Life

Musings about Palm Trees

22nd August 2018 · Leave a Comment

So that was a trip.

I have returned from two weeks holiday; we went to my beloved Florida, and then my newly beloved St Lucia, in a veritable tour of palm trees and of wearing tropical kaftans. Like swigging a restorative tonic down in one, summer holidays are a salve, a balm, a tincture, and all other lightly medicinal things which make your soul feel better. So many thoughts occurred to me there that I want to share here, but I kept them stored up, not wanting to be inside, at a laptop typing (wishing there was an app that could literally record your thoughts, as you have them? Terrifying, but also oh so useful). So I am left with many impressions I want to record, observations, assertions and such like. Taking time away from home is, for me, as the ‘homemaker’, doubly thought-provoking, as the release from the daily work of caring for others creates space in my mind, and it’s liberating.

I learned that I still love palm trees and spent a good portion of time pondering why they represent such happiness to me. I think, like all things, it’s rooted in childhood, when we used to decamp to Florida for extended periods, as my parents ran a holiday home rental business there. We would touch down and my brother and I would race through the airport, through the air-conditioned casing of the place, vying to reach an external door which would allow us a deep breath of humid, hot air (no matter what time of day or night), with the sound of cicadas, and tiny brown lizards scuttling across concrete, and borders of palm trees. It represented safety to me. And amongst the tumult of divorce, there was contrast to home. A whole other empire.

Now, I see my children do the same thing, but for them, it is a satisfying inhalation of family time, where the rigours of home, work and school are suspended. There’s nothing like it. Even more bittersweet with teenagers as there’s the knowledge that the days of this kind of purist family time, all together, may be numbered. Soon they won’t want to come with us, will they?!

In St Lucia, we made lovely friends and spent the week chatting and drinking, and sunning ourselves. We went to Caribbean restaurants perched in rainforest canopies and ate lobster burgers. We fell asleep to the sound of tree frogs. We spent hours in the sea, sometimes flat like a pond, turquoise crystalline-clear, and saw striped neon fish dart around our legs. We spent an idyllic day on a boat, skimming the coastline of sheer black rock, edged with impossible green-blue. Every scene an instagram-worthy feast. Decisions involved which bikini to wear or which drink to have; Mango (rum) Crush or Piton Beer? But there were also airport delays. Travel sickness and a dodgy cod fillet. We got sunburnt and were profoundly jet lagged for the first few days. We argued over where to eat dinner and during playing cards. I forgot to bring enough books. I lamented the blatant and obscene over-use of plastic packaging in both American and the Caribbean (even more sacrilegious for being a small island, somehow). There was that curious phase after the mid-point where you kinda want to stay, but you also know you have to go home. There was the packing and unpacking and all over again.

The good with the bad. The rough with the smooth. But most of all, family, tradition, indulgence and time were ours. We dissected the pros and the cons and wondered how, as a standard we have become people who work all year to escape the lives we should be loving. What’s the saying: cultivate a life that you don’t need to take a holiday from? I needed a holiday. But, I have to say, I have returned fresh and excited and poised for what’s next. So whilst post-holiday blues pinch and pull, and every time I look at social media someone, somewhere is still away, doing what we did, and that grates, I see that it performed its function. And that is to give perspective. To free up the mind. To release. To allow me to take stock. To a writer, what more could I want as I approach September, and the bouquet of sharpened pencils* that it represents?

*in the words of Nora Ephron from the film ‘You’ve Got Mail’.

Summer is for salad

1st August 2018 · Leave a Comment

When writing, I don’t pen a word for days, weeks even, and then I get stuck in, shoulders aching in protest as I sit at the keyboard, in awkward, hunched positions, trying to keep my back straight, limiting my punctuation because I just want to get it down. If the mood to write comes, I musn’t ignore it. In the summer time though, this is near on impossible. Instead, I make endless notes and carry stuff around in my head with the plan to write it when the sun goes down. The grass outside is burnt, tinder-dry, ochre and it looks so odd compared to the usual green lushness of the British summer. This spell of weather brings with it a new way of living; one which feels surreal, and as if we are on borrowed time. It takes three weeks of doing something regularly before it becomes a habit, right? So with this summer comes the habit of throwing open the doors each morning, opening up the back of the house, as the wall is all glass, and allowing a four metres scheme of fresh air in, after a night of being closed up. Checking the garden. Feeling the warmth, choosing clothes that are cool, protective from sun. Incongruously, winter coats hang on pegs and in cupboards and it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever need them again. Oh, but we will, come October! It feels endless, this summer, like an intermission during a long show. Time to get an ice cream and watch the world go by. The summer brings with it an extension of time, of days, one that differs to the dark drawer of winter.

