cool, as it happened, and I carried her around with me as if I was Christopher Robin and she was my very own Pooh. In fact, the only thing that stopped me dragging her down the stairs by one foot was that my mum rather insensitively wouldn't let me.
What I was not happy about, however, was being forced to share my birthday. And it was a shared birthday, no matter how much my parents tried to separate it back out again (too late, mum and dad: too late). The month run-up to my birthday had been cruelly taken away from me - the month that should have been all mine was snatched out from under my eyes - and I was not impressed. If I wanted a present, she could ask for it first and get it before I did; if I wanted to go somewhere, she could - two weeks before the Big Day - hear about it and decide she quite fancied it too. And - I was utterly convinced - all the best Birthday wishes were given out to her and never quite reached me. Because - and I knew this in my heart of hearts - everyone knows that there are only a certain amount of genuine cheers when the candles get blown out, and mine always sounded a little lacklustre.
So I took it back. I took my birthday back, and I stole my sister's with it.
"It's my birthday in seventeen days!" she would shout, jumping up and down on the bed.
"It's my birthday in thirty days!" I would shout, jumping next to her.
"It's my birthday in five days!" she would remind mum and dad from the back of the car.
"Mine in eighteen, remember?" I would inform them immediately afterwards.
And then, when the big day came, my sister would run into mum and dad's bedroom, screaming "it's my biiiiirttthhdaayyy!" and I would run behind her, yelling "and it's neearrrrlly miiinnnnee!!"
Eventually - after four or five or six or maybe seventeen years of this - my little sister burst into tears and asked me to keep my grubby hands off her birthday so she could have one day for herself, and my mum and dad repeated what they repeated every year: which was, more or less, "stop it, Holly Smale, or we're cancelling your birthday altogether."
Now, I'm left to wonder if this is exactly what happens with my grandma and grandad when we're not looking, who have all but shared a birthday for the last 50 years of their marriage. A marriage that has lasted even though I'm certain that - when the rest of the family go home and they're sitting down with the rest of my grandad's birthday cake - is filled with my grandma's cries of "it's my birthday in twelve days!"
Twelve days, and I wonder sometimes if my grandma also feels as if all the best Birthday wishes get used up two weeks earlier; as if all the best singing and hugs and cards and blog posts get sent to my grandad instead. So it is a sign of her utter dignity and composure, I think, that she doesn't kick my grandad's birthday cake off the table on the 3rd of May, and demand that everyone begin a twelve day countdown to the 15th of May immediately. An utter dignity and composure that my grandma is famed for, because if my grandad is the greatest of all wizards, and - let's be honest, we all know it's true - behind every great man is an even greater woman, you can only imagine the woman he goes home to when he has finished saving the world. A lady with a mixture of fire and serenity, determination and kindness, thoughtfulness and sheer gumption that most women aim for and frequently fail to combine as perfectly. A grandma with honesty and warmth and humour; who quietly and firmly holds the family together, and singlehandedly cooks - at the age of over 80 - a full Christmas meal for fifteen people every year without once telling us to do it ourselves; who - every single week - takes a slice out of her homemade apple pie before she heats it up because my dad prefers it cold; who keeps track, in minute detail, of exactly what each of her six granddaughters is doing at any stage - who they are dating, how they are feeling, what mood they are in - because she knows that is what a loving grandma does. Who cooks the world's most amazing roast potatoes, who has the world's most incredible, lineless, translucent skin (I'm keeping my fingers crossed for genetic inheritance) and smells just like a grandma should. Who has dedicated an entire life to caring for other people more than for herself, every single day, in every single action, and who never, ever thinks to mention it to anybody. And whose wit, candid sharpness (when I was five I told her that "one day I would be bigger than her" - which was true by a good seven inches - to which she replied - with similar accuracy - "yes, but you will never be wiser") - kindness and wisdom I have tried to replicate since I was old enough to realise how precious they are, and what a rare combination.
