Lou Bradford

Writes

This ain’t no disco

· Leave a Comment

School is back! The manacle of school holidays thrown off! I reflect; something about the cessation of the term is always bittersweet, mornings spent in pyjama’d free-fall, with too much TV and a messy house. It’s necessary and well-deserved for all of us, but after over three weeks, I am longing for routine again. I now have two teenagers in the house as my son turned thirteen this month. Hormones run high; theirs as they surge towards adulthood, mine for different reasons. Moods fray. Creative work does not get done. It takes a week or so to reacclimatise once they’ve gone back, and now I am alone in the house once more. Order restored.

Who’d have thought that my life would be so closely linked to term time, even though I am no longer an academic? Who’d have thought – and I texted this sentiment to one of my old university friends just yesterday morning – that our lives would have become interminably busy? I don’t recall this busy-ness being an issue in our twenties and thirties. I was the first of our group of friends to have children; the pioneer, a trail-blazer. I now look at women who are 26, as I was when I had my daughter, and I think: I was a child. Twenty six. It’s no age! Not for this sort of serious shit. Parenthood loomed up with a banner that said ‘it’s not about you (anymore)’ and I spent the best part of seventeen years absorbing that new and all-encompassing fact.

I hear adults talk about their childhoods. I have a particular penchant at the moment for listening to couples counselling on podcast – utterly fascinating, and makes me want to retrain as a psychologist. Oh no, wait, I’ve already retrained once *grimace emoji face*. The last thing any toddler wants is for their parent to tell them his or her problems. Double that for a child, quadruple for a teen. For teenagers, adult problems are just embarrassing and awkward and the last thing on earth they want to deal with. Feelings are the domain of the young. Is it that my contemporaries and I are expected to navigate life without having feelings, as feelings have become treacherous territory? I therefore make a point of asking people ‘how did you feel about that?’ in conversation, in the style of the podcast psychologist, a gentle lilt to my voice, and I find people surprised, wrong-footed; ‘what do you mean how do I feel?‘

The teens and I sit each night and eat dinner, a table set where I am often the only adult. My son plays offensive rap music during the meal and we argue daily about who is going to wash up. They do it. I assert the rules. We discuss injustices and daily events and the need to develop strategies for managing the future. The future feels awash with the great unknown and I wonder if they regard me with interest. I dispense advice and opinion and they look at me clear-eyed, dispassionate. What do they see? A woman who inflicts too many vegetables on them (chickpeas, aubergines, cauliflower and broccoli in one sitting), and wears slogan sweatshirts that she finds ironic, but they don’t understand. Woke up in Paradise. Give a Damn. This Ain’t No Disco.

I smile to myself and feel grateful. Life is good. I get to wander around in the daytime and ponder my writing. I get to browse the web without limit. I get to make plans and make beds. When driving, my son comments that I have a free life and I agree. I explain to him that I have many responsibilities, it’s my job to hold everything together. He nods and says sagely; ‘it’s like you’re in a cage, but you have the key.’

Yes, I say. It’s just like that.

SaveSave

Deconstructing ‘The Breakfast Club’

· Leave a Comment

I devoured Molly Ringwald’s beautifully argued essay in The New Yorker, ‘What About The Breakfast Club?’, relating to her role in the 1980’s film. That film formed a pivotal moment in my adolescence and only last week, I found myself recommending it to a teenager I know, as a film that all people absolutely must see. Part of the cinematic canon, so to speak. Such was its impact on my teenage years, that Molly Ringwald (who, for years, to the consciousness of most, had lapsed from the limelight) remains an idol and someone whom I emulated, to the extent that my peers and I performed the confessional scene from the film in our drama exam, and fought over who would play ‘Claire’. In the end, my local contemporary Julie Huggins snagged that accolade, owing to her strawberry-blonde hair, which resembled Ringwald’s ‘Cherry’. I can still recite great swathes of the dialogue from the film and considered director John Hughes, also responsible for ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ”Sixteen Candles,’ a genius, with near-perfect recall of the teenage angst that afflicted us.

Cue line from the film: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’ So cautionary was this sentiment to my young heart and mind, that it seared in memory. I was not going to become that kind of adult, that kind of parent. Nit-picking but distant; demanding of academic and sporting excellence, preparing packed lunches of ‘PBJ with the crusts cut off’. Yet when asked what her parents do to her, Ally Sheedy’s character replies: ‘They ignore me.’ encapsulating the awful truth; that parents of teens, when the gulf widens between us and our offspring, retreat, somewhat wounded, into our own pointless middle age. Don’t you forget about me.

