Laurie Graham's Blog, page 5

Off-Piste Knitting

Like this heron, I’m going out on a limb today, admittedly without much risk to my health, but public commitment to a deadline can be a powerful thing. The next Dr Dan book, drum roll please, will be published on October 30th. There. No going back now.

Yesterday a friend asked me how deadlines work when there are no penalties for missing them. Well, maybe no penalties in the sense of a massive fine or a pillorying in the world’s press, but I still have to live with myself. My, ahem, career, has been built, not by clever publicists or inspired marketing, but on the loyalty of my readers. When they stop asking for more books, I’ll stop writing them. Probably. I can find plenty of other ways to use my time. For instance…

One of my lockdown achievements has been to overcome my fear of circular knitting, as witness this sheep’n’fishing boat Shetland wool beanie I prepared earlier. I had two false starts that had to be unraveled amid much gnashing of teeth, and then, to make life even harder, I went off-piste so I could have a black sheep among the white ones. That’s not a diversity quota, by the way. I just fancied a bit of improv. The hat is by no means perfect but who needs perfect?

And finally, because I’ve been quiet lately and I’d hate for you to feel neglected, here is access to my most recent gift to mailing list subscribers: an interview with Enid, the long-suffering wife of Professor Bernard Finch.  the hon enid I hope you enjoy.

 

 

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Live Free or Die

These are dangerous times, and I’m not talking about the pandemic. When the howlers arrived at the door of J.K. Rowling, darling of the publishing world, and issued their fatwa, it was a wake up call for anyone still unaware that the death of freedom of speech is imminent. This is what happens when you stop teaching children history. The names of a few countries where, within living memory, speaking your mind could cost you your life or at the very least your freedom? Anyone? You at the back, busy messaging your mates about no-platforming Shakespeare.

With JK it happens to be the trans lobby but the howlers are a broad church. They’ve come for David Walliams, another erstwhile national treasure. They’ve come for the Dixie Chicks. (Cultural appropriation). They’ve even come for a UK maths teacher who Liked a Tweet that said, ‘All Lives Matter.’ Meanwhile, college administrators, TV executives and publishers are rushing to take the knee. They are a craven bunch and I find myself quietly pleased to be free of them.

What’s to be done? I’m not optimistic. I fear we may have to endure a prolonged period of ConformSpeak, where men are people who don’t menstruate and most of the population are too scared to say otherwise. Novels will start to reflect this, of course. All characters will comply with industry standards of wokeness, so there will be no surprises, no unfashionable viewpoints, red-neck opinions or Old Testament mores. I feel my eyelids grow heavy at the very thought.

Actually, there is something you can do. I commend to you the Free Speech Union, if you’re in the UK, and if you’re elsewhere, its equivalent, for it surely exists. The FSU is already underwriting legal support for those whose livelihood has been threatened by the howlers. Not the big earners, but the ordinary people who’ve been publicly admonished, bullied or sacked for expressing an opinion. Support them. Bung them a few quid. Live free or die.

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What’s It All About?

Let’s talk about critics, by which I mean, people who are paid to critique the stuff others have created. Fiction, poetry, music, art, whatever. Something created out of nothing and then offered to a wider audience. Who are these people, or perhaps I should ask, who do they think they are?

Some are simply full-time critics. Many are also academics. They are the intellectual equivalent of butchers and car mechanics, taking things apart for a living, except that butchers and mechanics both perform useful services. But what about the literary critic who hoists a poem up onto ramps and proceeds to diagnose what’s wrong with it or what it actually means. Do we need them?

I need to back up for a moment. A Russian friend asked me to choose a couple of English poems for her to learn by heart. Having made my choice, I looked for online recordings to accompany the text. Natalya’s English is excellent but I thought audio might help with scansion. That was when I stumbled upon an interview in which an academic was explaining how we’ve all got Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken woefully wrong. Gosh.

Dr Orr of Cornell University was flogging his latest book. He had written a whole book on a much loved, oft recited poem which he felt duty bound to point out didn’t mean what it seems to mean at first pass. He particularly had it in for its final sentence: I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Frost didn’t really mean that. No, no. Pay attention, dumbkopf. The poet tells you earlier in the poem that there was effectively no difference between the two paths. It was a coin toss. No biggie.

