WanderingScribe

Landsdowne

2009-06-26T10:13:00.006Z

If ever you get around to reading this, I just want to say thank you for listening to me. It was a relief to finally tell someone about my book like that last night, maybe I should have done it before. The sandwiches and spritzers were good too... Good luck with selling the rest of your tickets...

...I turned a corner

2009-04-29T17:58:00.005Z

Today it was the smell of lilacs that got me. I turned a corner, on a road I'd never walked down before, quite close to home, and bang... There I was a child of seven or eight again, dragging her feet on the way to the big houses under the railway bridge, where on some Sunday mornings, a tiny lady who lived in one of them sold us rhubarb, and bunches of mint for potatoes. Delicious smells...but before we got to them, we walked with our huge bundles of rhubarb along a crescent-shaped road that was full of (what I now know to be) lilacs, and the smell cleared everything else from your mind. For a while, everything...One of the saving graces of childhood. To this day I love lilac - the colour, the smell, the look of them...and of course the way they make my mouth water for rhubarb crumble.

Robert McKee - STORY Weekend

2009-04-17T16:38:00.020Z

I am at a writing course this weekend, given by the legendary Robert McKee — the Los Angeles writer of the book STORY. He is an amazing teacher. I did the London course 2 years ago too, and read his book (a month or so before my own book came out), but it has taken all this time to absorb what he had to say on the level it needed to be known at; I feel like I am finally mastering story, and all that instinctive way of writing is being tamed by proper plotting and structure. I am really excited that bits of the craft are finally slipping over from right to left brain; very excited... But as he says in his book, no matter how much you think you've got it sussed, you can't do it properly until you have actually done it!

Here's something I re-read from his book last night, and which has stayed in my head all day. It's commonplace but something that really hit home...He says, once you've mastered the rules of story and the conventions of the genre you have chosen to write in, put away the rules and "Write only what you believe. Write your kind of story. The kind of story you’d stand in line in the rain to buy." What fantastic advice... '...the kind of book you'd stand in line in the rain to buy." (well, actually he says "...the kind of film you'd stand in line in the rain to watch." because his course is also for screenwriters, but it's relevant for all forms.

Just a word of warning if anyone is thinking of going to his next course (and he does them in countries around the world)...Two years ago I got lambasted by him because my phone went off during the first day of the 3 day course, when he had forbidden us to have phones on in the auditorium. He fined me £10, the total sum of money I had on me for lunch, but he made me hand it over. (To this day I swear I don't know how my phone switched on, as I'm convinced I turned it off...). I was emotionally raw because my book was about to come out, plus all that ugly stuff that was going around about me at the time, false and malicious though it all was, had finally got to me, and so the emotion his 'telling off' brought about almost knocked me for six. I wouldn't have believed it possible to feel that much over 'relatively' so little...I must have been holding all that emotion in for all that time waiting for my book to finally go public, and there in that lecture theatre I almost went into meltdown. I had shut myself down over the years, especially all those months that I was living in the car, and almost never cried anymore, about anything.... But during the 3 days of the course, I couldn't stop. I just couldn't hold back the tears, and in fact it got so bad, that on the afternoon of the last day, as we all settled down for the screening of Casablanca, I had to leave. The crying was silent of course, or as much as I could make it, but it felt like a hand had passed into my chest and was squeezing my heart over and over again, big fist-sized handfuls of it, kneading it over and over like dough, and I almost couldn't see for the tears, or breathe for the pain of it. And although no one else in the lecture theatre seemed to notice (who doesn't cry at Casablanca?) it felt like somehow he knew...I don't know how, but it felt like he did...and as he passed behind my seat as he briefly left the theatre for a few minutes while we continued to watch Casablanca, he slowed down and seemed to look directly at me and tears were just streaming down... He must have thought I was mad...having a slight overreaction anyhow...I think he recognises me this time too. Maybe I am just imagining that, but... Anyhow, this year I have been smart enough to leave my phone behind — for that read, so terrified of it happening again that I didn't dare bring it along...The man's a genius, but you don't want to see his dark side...So be warned, if any of you decide to go to his next course, and I would absolutely recommend it, switch your phones off! You have been warned...

