173. One minute with...

Nicked from this Friday’s i. I shall pretend I’m an established author, tho often I’ve never heard of them - way too intellectual or esoteric for me. I imagine they had a word limit. I don’t - I can waffle for as long as I choose. My blog...

Where are you now and what can you see?
I am still in my pjs at 11am but it’s Sunday morning and there’s nothing to do. I’ve done my emails, breakfasted, edited Trina’s writing for a competition and read a bit of my book. Why am I excusing myself????? I am still in bed, my favourite place. There’s music from downstairs so I can gauge Dennis’s mood (we’ve have had conversations, I just mean music is always a good guide). Today he’s feeling fine. He’s playing one of his favourites, Henry Kaiser.

I can see an extraordinarily messy bedroom, with a bright yellow Woohoo card wrapped around the pot of a struggling plant on the window sill. Beyond, there is/was vivid blue sky. There are too many clouds for me to leap up, get washed and dressed and equipped for the rest of the day in the garden. I can see by the treetops that there’s a bit of a wind, rather than a breeze so, if I do get out for some vitamin D, it will be with my parka on. There’s sparse white blossom on the damson tree, crushed by bad garden planning by our predecessors, sandwiched as it is by ever-growing and despised conifers. From the other window, I see the beech tree, not yet budding but always a great source of entertainment. I can hear a lot of birds and no cars (in these days of plague, most people are doing as they’re told) but no birds are bothering with the beech right now. The birds sound very much like hungry starlings but look like some kind of finch in battle with what may be a female blackbird or a thrush. Why do birds never match what they are meant to look like? I must investigate later. Oh there are two red kites flirting in the skies.

What are you currently reading?
Yawn. Yes, I’m still reading The Mirror and the Light and relishing every word. I‘m about 2/3 through and already I can see her gently planting the seeds of Cromwell’s fate: who will betray him, what so-called evidence will be used against him. There will be no surprises for me but it’s delicious to see how skilfully she does it.

 For decades I believed my Auntie Eileen’s claim that we were descended from the Duke of Norfolk, who brought Cromwell down to get his own niece Katherine Howard installed as wife #5; that my great-great-grandmother Georgie Howard, the Gaiety Girl, had married the youngest son of the Duke of Norfolk and he was immediately cut off from his family so they lived in genteel poverty, eventually landing in Tynemouth Road, Mitcham (the place Mum called ‘that rat hole’). The census evidence sort of belies that fantasy, though they did have servants in 1901, so I’m sceptical now, but it used to be kind of thrilling to think that we were descended from the Howards. Unfortunately, the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, is never painted in a good light but he survived for a bit longer than Cromwell!
Apart from that, I’ve read Millie Johnson’s The Marvellous Mrs Mayhew; badly written, shallow chick-lit but perfect for our first foray into an alternative book group. It was gently amusing, entertaining and short. In that last respect, it compared favourably with The Mirror ;)

Who is your favourite author and why do you admire him/her?
Absolutely no idea. It depends what I’m reading at the time. I do stay loyal to modern authors and buy everything that comes out in hardback, not great when I find it impossible to give hardbacks away! For sheer enjoyment, Lee Child, Elly Griffiths, Eion Colfer, Belinda Bauer, Karin Slaughter...I also enjoy Ian McEwan, perhaps more for thinking than enjoyment. Looking further back, Dorothy L Sayers, Paul Scott. I loved Nevil Shute as a kid.  Further back, some Jane Austen, some Thomas Hardy, maybe some Charles Dickens but usually I’m a lazy reader. I don’t want stuff that makes me think too much or struggle with the fluency of the language and story (most 19C stuff just is too verbose or the women too passive for me to truly enjoy them). To go further back would be pretentious but I can now admire Chaucer’s wit after many decades - at school, I cursed him.

Describe the room where you usually write.
Write what? The short pieces of fluff I write are mostly written on my ipad on my lap, with me propped up by pillows on the bed. Like now. This is a bad habit I got into during chemo, when I just wanted to be left alone, but it’s also the result of my husband’s lifestyle which is very much in contrast to mine. He fidgets, chops and changes and is addicted to news and political channels or playing dubious stuff he’s just downloaded and my head can’t cope with it any more. No joking- if he speaks to me when the tv is on, I just can’t hear what he’s said. My head feels it’s too full. And this from someone who could happily entertain 150+ voluble 15 year olds, all set to go out on work experience, all in the hall, me in charge. If I’m trying to concentrate, like reading, I cannot do it with Dennis around. So finding my own space in the bedroom may not be the best solution but it works. The downside is, I’ve been doing this for so long now, I feel I’m intruding into his space when I go in the living room - and I know he hates it when I go in the kitchen. “I could have done that.” Aaarrgh. So... I write up here in the bedroom.

I am too embarrassed to describe it but I have vowed to sort it out One Day. I suspect I’m turning into a hoarder. It has the same cream walls we inherited, though we did roughly paint over the RED (!!!) statement wall behind the bed. The colour scheme is the same as downstairs - once I like something, I like something - so it’s kind of aqua and teal if you look past the mess.

What fictional character most resembles you?
I don’t think I’ve ever identified with characters, though I’d love to be like Holly, the fairy in Lep-ReCon (in the Artemis Fowl novels - child/young adult?). There is a distinct touch of Miss Havisham* in me but the causation is different. I’ve never found her a freak, more an extremely sad depiction of a misunderstood woman. But I’d never manipulate people like that, I hope. I think I must be unique because I’ve never spotted any resemblances anywhere.

* To my early readers, a blushing apology for chemo-brain. Faversham was the pub we went to at university!! Mind you, how much longer I can blame chemotherapy for my lapses, I don’t know. I knew it didn’t feel right lol.

Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?
I’ve never really been the sort to idealise people. In History, I’ve always been drawn to the people behind the scenes, the Thomas Cromwells and Bismarcks who shaped their worlds with quiet certainty, ruthlessness and amazing intellect. None of this military glory or pomp and circumstance nonsense; though some was unavoidable, it was never what they chose. In the modern world, one woman has stuck in my mind. Hanan Ashrawi who was the first female spokesperson for the Palestinian people in the peace process that has now been buried by wider developments in the Middle East. She showed such honest passion and diplomacy, would negotiate but never lose ground. I’ve just googled and she is still a Palestinian legislator, aged 73. Crikey, I though her an older woman and she was only 5 years older than me!

Please work out who is who as I lack the patience to fight with layout any longer! Chronological order - TC, OB, HA.

But, cliché though it is becoming, every nurse who gave me chemo; Belinda my breast care nurse who has talked me out of every fear (that woman should be a therapist, she’s a genius); Susan, my oncology nurse who fed me confidence and who read me wisely, knowing when to push, when to stall and when to stop; every individual involved in my care last year, including the sandwich girl Dennis had a crush on, they are my heroes. I worry for them now. And one other person, one who has overcome such adversity, such trauma and fights to survive every day - you are my hero. You know who you are. And Dennis of course. But none of these are idealised.