It’s so unusual to have such a spell of sun, it defies all normal convention in this country. We, as a nation, are so starved of this weather, we have instead a ubiquitous blanket of cloud that hangs low in our skies through most of the year. We went to Portugal and on the flight back (above the clouds) I made lists of things I need to do. My reminders list stands presently at 59. What will be lucky 60? School holidays are a hiatus that I both love and deplore. A time of flux for us before September returns, and sharpens us all up again. My list spans from essay ideas (social media and teenagers/procrastination methods when it comes to writing/why I want to befriend people who make podcasts), to items I need to source (car wash sponges/’Bitter Orange‘ by Claire Fuller/beaded necklaces perfect for tanned skin). I think of the future and the traction I will need to get from where I am now, to where I really ought to be, and I shudder. Make a fresh list. Write the book.

Writing is not for summer. Summer is for salad.

We’ve had family staying and a houseful of kids. We’ve had a makeshift pool in the garden that’s needed daily coaxing to stay clear-watered. We’ve had builders planning the next phase of renovation. We’ve had the dog groomed and hedges cut. I’ve scoured the summer sales for impractical dresses in retro patterns. A steady stream of stop, start. We’ve watched a season of ‘Ozark‘ and felt the lingering sense of ‘what next?’ when it ended. Season two is out now, I believe. The floor is littered with flip-flops and tennis rackets and half-unpacked suitcases and as ever, there’s more laundry that there ought to be. All this to the soundtrack of comings and goings. I’m aware these summers will pass me by soon; this cornucopia of family life that I am the epicentre of. What’s for dinner? At some point, in the not too distant future, term time and school holidays will be something that affects others, a distant memory to me, like night feeding a newborn, or pushing a pram.

But for now, it is where I am at. Wholeheartedly.

Friends For Dinner

29th June 2018 · Leave a Comment

I cook every evening, it’s an eclectic mix, as I believe in the power of the side dish. I will prepare three of four kinds of vegetables, ostensibly to accompany something more substantial, but really the vegetables are the meal. The substantial thing might be an egg. Or lentil dahl. This would horrify my husband who thinks a meal does not qualify unless it contains meat, carbs and the addition of a garnish for colour. My way of cooking is simpler; it’s more or less impossible to mess vegetables up; they don’t go off as quickly, there’s less waste, and there’s never the feeling of overdoing it. I planted a herb garden a week or so ago. I appreciate this is the kind of bollocks I used to read in blogs or articles when I was working, and I would think: yea, right (ffs). It’s all very ‘Good Life’, and it’s not lost on me that this whole extravaganza of home-making is down to the fact that I don’t do paid work that often, and I am at home a lot. There’s a bittersweetness to this fact. Housewifery run amok.

My children and their friends have come to expect this bizarre range of dishes; baked aubergine with yoghurt and pomegranate, roasted peppers with finely chopped red onion, fresh basil pesto, raw broccoli and apple salad, tomatoes, butternut squash with chilli, broad beans, feta. Wedges of crisp, iceberg lettuce with creamy drizzle of caesars, and sea salt. God bless the chick pea. Turmeric dressings with honey. I no longer apologise for it; if they don’t like it, there’s always something else on the table that they might like.

When we were newly together, my husband and I befriended a local couple who, every Sunday, offered us a place at their table. They lived modestly, but the food was exquisite, and prepared with love, as an event, really. It was an open house, an open table. This kind couple, who were probably in their early 40’s – the age I am now, and we were twenty years younger – shared food and wine. It enabled us to punctuate our week with a feeling of calm and of home, at a time when we gave little importance to the need for such things.