Here and there

2009-04-15T13:22:00.009Z

I'm sitting here typing this under blue skies. The busy city street below my window is full of the smell of warm blossom and, now and then, when there is the occasional lull in traffic and all you hear is the slow swish of trees from neighbouring gardens and the call of birds in flight, you can close your eyes and think yourself almost anywhere. I love days like today.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well...

2009-04-09T15:32:00.008Z

All feels right with the world today.

Last night I made, and froze, a banoffee pie, a mound of gooey loveliness to be eaten at the weekend. The rain has stopped. The first purple bud of the desk-plant I bought last year has appeared overnight; I have just re-read psalm 23 and using my brand new keyboard have written the start of the first poem I have written in what feels like years. Also the magnolias are out and there are only 2 clear days left between now and the end of Lent. Coffee is fast approaching...And, just for today, it feels like nothing else matters.
Today I feel like someone has just given me a long, cold drink of water.

I hope the sun is shining where you are.

Lost in translation

2009-04-04T09:10:00.009Z

I just found a widget that allows readers to translate this blog into other languages. It is over on the links bar at the side. I don't know how accurate it is, so if anyone is fluent in other languages, it would be good to know.

The sun is out so I'm off on my bike to get a few miles in before the rain comes back, or my legs cease up completely.

P.S.
Apparently the Google Translate widget was very bad, so I have taken it off.

Out of sight jigsaws, and sushi...

2009-03-04T16:56:00.008Z

It seems only yesterday that I wrote in here that I had given up chocolate for Lent...Well, I've done it again...Chocolate AND coffee this year, so my nerves are on fire — constant red alert. Only another 35 days to go though (apparently Sundays don't count as Lenten days!).

Anyway, I really can't believe that it has rolled around again, and that Lent is here. Time has just slipped away.

I should be keeping an eye on time...making sure it doesn't just pass me by. It is not just me saying that, apparently it was a direct message from angels for me. So I was told anyway...

When I got back in touch with my dad (Brendan) again, the time just before I ended up living in my car, he heard about a woman in Ireland who was a mystic and received messages from angels. He got in touch with her. I don't know to this day what he said to her, but he had her telephone number and urged me to call her, saying she would be expecting my call. I didn't know what to say, and wasn't going to, but one day, feeling very foolish, I found myself dialing her number.

A softly spoken Irish lady answered, but it clearly wasn't a good time for her — I think she was in a hurry to pick one of her children up from somewhere (yes, she also has children and lives in a modern house in a modern part of Ireland). She said she had received a message for me though — that the angels had given her a message saying that I had many talents (haven't we all!) that I was in danger of wasting, and that time was running out. She said she was very busy and couldn't talk but that I should give her my address and that she would write to me with the message.

I thought she was fobbing me off, but I gave her my address in Newcastle anyway and a few weeks later a letter did arrive. It took up only one side of paper and repeated the message from the angels: saying that they stressed that I needed to be particularly careful about time, and not to let it slip past. Which at the time I thought was a very strange message, even though that is what I have always tended to do in my life. I was a bit disappointed in a way, of all the things that angels could tell you...especially me in the lost and fragile state I was in at the time. She also gave me the name of my two guardian angels. Names which weren't in English, but which, even though I was sceptical of the whole thing, I still found a bit disturbing seeing written down in the letter.She said all I needed to do was call the name and ask them to come down and they would. I remember rolling the sounds around my tongue and for a few days finding myself silently saying them. But then I got frightened of what I was doing and tried to forget them — which, unfortunately, I have now succeeded in doing. (Though I think I still have the letter somewhere.)

I'd never met this woman myself. All I knew was her name, and her voice...

Then yesterday, in a local bookshop, I squeezed past a couple pushing a toddler in a buggy, and as I did so knocked up against one of the bookcases. A display book, standing face-out on the edge of one of the shelves, threatened to topple. It was a new hardback book with a very nice light cover. As I reached up to straighten it, I instinctively read the title and then my eyes shot up to the author - because suddenly I knew who it was. It was her. The woman with the message for me from the angels. She has a book out, an autobiography called Angels In My Hair. Her name is Lorna Bryne, and she is apparently Kosher — for those who believe.

