Biology of the Worst Kind

Life in the Very Slow Lane

Lassitude, indolence, extreme laziness, idleness beyond belief - I don't know how to convey the degree of my incapacity for activity.  People don't believe me.  You don't believe me.  You think I exaggerate.  No, I don't.  You won't believe that either.  You think it an affectation.  So yesterday I went out.  I did a reading with the estimable Francis Spufford at the Small Wonders Festival at Charleston.  There was nothing unpleasant about it (apart from the Bloomsburyness of Charleston.  Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Virginia visiting.  God I hate that drippy painting and twee tastefulness). 

My publisher sent me in a chauffeur driven car from Cambridge to Sussex, causing much hilarity to The Poet who pointed out that I'd have my very own chauffeur on Yom Kippur.  (The academic term might be starting again but even that doesn't stem the flow of punnery from the turmoil, no, maelstrom, in The Poet's mind.)

'Thank God,I'm back,' I wailed as I walked through the door and collapsed into The Poet's arms at eleven o'clock last night.  'I've done it.  It's over now.  I've don't have to go out for the next ten days.'

I'd been out since 2.30 that afternoon.  All I'd done was sit for two and a half hours in the back of a Jaguar ('Would you mind not wearing your cap?' I asked the driver nervously), spent three hours talking and reading to people, signed a few books, and sat for another two and a half hours in the back of the Jag.   If you live what they call A Life, my abjection and exhaustion might strike you as extreme.  What can I say?  I think my blood runs slower than your average three-toed sloth, and that I got born without the gregarious gene that made the human race the monstrous social success it is today.

Actually, I'm about to find out exactly what my problem is, why I'm such a sliver of a soul.  My friend S. send me a card the other day.  We were best mates in the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in 1968.  Difficult, annoying, angry young women in the bin.  It turns out, astonishingly, that they've still got the medical records from back then, and that the Data Protection Act means I have the right to get copies.  S. got hers.  Every session with the shrinks is noted, all their diagnoses and comments still there.  'Are you sure you're up to it,' S. said.  'What with being madder than I am...'  It's a debate that's been going on between us since 1968.  In fact, she is madder than me, but she just refuses to see it.  So I've filled in the form and I'm awaiting a shoebox full of my deviant past.  Just nobody mention Pandora.  But perhaps it will explain my epic idleness.  Or idyllness, as I prefer to  think of it.

Very excitingly, just by the by, I got paid for doing the reading in scarves.  Instead of real money (hey, writers don't need money, do they, it's not like they need to earn a living?) F. Spufford and I got a voucher each to spend at the Charleston gift shop.  So now I'll be spending the winter with my neck swathed in bloomsbury-hued silk and satin.  I looked on the shelves for elegantly rounded stones to keep in one's pockets in the event of a sudden river in one's vicinity, but they must have run out.  So I shall have to content myself with wearing my Vanessa-and-Virginia scarves sitting in the room of my own in which I plan to stay for as long as I possibly can.

I Am Bad

OK, I've been outed as a noise nut and it's true.  I am crazed by noise.  I have to put my fingers in my ears when I'm on the street and a lorry passes, my whole insides turn liquid when the recycling bin men come by and tip boxes of glass into more glass.  I can't bear it.  I hyperventilate when the dog two doors down barks for twenty minutes.  Noise, like pain, makes me want to leave the planet, but before that to kill someone. 

I spend lunatic hours on Google checking out earplug sites.  None of them (of course) make silence happen.  I organised a visit from a technician to make moulds of my ears for custom ear plugs.  He didn't come.  Hope curled up and sulked.  Earplugs in any case are problematical.  Talking to the daughter who had a temporary problem with roadworks, she said she can't use earplugs because they stop her from thinking.  Which is weirdly right.  I seem (as she does) to need ambient air to think in.  Closing myself off makes my own internal sounds scream, or perhaps it's a kind of claustrophobia.  I've tried white and pink noise cds but they sound like noise to me.  Best thing I've found is Brian Eno's Music for Airports and Neroli.  Which makes the daughter threaten to disown me for naffness.  Anyway, I am a nutcase, I don't have much of a problem owning to that.