Are we any the richer for this insight? Do we need this kind of deconstruction? I don’t. A poem, like a painting, either speaks to me or it doesn’t. At first Dr Orr annoyed me, until I began to find his solemn pontification amusing. I’ll bet he’s not a lot of fun across the breakfast table. Then I was reminded of that delicious scene in Brideshead Revisited when Anthony Blanche gate-crashes the private view of an exhibition of Charles Ryder’s paintings.

‘Where are the pictures?’ he says to Charles. ‘Let me explain them to you.’

The Road Not Taken will be one of the poems I give to my friend. She can make her own interpretation of it. Another will be A.E. Houseman’s Loveliest of Trees, a poem every English child learned in school once upon a time, until schools stopped doing that kind of thing. I remain open to further suggestions. Nothing too long, mind.

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Crossroads

Has it really only been a month? It seems like years. I’m back at my desk because it’s the place where I know (usually) what I’m doing. I suppose that makes it my comfort zone, though sometimes it doesn’t feel like one. Ask any non-delusional writer/artist/person engaged in any creative endeavour.

So I’m reunited with Dr Dan and I still have my hopes pinned on October to publish Book 3. But what else? I’m standing at a crossroads. Until recently two things, apart from work, shaped my week: visiting my husband and putting in study time for an online course I was enrolled in. Now I’m in the final week of the course and visiting Howard has no time constraints. I can drop in on him any time I happen to be passing the churchyard.

My diary has opened up, as have other options. Where do I want to live? How do I want to spend my spare time? Darned if I know. Fortunately there’s no urgency for me to choose which turning to take and anyway, new roads can be exciting. For the time being, work, tea and cake with friends and perhaps a little light knitting seem about right.

My mailing list subscribers have already received the latest Interview With, a slightly tense but revealing phone conversation with Lizzie Partridge’s indestructible mother, Muriel. If you didn’t get it, you can find it here.

Next up, I think it’s time I checked in with Lady Enid. Is there life after dear Bernard? I suspect there is.

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Choosing a Husband 101

Not a huge amount of work getting done in this parish at the moment, for understandable reasons, but I have managed a piece of journalism which you can find here.

The Spectator has a special place in my heart. I met my husband on a blind date and, checking him out from a distance before I committed myself to having lunch with him, I noticed that he was sitting with a glass of wine and reading The Spectator, while he waited for me to show up. This signalled to me that he was a discerning reader and definitely worth at least an hour of my life. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’m only sorry that by the time I started writing for his favourite magazine, he was beyond knowing or understanding. He’d have been like a dog with two tails.

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Going Dark

Dear readers, I haven’t posted recently because I’ve been keeping a deathwatch for my dear and lovely husband. It has been a strange, disorienting time, with night turned into day, and sorrow alleviated by funny and affectionate stories about him.

Howard died this morning, holding my hand, in blessed peace at the end of a long and difficult journey. It’s rare for me to be lost for words but today I am, so my blog page is going dark for a while. I’ll be back, of course.

Here is my man in happier, healthier times. Already I hear him whisper, ‘Seriously, Laurie? Is that the best picture you could find?’

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In Memoriam

Another notch on the belt of this damned virus with the death of Ferruccio Berolo, maestro ballerino and notable feature in the San Barnaba/Santa Margherita neighbourhood of Venice. Whatever the time of day you could depend on Ferruccio to be somewhere on your route, ready to stand you a coffee, or, preferably, something stronger.

In spite of a gilded career in classical ballet he wasn’t ever too grand to help out with amateur hoofers. He knocked my juvenile chorus of rats into shape for a production of Dick Whittington, and exceeded all my hopes when he transformed two, ahem, mature Englishmen, into Ugly Sisters capable (just about) of doing  barre work to Delibes’ pizzicato from Sylvia without giving themselves hernias.

Ferruccio was also a cook. One of his signature dishes was something that converted me to aubergines, but I found I could never quite reproduce it. He was generous enough to share his secret.

‘Dollink,’ he said, ‘you must buy smaller melanzane, small as possible, not those tasteless monsters. Then keep them, days, days, weeks even, until they shrrrrivel. When they look like an old black man’s willy, they are ready to cook.’

I share this colourful piece of culinary advice in his memory. Dance on into eternity, Maestro.

 

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Granny, Where Do Books Come From?

One of my grandsons emailed me yesterday. He had done a page count of some of my books and wanted to know how I manage to write upward of 300 pages. He, aged 11, had just struggled to complete 17 pages of what he’d thought was a super idea for a story.