Ringwald illuminates how various scenes in the film seem inappropriate, when positioned against the #MeToo movement, of how toe-curlingly awkward it is to watch this film with your own kids. I can attest to this, having watched it with mine, I found myself forming an inadvertent  furrowed brow: I don’t recall it being quite this risqué  I definitely did, aged 13 and circa 1986, when it would have hit VHS video to be watched and re-watched at home, gloss over the sexual overtones, the drug use and the swearing. I felt little empathy with the adult characters; Mr Vernon and his ‘Barry Manilow suit’ and Carl the janitor’s creepy, voyeristic tendencies. When holding a mirror up to my adolescence and to the culture I absorbed, I see Ringwald is right. So much of it was tinged with what would now be considered inappropriate. There’s a systematic unravelling of everything I grew up to think of as ‘normal’.

I’ve written before about generational feminism; the extent to which my 16 year old daughter and I may hold the same feminist doctrines, but how the lens from which we look will differ, according to our societal and cultural references. What is her equivalent to ‘The Breakfast Club’? Who is the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald of her generation? How will she reflect, when she is 44, on the films which shaped her consciousness? In this seismic moment of gender politics, will girls not still be drawn to the references that best reflect their own experience? ‘The Breakfast Club’, with its setting in a Chicago high school, did not so closely resemble the life I led as a teen, not least because I attended an all-girl’s school in rural Sussex. We wore bottle green school uniforms, and read about what happened in other people’s lives. But the heady prospect of girls and boys in co-education presented itself through American cinema; prom nights and the backseat of Daddy’s car. In reality, although Brits have adopted the prom night protocol, evidenced by reams of proud, sparkling photos on Facebook each June, we do not do it with the American panache that was captured in the Hughes’ films. It was teenage world for the taking.

As my generation’s cultural lynch pins are removed and examined, there’s a sense that ground shifts again and I turn inward wondering why growing up with misogyny did not affect me more negatively, or become a preoccupation until I was older. I realise it had seeped into me and was the standard, and even as I look back I conclude; well, at least I knew where I stood. My expectations were met. We survived in a man’s world and that was fine, it made us wily. I don’t even recall, as I was at University in the mid-1990’s, that my friends and I ever questioned this status quo or railed against it. It is this that makes me shame-faced now, and I suspect was part of the impetus provoking Ringwald to pen her retrospective essay. Does not knowing any different make it OK? As she says, with a resigned tone, ‘Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art…’ Although the films of my youth may now seem tawdry and misguided, they were to me the steady hand over the slippery path of teenage hood.

The craft

· Leave a Comment

In my old career, I would mop up the aftermath of corporate stress. The very worst cases would land on my desk – or in my inbox, moreover – where I would consider and ‘solution’ them for the company, finding a route through the messy undergrowth that had led to corporate litigation between employee and workplace. When there was nowhere else to go but the law. The employee would say ‘I’ve consulted my lawyer’ and we would say ‘Good!’, knowing that then it would be slightly less David and Goliath; we the corporate monolith, they the small pebble. I would search the technicalities, absorb myself in the risk assessment, brief the executives and we’d stagger towards some sort of outcome. At that time, I felt distant from the complainants, it wasn’t until I left the job that I allowed myself to really think about how their lives had been, and what had compelled them to litigate against their employer. There was a strong current of blame that pushed them along; it had to be someone’s fault, someone had to be to blame, and I recall writing policy documents about how causation is not definable.

It seems a long way off now, I am out the other side. But there is a large part of me that misses that work, the completeness of it. The shade you feel under a corporate umbrella, which I suspect can only be found when the company is as large and well-known as the one I worked for. Now there is no umbrella, and instead I feel the blinding glare of reality all of the time. When you forge a (new) career you have to evaluate daily. No boss, no objectives, no appraisal. No executives, no corporate perks, no training. In writing, it’s challenging even to keep colleagues. In fact nothing of my previous life features other than the pill of experience that I swill down when I am writing; when the words come from somewhere I once went, or heard someone say, or from that attempt to express the unsaid.

