LITERARY SHENANIGANS...

A year ago I was persuaded, against my better judgement, to take part in the first Women Aloud NI event at No Alibis bookshop. A whole clatter (a quire?) of women writers were going to celebrate International Women's Day by reading short extracts from their work (well at least they'd be short) but then we were all going to have to read together. That's bits of fiction, poetry, travel, biography, you-name-it, read ALOUD, at the same time, in a confined space.

It was obvious to me that the organiser, Jane Talbot, was a lunatic, but she was a persuasive lunatic, and I'd already agreed, so I turned up. I took the other two members of the Literary Ladies Get Slightly Drunk Society along with me for moral support, but in the end we all enjoyed ourselves hugely and I had to take back everything I'd said.

I didn't take part in this year's events, mainly because I was reading in three branch libraries on three successive evenings last week, and that seemed like enough excitement. Also, this year's shenanigans took place in public places - in Belfast and in Dublin - and I don't think I'm that brave. Not without dark glasses and a false moustache, which might have looked slightly out of place... But I take off my hat to all who took part (and to the indefatigable Jane) for their enthusiasm, and their dedication to making women's voices heard.

The library events were a pleasure. Lesley Allen, Angeline King and I read from our novels and answered questions at Newtownbreda, Banbridge and Larne libraries, and at all three we were made enormously welcome. The number of people who turned out to hear us was surprising - to me, anyway. I don't usually expect much of an audience - Professor Gloom, the Literary Ladies (suitably bribed), two drunks and a passing dog would be average. Mind you, the Literary Ladies provide a certain arty glamour, and Professor Gloom's furrowed brow and downcast eyes are generally taken for evidence of deep literary thought, when he is, in fact, playing Solitaire on his phone.

The other great pleasure of public readings is that you get to know your fellow-writers, discover the

things you have in common, and the books you've recently enjoyed.
Lesley, Angeline and I all loved Sarah Winman's When God was a Rabbit, and if you liked it too, then you might try The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen: both books are whimsical, funny and touching. And we all three of us read, at least once, from the start of our own novels - which is hardly surprising: if your first few sentences don't grab the reader's attention, you're probably in trouble.

I'm a fan of clever, quirky novels myself, and three of my favourites (all by women, as it happens) have some of the most memorable opening lines in fiction.,

Dodie Smith's beguiling I Capture the Castle  - one of my all-time favourite books - begins 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.' 

Kate Atkinson kicks off Behind the Scenes at the Museum with 'I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight...'

And then there is The Towers of Trebizond by the wonderful, witty Rose Macaulay, with her deathless opening lines:

'"Take me camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.' 

I defy anyone to do better.

And the week ended with Jan Carson's short story Egg being read aloud on Radio 4. All in all, a good week here for women's voices.

GREAT VARIATIONS

Northern Ireland went to the polls on Thursday, and I went to cast my vote for Alliance. I believe passionately in the non-sectarian, shared-future aims of Alliance. I've also got a soft spot for the Greens, and I applaud anyone who tries to put their views across in an unaggressive, dignified manner. (Why can't more people be like Stephen Farry?) Unfortunately confrontation is still the order of the day, and there have been times in the last week when I felt I would vote for anyone who didn't try to shout the opposition down. Couldn't we start a movement to  have politicians lined up for discussion with their mouths taped shut, the tape to be removed for an agreed time - one minute? two? - before the next question is asked?

The opposite of listening to our politicians badmouthing each other is to listen to the @UlsterOrchestra. They have two wonderful conductors at present: the glorious Rafael Payare (think Johnny Depp meets Groucho Marx meets Fred Astaire) whose rapport with the orchestra is tangible and whose movements are so mesmerising I'd watch him conduct an empty stage; and there is Jac van Steen. I have a natural affinity with Jac - I've got Dutch blood in my veins - and there is a warmth and honesty about him that allows you to settle back, secure in the knowledge that what you are going to hear will be worth hearing. (Unlike most of our politicians.)

Friday's performance was definitely worth hearing. A young Spanish oboist, Ramon Ortega Quero, was deservedly cheered, but it was Elgar's Enigma Variations that raised the roof. Nimrod is the best-known - it was my father's favourite, we played it at his memorial service, and I can never hear it without thinking of him - but this performance was especially memorable. As Jac van Steen urged them on, the separate voices of the orchestra - strings, woodwind, brass, percussion - combined and soared together to produce a wonderful, powerful and soul-restoring end result.

I just wish our politicians were more like the Ulster Orchestra.

GOODBYE TO SELF-IMPROVEMENT

I

I'm a big fan of people who reclaim, recycle and generally put old things to new use. (Pity someone can't do the same for me...) Top favourite this week is ON THE SQUARE, Unit A3, 17 Heron Road, Sydenham Business Park. It's tucked away and there aren't any signs up yet, but it's worth hunting for, believe me.