What to tell him, apart from the fact that 17 pages is a great achievement? Certainly more than I managed last week. Well, first to point out that a full-length novel is a very different animal than a short story. A novel is a marathon, written at a leisurely pace (unless the bailiffs are at the door). A short story has to achieve much in very few pages. I think it’s the toughest kind of writing to pull off and though I’ve done it, on request, I never really got the hang of it.

I was quite impressed that Max understood what I do for a living. When I was his age I had absolutely no concept of writers as real people who sat at a typewriter. Were Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil actual human beings? The thought never crossed my mind. Books just…. existed. But of course Max is of a generation accustomed to celebrity authors. It started with J K Rowling. A lot of things did. Children now know where books come from.

Max’s other question was, had I learned how to write books from a YouTube tutorial and if so, could I send him the link. That was an easy one to answer. No tutorials. I’m allergic to them. In my youth Creative Writing courses were but a twinkle in the eye of college administrators. I grew up in a house that didn’t even have a dictionary, though both of my parents, despite having left school aged 14, spoke and wrote good plain English. I had a library ticket. That was my open sesame to books. And I also had pencil, paper and long hours of freedom in a provincial suburb where, apart from one murder, nothing much ever happened. I suspect I started writing to escape.

My grandson’s approach is intellectual and analytical. How does plot work? How do you know where to end a story? How indeed. I’ve just been online and bought him a book called How to Write Your Best Story Ever. It’s being mailed direct to him. But now I’m thinking maybe I should have had it sent here so I could read it first. They say we’re never too old to learn. Whoever ‘they’ are.

 

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Getting Personal

Today I made a decision. Having spent the past week indulging in an orgy of Olympic-level faffing, I admitted that I need a more disciplined approach to lockdown and so, this morning, I hired a personal trainer. Her name is Laurie and she’s on tap, right here, 24/7. Barmy as it sounds, I think I (wearing my personal trainer hat) may be just what I require.

As a self-employed person I obviously have a modicum of personal discipline. I start each day with a list of (mainly) achievable goals. My problem is a tendency to cherry-pick. I do all the easy or enjoyable stuff first, then slowly edge towards what remains. And remains. Things I hate doing, like replacing light bulbs or checking my bank balance, I too often flip on to the next day’s list, and the next. But today, Trainer Laurie took charge. There were ten items on my list.

‘Number them,’ she said. ‘Not in order of priority. Just number them. Now, in an envelope, place scraps of paper numbered one to ten. Draw a number. Consult the master-list. Do the task. Do not put the number back and try for something more desirable. This is not a Lucky Dip.’

And you know what? She’s dead right. I’m fairly motoring through today’s list. Trainer Laurie would be worth every penny I paid her. If I were paying her.

For those refuseniks who aren’t on my mailing list, here is access to the latest Interview with a Character that went out to my subscribers last week: Lizzie’s store cupboard

Lizzie Partridge wasn’t terribly inspirational. The woman has such an attitude.  But I’ve tested a few of her suggestions and can honestly say that the fishcake idea was a success  –  I’ve eaten worse fishcakes  –  the barley pudding was delicious and the frozen banana ‘ice cream’ does work although I was nervous that my puny Moulinex whuzzer might not survive the required sustained whuzzing.

So there you have it. Efficiency tips from Trainer Laurie and bonus materials from characters past and present. Do I look after you, or what?

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On Not Taking Things Lying Down

I was rather tickled to learn that at some point in the 1830s Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s revered literary giant, found himself quarantined because of a cholera epidemic. He was at his country pile and alone, though I suspect his idea of ‘alone’ was no mates, no fiancée and just a skeleton staff. He wrote a letter describing a typical lockdown day.

I wake at 7.00, drink coffee and then lie down till 3.00.

I thought, lie down already? You only just got up. But then a Russian friend explained that Pushkin liked to work in a horizontal position. Like this?

 

 

 

Or perhaps like this?

The letter continues. At 3 o’clock I go for a ride. I take a bath at 5 and then eat. Potatoes or kasha, kasha or potatoes. I read until 9pm. That’s my day, each one the same, like peas in a pod.

Sounds pretty tedious, doesn’t it? And yet it is said that in terms of writing this was one of Pushkin’s most creative and prolific periods. I can make no such claim for my locked-down days. Creativity? Yes. I’m cooking (I have no serfs to stir my kasha), knitting, drawing, breeding paper rabbits. But cracking on with the next novel? Not so as you’d notice.

Tomorrow, I solemnly swear.

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