I met with my MA colleagues at our college, to retrace our steps I suppose, and when speaking to the under-graduates, we all realised our time there has passed. Going back felt furtive and confusing, and we all came away wondering what strange territory we are in now, as writers. If I’d have applied a corporate plan, then my book would be finished, published, marketed and on the best seller list by now. Double digit growth. But of course, in creative endeavours it doesn’t work that way! And as I try to forge forward, it is the mental barriers I create for myself that stop progress, rather than anything external. When studying to be a writer, the concept remains an elusive nymph of a thing that you can sense in your future. I could be a professional writer. It hovers and wavers there in your mind’s eye like heat waves on the horizon. The reality is so different!

We devise ways to make ourselves work. I look at my laptop reproachfully. I schedule ‘writing time’ and feel pangs of envy when I see new books published. I assume every other writer is penning droplets of brilliance, whereas my work comes out leaden, lopsided, lumpy.

What a curious thing being an academic or a creative. So used was I to the definable objectives of the corporate world, everything thought through and cascaded, everyone working to a common goal, and the goal was financially motivated. For many that emphasis would be deplorable, but to me, back then, it made sense. There was an honesty to having blatantly expressed objectives. Maybe what I find frustrating about writing is that it’s so unclear, there is no measure of success. One person might like your work, a million others might not. Or vice versa. The enormity of this principle troubles me and I go back to the mantra that I must write to please myself. Write what I want to read. Write  – in the words of Hemingway – hard and clear about what hurts.

In any craft there is the privilege of the practice. How lucky to be able to write! How fortuitous to be released from corporate toil. A chance to regain my cosmic karma after I stopped messing about with litigation defences. We didn’t do it.

I console/distract myself from these unanswerable questions with learning to cross-stitch and coveting expensive shoes. Happy days.

Painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi, ‘Interior with Woman by the Piano’ 1901.

Posted by / Filed In: Writing

Steady selfish

· Leave a Comment

My parents divorced when I was a child, leaving me fearful of abandonment. This, compounded by my father’s profession – an airline pilot – meant that in my young mind, I worried about plane crashes too. Meanwhile, my brother, who is seven years older than me, navigated the treacherous waters of being teenage with a single mother. Despite my Mum’s best efforts, our home was not always calm. I would climb into her bed some nights, listening to her breathe and she would allow me to sleep there, safe in the knowledge that she was not going anywhere. As I write this, I sense the faint fingerprint remaining from my childhood. Divorce can be misunderstood by those who haven’t experienced it. It’s not that I didn’t understand my Dad had to go, and it’s not even that his leaving impacted us so much in the day to day; after all, pilots are away a lot. But the bedrock on which I relied was no longer sound. It remained, some semblance of its former self, but it was jagged and uneven, and there were gaps where steadfastness used to be. I wonder now if I have fabricated this perception because I have reflected on my own childhood and cross-referenced it with that of my own children? Isn’t that what being middle-aged is all about? Looking back and looking forward; stranded midway.

My children walk on steady bedrock. That is because my husband and I provide it for them, and I particularly, as I don’t ‘work’ for a living, devote myself to ensuring bedrock stability. That sounds as if we lack selfishness. I note in the media the recent preoccupation with ‘self care’ – and how we should all practice it. I wonder: is self care just selfishness, its thinly disguised cousin? I resolve to put myself first more. The happiness of everyone depends on it. But self care can feel like a little-used habit from the past. I remind myself I spent 25 years with just myself, no children to think of, how hard can it be?

I watched a documentary about Joan Didion on Netflix which was fascinating but also tragic, and I was struck by a comment she made about her ill-fated daughter, who died in her late thirties.  She said her daughter found her remote. When I watched the cinematic footage of Joan in earlier years, writing prolifically, immersed in her craft, surrounded by other creatives, it’s clear that the life she strove for did not feature bedrock stability. It featured something else entirely; the pursuit of her own needs, her own compulsion to write. And as such it makes me wonder, as most people my age do, what’s it all about? I don’t write for a day or two because I do mother stuff, kid’s stuff, house stuff. The ‘pursuit of my own needs’ comes low down on the the ‘to do’ list.