Brendan still has her telephone number and gave it to me again yesterday when I told him. Though I wouldn't dare call her again. But how odd...Time did run out for me in the end and I ended up in my car. So in a way the message was right. And then I wrote an autobiography. An autobiography which was there right at the right time in publishing in a way. And now the person who gave me that message has written her autobiography too - with many more books to come it seems. It gave me shivers standing there in the bookshop holding it in my hands. Kind of...sort of...in a way...mysterious...

You can get yourself in a state of mind where things start to feel like proof. As if someone is laying a trail... constantly saying: Now do you believe? Now do you ...? Now...? How about this time..?

Skye High

2008-12-30T11:49:00.010Z

I had an almost perfect Christmas — up on the Isle of Skye. My head is full of postcard-perfect images that I hope never fade.

I've never been to Skye before. I'd nearly been. I once went across to the island of Barra — many years ago, landing with only 3 other passengers in a tiny, 12-seater British Airways plane directly onto their long, white, cockle beach, which doubles as the runway — and island-hopping on the way home, down the freezing necklace of islands that make up the Outer Hebrides — uninterested in them mostly, ticking them off, reading Louis MacNeice and dreaming of getting to Skye and of home. But I never had time to stop off there in the end. And it's a place I've wondered about ever since...So I am so glad I got the chance to go. Skye is in a world of its own, definitely worth making time for.

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas.

In the words of the Mexican emailer I mentioned in the last post ...I splash all your New Years with blessings.

From Mexico with love

2008-12-20T23:49:00.004Z

Someone sent me an email this week. Someone from Mexico, writing mostly in broken English. They signed off saying - "I splash your life with blessings"
'I splash your life with blessings'... It's still making me smile.

Tis (almost) the year's midnight...

2008-08-31T20:55:00.022Z

and the day's...

Today is the last day of summer — apparently! My knees hurt already... The starlings are off to Africa, everything is hunkering down, and despite the shiver I get at this time of year now from memories of being in the car when the cold set in — I still love more than anything this whole season we are coming into — the long, slow striptease of autumn.

Thanks very much for your emails. Yes, I am well, just haven't written in here much because I am concentrating on looking ahead, putting all this behind me... Things these days are, mostly, good — definitely mostly good. Even though at times it still feels as though I am holding up the sky with one hand. Especially as we begin the long run-up to Christmas.

Try as I might to shrug it off, and no matter how many people I surround myself with, Christmas will probably always be dimmed a bit by loneliness for me — it probably always has been — but now that I've written my book and so can no longer be in touch with any member of the family I used to have, ever again — even just to play 'happy families' once a year — even if I wanted to - I find myself looking on Christmas almost as a chore, wishing it was over already . It's only once a year though — and there are definitely worse things. Definitely, definitely worse things! And having lived in my car for all that time, I now feel very qualified to say that. I need to remember it...No matter how tough or hopeless things seem - there are definitely worse things.

Besides, this year I will be with someone who I know cares for me, and with other lovely people — and, before the Christmas tree is dusted off and the tinsel untangled from its boxes, we've got the year going down in flames, in another spectacular autumn to look forward to! The perfect time of year.

Food for thought

2008-08-23T13:36:00.020Z

When things get to me I cook. When they really get to me I bake. Yesterday I baked TWO egg custard tarts - which, warm, has got to be the ultimate comfort food — and a loaf of banana bread. Then I settled in, with several mugs of builders tea, to finish the book I am reading - The Road Home by Rose Tremain.

Almost every novel I have read recently has increased my desire and — more and more — my confidence, to write more books. If writing were that simple everybody would be doing it, but sometimes you read a book that makes it seem so clear. The Road Home is one of them - Tremain definitely manages to make it seem that way. Maybe my response is because it deals with homelessness and surviving on the edges of society - things which are still fresh in my mind; and so I feel I could have written something similar from experience rather than imagination. In places it almost feels like writing-by-numbers, which after the brilliance of Music and Silence I almost don't dare write. Of course it isn't...But because of my own experience of it all, the fact that for all those months I walked such a similar walk to Lev's (the main character), it seems so.

