Laurie Graham's Blog, page 11

The Roar of the Greasepaint

This is possibly, almost certainly, my last blog post before Christmas. I’m about to set off on one of my Granny Progresses, though I’m a lot cheaper to keep than Queen Bess was. No retainers and horses that need feeding, no truculent demands for entertainment. I may not arrive with my own bed and carpenters to assemble it but I do bring my own hot water bottle.

Christmas gift-wise I have now entered calm waters. The things that excite my grandchildren are a (mainly) high tech, shrink-wrapped mystery to me so I’m excused the horror of trudging round toy shops. I know unicorns are having a big moment but I can pretend not to have noticed. Instead, it is now my pleasure to take my grandchildren to the theatre. They are all old enough to wait for the interval to go to the toilet and one of them is even old enough to buy me an intermission G&T if I so desired.      

What do we have lined up? Nellie Limelight and the Oysters of Time, Fiddler on the Roof, Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales and Aladdin  –  with spectacular scenery, stunning special effects and hilarious slapstick comedy (it says here).  Now I live alone I never go to the theatre. Funny that. I love solo trips to the cinema and I don’t mind going to concerts alone, but the theatre? No.  So how lucky am I to have young en suite relatives as companions for my December theatre splurge.

Merry Christmas, dear reader. I know you’re out there.

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Foxes and Hedgehogs

I’ve been asked the same question by several readers recently. How come I know so much about such a wide range of subjects? I blush even to type that last sentence. Now I’ll hurry on to correct a very mistaken impression.

To answer the question: I don’t know a lot. I’m just interested in a lot. I’m prey to sudden enthusiasms (which fade as mysteriously as they appear) and when something captures my interest I’m capable of getting the gist and, apparently, putting on a good show of knowing my stuff. More actress than scholar, you might say. I also have a serious book-buying habit which has resulted in my owning a good, if eclectic reference library.

Some Ancient Greek  –  I think Archilochus, but I bow to those who know better  –   divided people into two camps: hedgehogs and foxes. A fox may know many things but a hedgehog knows ONE BIG THING. Isaiah Berlin wrote about this with a level of erudition I’m not even going attempt. Apart from anything else I have the ironing to do. Suffice it to say that I am a fox. I trot from topic to topic, sniffing the air for the next interesting smell. I have a friend who is currently writing a lengthy PhD thesis on one abstruse aspect of one poet’s oeuvre and her life is my idea of hell.

I’ve occasionally been lucky enough to be invited to dine at High Table and my first thought has always been, ‘Oh no. They’ll rumble me. They’ll find out I barely scraped a bachelor’s degree and know zip about anything.’ Then I go to dinner and am reminded that Oxbridge Fellows are almost all hedgehogs. I suppose it’s in the job description. By the time we get to dessert I know I’m in the presence of great minds from the field astrophysics or archaeology but I’m also thinking that these people need to get out more.

I suspect our hedgehoginess  or our foxitude is fixed in our DNA. My father was a fox, as witness his ‘garage’ which he filled with dozens of whimsical projects, some never completed, to the point where there wouldn’t have been room for a car even had he wanted one, which he didn’t. He wanted to know how to paint snow, why bats don’t bump into each other in the dark, and which mushrooms we could eat without dying a horrible death. Pure fox.

Next?

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Cooking the Books

First, I’d like to reply to a question several readers have put to me: how can I possibly be without a publisher? The quick answer is, very easily. But let me explain. Publishing houses are no longer gentlemanly outfits where authors are cherished even in their dotage. Publishing is now big business, answerable to shareholders. When a writer is unprofitable she has to go.

‘Well,’ you may say, ‘I buy your books.’  Indeed, and for this I thank you, truly. However I also know that people often buy my books and then pass them around their friends, which may, in the long run, gain me a few new fans, but quite often doesn’t. I pass books around myself. It’s a nice thing to do. It just doesn’t help the author’s bottom line. Many of my readers are also great library users. That too is good. Long live libraries! Sadly, they don’t figure in the publisher’s accountants’ world view.

I hope that clarifies my current situation. And let’s look on the bright side. I may yet find a new publishing home.

Having missed my bus by a whisker and with half an hour to wait for the next one, I dropped by a bookshop this week. I thought I might find a cookery book for a certain person’s Christmas present. The cookery section was a place I hadn’t visited lately and in my absence cookery books seem to have become works of art, lavish and heavy. A bit lightweight in the recipe department though. Not that recipes are the be-all. Personally I love a cook book that tells me a few stories as well. It’s one of the reasons I like Diana Henry’s books. Also her recipes actually work. Her Roast Figs, Sugar Snow might well be my desert island cookery book.