So, grandma, this is my birthday gift to you: a birthday gift that is no less heartfelt, and no less meant, just becomes it comes rather close to grandad's (and I wanted to get you flowers too but they would die in the post; roses aren't very good at travelling 10,000 miles in the air apparently). I miss you and I wish I was there to help you celebrate properly, because the cheers will never be lacklustre for you: not from any of us. Not from the family you hold so perfectly together.
Today in particular - and, in fact, most days - for all of us you are most certainly The Point Of It All. x
I quite liked my little sister, what with her being tiny and fat tummied and quite capable of fitting neatly into all of my teddy bear's clothes; a fact that immediately rendered every single of one of them utterly naked (and my sister rather jaunty in a navy sailor outfit and Paddington's hat). She was pretty cool, as it happened, and I carried her around with me as if I was Christopher Robin and she was my very own Pooh. In fact, the only thing that stopped me dragging her down the stairs by one foot was that my mum rather insensitively wouldn't let me.
What I was not happy about, however, was being forced to share my birthday. And it was a shared birthday, no matter how much my parents tried to separate it back out again (too late, mum and dad: too late). The month run-up to my birthday had been cruelly taken away from me - the month that should have been all mine was snatched out from under my eyes - and I was not impressed. If I wanted a present, she could ask for it first and get it before I did; if I wanted to go somewhere, she could - two weeks before the Big Day - hear about it and decide she quite fancied it too. And - I was utterly convinced - all the best Birthday wishes were given out to her and never quite reached me. Because - and I knew this in my heart of hearts - everyone knows that there are only a certain amount of genuine cheers when the candles get blown out, and mine always sounded a little lacklustre.
So I took it back. I took my birthday back, and I stole my sister's with it.
"It's my birthday in seventeen days!" she would shout, jumping up and down on the bed.
"It's my birthday in thirty days!" I would shout, jumping next to her.
"It's my birthday in five days!" she would remind mum and dad from the back of the car.
"Mine in eighteen, remember?" I would inform them immediately afterwards.
And then, when the big day came, my sister would run into mum and dad's bedroom, screaming "it's my biiiiirttthhdaayyy!" and I would run behind her, yelling "and it's neearrrrlly miiinnnnee!!"
Eventually - after four or five or six or maybe seventeen years of this - my little sister burst into tears and asked me to keep my grubby hands off her birthday so she could have one day for herself, and my mum and dad repeated what they repeated every year: which was, more or less, "stop it, Holly Smale, or we're cancelling your birthday altogether."
Now, I'm left to wonder if this is exactly what happens with my grandma and grandad when we're not looking, who have all but shared a birthday for the last 50 years of their marriage. A marriage that has lasted even though I'm certain that - when the rest of the family go home and they're sitting down with the rest of my grandad's birthday cake - is filled with my grandma's cries of "it's my birthday in twelve days!"
Twelve days, and I wonder sometimes if my grandma also feels as if all the best Birthday wishes get used up two weeks earlier; as if all the best singing and hugs and cards and blog posts get sent to my grandad instead. So it is a sign of her utter dignity and composure, I think, that she doesn't kick my grandad's birthday cake off the table on the 3rd of May, and demand that everyone begin a twelve day countdown to the 15th of May immediately. An utter dignity and composure that my grandma is famed for, because if my grandad is the greatest of all wizards, and - let's be honest, we all know it's true - behind every great man is an even greater woman, you can only imagine the woman he goes home to when he has finished saving the world. A lady with a mixture of fire and serenity, determination and kindness, thoughtfulness and sheer gumption that most women aim for and frequently fail to combine as perfectly. A grandma with honesty and warmth and humour; who quietly and firmly holds the family together, and singlehandedly cooks - at the age of over 80 - a full Christmas meal for fifteen people every year without once telling us to do it ourselves; who - every single week - takes a slice out of her homemade apple pie before she heats it up because my dad prefers it cold; who keeps track, in minute detail, of exactly what each of her six granddaughters is doing at any stage - who they are dating, how they are feeling, what mood they are in - because she knows that is what a loving grandma does. Who cooks the world's most amazing roast potatoes, who has the world's most incredible, lineless, translucent skin (I'm keeping my fingers crossed for genetic inheritance) and smells just like a grandma should. Who has dedicated an entire life to caring for other people more than for herself, every single day, in every single action, and who never, ever thinks to mention it to anybody. And whose wit, candid sharpness (when I was five I told her that "one day I would be bigger than her" - which was true by a good seven inches - to which she replied - with similar accuracy - "yes, but you will never be wiser") - kindness and wisdom I have tried to replicate since I was old enough to realise how precious they are, and what a rare combination.