Maybe that is why the plot felt so visible at times, that I always had the feeling of knowing what was coming next. Maybe because that is what comes next...that it was so true to life! But it spoiled it for me a bit. Answering questions raised in a novel before the plot reveals them to you, and anticipating surprises, is part of the pleasure of reading, but I felt the answers came a bit too easily here (robbing me of the satisfaction of the penny-dropping moment coming only after the appropriate amount of head-scratching). Who am I to say though - it was definitely a moving read, and kept me engaged with the characters, and wanting to know what happened next right to the end, and Rose Tremain is Rose Tremain — every line of her should be read, and I couldn't even dream of writing that well — it has even won the Orange prize for fiction, so what do I know...Maybe you need a book like that to come along to give you that extra bit of confidence that you can do it yourself... Or maybe the craft always shows through the story when you look for it as closely as I have probably been doing since I put my own story into words - something, subconsciously, I had probably been 'writing' in my head my whole life, since it happened. Anyway, it has confirmed the fact that I want to write more than I want to do anything. Nothing comes closer to that feeling of sitting alone in a room and loosing yourself in writing and it all coming together... I want to do that more than anything. To write books that people want to curl up with. There can't be a pleasure greater than that.

Though egg-custard tart sometimes comes close...

In case I've wettted your appetite, here's my recipe:

250g (9oz) sweet, shortcrust pastry (you can make it or buy Just-Roll shortcrust pastry)
2 egg yolks, beaten — for sealing the pastry case
75g (3oz) caster sugar
8 egg yolks
570ml (1 pt) double cream
freshly grated nutmeg
20cm (8") fluted flan tin

Preheat oven to 180/350/mark 4. Line the flan tin with the pastry and cover with greaseproof paper. Fill with uncooked rice (or baking beans if you have them) to keep the pastry flat. Place the pastry case in the oven and bake 'blind' until it starts to brown around the edges. Remove from the oven. Carefully lift out the greaseproof paper and baking beans before replacing the pastry case in the oven. Once the base starts to colour, remove from the oven and brush the pastry all over with the 2 beaten egg yolks to seal any cracks. Return to the oven and as soon as the egg yolk mix is cooked repeat the process twice more to ensure that the pastry case is totally sealed. Finally, remove from the oven and set aside.

Turn the oven right down to 120/250/ mark 3/4 and proceed to make the filling. Whisk the sugar and 8 egg yolks together in a bowl. Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan, then take off the heat and pour over the egg yolks and sugar, whisking well. Pass through a fine sieve (if you have one) into a jug. Leave to cool slightly and skim off any bubbles from the surface.
To bake the tart, place the baked pastry case on a baking sheet and put into the oven (it is much easier to fill the case once it is in the oven - it avoids any spills!) Carefully pour the filling into the case. Grate fresh nutmeg over the top and bake for 45-50 minutes. Keep checking as the tart cooks. You are aiming for the filling to be just set, but slightly wobbly in the centre. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. Don't put in the fridge as this will change the texture. (But I any leftovers put in the fridge will taste even better the next day).
Now, dim the lights, draw the curtains, turn the lock and settle down to eat it undisturbed with a good read and a glass of something cold. Some things are not for sharing. Enjoy!

P.S.
If you have any favourite recipes of your own you would like to share, add them here as a comment, or email them to me: I'm collecting recipes at the moment...the luminous yellow notebook I used to keep recipes in, and which was bursting with torn-out recipes from magazines and newspapers over the years, and scribbled with ones people had given or cooked for me, disappeared with all the rest of my stuff in storage, so now I'm starting again — making a new one — and since there are readers of this blog from so many countries there must be some really interesting foods. I'm sure everyone has at least one meal they love to cook, one recipe they think is perfect and would be able to cook on a desert island.

There are eggs, potatoes and onions, a few slivers of ham, some slightly greenish cheese, and half a loaf of homemade olive-bread in my fridge. Anyone got a good recipe for tortilla? Or maybe Quesilladas (if you are in Mexico)?

Hasta la vista...