When my own sixteen year old daughter sleeps in my bed, as she did so for a brief spell recently, it was for comfort, but also to draw strength. There was something in her own life that required bravery and clarity and she took that from me, her mother life-force. I didn’t see this until after it had ceased happening, and all that was left of those nights she slept next to me was the memory. This time round though, I listened to her breathing and recognised the same in-breath and out-breath of her babyhood, the same snuffles, the same sleeping sighs as she made her dream-led twists and turns. So elemental yet also incongruous, as when your child emerges in to young adulthood, you loose that sense of oneness with them. Their scent, their skin, that extension of yourself. She is me. I am her.

It’s curious but it is from these everyday inconsequential human nuances that I notice my writing gets richer. To me at least. It is there that I find words. I put off the pursuit of what I desire and aspire to because what happens in between is every day life. So these moments have to be lived and enjoyed and even, at times, endured, as from them comes the goodness.

SaveSave

Please yourself

· Leave a Comment

3.07am or thereabouts, I wake, then can’t get back to sleep, and my mind cranks itself up a notch. This is a sign. Of late, I’ve been a writer who doesn’t write. It’s a temporary thing to start with; a few missed days, then a week, then a fretful month, and I start to chastise myself that I should be doing better. It’s not that I won’t write, it’s that I can’t write. So regular is this on-again/off-again style of mine, that I wonder if this is just how it goes with me.

We went skiing. Well, I spent half the week skiing, then caught a cold that led me to be hotel-bound. Aren’t hotels peculiar places in the day time? They live a half-life, waiting for guests to return in the evening and, particularly in ski resorts, there’s an unspoken rule that everyone must be out and up the mountain. If you’re not, then why are you there? I binge-watched ‘Stranger Things‘ and ached for my childhood of the 80’s, complete with white ankle boots and Chopper bikes.

I lectured undergraduates on writing and blogging and then following that, proceeded to not write, nor blog! It was like talking about it distilled it. They say those who can’t do, teach? The blog waits in the wings for me, ready when I need it. We enter year eight of blogging and I recall the heady days of daily posts and collaboration between the blog community, which now, has resolutely moved over to Instagram. I spend too much time on Instagram; it is a time-suck, especially stories.

I decide to shift the novel from first person to third person and the enormity of this rears up in front of me like a roadblock. I am trying to skirt round it. I study my own indecision and conclude that I have the luxury of time, and it’s working against me. I can’t help thinking if I still had a demanding job, I might have just penned this damn novel at night. Would it have been keener to get out? I scan job websites.

I fret about single use plastic and wonder how we – and by this I mean my generation – can have gone for so many years not considering the impact of using plastic in everything. The insanity of it; did we really think it would just go away? Turns out biodegradable means in a 100 years, by which time our children’s children will be surrounded by mountains of the stuff. I imagine the oceans thick and oily with pollution. It makes me shudder and I buy beeswax food covers and a water bottle with a fairly pretentious chunk of Japanese charcoal in it (to filter, of course) and feel marginally better.

The weather barrels on with rain and murk, small suggestions of Spring which don’t quite materialise, but the promise is there. Daffodils, birdsong, morning light. One day it will be summer again.

I buy an Anthony Burrill poster. My teeth ache. I listen to an Oprah Winfrey ‘Super Soul Sunday‘ book on Audible and it causes my head to spin as they discuss giving oneself up to the universe. I consider my universe. My friend suggests to me that I need to get outside of my own head. I order an embroidery cross-stitch kit and await its arrival with interest. I drive my kids around. I start using retinol on my skin. I walk the dog; there’s so much water in the earth that I can literally hear it seeping, because of the thaw of the recent, random snowfall.

Ultimately, going back to the universe, I decide what it boils down to is this: please yourself. If you can master that, you’re halfway there! That, and get good sleep! This is how life goes, the layering of stuff and thoughts and work and rest. I read this back and think, with a shamed face: first world problems. Resolve to do better/try harder/finish the novel/stop thinking so much.

SaveSaveSaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSaveSaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

Quiet Ambition

· Leave a Comment

When I told her I wasn’t ambitious, my best and wise friend Dawn said I was lying. She said I had wild ambition but harboured it in a quiet, almost covert way. ‘You don’t shout about it’ she said, ‘but it’s definitely there.’ Like many moments in our twenty-five year friendship, she summed things up in a sentence, and I stopped talking, mute in the knowledge she was right. There is something grubby about ambition in women, a facet of our society discussed with abandon of late. Commonly, my generation don’t allow ourselves to say we want something as blatantly as we should. Whether this is habit or lack of confidence or conditioning I don’t know, but the result has produced a guarded conflict in me between naked ambition and the kind of gentle, motherly humility I hope to exhibit.