In reality now, this is hard to recreate. Friendships appear to no longer be predicated on impromptu dining. My friends and I schedule weeks, sometimes months in advance for a dinner, which invariably falls at a time when the host is stressed, or has something else they need to be doing. Availability and time has become the enemy of the friendly meal. It’s something I lament; why don’t people just pop round for dinner? And why does cooking food have to be so challenging? Why must complex ingredients be sourced? I like it when there’s enough for everyone and a meal can stretch because ultimately, there’s always another side dish that can bridge the gap. I used to not even like cooking, but I see that something that is a necessity (eating), can become a pleasure, and an expression.

I’ve written before about how eating evening meals with teenagers is the single best piece of advice I’d give any parent about to embark on that particular phase of parenting. There’s nothing like eyeballing them each night, and extending the process of eating, of having seconds, and thirds, waiting for the meal rather than rushing it, a conspiracy to help chill the mood and glean the issues of the day. In fact, I regret the years I cooked ‘kiddy tea’ for them, served quick and early, as I maintain now that children who eat with adults gain more than they lose. In a frenetic day, it slows the pace.

And as for the vegetables, for all that the ‘clean eating’ movement has been maligned – and it’s not hard to see that veganism and clean eating have, for some, become synonymous with an unhealthy preoccupation with food or a propensity to eat disorderly – it has provided a way to see vegetables as something other than an afterthought. A good friend of mine recently became vegan after a lifetime of vegetarianism, and said to me that it was deplorable that we, as humans, presume that the eating of meat every day is normal, expected, understandable. Even if we all ate less meat per week, carbon footprints would of course, notably reduce. I suppose the point is, like so many elements of our society, we do it because we can. Because meat is supplied in the most innocuous way, as slabs of something to add when cooking, even though we have participated a sum total of zero in its procurement (how many times do we consider the abattoir when cooking a steak, for example?) In a counter to the argument though, another friend said to me; ‘we are carnivores, we have canines, we can digest meat with enzymes in the gut; we are meant to eat meat!’

I wonder whether the way I languish in the preparation of food is because I don’t have a job. Cooking is a bit like writing, and I spend my days thinking about writing, and doing it, and then fretting about whether its any good. Cooking is the same but the results are better, more reliable. The preparation and the repetition is meditative, and the transition from uncooked to cooked satisfying, like a makeover montage in a film; there’s a before, and then you enjoy the after.

I use this blog for inspiration (Tania is vegan, and cooks the simplest meals which always just work, are not over engineered, and she is so passionate about the topic, it’s contagious!). There are the usual suspects; those celebrities who’ve infiltrated the culinary canon of this country; the monolithic works of Jamie Oliver but also Deliciously Ella, whose recipes are ridiculously easy. This book by Jane Clarke has featured on my kitchen shelf for years, and Tonia Buxton is also a good staple. I also cook a lot from The Scandinavian Cookbook which is broken down into seasons. It’s all good.

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Right here, with me…

22nd June 2018 · Leave a Comment

So sometimes an essay on generational feminism, sometimes a rambling list of things, people, books and clothes that are on my mind.

I am reading a lot of non-fiction, and realising that with this medium, writers divulge so much of themselves, but now in a narrative style that mimics fiction. The underlying lesson; anything in life can be a story. Fiction is story-telling, but so is a memoir. When asked last summer at a book event, why I wanted to write, my contemporaries on the panel said the compulsion to write was so strong, that doing so formed a type of cathartic therapy. I answered that I felt I had something to say. Therein lies the rub. This bumps and echoes around the chambers of my creative mind, over and over. If I didn’t have something to say, I wouldn’t keep writing this blog. But if you have something to say, then writing fiction can feel like a straight-jacket, as there is a need to weave your truth – your manifesto – around a purely fictional world. I’ve realised I might not be up to tolerating this limitation, so have started writing non-fiction in earnest, as an experiment. The novel remains in draft form, but I draw from it daily, in an iterative, cumulative process. Morphing from fiction to non-fiction feels less disingenuous. May as well write real life.

I have a heel injury from running up a hill. This strikes me as sad, given that running up a hill is something which didn’t historically result in injury. I receive a litany of tips from any one I mention it to. It’s possibly – although not conclusively – plantar fasciitis, which is the scourge of the runner. I am meant to wear trainers at all times, and yesterday, when sporting a badass denim jumpsuit that makes me look like I stepped out of the the film ‘Tootsie’ from the early 80’s, I had my gait analysed in a Triathlon shop. This was all very technical, and involved me running on a treadmill in my bad trainers and then trying out their good trainers. After much discussion about ‘heel strike’ and hip flexors, I came away with new running shoes which cost a fortune, and the colour of which I did not choose. No other shoe shopping experience like it; a decision based entirely on feel, and not look.