So, grandma, this is my birthday gift to you: a birthday gift that is no less heartfelt, and no less meant, just becomes it comes rather close to grandad's (and I wanted to get you flowers too but they would die in the post; roses aren't very good at travelling 10,000 miles in the air apparently). I miss you and I wish I was there to help you celebrate properly, because the cheers will never be lacklustre for you: not from any of us. Not from the family you hold so perfectly together.
Today in particular - and, in fact, most days - for all of us you are most certainly The Point Of It All. x
Party
I don't know what the official signs of a good house warming party are - having never thrown one before - but if they involve an unidentified cheesecake in your fridge, the next door neighbours' table in your living room and a mural featuring man eating fish, bits of genitalia that look like drag queens and depressed elephants stuck haphazardly on your wall, then I think I can safely say that last night's event was excellent. Even if I was already quite significantly drunk by the time everybody turned up (note: all of the Japanese guests turned up at exactly 8 o clock, which is what it said on the invitation. All of the non-Japanese guests turned up whenever they felt like it, ranging from 8.15 to 11.30, and showed some surprise that there was nothing hot left to eat. I'm still expecting some people to arrive at around about now and ask where the vodka shots are).
It was obviously a good party, because I wasn't even slightly prepared for it. Luckily I had the foresight to invite my lovely next door neighbours (the old couple who wake me up early in the morning but who I like very much regardless, which is saying something), and they not only turned up with six plates of hot, homemade Japanese food (which trumped my bowl of marshmallows, even if they did have bits of jam in the middle of them), they brought their table, their plates, their glasses and their cushions: without which it would have been less a party, and more twenty five people standing in a circle and telling each other they were hungry and wanted to sit down.
It was a roaring success, frankly. Three generations, six nationalities; beer, wine, spirits and food from all over the world. There wasn't a pause; not an argument, not a hiccup, not the slightest bit of tension. Friends turned up and immediately started cooking food for everyone; every single person turned up with a gift of some kind or another. Not one thing got broken; an hour of moving bottles and cans to the tip, and the house is as it was at 7.30 last night. Even more astonishingly, I woke up this morning and discovered that someone - and I suspect I know exactly who, because she promised me she would help make it less terrifying days and days ago - had washed up. Everything. Every single glass, pot, pan and plate. My house was probably less messy this morning than it was eighteen hours ago, because some of those glasses and pots had never been washed, and had been in storage for the past year and a half.
I've never really understood the concept of a 'house warming party' before - the temperature of a house doesn't even vaguely change just because lots of people have spilt beer all over its floors - but I think I do now. Friends oohed and aahed over my home decor (which made me like both friends and home decor more) and they laughed and shouted and chatted each other up and introduced a dangerous beer bong that made everybody ridiculously drunk and drew a big picture for me and brought gifts and loaded my house with food and drinks and cigarettes and generally welcoming good humour. They told me how glad they were that I was there, and how much fun they were having; they discussed plans for beach barbeques and camping trips and dinner parties and wheelchair races (more about that at another time), and they invited me to all of them. And - after a year (possibly longer) of incredible loneliness and isolation abroad, that felt..... good. Really, really good.
And - when they all held their glasses up and cheered me and my arrival in Nichinan - I can honestly say I finally understood why people have parties. Because I felt thoroughly warm, and I think my house did too.