The trajectory of my younger life had this tone:

I want that. Can I do that? No. God, no. Oh, actually maybe, yes. OK yes. *Completes education*.

Now I want that. Can I do that? No. God no. Oh, actually maybe, yes. OK yes. Yes! *Goes after the challenge of a corporate career, like a woman possessed*.

When I left my first profession a little over three years ago, I badgered my friends about what I should do next. Many advised me to do nothing, which was in itself the greatest challenge. To not work, I concluded, was bad for me. My brain whirred, the covert ambition did not go away, but spiralled inanely in the background like an inflated balloon that has been let go, the air escaping. What ensued was a year of miserable inner dialogues and lengthy, circular conversations with others, where I tried to figure out my new place in the world. I was unhappy. After all that. It seemed like a cruel trick; wasn’t I meant to be content? I had given up work!

My early retirement lasted until I signed up for a Masters degree in Creative Writing, and started on an academic path. In an underestimation of what it would mean to be a student again, I launched in with my usual tenacity, getting it done whilst the rest of my life continued around me, raising our children, wiping surfaces, driving, cleaning, walking the dog. Only on a couple of occasions did I take myself off to write my assignments, but on the whole, the impact of my second education was minimal to those around me. Intently, I absorbed and relished being back amongst academics, talking books, words, metaphors and conceits. I’ve written before about the merits of doing a Masters and I would say it was the best decision I made at the time. It enabled that pesky ambition to take a back seat, until it came time for my finals, and there it was again. I so wanted to ace the test, to be the best, as I had before. But this time, the nebulous nature of what I was studying made that near-on impossible. I did well, for sure, but compared to my professional life, where an established meritocracy applied (work hard; get paid), this was fundamentally different. A Masters education is about a critical analysis of oneself. Of one’s own motivations and capabilities. It’s about how effectively you can apply all that knowledge.

I returned to my college last week to lecture the undergraduate students on the relationship between writing and blogging. It was a twist of fate, as this activity of blogging has formed part of my identity for over eight years. I sat across the table from the students, the opposite side to where I had been only a year ago, and thought how life can reformulate itself. For all the words that have been written about blogging, there remains a taint of frippery to it, as a medium it lacks seriousness and is often considered as supplemental to other, more immediately gratifying online places like Instagram. Micro-Blogging has overtaken all. Micro-influencing is de rigueur. For the serious writer, this presents a challenge; we like quality and quantity. The craft of writing is an art, it can’t be done as an Instagram post. A blog remains the only medium through which the power of words can be explored. Where consciousness can flow, as it would in a personal diary, but then is published for the internet to read. Such a curious phenomenon.

Writing a blog has been about taking control and doing something. About channeling my thoughts and writing, writing, writing, even when I thought there was little to say. It’s been an enabler in so many ways and I heard myself, during my lecture, sounding almost evangelical about the benefits. There are downsides of course, as I have alluded to, it is a medium which solicits judgement (the ‘comment here’ mentality), and one must become comfortable with brutal honesty and openness. Blogs steeped in privacy are generally hard to accept. But there are limits; I write less about my family, as my children are older and it’s not their decision to feature here. I respect that and turn instead to commentary about other elements of my life and of course, the book, the words, the struggle to move forward when you have quiet ambition and you’ve entered your second profession.

Shhhhhh…

The Education of Adults

· Leave a Comment

It’s a curious thing, being nearly 44 years old. The shenanigans of middle age continue to bring new and exciting dimensions to life. I find myself noting the behaviour of my elders and wondering, as I’ve alluded to before; why the grump? Why the know-it-all? Why the backward-looking attitude? I heard a British social commentator say – in reference to the demographic of Americans who voted for Trump – that they were looking to restore the past. Rather than looking forward, the impetus was to go back, to make it like it was. They rue the day when the future encroached. But, as all humans (and most animals) know, there is no stopping the future, it’s going to come whether we like it or not. I notice too the passing of time – another Christmas, another new year’s eve, another cold and gloomy January. Time tick-tocks, and I see I am straddled between two places; what was and what will be. There may be an esoteric truth to this which can only be understood by the over-40’s. Am I the only one whom until my mid-thirties, had no thoughts on this topic? Sentimentality and nostalgia were not my constant companions then, as they are now.

