Stories that make sense
Last week the weather – if you can even call it that – was so depressingly grey that today I’ve been particularly grateful for two bright days in a row. This isn’t anywhere special; this path runs from the bypass to a car park, and I’ve cropped another car park out of the photo. But just look at it.
This lunchtime I walked – briskly; there was a chilly wind – to Camley Street Natural Park. I had passed it many times, but never turned up the little side street to find the entrance until today. It’s a tiny sliver of wildness wedged between two great railway stations, St Pancras and King’s Cross – a managed wildness, but a wildness none the less.
The rushes are tall, and the trees are tall, and mostly still in leaf, and though you can look across the canal and see diners eating expensive lunches in the new King’s Cross development, or look into the canal and see a discarded shoe, and hear the whine of electric trains coming into and going out of St Pancras, it still has the sense of being a place set apart. I looked up, and saw fluffed-up bluetits; down, and saw coots dabbling; across, and saw a bold blackbird. I’ll be going back.
This summer I rather unexpectedly found myself coordinating and curating an exhibition. This is a first for me, and I’m rather pleased with the result.
Ventnor Fringe was on. I was going to be there. So was 3267, in the guise of the Book Bus. So far, so normal. I’d missed last year, the baby being just too tiny, and was looking forward to returning to my summer arts hit.
Ventnor Fringe has been getting bigger every year, in terms of both space and time, and this year it was going to be ten days long. It was only going to be reasonably practicable to make the bookshop happen for four days of that, and the preferred distribution of those four days was both Fridays and both Saturdays. Which left a five-day gap in the middle. Perhaps we could have some sort of an exhibition to fill it…
Such was the situation as described to me in mid-June, and to my delight the creative bit of my brain, which has been in and out and mostly out for the past two years, immediately rushed in. Various other people were having ideas too. Brilliant! My brain was coming up with a grand overarching idea to pull it all together:
This bus is usually a bookshop. So what do you get if you take the books out of a bookshop? And what if that space is something that has seen a lot in its time?
A title appeared. Espace Libre. Free Space. Maybe Espace Livre? No, trying too hard. Let it speak for itself. This is just another way to express what I’ve been trying to do with Book Bus Stories, assuming I ever finish the thing. If I had finished the thing it would make an exhibition in itself. But it could make a little part of one, maybe…
I angled for the job of coordinating it all – perhaps a trifle ambitious, trying to do it all from the mainland and with a baby clinging to my legs, but I wasn’t going to let that worry me – and the rest of the gang were extremely happy to let me do it.
So off I went. I selected (extremely select) quotations from my father’s accounts of how he got the bus this side of the Channel in the first place. I polished up three of my own Book Bus Stories to make a small display – and commit myself to finishing the rest of the damn things in time for next year. I spent quite a lot of money on boards and various forms of adhesive. I bought chain and cable ties in the DIY bit of our wonderful local department store, and if the assistant thought it was in any way weird she didn’t let on. I printed out everything I’d written. I posted the whole lot to Ventnor. And I chased and chased and chased the other contributors, and/or my family members who had undertaken to organise the other contributors for me.
Then I got to the Isle of Wight and spent a frantic couple of evenings sticking photos and cards to boards, or, in one case, making holes in a board with a corkscrew and attaching books with string, chain, and cable ties, while the baby was in bed. And we moved the whole lot onto the bus on Sunday morning.
In short, I had a lovely time.
This was a combination of the kind of project and people organising I do in my day job, and the kind of creative work I do in my free time, and it was the first time since I’d gone on maternity leave that I’d got my teeth into either of them in a big way. My brain had come back, and, since I’d been a bit worried that it had dissolved and dribbled out of my ears some time between COVID and quickening, this was incredibly exciting. I can do this kind of thing. Not only is this reassuring in the context of my return to work next week, it’s also encouraging to think that I might be able to return to some of the three or four books I have been attempting to write on and off since 2021.
I’m not going to have a huge amount more free time in which to use reclaimed creative powers. I get a couple of train journeys and a couple of lunch hours every week, and all the fruit trees need pruning. I will aim to get something done. I hope to post here more frequently, too. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, here’s a look at The Book Bus: Espace Libre.
I have about one hour in every day in which I have both hands free, and writing has been coming a long way down the list of things I could do in it. And it’s never the same hour for very long: I don’t seem to be able to adjust to the ever-changing routine quickly enough to get much done. Sometimes I see the moment and grab it, but not often.
So much of my life at the moment is focused on the baby, dependent on the baby. That’s why I’m not writing much here. I don’t want her to embark on life to find that the internet already knows all about her. This time is private.
It just doesn’t seem very important at the moment. There’s nothing in particular that needs to be written by me, now. No idea has yet grabbed me by the throat and insisted I write it.
My creative energy is going on other things. Smocking. Cursillo. What to do with a bus that’s a bookshop when it doesn’t have books in it.
I just don’t feel like it.
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(There is a cat on my keyboard.)
I am writing.
Little by little. More and more, week by week. Even when I wasn’t writing at all, I was writing. I’ve kept my diary up to date all this past year, and never had to catch up more than a week at a time. Even when I had to write in very large letters to fill a day, or just stick in a picture instead. I’ve written reports. I’ve written letters – fewer than I’d have liked, but some. I’ve even opened up some of my pre-baby projects and added a line here and a line there. There hasn’t been one big bam! I’m writing again! moment – or, rather, there have been several, but they haven’t released an exciting new flood of words. More an occasional dribble.