But it's actually worse than that.  Much, much worse.  Loud or sudden noise is painful but passes.  What I really hate is the noise of other people.  And that's dissembling, too.  What I really hate is the noise other people make that reminds me that other people exist.  There.  Children screaming and shrieking in the neighbouring gardens (it's hot in my glass study, I have to have the door open) sends me into a spiral of fretting and whimpering.  Do they really need to bellow in order to grow up well-balanced human beings?  Other people's hi fis, their drums, for god's sake.  I know about people's right to have rights, but if my inclination is for silence, it gets trumped by theirs.   I want to  sit in my room and not be reminded ('Do you HAVE to have that conversation in the street under my window?') that I am surrounded by other souls.  Something about the community-minded Sixties just didn't take with me.  I have fantasies about living in the middle of a field (preferably in a house) but the Poet points out that there's nowhere noisier than the countryside.  All those machines, and the birdsong., my dears.  I've spent time on retreat in convents and monasteries of silent orders, and it was wonderful, but there's the god problem (and the food is inedible).  It's like stealing silence.  I want it by right.

All this might sound like typical old lady complaint.  And it is of course.  Christ, the young!  Why don't they grow up...?  But actually apart from my new sense that my time is running out and can I please have things the way I need them while I still can, my vileness and non-fitness for purpose as a human being has always been like this.  I didn't want to hear the sound of the neighbours even when I was a kid.   I am ashamed, and then again, I'm not.   What can I tell you?  I'm bad, through and through.

Winging It

France. Late afternoon.  Lying in a recliner chair, looking up at the sky.  Every day a free-falling, tumbling, wind-dancing performance by dozens of birds catching insects on the wing - though it's very hard to avoid the thought that they are not doing anything practical like subsisting, but just showing off to each other, and to me (obviously to me, I'm the human), as they dart and dive, swerve inches from the corner of the wall, barely skim the roof, miss colliding with each other by less than an intake of breath.  The walls are high so looking up there is a small arena where they perform over my head, shrieking and squealing like playtime.

The first problem is what are they?  Swallows?  They've got what can only be called swallow-tails.  No, says the Poet, who was brought up in the Country and knows these things.  Too big.  And swifts have bifurcated tails too.  House martins or swifts.  Or a mixture of all three, with the occasional something-or-other eagle circling meditatively high above them, and a couple of pigeons playing chase between the swirling little birds.  The Poet proves his point with a web page full of pictures of swifts/house-martins/swallows for the bewildered.  Somehow it makes it no easier to decide what they are when I look up again. Does it matter?  Well, yes.  I wish it didn't, but I urgently need to know the names of things, in spite of, or because of, the things neither knowing, nor probably caring what they are called.  It's a sad human foible, but it has its uses for description, finding out more and taking a position.

For example, if they are swifts then I have to look at them quite differently from house martins.  What I think I know about swifts though I don't know why I know, and what The Poet definitely knows from his Country Lore, is that they are always on the wing.  The Romans or some such believed that they had no legs.  In fact, why do they have legs?  Did they once land like other birds but decided that constant eating gave them the edge over the swallows and house-martins?  They fly all their lives, never stopping, snatching a quick nap while they glide.  So why don't they bump into things?  Why don't they fall down from exhaustion?  The more I watch and think about the never-stopping swifts, the more ridiculous it seems.  What about nesting?  Albatrosses are always out of sight of land, but they bob about on the water to sleep and even they have an island where they land to mate and produce young.  How can swifts give birth on the wing?  Flying eggs?  I worry a lot now about the problem.

I offer The Poet the opportunity to modify his certainty.  'For God's sake, consider...'  But he is adamant.  As you would want to be once you've taken up the cause of the skybound, prisoner of the air, swift.  Now I'm back home in my solitarium at the top of the house, and it's all collared doves and blackbirds, but I still wake up in the night, or put off getting a sentence to make sense with the worry about the swifts that never stop flying. Oddly, neither I or The Poet have clicked on Wikipedia or the endless bird watching sites to find out the truth of the matter.  It seems, we both want the idea left in the air.

Where Was I?

You see, this is how it is with me.  You start things and you don't finish them, you've got no stickability, my father was always telling me.  Brief enthusiasms that peter out.  Bored after five minutes.  Incapable of seeing things through.  A character flaw.  And how right he turned out to be.  Not just childish fickleness, but what you might call an accurate description of me.  I don't carry on.  Diaries, correspondences, yoga, gym, friendship, knitting, Latin classes, you name it and I don't carry it on.  And so, a month and a half or thereabouts and no posting.  Can't be bothered. Can't think of anything interesting to say (what on the day the wretched liar Blair finally fucked off?).  Can't bear myself talking about myself all the time, or can bear it but think maybe it's better if I get on with writing about myself and getting paid for  it (see: mercenary, too).  Or just lost interest, don't care, so what, so there.  Likeliest of all, I am infinitely idle.  That last covers about all of it.