I also notice the behaviour of the young, my children, their friends, the cohorts of youth, where everything is ahead of them and not behind. My children look back on their younger childhood and regard it fondly. I can isolate each event in memory and recall the effort involved in making it lovely. This activity is grossly exaggerated now I ‘don’t work’. I use that term reluctantly, as I feel like I work every damn minute of the day, until I fall into bed exhausted, but it assists me in making my point. Motherhood can be distilled into a series of efforts, some minuscule and some Herculean, all of them combining, we hope, to make up the whole: to raise a happy child. In amongst it, there are efforts that are misguided or just plain wrong. The times when not enough effort is made, or there’s too much and it overflows in an ugly spill.

I then look to my peers, the beleaguered 40-somethings! I regard my friends with insatiable interest; how are they doing it? Do they feel the same as I do? Is this what we signed up for? Why are we so guarded? Decisions of others are dissected and turned over in my hands, trying to see the angle.

I conclude it’s all a whopping, great big overthink.

Meanwhile, I am lecturing next week at the college where I did my MA. I am returning to spend time with the under-graduates to talk about writing and blogging. I’ve written a blog for eight years this month. Eight years!! Blogging has become almost unrecognisable to itself in that time, so much has changed.

I get asked, pretty much on a daily basis, ‘how’s the book?’ as if it’s a living, breathing thing, like ‘how’s the garden?’ or ‘how’s your mum?’. I pause, and reply that it’s going slowly. For all the momentum of an educational qualification and a publisher’s meeting, the fact remains that work still needs to be done to refine the book. What I produced was a first draft, and what I need it to be is a final draft. There can be fifty iterations between those two points. I notice this statement makes me feel like a fraud. Writers write; they might write every day, but the end result may not change that much. It feels like that now. I persevere. And fret about how hard the perseverance feels. Did I mention that writing, much like motherhood can be distilled into a series of efforts, some minuscule and some Herculean, all of them, we hope, combining to make up the whole: to create a book. The irony of my choice of pursuits is not lost on me.

January always was the pensive month, for all the talk about Blue Monday (to me; a perennial favourite of the 1980’s by New Order), the weather, the post-Christmas slump, the crazy, short-lived bursts of healthy eating and exercise regime, it remains a sullen, after-party sort of month. A time to endure whilst we wait for something better. Roll on the future.

Solstice

· Leave a Comment

Forgive my addled mind; I blame it on my three-week enforced quarantine, as both of my children have systematically exchanged cold and flu viruses, and I have resembled a Florence Nightingale figure, day and night, ministering to them. Nothing like a sick child to halt proceedings. It happens this time of year as we face the shortest day and the sky darkens in mid afternoon and slides into night by 4pm. I curse it, and wonder how I spent so many years of my life not noticing, not caring about this frankly antisocial, anti-happy, antithesis of summer! We all muddle through in darkness and cold, waiting for respite: ‘it makes me grumpy’ I retort to my children, when they ask if I am alright, (and I clear the next round of soggy, used tissues to a soundtrack of coughing, and wash my hands for the millionth time). Find the joy, find the joy, find the joy!

In a looping, multi-faceted WhatsApp chat between myself and a dear friend, we comment on ‘noticing’, on how we now so aware of everything. The small things and the large. Poverty, crime, the environment, nature, weather, how everyone looks so damn old. We wonder if this is a 40-something trait, something that comes home to roost after our years of self-centredness? Were our twenties the same, or our thirties? I couldn’t tell you one major news story from my thirties; I was knee-deep in nappies, my ‘career’ and my own self-regard. Me, me, me. I consider that career now, which seemed so vital then, and wonder what it would have been like to have held on. Kept my toehold in the corporate cliff-face? Three weeks of sick children would have posed a Herculean challenge and I would be bathed in mother’s guilt by now, struggling. Isn’t this why I gave up? I gave up for many reasons, some of which I can’t even recall now, but wasn’t it to be able to respond to the demands of my family, when they arose? And to write…

Another good friend, who sensed my isolation, made an impromptu visit this week, and we shared glasses of wine. When we met, our children were four and now her son is seventeen and my daughter is sixteen. The preoccupations of the past no longer occupy us, and we have new ones; wild and varied ones that relate to the life of the modern teen and how to parent them. It’s something I’ve written about before in articles here and here. To break it down, it’s along the lines of parties, illegal substances and our abject fear of them somehow infiltrating our teenager’s well-briefed sphere of reality, university places, extracurricular activities, whether they should earn money (and where’s the time amidst studying?), are they OK? Is it all going to be OK? If I contrast this to ten years ago, the preoccupations would have been Phonics, dexterity, reading Jane and John books, learning their spellings, head lice outbreaks and was their friend mean to them at playtime? All said and done, and bed by 7pm.