I am still obsessed with podcasts which, on a par with Audible, have altered my days. I am someone who rarely sits still, and I loop from thing to thing; driving, writing, tidying, walking, running, scrolling, googling, organising etc but with minimal time to read. Listening is a different discipline and one that allows me to plunder all sorts of new fascinations. I listened to ‘Everything I Know About Love‘ by Dolly Alderton, and found it compelling, relatable, but also somewhat alien to my 40-something construct. The ‘London Career Girl’ stage is one I missed out entirely, as I moved, as did most of my generation, straight into co-habiting with my future spouse. London remains an amorphous presence in my life; a place I go to but never feel at home in. The book is a powerhouse of writing though, in a journalistic style that I really liked. It’s stayed with me days afterwards and her podcast ‘The High Low‘ (with another girl-about-town Pandora Sykes) is brilliant.

I took my daughter to my old university town, Bristol, for an Open Day, at which we toured prospective accommodation and listened to a lecture from a startlingly clever woman with a PhD, who has designed a super-modern degree course in which students innovate in modern industry. Blew my mind. She talked about ‘disruptive thinking’ and how our children needed it, and I felt like she’d described exactly what defines their generation. Ours was the generation to observe the status quo, berate it maybe, but I don’t feel we disrupted it as my daughter’s generation might. So much of current discussion is around dissecting the way things have always been done and asking why? Is there a better way? It’s not an act of rebellion so much as a collaborative shake-up of everything we’ve ever known. There’s a stealth to it though, it’s subversive and surprising. Which is why everyone must watch, aborb, be shocked by, and understand the song and video for Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America‘. Then to have an opinion on plastic use (David Attenborough’s legacy), sexism (#metoo), corporate ethics (Facebook & Cambridge Analytica), Veganism (why eat meat when you don’t have to?) gender fluidity (identifying as ‘they’ not ‘he’ or ‘she’). It is all about disruptive thinking. It’s all about knowing what your opinion is.

I shop for clothes in the sales and am released from the winter of boots and wool in favour of linen and cotton. I buy with a discerning eye – no longer accepting of polyester or viscose or fabrics that will never decompose. I consider vintage. I feel nostalgic for my youth; the 70’s and what my mum wore, the 80’s and what I wore, and the 90’s when I had money for the first time, and all I wanted was to look like Winona Ryder in ‘Reality Bites’. I think about everything I buy and wonder: where will it be in ten years time? Twenty?

My son is about to end his time at Prep school and so these final weeks of term consist of various events which prick the heart with sentimentality for his childhood. In truth, his childhood is seeping away by the day as he grows, broadening, getting taller, voice changing, becoming a young man. As he enters his teenage-hood, my daughter matures and prepares to leave hers. I feel like a veteran, and note the greener school mothers discussing senior school as if it’s something they will be able to control, whereas I know that the contrary is true. Parenting a teen is to find their behaviour endemic; they will do what they do, and whilst panic ensues amongst the mothers at this prospect, I have learnt that it is a necessary phase. Letting them go is all part of the process, but nonetheless I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t rueful of the change.

So I go to yoga, and plant a herb garden, and write 1000 words a day, and meet my friend for coffee. She says the torrent of words in me is coming, she can feel it. I chatter on. I walk the dog around a field where sweetcorn is growing, and deer bask in the long grass. Look how far I’ve come since those silly corporate days…

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Whatever happened to mystery and glamour, and all that good stuff?*

18th June 2018 · Leave a Comment

I maintain a long held fascination with why women wear what they wear. A topic which I have, many times before, mused about here. About those who are described as having ‘style’; the women who dress well, and adopt godlike status, especially in the world of social media. Read the testimony of Iris Apfel, fashion guru aged 96, who maintains that simply knowing what she likes is what has led her to a lifetime of enviable wardrobe curation. Icons are created; girls metamorphosise into women, a rare few attaining the elusive combination of interest, elegance, attractiveness and comfort. This alchemy is what, for those of us who care, we strive for. And to those who say they don’t care, my riposte would be that every human gets dressed every day; we all make the choice.