I am about to be sixty.  How did I survive so long being me?  It's surprising, really.   And how did my father know  when I was three  what I was going to be like when I was sixty?  At three you're not supposed to have stickability, are you?   Maybe I underestimated him.

Then again, not much happens in my life, and I tend to cancel what does happen, if I possibly can.  I could claim there's just nothing much to write about.  But I've been singularly unsuccessful these last couple of months at activity evasion.  I've been so Stockholm, spent a week in two local schools, written a couple of reviews, got on with the novel to be finished by December and most exhaustingly lolled around in France for a couple of weeks.  And I'm supposed to write a blogs as well?  Eh, Deborah and Val8tine?

Here, for Deborah and Val8tine is my thought for the day:  Where were all the street parties celebrating the Blair departure?  I was in San Francisco the day Richard Nixon resigned and the town went wild.  There was dancing in the streets, painted banners strung across streets, people shook my hand and told me to go home and tell England how proud they were of getting rid of their crook.  And people wonder why the Sixties generation's nostalgic.  Yet I suppose all possibility of a celebration today died of exhaustion during the weeks of endless farewell, to say nothing of all of us biting our knuckles at the thought of Tony Blair the Middle East peace envoy. 

Best, if you can't actually be useful, either to keep busy fiddling with pointless detail or stay asleep.  This is my very latest advice for surviving one's own uselessness in a spectacularly nasty little world.

Breakfast Thoughts

Ida Holmbom from Sweden wrote to me asking me to contribute to her breakfast blog .  Other people ask my advice as a writer, from time to time.  Here it is: never waste words.  A sentence worth writing is worth publishing twice...

Tea.  Assam.  Harmutty Gold.  I don't eat breakfast - sometimes in the early hours a chocolate biscuit - breakfast perhaps or late tea.  No appetite in the morning at all.  Just assam brewed for 3 minutes.  No milk, no sugar.  White bone china mug.  Later on green tea (Dragon Well or mao jian) and later still Darjeeling (Castleton, second flush).

Except: when I'm away and then my ascetic morning needs bloom into ravening greed.  For choice an American breakfast: sausage, pancakes, hash browns, eggs over easy...or in England the UK equivalent of a fryup: sausage, bacon, eggs, fried bread (I can do without the baked beans), a grilled kidney even.  Though the right kind of caff is no longer on every corner.  My breakfast tastes when I'm away are remarkably eclectic.  I even take pleasure in those damp slices of white sliced toast with unpalatable mass produced marmalade in small pots.  I can't say why.  I also like pork scratchings, though not for breakfast.

Muesli, on the other hand, I won't eat anywhere.  For a while I was at a vegetarian boarding school where huge tin bowls of wet pasty oats and dried fruit slopped about on the breakfast tables.  Pale vomit.  No matter how fashionable or organic or life-saving muesli becomes, I will not eat it.  Porridge, on the other hand, I will eat - at home before bed sometimes; away, for breakfast, with or without a kipper.

I have discovered though that eating breakfast makes me hungry.  If I eat in the morning, I'm ravenous a couple of hours later.  If I just have tea, it can get to mid-afternoon before I start feeling hungry. Actually, eating always makes me feel hungry.

My Yiddisher Momma

My Yiddisher Momma was a song I dreaded hearing when I was little, because my mother would use it to berate me for not being a natural child and loving her like the singer (cantor) loved his mother.  I turned on the Radio on Good Friday morning to hear My Yiddisher Momma being played on Desert Island Discs.  Actually, Jesus didn't seem to be a much better son (of his mother) than I was a daughter, but let's imagine that he sang it to Mary along the Via Dolorosa.  Happy Easter.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I am speechlessly, bizarrely excited.  That 'something coming' feeling in the solar plexus that spring or nothing you can put your finger on at all brings on.  There is spring, of course, and the sense of everything freeing up (but I wouldn't be me if I didn't know that winter is coming back this weekend and that'll be it for the blossom and the frogspawn in the pond, probably).  But my inner buzz isn't that, it's the letter I got yesterday about my pension.  My old age pension, that is.  It used to be called that before the old became senior and even more ignorable. 