2008-07-30T15:04:00.007Z

Time has just flown by. My book was published in Portugal last week and there was also an interview in Reader's Digest in Mexico! How bizarre is that?
Can't believe it is the last day of July tomorrow...Every time I go to write in this blog I always find myself waiting for something 'better' to write about - though if anyone knows by now that the extraordinary is usually there in the ordinary, then it should be me. Time has got the better of me again for now though... I promise I'll update this blog with news soon ... but for now I am still working hard and trying to keep on track...and enjoying the sun when it makes an appearance.

Butterflies

2008-05-03T13:30:00.008Z

Saw lovely, blue butterflies in flight today. Don't think I've ever seen blue ones before, not like these anyway — small triangles of bright, summer-sky blue — like little chips of sky — fluttering above long, green grass at the back of a churchyard. And, for a change today, the sky was almost the exact same colour. Yesterday's hailstones almost don't make sense. So, for the first time in weeks, I'm just about to take my bike out and hope that if the clouds darken I can cycle faster than them.
Thanks for all your comments...It's great knowing people are still reading and really interesting seeing where you are all from.
A

...like bookends

2008-04-18T17:34:00.012Z

I was thinking of my old bookcase today — a wood-worm-riddled, junk-shop find that I got from outside a shop up near Leeds just after my last year at college. Somehow I'd managed to hang on to it through countless moves over the years. Until the year before last, when all my belongings in storage were sold-off without notifying me, when I could no longer pay the bill and didn't have an address for them to get in touch to let me know: everything from diaries to cutlery to washing machine to a triangular piece of the Berlin Wall I'd hammered off myself, to every photograph I'd ever had, to that lovely, dark-wood bookcase, went.

It was wider than most bookcases, mahoghany or a dirty oak I never knew how to tell, with four shelves — a larger one at the bottom for dictionaries and atlases and all my old Law textbooks, the three others bowed under the weight of an ever-changing hoard of paperbacks that I loved taking out at random, sometimes just for five-minute reads one after the other, tuning into the sound of all those distinct voices while pasta boiled or toast burned, unconciously getting the rhythm of the voices in my head until they were familiar, before snapping them closed, blowing the dust off another and spending time in other company and another world. A wooden pelmet, with three carved spirals along it, grey with clogged dust, came a few inches down over the top shelf and one of the front legs was shorter than the other requiring a wad of paper wedged in to stop the wobble, and it smelt of the dark oil I occassionally used to clean it and the damp Woods from where it once must have come.

In January every year, as close to the New Year as I remembered to do it, I used to clear all the books from the top shelf, wipe it down, and only fill it again with any book I'd read from that date on. It was very satisying from month to month watching the top shelf fill up again, as much as the ones beneath it, almost like watching a child grow; and seeing it so empty at the beginning of the year was always a good incentive to get to bed early to crack the spine of a new book, and form a good habit for the rest of the year.

I thought of that today, because I just did it here on the unwonky Ikea bookcase I bought as a replacement last year. So far there are only six books on it, not good for April. But hopefully passing it every day on my way out the door will shame me into reading more.
Hopefully, in the not too far distant future, there will be space on it for another one I have written myself.

Black swans and cravings

2008-03-16T16:31:00.011Z

I saw a pair of black swans yesterday. I had no idea swans could even be black - let alone seen one before. They were smaller than white swans, and completely black, with long red beaks. These two looked like they were preparing to build a nest as well, in underneath a curtain of long, green tassells of weeping willow down at the edge of a pond. One of them shovelling up bits of reed and dried leaves and grass with their bright red beaks, the other shaking it all out into loose piles.

Apparently it's a phrase too, a noun: 'a black swan'. Didn't know that either.

One week until Lent is over and I can eat chocolate biscuits again. It's all I can think about recently.

Endings

2008-03-08T12:49:00.003Z

I've finally crashed through a barrier. I finished reading the endings of several books I've had on the go for what seems like months, and it's a fantastic feeling to have finally done it. It was almost a psychological block. For some reason, I just wasn't able to finish them. But in the last few days without even thinking about it I found myself opening them at the bookmark, curling up somewhere and, one after the other, reading on until the last page. Pure joy.