But the books I leafed through last Thursday were all hat and no cattle. I don’t know about you, but I can live without a ribbon bookmark. My own kitchen bookshelf looks more ‘bin end’ than ‘coffee table.’ There is a yellowing French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David which I no longer use but keep for sentimental reasons because page 491 is stained with the red wine my first husband knocked over when he was cooking a saddle of hare in 1972. There is also my second husband’s copy of The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, liberally encrusted with egg, mustard and honey from his many, happy iterations of fried rabbit. And then my inheritance. My mother’s folder of thrifty recipes jotted down or clipped from magazines and her treasured, dog-eared Delia bible. She rated Delia Smith, a no nonsense cook after her own heart.

Did I buy anything on Thursday? I did. I bought a Jamie Oliver on the grounds that it contained at least five recipes that I might test (without splattering) before I wrap it in Christmas paper. More than that I cannot say because my daughters occasionally read my blog.

 

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The Zen of Unemployment

 

This is the button I’m definitely not going to push before, say, February’s rent is due. I’m puttering on with Volume 2  so that if/when the day to self-publish dawns I’ll have the convincing makings of a series. And when I’m not writing I’m keeping the hamster wheel of domesticity turning. The mending basket is empty for the first time in years, there is nothing suspect lurking at the back of the fridge and this week it will be time to bottle my plum vodka which is looking a rather lovely cornelian red.

Then there is YouTube. Some people find daft cat videos cheer them up, others prefer videos of dog misdemeanours. I quite enjoy tapes of comedians of yesteryear. Les Dawson and Tommy Cooper are two of my favourites, but my gold standard rib-tickler which I feel moved to share with you is this 1930s recording of Wilson and Keppel’s Sand Dance. Worth two minutes of anyone’s time, I’d say.

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Displacement Activity

Displacement activity, definition: an unnecessary activity carried out to avoid a difficult or unpleasant scenario.

Examples: A bird, faced with an ambiguous situation  –  should he fly away or hang around for some potentially nutritious crumbs?  –  will peck the ground.  A dog, unsure whether or not he’s in trouble, will scratch himself. A writer, who knows she has fans waiting for another book but also has growing fears that no-one wants to publish her, makes an apple pie.  

I’m a recent convert to sour cream pastry and will say that it made a superb pie crust but I must also confess that this household didn’t need an apple pie. Neither has it needed two bottles of plum vodka, a tapestry cushion cover and a dozen origami harvest mice, but there it is. That’s what you get when you have an anxious novelist displacing away like there’s no tomorrow.

So yes, I’m still without a publisher. But thank you for asking.

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Words for the Season

Like every English schoolgirl I learned Keats’s Ode to Autumn by heart and can still remember fragments of it now. Uplifting as that is, I wish the part of my brain that retains poetry would also hang on to some useful stuff, like PINs and phone numbers.

Autumn is a rich seam for poetry readers. John Clare is good, and Emily Bronte’s Fall, leaves, fall. Siegfried Sassoon’s too, though his lines are better suited to November remembrance.

One of my own favourites is Betjeman’s Diary of a Church Mouse which I thought of this morning in a church that was two thirds empty a few weeks ago but packed to the rafters today. One of my most powerful childhood memories is of standing with my classmates in the school playground, belting out Come Ye Thankful People, Come, while our mothers jostled for pole position ready for the veg stall scrum. My bet is, the children who lugged their gifts of vegetables and seeds and flowers and fruit up to the altar today will remember the moment all their lives. Thankfulness is an underestimated force for happiness.

Robert Frost is also very good for the season. O hushed October morning mild…  but my Frost of choice is After Apple Picking. We used to have a recording of the man himself reading it. Heaven knows what became of it. Lost in one of our many moves, or loaned and never returned. My husband knew the poem by heart and would recite it when called upon. Like Frost, he’s done with apple-picking now. And with reciting poems. He has fallen silent. Dementia has got his tongue.

But I still have mine, so when I visit him this week I’ll be bringing along Robert Frost and his two-pointed ladder sticking through a tree. Essence of winter sleep is on the night…

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Something For the Weekend

Thanks, first, to readers who sent me words of encouragement in these dark days. I may be out in the publishing wilderness but I’m still writing and probably always will. My dying breath will likely be, ‘Quick, a pen…’

I received a lovely gift yesterday: two issues of Slightly Foxed, that most charming and readable literary quarterly. It was particularly welcome with a grey, wet weekend in prospect and an ugly sea roiling outside my window. I haven’t read Slightly Foxed in years, tsk tsk, but I’m going to buy myself a subscription for my fast-approaching birthday.