Oh how things change! And that is what I notice now. Experience is a peculiar thing. The recognition of something similar to something you’ve seen before. What I find interesting is that even things from a year ago seem facile now. As your child accelerates towards adulthood, there are a litany of milestones that make the last milestone seems less significant. Where does it end?

Meanwhile, Netflix has been my best friend as I watched Alias Grace (absolutely spellbinding). And then, with my twelve-year-old son, who is bored with his kid’s TV after days of bedrest, watched ‘Anne with an E’, a revisiting of the classic ‘Anne of Green Gables’. I made chicken soup. I plumped pillows. I escaped to the hairdresser for the afternoon and in an act of rebellion, had my hair cut short and now feel slightly traumatised, but in a good way. I cleaned and sorted and did what the housebound do! I haven’t written a word of the novel for weeks and weeks and this weighs a little heavy. Can I get you a drink? Something to eat? But this is how it goes; the ups and downs. The light and the dark. Happy solstice…

Painting by my favourite, Jessica Cooper, ‘Red Apple’

The minimal

· Leave a Comment

The festivities are about to set in, and I for one, am trying to keep hold of my Christmas spirit. Scanning through TV channels, there’s Dickens’ Christmas Carol and I relate more to Scrooge than Cratchit; I am miserly and grumpy! At my son’s carol service last night, a church priory packed full, we watched as three members of the chapel choir (the singing elite) were assisted off to be sick. Pale, peaky and eventually led home in an embarrassed hush. At no point were proceedings stopped, we all just carried on singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and pretended that we weren’t observing the spread of end-of-term norovirus happen before our eyes. The children are over tired, over exerted, over excited. It’s all too much. This midwinter business is not for the faint-hearted! Our house has been a hotbed of illness over the last two weeks, I have been glugging elderflower immunity syrup and Manuka honey as if my life depends on it. Does anyone know if Manuka honey actually works?

It gets dark at four and we spend long, long evenings, wondering when the spring will come. It’s a way to go.

Meanwhile the shopping and ‘preparations’ continue in earnest.

Isn’t the mantra less is more? Doesn’t every self-help book and blog suggest to declutter, to jettison belongings, reduce, reuse, recycle? Don’t we know that for our own sanity and wellbeing, we need to stop acquiring and start appreciating? Why then, has Christmas become such a monstrosity? Don’t get me wrong, I love the twinkly trees and the build up to Santa and the re-runs of Home Alone and Elf (which I maintain are two works of genius). But it’s gone too far, surely?

Where’s the hygge? Where’s the stillness?

I find myself wondering if I have become my own enemy? Christmas used to be my favourite time of the year. Since I was a child, I planned it out, agonised over which gift to buy with my pocket-money, I even hand-printed brown wrapping paper (seriously, how did I find the time?) and tied presents with velvet ribbons. Is there anything better than velvet ribbons? There’s something so elementally lovely about velvet, it’s like the fabric equivalent of a warm hug. But I digress…

I search in myself for the source of my mood. A couple of years ago we went to Florida just before Christmas and it made me gloriously happy to see palm trees and boats decked in lights, and garlands festooned with candy canes. It seemed breezy and ironic and kitsch. Like the Coca Cola commercial. Maybe us Brits just take it all too seriously? Maybe it’s something to do with the cold and the darkness? Maybe I need to just get a grip and get onboard.

I like little Christmas trees – the old-fashioned kind that drop their needles and smell like pine – decorated sparsely. I like the rustle of paper against the stocking. I like my mum’s Danish family recipe carmelised potatoes on Christmas Eve. I like candles and red wine. I’d like it to just be slightly less amped up. Turn down the dial! Happy Friday.