It was obviously a good party, because I wasn't even slightly prepared for it. Luckily I had the foresight to invite my lovely next door neighbours (the old couple who wake me up early in the morning but who I like very much regardless, which is saying something), and they not only turned up with six plates of hot, homemade Japanese food (which trumped my bowl of marshmallows, even if they did have bits of jam in the middle of them), they brought their table, their plates, their glasses and their cushions: without which it would have been less a party, and more twenty five people standing in a circle and telling each other they were hungry and wanted to sit down.
It was a roaring success, frankly. Three generations, six nationalities; beer, wine, spirits and food from all over the world. There wasn't a pause; not an argument, not a hiccup, not the slightest bit of tension. Friends turned up and immediately started cooking food for everyone; every single person turned up with a gift of some kind or another. Not one thing got broken; an hour of moving bottles and cans to the tip, and the house is as it was at 7.30 last night. Even more astonishingly, I woke up this morning and discovered that someone - and I suspect I know exactly who, because she promised me she would help make it less terrifying days and days ago - had washed up. Everything. Every single glass, pot, pan and plate. My house was probably less messy this morning than it was eighteen hours ago, because some of those glasses and pots had never been washed, and had been in storage for the past year and a half.
I've never really understood the concept of a 'house warming party' before - the temperature of a house doesn't even vaguely change just because lots of people have spilt beer all over its floors - but I think I do now. Friends oohed and aahed over my home decor (which made me like both friends and home decor more) and they laughed and shouted and chatted each other up and introduced a dangerous beer bong that made everybody ridiculously drunk and drew a big picture for me and brought gifts and loaded my house with food and drinks and cigarettes and generally welcoming good humour. They told me how glad they were that I was there, and how much fun they were having; they discussed plans for beach barbeques and camping trips and dinner parties and wheelchair races (more about that at another time), and they invited me to all of them. And - after a year (possibly longer) of incredible loneliness and isolation abroad, that felt..... good. Really, really good.
And - when they all held their glasses up and cheered me and my arrival in Nichinan - I can honestly say I finally understood why people have parties. Because I felt thoroughly warm, and I think my house did too.
Friday, 14 May 2010
Countdown
The party has started.
Not right now, obviously. That would not be a good start to any party; inviting people in and then sitting in my study and writing my blog while they sit on the carpet and wait for me to open the fridge for them.
No: it starts in two hours. The countdown.
I'm drunk already. I thought that would be the best way to handle the stress. Except that now I'm drunk on UmeShu (Japanese plum wine: very nice) and I still haven't cleaned my flat or worked out where I put all the snacks or hidden all the things I need to hide or made sure the MacDonalds drink cup is out of my bathroom, where it is currently sitting on the edge of my bath (next to The Beautiful and Damned: thoroughly good book, all two pages read of it thus far). And - because I'm a bit tipsy on UmeShu - I can't be bothered to actually do anything to prepare at all. I can't even be bothered to get changed out of my work clothes.
I think - in hindsight - the nerves were perhaps there for a reason. They stop me being a lazy drunkard.
Anyway, once I've found the seven bags of marshmallows - which is what I am providing in the way of food - and swept the sushi off the floor (I dropped it; it's hard to eat sushi and drink UmeShu at the same time), I will be ready.
Except for a shower.
Once I've found the marshmallows and cleaned up the sushi and had a shower, I will be ready.
And wiped down my bath. And vacuumed.
And made my bed. And turned my computer off so that nobody knows I'm going to write a blog about them tomorrow.
And eaten all the marshmallows and then gone back to the shops to buy some more.
Actually, I don't care anymore. I'm going to drink another bottle and see what happens.
I've decided I absolutely love parties after all.
Not right now, obviously. That would not be a good start to any party; inviting people in and then sitting in my study and writing my blog while they sit on the carpet and wait for me to open the fridge for them.
No: it starts in two hours. The countdown.
I'm drunk already. I thought that would be the best way to handle the stress. Except that now I'm drunk on UmeShu (Japanese plum wine: very nice) and I still haven't cleaned my flat or worked out where I put all the snacks or hidden all the things I need to hide or made sure the MacDonalds drink cup is out of my bathroom, where it is currently sitting on the edge of my bath (next to The Beautiful and Damned: thoroughly good book, all two pages read of it thus far). And - because I'm a bit tipsy on UmeShu - I can't be bothered to actually do anything to prepare at all. I can't even be bothered to get changed out of my work clothes.