I’m very picky about what I read these days. Newspapers seem so lightweight in content in spite of the fact that the weekend editions weigh a ton. Even my old journalistic perch, the formerly steady Daily Telegraph, now runs fashion features dreamed up by people who are clearly out of their minds. Haven’t they noticed the ads for Velcro shoes and stair lifts? Don’t they understand where their readers are at, or do they just not care?

Magazines like the Literary Review seem ponderously up their own fundaments. Cosmopolitan, where I started out in the ’80s, now makes me shudder. SHE, where I enjoyed happy times as a contributing editor in the ’90s, died of excessive efforts at trendiness but by then I was cold toast. And Private Eye just isn’t funny any more.

I do read the Spectator. When it flops through the letterbox I rip off the envelope and proceed as follows. First I look at the cartoons. Then I read Rod Liddle and Jeremy Clarke. I always hope to find a piece by Aidan Hartley too but he doesn’t appear nearly often enough. He is currently leading the field for my Best Opening Sentence of the Year award, with, Last night the hyenas made off with our fudge cake. Unlikely to be beaten, I’d say.

The rest of the magazine I save for the many train journeys I take, rattling around Dublin Bay on the DART.

The Spectator fits snugly in my bag and so will Slightly Foxed. Sorted.

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On Being Binge-Read

As I wait, anxiously, for publishers to break through the security cordon screaming, ‘Me, me! Let me be the one to publish your next undoubtedly brilliant novel’, I try to keep my chins up by staying productive. So how hath this little busy bee improved each shining hour during the past week? I repaired a skirt I haven’t been able to wear for months, I made half a litre of plum vodka and a jar of pickled prunes (looking good), went for a long and bracing walk along the seashore, and wrote a bit more of a book no-one may want.

Then I bumped into someone who brought me great joy and hope in these bleak times. ‘Laurie!’ she said, ‘I’m having such fun. I’m binge-reading everything you ever wrote!’

As far as I know this is my first instance of being binge-read and I can’t tell you how cockle-warming it is. Don’t ever be afraid to tell an author how much you like their books. Well…. perhaps tread carefully if they’re terribly grand or already laden with awards. Perhaps don’t approach too chummily if there’s a research assistant or bag-carrier trailing humbly in their wake. But generally speaking you can assume that any mid-list novelist is grateful for and touched by words of appreciation. Some of us don’t get out much, you know?

 

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Words in Their Mouths

The lowlight of my recent visit to the UK was when the Yeoman Warder tour of the Tower of London which my granddaughter and I had so looked forward to was cancelled for reasons of health and safety (rain, basically). I guess even the Royal Palaces have to be risk-averse in these litigious times. But we did enjoy the ravens who are good value whatever the weather.

The high point of my trip, indeed its main purpose, was to appear at the Hampshire Festival of Book Clubs. It was a superbly curated event and though it probably isn’t my place to praise the quality of the speakers I can certainly vouch for the quality of the cake. Dear literary event organisers, I am a low-maintenance, moderately successful novelist and available all dates in 2019. If you’re offering cake, count me in.

I had just one unsettling encounter. A reader approached me to tell me that though she had quite enjoyed one of my historical novels she was uncomfortable with the way I put words in the mouths of real people, now deceased.

My own mouth was momentarily lost for words. I then recovered my composure sufficiently to say that I always think very carefully about what my characters say, that I tried in my historical novels, to recount familiar events from a different angle and perhaps give the dead a fairer hearing and that, as far I recall, I’ve never done anyone a terrible injustice with my pen. Still, makes you think though. At least I’m back on safer ground with my return to current times and invented characters.

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On the Road Again

The suitcase is out again. I’m off to England later this week to inspect some of my grandchildren, catch up with some friends and, most important of all, to meet some of my readers. The Hampshire Festival of Book Clubs takes place next week at Lord Wandsworth College.

What a lovely place to go to school. I might ask if I can stay and retake my GCSE Maths. I still have the name tapes that have lurked in my Mum’s old sewing box for more than sixty years. I wonder if they’d make me do Phys Ed though? Hmm.

There’s a little interview with me today on the History Girls blog. I was formerly of that parish, a lightweight contributor compared to most of their learned members, so it’s very generous of them to have me back to talk about the vagaries of sequel-writing and the bonuses of ageing.

The downside of ageing is that you go to more funerals. My old home town, Leicester, will be another pit-stop on my UK tour, to attend the funeral of my second cousin, Colleen, a much-loved matriarch, a formidable line-dancer and pretty much the last of her generation in the family.  Dress code: blue.

So a bit of Granny Time, a bit of work, and a moment of sad farewell. A good balance, I think you’d agree.

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