But I’m writing.
… that would be fine. There’s more to me than writing, more than I know about yet. And, while writing is one of the most important ways in which I find out about myself, it isn’t the only way. This last year – these last four years – has been a time of huge transition for me, in many different dimensions. I’m still emerging.
Who knows, I might write about that.
I’m still here, still not getting more than about ten minutes at a time in which to get things done, and mostly having to spend those ten minuteses on things that aren’t writing. I do have a vague plan for a return to blogging, but in the meantime, here’s a cat picture.
As you might have guessed, I haven’t been writing much recently. At first I didn’t have the brain. I’ll write more about that, some time, maybe. Then I didn’t have the time. Still don’t, often. I get about ten minutes at the computer at a time before people start howling. If this post turns out very short, you’ll know why.
Instead, I’ve been exercising my creativity in more three-dimensional forms. I’ve been going for projects that I can pick up and put down again without their unravelling completely, and at the moment I’m tackling my mending pile and posting about it on Instagram under the #MendMarch hashtag. The picture on this post shows a mend on top of a mend; the new one features a long white stripe in between cypress green and terracotta, in honour of the Strade Bianche which you might just be able to make out on the TV in the background.
But I did manage to put together a list of the five best cycling novels for Shepherd. I think I’ve remarked before that there aren’t very many to choose from, and I suspect everybody puts The Rider at the top. No shame in that. It’s a brilliant book.
As for the literal bike, I’ve been out once on my faithful red town bike to go to an ultrasound appointment that didn’t happen (long story) and had a few goes on the cargo bike, which may or may not be being recalled (boring story). It’s all a bit of a waiting game, really, but we’ll get there in the end.
… the umbrellas in the litter bins are the big ones that only close up in one direction. Everyone expects those little folding ones to fail in the face of a stiff breeze (of course they’re going to, with that added weak point half way up the spoke) but the big ones need the wind to put in more effort.
I do own a little folding umbrella. The canopy is printed with Alphonse Mucha ladies and I bought it during a sudden downpour in Prague. I don’t use it much. The Fen winds would have it inside out in seconds. My preferred brolly is a 1960s vinyl number with black polka dots: it has nice strong spokes, but a comparatively small diameter, which is handy. I find umbrellas a bit awkward to manage, and wouldn’t trust myself with a golf one. The plastic is beginning to decay at the edges, though, and it’s not going to go on forever.
On Thursday I managed to forget completely that umbrellas exist and that it would be a good idea to take one with me, so I got very damp. Oh well. Possibly you shouldn’t take advice on umbrellas from me.
Drink red wine from a tumbler.
Add three spoonfuls of sugar to black coffee.
Write a sentence longer than most people’s paragraphs.
Talk to a railway man.
Quote some dreadful Victorian slush.
Try to persuade the nearest soprano to sing some dreadful Victorian slush.
Photograph some buses.
Tell everyone you prefer trains.
Look at three different maps of the same place, none current.
Take the baby to look at trains.
Take a beermat home with you. Take six beermats home with you. (Or: be pleased that the beermat collection has gone to someone who appreciates it.)
Join the Friends of King Alfred Buses. (I have been meaning to do this for ages and have at least/at last managed to print off the application form.)
Yell ‘Trolloper!’ at the cat. (I didn’t, because it was five in the morning and the rest of the household was more or less asleep, despite the noise of the cat/waste paper battle.)
Read the lesson at Mattins. (I get one opportunity per year. I am on the rota.)
Remember the date. Tell people why it’s meaningful on a personal level. Although probably not in those terms.
(Two years without Pa, six months, nearly, with the little one.)
(Thanks to Havi for the concept of SMOPL.)
… my identity as a writer, for the moment at least.
My other best decision of 2023 was turning down my first ever book contract. I meant to write about that – first about getting it, then about turning it down – but I never managed it. Not longhand (can’t get to a flat surface), not touch typing (very rarely have both hands free), not dictating (distracts and confuses the baby). Any solution I find works for a week or so and then fails. All I’m managing is these tiny little blogs, typed with one hand on my phone
More to the point, I just don’t want to. The urge to write (fiction, long form non-fiction, poetry) has been patchy over the last couple of years, and non-existent over the last few months. I could force it, but why? Only recently have I found myself thinking myself back into a character’s head (what would Julian make of war memorials, anyway?), and I’m not in any position to do anything about it. There’s time. It’ll come back when it wants to come back.
In the meantime I’m refusing to beat myself up for not being Superwoman. A friend told me about seeing a documentary about Judith Kerr in which the great author said, very matter-of-factly, ‘Of course I couldn’t do any writing while the children were small.’ So there we go. If stepping back is good enough for her then it’s most definitely good enough for me.
I’m hoping it’s au revoir rather than goodbye. But, the way things stand at the moment, I’m honestly much less bothered than I’d have predicted two years ago.
Pa gave me this venerable pig on semi-permanent loan some time in the late 1990s, probably, and told me, “You must cherish him,” so I did, and then gave him back when I went to university, I should think, and then I reclaimed him last year.
I have a few of Pa’s old toys (for a war baby, he did extremely well). I’m still missing one of the Dutch dolls. I think Pa removed her from the dolls’ house to crew a steam engine, but where has she gone? I hope she’ll turn up as we continue to empty the house.
Kathleen Jowitt 