I think - in hindsight - the nerves were perhaps there for a reason. They stop me being a lazy drunkard.
Anyway, once I've found the seven bags of marshmallows - which is what I am providing in the way of food - and swept the sushi off the floor (I dropped it; it's hard to eat sushi and drink UmeShu at the same time), I will be ready.
Except for a shower.
Once I've found the marshmallows and cleaned up the sushi and had a shower, I will be ready.
And wiped down my bath. And vacuumed.
And made my bed. And turned my computer off so that nobody knows I'm going to write a blog about them tomorrow.
And eaten all the marshmallows and then gone back to the shops to buy some more.
Actually, I don't care anymore. I'm going to drink another bottle and see what happens.
I've decided I absolutely love parties after all.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Workman
It's hard to be a writer when your tools are absolutely rubbish.
It's not my fault. Every time I sit down to start writing - and I mean writing properly, because blogs don't count and everyone knows it - my tools make it entirely impossible to be creative. I sit down to write a perfect sentence (grammatically faultless, insightful, profound, never before written) and my chair is too high.
So I lower my chair.
And then I sit down to write the same perfect sentence, and my chair is too low.
So I raise my chair.
And then I have to go to the shops and buy a cushion for it, because I can't concentrate on the perfect sentence when my butt hurts.
The perfect sentence is still there, though, waiting to be written, so I sit down and decide that it is about time I wrote it.
But I can't, because the space bar has broken on my laptop and alligetisalotofprosethatlookslikethis. So I email home to England so that I can get my desktop shipped over to Japan, because I have suddenly realised that a bestselling novel is never going to be written with a broken space bar and a computer I have to crouch in front of like a big literary spider, and what I really need is my computer - my precious computer - and I can't write a single solitary word of a bestselling novel until I get it, because what is the point inwritinganovelthatlookslikethis?
Although it would still be better than anything Stephanie Myer drivels out.
So I wait a month, and I spend a fortune (my dad spends a fortune) getting my computer sent to Japan - a computer with a perfectly respectable space bar - and then I discover that the keyboard is entirely unworkable.
Literally unworkable. The keys are too high, and too sticky and it feels like playing the piano. It is a veritable threat to my health, this keyboard. It is going to give me arthritis. I cannot concentrate when I am being given arthritis.
Never mind that I wrote six chapters of the novel in England on this exact keyboard and it was thoroughly easy and painless. It was a fluke. I was numb to pain: I worked in the reception of the NHS.
So now - of course - I have to wait to receive my brand new, expensive, state-of-the-art keyboard before I can start writing the perfect sentence in the perfect book, in the perfect life that has to - absolutely has to - be mine before I can do anything.
The problem is: my heartbreak is now over, or the short-term type is; the incessant Yokohama rain has stopped; the long working Yokohama hours have stopped. I am in the sunshine by the sea: happy, free, with plenty of time on my hands to write the damned book that is going to mean I can write and write about writing and procrastinate before writing forever. I just don't appear to have a computer that will do it for me.
So - until the keyboard turns up in a few days - I'm delaying the start of my masterpiece again. Because at some stage - when I have replaced every single piece of technology in my house and possibly both wrists and arms, just in case they're getting in my way too - I am going to write the most perfect sentence that anybody has ever written, which will be a part of the most perfect book that anybody has ever written, and will result in the most perfect book that anybody has ever read.
And - if I don't - it will be all the fault of these goddamn tools.
It's not my fault. Every time I sit down to start writing - and I mean writing properly, because blogs don't count and everyone knows it - my tools make it entirely impossible to be creative. I sit down to write a perfect sentence (grammatically faultless, insightful, profound, never before written) and my chair is too high.
So I lower my chair.
And then I sit down to write the same perfect sentence, and my chair is too low.
So I raise my chair.
And then I have to go to the shops and buy a cushion for it, because I can't concentrate on the perfect sentence when my butt hurts.