Image via my scandinavian home

Posted by / Filed In: Life

Getting dressed

· Leave a Comment

Along the South coast of England, if Portsmouth is the spotty little brother, Brighton is the cool older one. We went there, my daughter and I, in an attempt to buy Christmas presents, but were met with such a mass of people that we didn’t achieve the aim. We returned more or less empty-handed, too overwhelmed by the real, live shopping experience. It made me think I have become conditioned to buy online, ordering up and waiting for the delivery man. The process of touching and choosing; paying and carrying a bag, having the item at that moment, is now rare. I instead conduct a strange, logic-based inner dialogue when deliveries arrive: should I keep it? If I were in a shop, would I choose it? Do I love it? Is there that buzz of desire?

I observed a man on the train on the way to Brighton. Aged and wizened, with whiskers, smelling faintly of sour and clothes that hadn’t been washed. An unsavoury smell. The cuffs and collar of his tweed jacket were worn-through, his skinny wrists jutting out, his hands jittery. People averted their eyes, but really there was nothing untoward about him. He just looked unkempt. I wondered about that tweed jacket. Had he worn it every day for fifty years? Where was is bought? Does he like it? Was it his fathers before him? Or his brothers? My mind reels. In a fresh bourgeois preoccupation, I now worry about the mountain of cheap synthetic clothes that are discarded after one wear – unlike the man’s thread-worn tweed – and will fester now in refuse tips. It’s the on-land equivalent to plastic bottles which amalgamate together in our oceans, a shameful swathe, an eerie layer over the water.

I normally drive everywhere, and rarely spend time sat faced with the Great British Public on a train. I have become unaccustomed to them, close up. I counsel myself – who am I to judge? But it’s not so much that, it’s the noticing. It’s got worse since I threw myself into this writing profession. I was always observant, have a memory of an elephant, especially when it comes to people, and their clothes. I recall with absolute clarity the touch of my mother’s fur collars and angora jumpers from my childhood. But now, I notice everything. Very little I see doesn’t have some relevance, some possibility, when it comes to furnishing my writing with detail. Although, when planning my novel I made a deliberate decision not to write about what people wore. I didn’t want that element to date to narrative; I didn’t want the present day-ness of it to overwhelm everything else. But I realised this left gaps. So many of our impressions of others are based on what they are wearing.

Those adverse to the frippery of fashion will dispute this, and say that clothes are not important. I disagree. Look at ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘. The outfit Margaret Atwood designed in her mind is the visual equivalent of oppression. In the book ‘Women in Clothes‘ – one of my all time favourites – a contributor describes in aching detail how she coveted the dress of another, then bought it in a frenzy of lust afterwards, then horror-of-horrors, bumped into the women whose dress she’d copied! The shame of how much we long to be like the people we see. How childlike and fundamentally human it is to want what others have. This is why I assign so much success to internet shopping; it’s the photography! The perfectly curated ‘lookbooks’. This is why Pinterest is a booming festival for the covetous.

Everybody gets dressed so everyone must choose what to wear. Getting dressed every day is a moment of expression. Some lessen its importance, whilst others embrace it with a jaunty coat or a tangerine hat or red shoes. I thought to myself, when disappointed with the sartorial offerings of Brighton, maybe it’s the weather? Being British, everything reverts to a weather-based analysis. A stylist named Pernille Teisbæk wrote a book called ‘Dress Scandinavian‘ in which she explains how the Danes (my countrymen) layer up, man up and look fabulous even when the weather is bitterly cold. There’s no such thing as bad weather; just bad clothes. And of course there is Iris Apfel who puts everyone to shame with the sheer awesomeness of what she wears and most importantly, what it says about her. As she remarks in the documentary ‘Iris‘: why be dull?

In subscribing to her view I scout around for inspiration. I find fashion bloggers with bare ankles and cotton jackets, photographed against pretty London Mews cobbles or Kensington white facades. There is no Sussex mud in their world, as there is in mine! Celebrities on red carpets with umbrellas being held over their heads by film-studio runners. Money helps, and a dose of fantasy; what they present is not real. Maybe the train or the high street is the ‘real’ I should find beauty in? It seems to me though, that so many people don’t care. Don’t try. We should value the sartorial more. Years ago I wrote about this and a commenter, who went on to become a good friend of mine, said that maybe people don’t care how they dress because they’ve lost their way; maybe they don’t even know where to start. This always stuck with me, an insightful truth.

The train pulled in and the man in tweed got off and went about his day.

Posted by / Filed In: Life

       

Theme by 17th Avenue · Powered by WordPress & Genesis