In July I will receive £86.35 a week as a prize for getting this old.  Neither the state (which holds my medical records) nor I expected me to get here.  No one I imagine believes in themselves as a pensioner.  But it's weirdly exciting.  Not just the prospect of free bus journeys and cheaper tickets to the cinema on certain rainy afternoons, but the fact of being officially old.  An old age pensioner, when I haven't really figured out what it means to be 40 yet.

I'm terribly behind myself.  I have no idea how to dress or behave and nature, as usual, is not taking care of it.  Still, I feel I'm about to be 'let off'.  A cloud of inconsequentiality will descend on me.  I'll be passing the time rather than working out how to live through it.  I'll be looking back, adding it all up, figuring out if it was worth it, and I will be living in the future not planning it.  It's arrived, and here I am with my £86.35, accounted for and free to drift into oblivion.  There might be years to come (I am not yet so old that I don't buy green bananas for fear that I won't see them ripen), but they will all be the same.  Once you're old, you can only get older which is not what people mean by change.  Nothing else will happen to me.  I've been waiting decades to make sure that will be the case, and here I am.  Floating.  Purposeless - at any rate permitted now to be purposeless.  Pointlessness has always been a dangerous hole for me to look into, but now I'm beginning to see that I might be able to sidle up to it and peer contentedly straight down into its bleak depths with no more than a heigh ho.   Or at any rate a ho hum.

Don't Believe A Word I Write

  When I was in Ireland a few years ago, I found a bookshop in Bantry that had a wall of fiction divided into two.  The left section was headed BOOKS BY MEN, and I bet you can guess what the right section was.  I don't know what the expectation was here - the bookshop owner was very grumpy (a man, but he needn't have been) and I felt disinclined to ask.  Were men supposed to gravitate to the BOOKS BY MEN half and women to the other  on the grounds that each gender would find what suited them best written by their own sex?  Or was it the other way round?  That men would read books by women and women books by men, and thereby we would learn about each other and sexual harmony would be encouraged?  Or was the bookshop owner simply an obsessive compulsive who owned a bookshop because what better job is there for the ordering and categorising of its elements?  I'm very partial to Daunt Books which shelves books not according to author alphabetically, or fiction and non-fiction, or subject, but by geography.  All books on or concerning themselves with or by the French are shelved under France.  Camus and the history of the Wars of Religion live happily side by side with Escoffier and tourist maps of Paris.  It has a certain gaiety even if it sometimes it leaves you a bit baffled: where do you look for a book on the history of the footnote?  The Bantry system of book cataloguing is more troublesome.  It assumes, and I suspect that it's generally true, that men and women do read different books.  I once had to get a signature for a contract from a solicitor who, when he saw I was a novelist, asked me if his wife would have heard of me.

These thoughts are prompted by a letter from a reader telling me that his men's book group have been reading a novel of mine: Happily Ever After.  Reading groups in general strike me as a slightly strange way to read a book.  I know there is fun to be had from talking about something you've read, but I'm much more taken with the idea of the private reading of what has been privately written.  Still, reading groups are big.  There are writers who include on their websites Discussion Tips and Questions for reading groups about their latest books.  All life as a GCSE class.  I am not the world's most sociable soul, so I am no authority on group activity.  But a men's reading group is an odd thought.  It's almost daring - as if they might be uncomfortable in a mixed group - women having the upper hand in the fiction reading stakes.  Or it's a less objectionable way to get together and exclude women than joining a working men's club.  There were mixed reviews of my novel from the men's reading group.  It (partly) concerned a middle aged man, Liam, who falls sexually and passionately in love with a woman of 70.  Some of the men  didn't like the book because they didn't believe in the possibility of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman whose wrinkly old body is vividly described in terms of his desire.  The man who wrote to me said he thought it was because they were threatened by the idea of the sexuality of an old woman.  I don't doubt that.  But there's something else here that interests me that has nothing to do with gender, but with what people want and expect when they read.