Where do I start? If you need a row of lovely old wooden bum-friendly chairs, a stuffed weasel or a boar's head (and who doesn't?) a pin-ball machine, a Persian carpet, a mirror, a painting, a billboard - or just a funky light fitting and some fabulous reclaimed furniture, then On The Square is the place to go.

I'm also a fan of a Danish psychologist called Svend Brinkmann. I heard him on Radio 4 talking about his new book 'Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze' and if I understood him correctly, he thinks the modern obsession with navel-gazing, right-to-happiness, find-your-inner-self stuff is a load of self-indulgent rubbish. Hooray for Svend! As far as I'm concerned, he's up there with Marcus Aurelius, another hero of mine, whose philosophy can be briefly summarised as 'Get a grip.'

Prof Brinkmann and Marcus Aurelius think you'll be happier if you look life firmly in the eye, accept that both you and it will never be perfect, and then do the best you can with what you've got. Knocking yourself out to achieve some perfect state of existence is a waste of time.

He's not in favour of too much empathy either, at least not when it clouds your judgement. My own youthful experience with my mother tells me he's right: all I had to do was look sad and wan (not every child can do pallor on demand - I was one of the lucky ones) and whisper, in a droopy little voice, 'I don't feel very well' and my poor mother would instantly begin to cluck. 'Oh dear! Why don't you jump back into bed and I'll ring the school.' Whereupon I would snuggle back down with the ten books I was hoping to read that week. I calculate I managed to miss at least 6 weeks out of every term for my entire school career.

There are some fabulous hypochondriacs and malingerers in fiction, incidentally. Jane Austen probably wins (Mr Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove - whose sore-throats are always so much worse than anybody's - and Lady Catherine de Bourgh's dismal daughter) but my personal best of the rest is the sublimely languid and health-obsessed Uncle Davey in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

I can't say malingering did a lot for me academically: I ended up well-read and totally unfitted for any proper job. So I was tougher with my own children: hot honey and lemon, with a Disprin in dire emergency, but unless you had an actual broken leg, off to school you went. I admit I got it wrong once or twice (the child who was rushed to sick-bay with malaria is still inclined to bring it up) but by and large it worked.

So read Marcus Aurelius (Meditations - 167AD) and Svend Brinkmann, because real life is tough and getting tougher, and anyone who preaches common sense is worth reading. But if you take my advice, you'll give up self-help books and buy more novels instead; then when reality finally overwhelms you, at least you'll be able to lose yourself in someone else's world.

And if you were reading this last week, no, the ceiling didn't hold. There are builders overhead, grit underfoot, piled-up furniture looms through clouds of dust... and it's beginning to sleet. I think I'll go back to bed with a book.

THINGS FALL APART, THE CEILING CANNOT HOLD...

Professor Gloom has trouble getting out of bed - well, he would have if I didn't yank the duvet off while simultaneously yelling GOOD Morning! in his ear. This is usually enough; there are harsher methods, involving iced water, cattle prods, etc, but one doesn't want to use them unnecessarily.
The other morning, I had no sooner whipped off the covers than there was a horrendous crashing noise and a large section of our ceiling fell down. I've never seen a man get out of bed faster.

The amazing thing was that once the dust cleared enough for us to start sifting through the rubble and plaster, we discovered - grimy but intact - my phone, as well as a still-functioning radio and hair-dryer, and three bottles of perfume whose combined cost suggests that perfume manufacturing is a good line to be in. All the framed photos were smashed to smithereens and the chest of drawers that took the direct hit looks a bit distressed, but what's really worrying is what's been exposed. I know this is an old house, but wattle and daub?

Still, it could have been worse. We could have been dead: some of those chunks of plaster were jagged and heavier than bricks. Clementina could have been dead: she was sharpening her claws on the carpet at the time but used up one of her nine lives to leg it a split second before the avalanche engulfed her. (If there is ever an earthquake in Holywood, or a tidal wave or hurricane, Professor Gloom and I will disappear down a chasm or be washed out to sea,
while Clementina will be found clinging to a branch, looking

misleadingly sweet and helpless, and be rescued by some other sucker. Take my word for it.)

Anyway, this particular mishap reminded me of the incident in J.P.Donleavy's The Ginger Man when the appalling Sebastian Dangerfield's wife goes crashing through the ceiling of the room below while sitting on the lavatory. I remember laughing like a drain. And there was an incident in my childhood when a friend of my brother's was dared to walk the attic beams and crashed through the ceiling to land beside my surprised mother who was having an afternoon nap on her bed.