One of them was the 'The Snow Geese' by William Fiennes, which is a book I had with me in one of my bags in the car all that time. Needless to say I wasn't in a state of mind to read much then, but I haven't been able to finish it since either, and I don't know why. I loved it from the start, for all sorts of reasons, one of them being the close-up-ness of the writing, he doesn't pan out much, he has the lens right up there, close to whatever he is describing. So if he writes about a woman in a long red coat wearing a black velvet cloche hat you see her standing there - very visual, you can 'see' everything he writes about as he travels halfway across the world following migrating geese to their nesting places and his own internal compass leading him back home. It wouldn't be for everyone, it's a very slow, quiet, but evocative, beautiful, beautiful book. Maybe it was because I had it in the car with me that finishing that one felt so momentous; it felt like I was finishing more than just the book, like I was finally drawing a line under things.

But the book I finished a couple of days ago: 'Eat Pray Love' (which curiously is also a travel book, of a sort) - and which definitely wasn't one of my favourites, her voice began to grate and it dragged on in places — is the one I keep thinking about. I woke up thinking about it this morning. Always just one thing she said at the end of the book about all the changes she has gone through by the book's end, how much she has grown as a person. And she said something which has stayed with me...About her growing as a person, she used the analogy of an acorn becoming an oak tree, and says the way she has come to see it there isn't just one force at work (the acorn pushing to become an oak tree) but two (also the oak tree being there already somewhere willing the acorn on to become the oaktree it already is - on some plane). She says, what if it's not just her younger, weaker self pushing on to become the stronger one she ended up as, but what if the woman she was always going to grow into was there already (somewhere) drawing her on to become her — The older you already there somewhere waiting for the younger you to push towards it. I may have got that idea a bit muddled - I've read a few other books in between — but it was something like that. And for some reason it felt like a powerful idea that I hadn't heard expressed like that before; and for some reason it stayed with me. So I thought I'd put it here. Because I woke up thinking of it again this morning: of the person you will finally become, being there already drawing you to become it. It's a strange idea to get your head around, but like words, what we imagine can be very powerful - and it's fun closing your eyes and imagining who that person you end up being might be — who you'd want them to be! And once you have an image of them in your mind to then push yourself to become that person that you end up being ('knowing' that they are there somewhere already drawing you to become them anyway) - walking towards them thought by thought, action by action, until you are the person you were always meant to be. Sorry...way too heavy for a blog. Rain is blowing across the windows here again.

One fire and a funeral

2008-02-17T10:49:00.014Z

I drove up to Camden market this morning to see what damage last weekend's fire had caused. I'd heard about it on the news at the time but at that stage they weren't sure how much damage had been done. Since then I've been out of London mostly, and the only news I saw was Sky news one time, with one very solemn report from India saying, 'The famous Camden Market in London has been reduced to ashes.' So I thought I'd better go up and have a look for myself.

I was expecting the whole place to be charcoal, all those places I used to go to when I was living in my car to be gone — but it's nothing like that. The Hawley Arms pub is destroyed, and there's half a row of boarded-up shops, and some top windows in the flats above blown in, and all of the stalls down the side, on the pub side of the canal, are gone. But it must have been very contained. The rest of the market, and the rest of Camden looks pretty much as it always has done, as buzzy and grubby and raunchy and edgy as it ever was when I was sleeping in the car and used to go down there to the Stables market across the way at the end of days I could afford to, for the cartons of hot chinese food being sold off cheaply for a pound. If anything, the soot and smoke stains and burnt-out shops, and the feint, lingering smell of woodsmoke mixed into more recent smoke from joss sticks and hashish layered with the stench of rancid canal water and new leather from the tiny squeeezed-together S&M shops and car fumes and sweat and cheap, fried street food, just add to the atmosphere.

If the wind had been in the other direction that night though, it would have been a very different story...really would have been hell down there. It would have taken something that random. As it is with lives.

I went to Andrew's dad's funeral on Wednesday, very sad.

2008-02-08T17:21:00.001Z

The buds are opening on the trees again. Today, for the first time this year I saw branches flecked with pale pink blossom.

DS

2008-02-04T23:43:00.000Z

An hour ago a friend of mine's father died; his name was Douglas, he was a good man. Maybe while you're passing this way you'll say a prayer for him.
x

Life seams...