In fact, many women had the same reaction.  Maybe because they too dislike the idea of an old woman's sexuality.  But always this point was made by saying that the situation and the characters were unbelievable.  Doubtless this is true, it is an unlikely scenario.  But the novel wasn't an attempt to reveal that all over the place younger men were besotted with haggard old women.  For all I know, it never happens.  None of my novels (or my non-fiction) is predicated on presenting a simple, recognisable picture of reality.  Here's the thing: it has never crossed my mind when writing a novel that it should be 'believable' to the reader.  I've always found it odd when a book is praised because its characters and their doings are 'totally believable'.  I don't think that novels have to be (and am not interested in writing novels that are) reproductions of the world.  There are novels written as realistic portraits, but by no means all and there's no reason why they should be.  It is certainly not the only task of a novelist to reproduce reality.  A novel is not good just because it looks to you like the world you know.  Nor bad because it doesn't.  There are other kinds of truth (or even untruth) that a writer might want to get  to.   Pictures they might want to paint of what is least likely.  Some of us want to play with ideas in the form of narrative.  Only the narrowest of views demands that novels must be believable and that novelists have to conform to their readers' notions of the way the world is.

Christmas Confidential

Christmas is coming along nicely.  I've got swollen glands, a sore throat, headache and dizziness.  Cancel the parties, throw on the 'I'm-at-home-feeling-ill-all-enveloping-robe-thing, hunker down into the sofa and complain to The Poet from time to time about my aches and pains.  Please note, this requires sympathy only from him, since everyone else seems to be getting the same bug, and anyway, compared with...hill of beans...and so forth (is Casablanca on the telly this year?).  Moreover, my feeling poorly strategies are very similar to how I spend every day - cancel parties, robe-thing, hunker down and complain.

The plan is to work on Christmas.  The Poet is writing the index to his Guernica book and I'm writing a piece on virtual life for the LRB.  We'll stop and eat some roast pork from time to time and then watch movies (or better still the CSI or Monk Christmas Special).  And all around there will be that amazing peopleless silence of everyone having gone home to somewhere else.  Perfect. There was a suggestion from The Poet in the Autumn of not giving presents to each other because we already had everything and we're far too old to need symbolic gifts, and I agreed, until a great sadness overcame me at the beginning of the month and I had to confess I wanted a present and that if I didn't get one I'd fall into a great well of something dark that goes back to way back when.  In fact, I'm simply irredeemably materialistic.  I need regular treats or I can't be sure I'm alive.   I am a woman of no substance.  I've always said so, but people choose to believe that it's some charming conceit of mine.  It's true that the brighter you shine the light on the grim truth, the more people laugh gaily and exclaim how witty, indeed how wonderful, you are.  The more you explain that you aren't, that you are speaking the simple unedifying truth, the more they shake their heads in admiration.

It's the same thing with my writing books.  'No,' I moan. 'I know the other books turned out more or less OK, but this time it's different.'  And The Poet (or The Daughter) replies, 'Yeah, yeah...'  'No, this is serious.  I mean it.  And why shouldn't it be true?'  'Why should it?' they say, and get on with their own lives for all the world as if mine were not much more important.

I've never understood how people have the confidence to apply probability theory to their own lives.  They assume that if it hasn't happened X times, it probably won't now.  (Doubtless, I've got probability theory entirely wrong.)  But why shouldn't it?  Or why if something is only a 1000/1 chance shouldn't it happen to me this time?  Who knows if it already hasn't happened 999 times already?  This must be a bone deep understanding of the nature of things.  You either assume if it can happen it will - or you assume it won't.  I have an innate knowledge of the one rather than the thousand.  It may strike you that I'm making the assumption that the one is always a negative event. 

Well, of course it is.

On the other hand in far-away Canada, my seven year old friend Cuan is reading Metamorphosis and laughing his head off at it, which cheers me up no end. 

Confessions of a Spiderphobe

This is a Diary piece in the latest LRB, the rest of it is at www.lrb.co.uk:

Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes spiders to wander into our houses – confused by some sudden indefinable but compelling ache in the forefront of their small minds – in search of a nice warm dark corner to nest (don’t think about it), ushers in my personal annual festival of anxiety and horror. Not that I felt secure during the other ten months of the year. My ex, having been my ex for some years and grown tired of being called out in the middle of the night to deal with a spider, gave me a blowtorch, which I used with desperate abandon. It’s a professional version of the hairspray and lighter technique, more or less likely to have resulted in my charred remains (oh God, and the daughter, the cats, the occasional lover . . .) being found in the smoking ruins. But death was never a worse alternative to being in the same room as a spider....