For true, clutch-your-ribs, uproarious anarchy though, you need to turn to children's books. Roald Dahl, Pippi Longstocking, Kay Thompson's glorious Eloise who lives, and creates havoc, at the Plaza Hotel. But for me, scruffy head and shoulders above them all is William Brown: the best-intentioned, blithest and most lawless child that ever caused mayhem in the adult world.

Richmal Crompton created William between the wars, in the gap between the clouds of horror building on the horizon; William cheered my father up, he cheered my children, he cheered me as a child, and he cheers me now. He even cheers Professor Gloom. So when the roof caves in or the future looks too grim to contemplate - which is seems to do quite a lot these days - you could do worse than spend an hour or two with William Brown.

BREAKFAST WITH PROFESSOR GLOOM

Breakfast with Professor Gloom is a silent affair – on his part. I remark from time to time on the weather, a local outbreak of Plague, a meteorite hurtling towards us, but the only sure way to elicit a response is to say ‘Cheese’. From the instant softening of his expression, the unfurrowing of his corrugated brow, I know that ‘cheese’ has much the same effect on him as ‘madeleine’ had on Proust. God knows why, but there you are.

There’s a lot of food in literature – well, there is in the books I like. From Enid Blyton picnics (potted meat and ginger beer!) to Wodehouse breakfasts of kedgeree and kippers, and the glorious, gluttonous feasts of hobbits and dwarves. Breakfast on Pluto, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Babette’s Feast, Tea at Gunter’s…it’s the titles that attract me first. But if you want to read about food, you must read M.F.K. Fisher. I am the happy owner of a copy of The Art of Eating, a book so stuffed with stories, recipes, quotations and wonderful writing that it is an everlasting meal in itself. Her titles alone will tell you at once that you are in for a treat: ‘Consider the Oyster’, ‘The Gastronomical Me’ and my all-time favourite, ‘How to Cook a Wolf’.

This last was published in 1942, in a period of wartime shortage when you might have been glad of the odd slice of wolf, and is prefaced with a quote from C.P.S. Gilman which should be written above every writer's desk:

There’s a whining at the threshold,

There’s a scratching at the floor.

To work! To work! In Heaven’s name!

The wolf is at the door.

Fisher travelled the world, married several times, and had an inexhaustible appetite for life, love and food. This is from her Alphabet For Gourmets:

‘As for dining-in-love, I think of a lunch at the Lafayette in New York, in the front café with the glass pushed back and the May air flowing almost visibly over the marble tabletops….a bottle of Louis Martini’s Folle Blanche and moules-more-or-less-marinieres…then a walk in new black-heeled shoes with white stitching on them beside a man I had just met and a week later was to marry, in spite of my obdurate resolve never to marry again…’ Now tell me you do not want to read her.

I finished writing a novel this week - and felt that rare euphoria that comes with the moment when you realise that it's finally done. Unfortunately Professor Gloom wasn't here to celebrate: he had departed with the air of a man setting out on a doomed but vital mission to a far-flung, dangerous land (the Bridge Club) but I poured myself a large gin and tonic and Clementina kindly consented to sit on my lap for a full five minutes before she bit me, and wandered off to some appointment of her own in the garden. So I had another gin and tonic.

Now back to work. Finishing a novel only means you have to go back to the beginning: to revise, to prune, to enrich, to rewrite, and maybe in a month or two to send off those first letters and sample chapters, like so many messages in bottles...

To work! To work! The wolf at my particular door is Time.

In Praise of Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a very good writer (the stories in Children’s Children are quirky, funny, macabre and poignant) but what I want to congratulate her on are her wonderfully pithy travel updates on Facebook: ‘Hamburg…it’s very German.’ ‘Now we’re in Sweden.’ No unnecessary information there. I just wish she had time to train the nation’s tour guides, and in particular those of the National Trust.

I have a complicated relationship with the National Trust but Prof Gloom has just rejoined us, so I’m getting my money’s worth. And what I want is to wander around houses and gardens in PEACE. I don’t mind someone saying ‘That way to library’ or being there to answer a query I might have about a painting. What I don’t want is to be button-holed the moment I walk in and subjected to lengthy descriptions of every last Chippendale cabinet or Victorian moustache-curler, along with titbits of personal information. ‘What isn’t generally known is that Lady Ethel was a keen jam-maker'. Give me strength.

(I recall a glorious moment at Mount Stewart some years ago when we were asked to ‘Just stand very quietly to one side, please – Lady Mary is passing by.’ I very nearly tugged my forelock.)

With books, of course, it’s different: you expect a bit of information, but it needs to be lightly done. There are books where the historical detail is so painstaking and laboured that you feel as though you are slowly drowning in porridge, and there are books that draw you into the past so subtly that you find yourself enchanted, caught in the shifting shadows of history before you even know it. Some of the best of these were written for children – on the male side there’s T H White, Michael Morpurgo, Alan Garner, but a lot of my favourites are women: Rosemary Sutcliffe, L M Boston, Philippa Pearce. ‘Catherine Called Birdy’ by Karen Cushman. And Penelope Lively’s wonderful, hilarious ‘Ghost of Thomas Kempe’, where a seventeenth century apothecary causes trouble in the present.