2008-02-02T17:53:00.002Z

I am sitting here trying to catch up with emails. Lots of them in the last few days are from readers in Asia.. I had no idea my story would end up in an article over there and be read by a 16-year old student in Singapore or a man in Pakistan...how bizarre is that! But over the last few days emails have been coming in from people who have read the article or read my book all those thousands of miles away, telling me how, although they might have very different lives, they have been able to relate to my story in some way.

I have spent the last hour dipping in and out of some of their blogs, reading about their lives and cultures, being reminded that people are essentially the same wherever they come from, the same fears the same dreams...
Some of their blogs have pictures, or some are so vividly written that I almost feel I have swapped worlds. Then I look up from the virtual world of my computer screen and back out through my side window, here in my real world, out at the London skyline — from this distance all the scaled-down, matchbox-sized landmarks stretching across from the towers and cranes of Canary Wharf and the dome of St Paul's along to the long misshapen pole of the Post Office Tower, and there, slowly turning through the trees, the big, bright bangle of the London Eye poking up from somewhere down on the Thames. I look back to the computer, at Shing Yi and her friends at their reunion, in a restaurant somewhere in Singapore, smiling out at me from the screen and I can't help smiling back at how this world wide web we are all now in is making the world so tiny...at the great possibilities of that...at how it was a blog and the people from around the world that came to read and give me encouragement on it every day, that literally saved my life in the end.

As I wrote that I just remembered something about Asia, some connection to when I was in the car. While I was sleeping across the front seats of the car in the laneway all those months, at one point, I can't remember exactly when, but at almost the coldest bit of it I seem to remember, there was an earthquake in the Philippines, catastrophic destruction; every morning I'd turn the key in the ignition to listen for a few minutes on the car radio to news of the mud slide disaster — to how whole villages had been wiped out, and generations of families gone overnight. Morning after morning there would be reports of how many more homeless people there were now in these villages in the Philippines each day. The Phillipines had always seemed a milllion miles away for me before, tiny squiggles on a map, just a name; but during those weeks I felt such a connection to them somehow. And as the traumatised voices of survivors filled the car each morning, or accounts of them given, telling how they had not only lost their homes and all they had, but had lost their people too: mothers, husbands, children, friends, grandparents, lovers, all gone in an instant, it made me realise how lucky I was in a way. I know that sounds bizarre: I was homeless, on my own, had broken down, and was living in my car and I thought my own loss seemed unending, but it made me realise that I didn't have to deal with the enormity of their loss all at the same time, not only were they homeless and had their dreams wiped out, but some of them were having to deal with the grief of losing all their loved ones at the same time. It was near the end of my time living in the car and I had almost shut down completely, but somehow something far worse that was happening over in the Philippines got me thinking again, and got me feeling something other than my own pain.

I used to sit there in the car under the trees those mornings shivering, eating whatever I had left over from the night before for breakfast, before I drove off to the hospital to have a hot shower in their basement, and whenever I thought I couldn't manage for another day or another moment I would think of all those people who had had their lives blown apart and say to myself 'At least you have a car to sleep in, Anya, they don't even have that.' So what many of you have said in emails about my story making you see your own problems in more perspective, I can understand. I don't think anyone's problems are really bigger or smaller than others', but I know that feeling. I know it because waking up to news about the disaster in the Phillipines all those mornings is what got me through some days too. It taught me that there is always something better, but even when you think things can't get worse, there is always, always something worse happening somewhere. What was happening all those thousands of miles away in the Philippines was much worse than how I had ended up, living in my car...at least I had a car to sleep in, and access to a blog to tell whoever might stumble across it one day about my story. I never realised that a journalist from the New York Times would be the one to stumble across it — and from that hundreds of people would read my blog and that there would be a book and then this, or that one day I would be out of the car, and that again the Philippines would come into my story. It did yesterday, with a man leaving a message here on my blog saying simply 'I am from the Philipines, thank you for writing your story.' I'll probably never know, but maybe he was someone whose life was torn apart by that disaster that time, one of the ones I listened to in the sleeping bag laying in the car...the ones whose voices came into the car those mornings to show me that I was still a whole lot luckier than some. Maybe he was part of the invisible weft of my life, as others through connecting with this blog or my book have become, and I part of theirs. I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to say here, it's just that sometimes you think you start to see the seams of life — meanings and purposes behind things, and how everything is connected. It comes, it goes — and I don't think anyone ever does ever quite see them, but I hope I never give up believing that they are there: that somehow things are connected and for a purpose and that there is some design in all this, some method in what sometimes just seems like madness.