The perfect sentence is still there, though, waiting to be written, so I sit down and decide that it is about time I wrote it.
But I can't, because the space bar has broken on my laptop and alligetisalotofprosethatlookslikethis. So I email home to England so that I can get my desktop shipped over to Japan, because I have suddenly realised that a bestselling novel is never going to be written with a broken space bar and a computer I have to crouch in front of like a big literary spider, and what I really need is my computer - my precious computer - and I can't write a single solitary word of a bestselling novel until I get it, because what is the point inwritinganovelthatlookslikethis?
Although it would still be better than anything Stephanie Myer drivels out.
So I wait a month, and I spend a fortune (my dad spends a fortune) getting my computer sent to Japan - a computer with a perfectly respectable space bar - and then I discover that the keyboard is entirely unworkable.
Literally unworkable. The keys are too high, and too sticky and it feels like playing the piano. It is a veritable threat to my health, this keyboard. It is going to give me arthritis. I cannot concentrate when I am being given arthritis.
Never mind that I wrote six chapters of the novel in England on this exact keyboard and it was thoroughly easy and painless. It was a fluke. I was numb to pain: I worked in the reception of the NHS.
So now - of course - I have to wait to receive my brand new, expensive, state-of-the-art keyboard before I can start writing the perfect sentence in the perfect book, in the perfect life that has to - absolutely has to - be mine before I can do anything.
The problem is: my heartbreak is now over, or the short-term type is; the incessant Yokohama rain has stopped; the long working Yokohama hours have stopped. I am in the sunshine by the sea: happy, free, with plenty of time on my hands to write the damned book that is going to mean I can write and write about writing and procrastinate before writing forever. I just don't appear to have a computer that will do it for me.
So - until the keyboard turns up in a few days - I'm delaying the start of my masterpiece again. Because at some stage - when I have replaced every single piece of technology in my house and possibly both wrists and arms, just in case they're getting in my way too - I am going to write the most perfect sentence that anybody has ever written, which will be a part of the most perfect book that anybody has ever written, and will result in the most perfect book that anybody has ever read.
And - if I don't - it will be all the fault of these goddamn tools.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
Friends
"You hate parties?"
"Yes."
"Really hate them?"
"Having them, yes."
"Can I....". My friend paused. "Would you think I was interfering if I offered to help?"
There was a pause while I raised my eyes to the ceiling and thanked whoever was up there for putting this person in my path at this particular moment (I`m referring to something celestial, incidentally; not the guy that lives in the flat above me).
"I would not think you were interfering, no."
"Because I love parties. I love everything about them. I love hosting them, and organising them, and arranging them, and decorating for them, and cooking for them."
"You`re weird."
"So are you."
"Excellent. Want to have my party for me?"
"In your house?"
"Yes. And I will pay for it."
"Yes, please."
"Fantastic."
Then we continued eating dinner: each of us very, very satisfied with the outcome of the conversation.
And that, in a nutshell, is why it is a terribly good idea to make friends as quickly as possible, and as intelligently as possible. I think I did a particularly excellent job in picking this one. And an even better job in being picked by her.
"Yes."
"Really hate them?"
"Having them, yes."
"Can I....". My friend paused. "Would you think I was interfering if I offered to help?"
There was a pause while I raised my eyes to the ceiling and thanked whoever was up there for putting this person in my path at this particular moment (I`m referring to something celestial, incidentally; not the guy that lives in the flat above me).
"I would not think you were interfering, no."
"Because I love parties. I love everything about them. I love hosting them, and organising them, and arranging them, and decorating for them, and cooking for them."
"You`re weird."
"So are you."
"Excellent. Want to have my party for me?"
"In your house?"
"Yes. And I will pay for it."
"Yes, please."
"Fantastic."
Then we continued eating dinner: each of us very, very satisfied with the outcome of the conversation.
And that, in a nutshell, is why it is a terribly good idea to make friends as quickly as possible, and as intelligently as possible. I think I did a particularly excellent job in picking this one. And an even better job in being picked by her.
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