As a teenager I devoured historical novels, everything from Georgette Heyer to Rosemary Hawley Jarman - the distant past was a refuge from the present. Later, I became interested in our different perspectives on the more immediate past, in the tricks that memory plays. I read Jennifer Johnston, Pat Barker, Nadine Gordimer, Rose Tremain; Penelope Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Blue Flower, the wonderful novels of JG Farrell, and more recently, Tan Twan Eng’s haunting, unforgettable ‘Garden of Evening Mists', and Kate Atkinson's Time After Time.

The book I'm working on at the moment deals with events in my own lifetime, here, and in the South Africa that I grew up in – at the time a country with seemingly even less hope of change than Northern Ireland. And time plays havoc with all our recollections: I keep having to go back, check facts and dates. It’s like darning holes in my memory. Jan Carson knows about holes in the memory -she also knows about dealing kindly. And that is what the past should be there for: to sift through, to question, and to learn from; to laugh and sometimes to cry over – and please god to make us kinder to each other. But not to venerate, or endlessly relive. Leave that to the National Trust, and to books.

Down But Not Out In Norn Iron

The man at the Braeside Nursery taught me a new word this week. (I love Mr Braeside: ‘£4.50, £2.99, £8.00’ – adding it up on a bit of paper – ‘That’s £15.49. £16.00 to you.’ Then he gives you a fiver change from £20) Anyway, the word he taught me was ‘kipe’. Now it’s entirely possible he makes a new one up every time he sees me coming, but here’s what he said: ‘You want to plant that against a wall or the wind will kipe it over.’

I’ve been adding new Norn Iron terms to my vocabulary ever since I got here, and I’m very pleased with ‘kipe’. Or possibly ‘kype’. At my advanced age I already trip, stumble, totter, fall flat on my face, now I can ring the changes with a bit of kiping.

The wind of change has kiped us all over this week, as a hideous groan from Professor Gloom in the room next door has just reminded me: he must be listening to the news. The news in Northern Ireland has often been more bad than good, but here’s the thing about the people in this particular corner of the planet: however many largely self-inflicted injuries they suffer, how ever often they knock each other over, they always scramble back up again, make a few concessions, and stagger on. So, despite the fact that we’ve been kiped over by Brexit, my money is on us getting back up and fighting on.

Humour helps. In times of trial some people turn to inspirational writing; I read Wodehouse (the English may be rubbish at referenda and football but they’re brilliant at humour) Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons – the book I most frequently take on planes so that in the event of a disaster, I’ll go down laughing. I could name a hundred other novels, a lot of them Irish, but these are my stand-bys.

So cheer up, my friends. It may have happened, but it’s never the end. To quote the late, great Canadian novelist, Robertson Davies (from ‘A Cunning Man’ but read ‘What’s Bred in the Bone’ if you haven’t tried him before) -

 ‘This is the great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous.’

I don’t know exactly why I find that comforting, but I do.

Tale of Woe

I haven’t needed literary inspiration this week: I’ve been sitting at my desk, working so hard that what I’ve needed most is a bit of respite. So I decided to take the evening off and go to the movies. And what I chose to see was Tale of Tales – a ‘gorgeous, grotesque triptych’ of fairy tales. ‘Fabulous, visually glorious, beautiful, inventive’ – at Cannes the critics loved it. And I like fairy tales myself, especially dark ones. (Angela Carter swoops by on a broomstick.) I like beauty, invention, imagination, and I like Salma Hayek.

Unfortunately, Tale of Tales is also very, very, very slow.  Salma Hayek (who has two basic expressions in this film: disappointed, and marginally less disappointed) plays a Queen who wants a child. Her husband, wearing a Pythonesque diving suit, and on the advice of a person who has clearly just escaped from some high-security institution, hunts down a sea monster in order to cut out its heart which is then cooked by a virgin, after which both virgin and Queen are simultaneously impregnated and almost instantly give birth to Albino twins. The Queen’s accent is uncompromisingly Spanish, the King’s is indeterminate (he dies, by the way – possibly a merciful release from a bad movie) but the albino twins are unquestionably American, and their fondness for each other causes the Queen even more disappointment. It might all get a lot better as it goes on, but after 20 minutes I’d lost the will to live, so I left.

If you tell me that I missed the point, that it really was a glorious, unique cinematic triumph, then I’m glad you enjoyed it. But I’m glad I went home and read Kate Atkinson’s book of short stories (Not the End of the World) instead. Her tales are better.