Book in Singapore

2008-02-02T17:47:00.001Z

I have been told that in Singapore you might find my book in MPH, Borders
or Kinokuniya stores?

If not, it can be ordered from this blog, by clicking on the link over at the side of the blog (the one under the pink book cover. Or just click on the pink book cover)
Hope that helps...

Goldfinches

2008-01-21T17:14:00.000Z

The birds I saw were goldfinches - just been sent pictures. If I figure a way I might put them up. Very cute.

Off to a painting class...yet again in rain.

Antidote to grey

2008-01-13T16:01:00.000Z

Woke up to bleak, grey, drizzly skies again today. Everything, even the grass and, in the mist that hung over everything, the trees, looked grey today. I stood at the kitchen window, in the new, pink bathrobe I got for Christmas, eating cereal, staring out at what could have been a scene straight from an old grainy, Sunday-afternoon black-and-white. Definitely a day for thinking about going straight back to bed... But for a while I stood there, chewing mindlessly, watching a pair of magpies hopping about next-door's lawn. Then just as my eyes adjusted to all the grey, two tiny, colourful little birds flew through the drizzle onto a birdtable in the garden at the other side. I don't know what they were, but seeing them there among all that grey made me smile. They were soft, minky-brown little things, with flashes of yellow on their breasts and bright red faces. Tiny like tits, but not tits...Beautiful splashes of colour brightening up the monochrome. There was something quite clownish about them. Their faces looked like they had just been dipped in bright red paint...And, on a morning like this morning, just before they flew off again skimming the hedges, it was easy to think they might have been designed just to bring a smile on the greyest of mornings.
It worked for me this morning...don't know what they were, but must look out for them more often.

...I really think so...

2008-01-11T11:11:00.000Z

It always seems to be raining when I write a blog.

In the post today I got the application form I'd requested months ago for a stay at a writers' retreat. I'd almost forgotten I'd sent off for it...While I was writing the book it was on my list of things I really wanted to do — hiding myself away in a retreat somewhere — which, by going down to Cornwall to write big chunks of 'Abandoned', I almost did. But now that I have the application form for a 'real' writers' retreat, it seems a bit self indulgent to want to go off somewhere just to write. I might feel differently if it ever did happen — because you have to apply quite far in advance, a year or more ahead sometimes - and, by then, who knows what I'll be thinking...maybe I'd be all fired up for it again by then. But I'm also beginning to wonder whether I was motivated by the right thing — maybe 'real' work should continue to take priority over everything for now. Maybe life from now on should be about plans rather than dreams — at least for me, to make sure I never end up in any place like the laneway ever again. Maybe writing books is something for other people...or at least for another time.
Just pipe dreams...

Rain has stopped, so I'm off on my bike to clear my head and get some air into my lungs. Hope it's stopped where you are...

Happy New Year!

2007-12-31T16:12:00.000Z

The tree lights are on behind me, the decorations still up, and I'm sitting here cracking nuts and eating the last of the Christmas chocolates from the tin, trying to work out what my New Year's resolutions should be this year. I intended posting them here so I'd have a constant reminder. But I've just remembered that my main resolution last year was not to do any 'shoulds' at all from now on. So, hopefully, at the stroke of midnight tonight, I'll be resolving just to keep positive and to keep going forward — which is what I want most from myself next year. I've got what feels like the start of flu, so if I can keep awake for it, I'll be seeing the New Year in tonight with a pint of Lemsip and some soluble Aspirin to bring my temperature down — but there's not a hint of complaint in that, because I was part of a new friend's great, family Christmas this year and I know the coming year will be a good one.
I hope it is for us all....
Happy New Year
x