I went to the horse races, where the ‘Great British Public’ feature, in their splendour. Much has been made of the way women dress at the races, and of the establishment refining dress codes so that skirt lengths are restricted, cleavages are less exposed, and hats cover the crown of the head. My overriding observation was that young British women do not wear nearly enough clothes. This seems ironic, given our stubbornly temperate climate, where any summer’s evening has a distinct chill to the air, and by nightfall, being outside is invariably uncomfortable. I noted young women – girls really – in the skimpiest of dresses, tottering in heels, calf muscles taut with exertion, their bottoms pushed outwards, their backs arching to accommodate the height of their heels, as they sink into the grass. Hair bleached, eyelashes glued on, lipstick forming a marionette stare, lips gluey and red. Clutch bags, clawed at with taloned nails. What style is this?! And wait, isn’t this what ‘Love Island‘ is all about?

This may be a uniquely British phenomenon. In a recent trip to Copenhagen, I noted how Danish girls and women bear a naturalness that is all but lost in this country. Hair is tousled, not set. There’s an unspoken confidence to the way of dress. Bodies are not contorted by the clothes. Similarly there is universal acceptance of the style of the French; a compliment between women is to quip: ‘you look very French in that dress!’ Not once would one remark ‘you look very British!’ We have a limited exhibition of national elegance, although clearly it exists in the echelons of the fashion world. But for the masses, there are mass-produced, one-size-fits-all, wobbly hemmed, polyester mini dresses with peek-a-boo midriffs. I lament. I see my teenage daughter and her friends adhering, within reason and propriety, to these standards of undress.

There has been a pendulum swing in dressing, for sure. Young women can now express their strength in dressing any way they wish. The notion of ‘nice girls’ has been eradicated in a generation, for whom now, no f*cks are given. Women dressing for themselves, for other women, for fashion, for individuality, because it makes them feel good, and the men can’t stop them, anymore. But I observe, with a reluctant side-note to my own feminist sensibilities, that dressing freely can sometimes make women look worse, not better. The style confines of the patriarchal past dictated hemlines, and decorum, existing because the currency of feminine style was based on allure, and on attracting and keeping a mate. Womanliness, amongst the woman at the races, was largely absent, and the older women there commented on the younger women’s clothes (or lack thereof) with alarm, in a collisional expression of shock. Conversely, the young women wore their body-con dresses with aplomb, with exposed bodies triumphantly thrust forward.

As for the young men, they were also formulaic. Obscurely – again – for the chillsome British climate, they sported bare ankles with lounge lizard loafers. But their decorum was intact; their parts were not exposed, unlike the women. They did not have goose bumps because they had come out without a jacket. So all in all, whilst freedom in dress has been adopted as a mantle of feminism, it has also provoked the exposure of more of the female body (and spirit) than ever before. Even in the heady days of the 60’s miniskirt, the thigh-hugging 70’s bellbottoms, there were still some elements left to the imagination; the same in the the shoulder-padded 80’s and the ‘Generation X’ slip dresses of the 90’s. But nowadays, my observation is that it’s all on show, all made up, all a startling show of skin and artifice.

Of course, there are style icons, there are those whose instagram feeds send me scuttling off to ‘add to cart’ in the hope I will resemble their look. There are women (and men) whose eye for clothes, for fabric, for design, for style, defy all logic. And even in any sea of women, I note a rare few who surprise, whose clothes look startling but in a good and positive way, like an unusual painting, or a riot of blousy roses, or a stark and assertive tonal contrast. These women memorable and pleasing; a tangerine hat, a striped, french-ticking sundress, or a calf-skimming, mustard-coloured, cashmere coat.

I’d prefer to be seen as the latter, given the choice…

*Quote taken from ‘Musings of a Geriatric Starlet: Iris Apfel Accidental Icon‘

This ain’t no disco

26th April 2018 · 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.

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Deconstructing ‘The Breakfast Club’

7th April 2018 · 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.

Please yourself

10th March 2018 · 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.

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Quiet Ambition

2nd February 2018 · 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 minimal

15th December 2017 · 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