Lucy Robinson's Blog, page 7

Wot I loved today: ALL THE THINGS.

It’s been three days since I dropped a Wot I Love blog. This isn’t because I’ve stopped loving things, it is because the data allowance on my phone has run out for this month and I won’t pay for any more.

I AM A PIKEY OF ASTONISHING PROPORTIONS!

Additionally, I am away from home and whenever I’m somewhere with wifi I’m generally talking to people. But I’m here now on a sofa with wifi and nobody to talk to so I’m going to tell you about the things I’ve loved since Monday.

So:

On TuesdayI loved having a literary inspiration day with my friend, bestselling bonkbuster author Victoria Fox. We sat on elegant sofas and read big glossy books about lighthouses, Ernest Hemingway and Surrealist photography. Every ten minutes or so Victoria appeared with a plate of refined carbs. What more could you possibly ask for?

On WednesdayI loved seeing about ten million fabulous writers. I lunched in Bristol with Lucy Diamond, Cally Taylor and Victoria Fox and then I went to Big London for tea with Ali Harris and Paige Toon, followed by Lucy Dillon’s launch party for her wonderful new novel 100 Pieces of Me. Lucy is an absolutely brilliant writer and, unsurprisingly, there was a veritable Who’s Who of great authors there to whoop and clap for her. I shan’t name any more names though because I’m beginning to sound like a twat.

Today I loved a blog written by… Er, me. A lovely reader posted on one of my old blogs from the Marie Claire days last night, and her kind words prompted me to re-read the old blog she’d commented on over breakfast this morning. It is no exaggeration to say that by the end of it I was clutching my stomach, crying with laughter. Not because of my writing but because of the events I’m describing. Sadly, when I brought all my old blogs over here from the Marie Claire website I lost all of my fab reader comments, so I can’t remember if everyone else found it as funny as I did . .. But for posterity’s sake I’m posting it here.

This blog is part of my Wot I Love series, which I started after recovering from ME. For more info, take a butchers at this.

Wot I Loved Today: GODMINSTER

This will be a very short blog. All you need to know is that Godminster cheddar is the finest cheese in the universe, including the bits of the universe that physicists haven’t yet found. It is a traffic-stopper of a cheese. It is perfect. It will make you weep and sink to the floor in a deep and blissful swoon.

That is all.

Wot I loved today: Accepting that I can’t polish a turd

In one of my ‘Tips for bad writing days‘ blogs last year I wrote about the importance of letting go of an idea that is, frankly, shit. Any writer knows the feeling of trying to maintain a story line that is not only improbable in real life but completely incongruous with everything else in their novel. You know it’s not working; you’ve pushed it through twenty hoops – all to no avail, you’re lying awake worrying about it – and yet you can’t let it go! You’ve spent three weeks creating this turd! And so you polish it until it gleams . . . and then you turn it over and realise that underneath it’s still completely rank. Just for a second, you consider flushing it down the toilet. But – YOU’VE SPENT THREE WEEKS WRITING THIS!

You sigh, and resume polishing.

Then, one day the clouds clear and without warning, you have a big literary dump. You let go of that pointless, turd-shaped storyline. You hold your breath and delete eight thousand words and wait for hysteria to set in.

But it doesn’t. Suddenly, your life is lighter. Your insides are cleansed. Your novel is slim, toned and bursting with promise once more.

Today, friends, I had that dump. And it were bloody magic.

Wot I loved today: Between Two Windows

Oli Hazzard is an award-winning poet who – like all great writers (ahem) – lives in Bristol. I recently bought his anthology Between Two Windows and every few days I treat myself to a poem. Today’s was ‘A week in the life.’ And it was (is) glorious. Spine-tingling wordsmithery at its finest.

Highly recommended.

Wot I loved today: VEG

For a long time I thought that I had to eat what other people told me to eat. I followed all sorts of mad food plans and forbade myself from eating a million things, mostly because people had told me I’d get everything from candida to cancer if I didn’t. They told me I’d have no energy, I’d be unhappy, I’d have brain fog and I’d go on sugar binges if I carried on eating these things. I never trusted myself or my body sufficiently to disobey, which strikes me as a shame in retrospect.

It was just part of my journey, I guess.

Today’s blog isn’t about being cross at any of the people who tried to help me – after all, they were all lovely people who just wanted the best for me. No, today’s blog is a celebration of being able to trust my very clever body, which ALWAYS tells me what it needs . . . If I’m willing to listen.

When I listen to it, it tells me when to start and stop eating. It tells me if it needs meat or fish. It tells me when it doesn’t want any more cheese. It tells me that I want a great big stodgy plate of carbs. Or – as happened this – it wakes up and says, very clearly, ‘Robinson, please feed me organic vegetables all day.’

I had no idea why it made this request, nor did I care. ‘OK,’ I said, without hesitation. ‘Veg it is, Body-of-Robinson.’

Luckily I’d just had my middle class veg box delivered (shhhh) and able to oblige. Here’s my lunch. Pretty unimaginative if you’re a proper foodie, but Christ JESUS it tasted good! And now my guts feel all nice and clean and I am smiling.

(Trump alert later)

Wot I loved today: The Friendship Holiday

As those of you who follow me on facebook will know, I’ve been on holiday in the North of England for the last week. It’s been absolutely lovely, in spite of biblical weather and a flat tyre and my extremely troublesome bottom. (My coccyx has gone mad; it’s not a fart-related issue.)

The Man and I have lots of lovely friends in the northern climes and have spent years saying, Yes, Yes, We will come and stay with you and it’ll be GREAT. And then we never go and stay with them. Largely because the North is not really en route to anywhere we are likely to go. So we decided last year that it was time we stopped waiting to be driving past the North and instead to go there. With intention.

Seven nights, seven lots of friends. And – unsurprisingly – it were magic. (Said in a bad Yorkshire accent.) Strong friendships will never die, however badly neglected they might have been, but the Friendship Holiday nonetheless breathed new life into these old relationships and made them even stronger than before. We sat by log fires, walked on moors and dales, went to Aqua Baby classes and visited cathedrals. We ate roast chicken on sofas, pies in pubs and curries with furry gorillas who wouldn’t go to bed. The North was fabulous. So much history, so much wild beauty, so many funny, friendly people.

And of course I was able to do it all – walk for hours, drive for hours, chat for hours – because I am so gloriously well. When I was rotting in bed with ME I wouldn’t have made it even to the motorway without having to lie down and die for a bit. My life really does feel like a miracle these days.

I can’t speak highly enough of the Friendship Holiday. It was a beautiful patchwork quilt of hospitality, friendship, old stories, new gossip, craft beers, pregnancy announcements and cake eating. And – even though money has nothing to do with it – it cost us almost nothing. Pongo the Skoda was a triumph and nobody laughed at my weird-looking coccyx cushion. Well not to my face anyway. Hurrah! A whole week of the life I love. It’s proving incredibly easy to write this blog, you know . . .

PS – this is me looking like a twat at my beloved Birmingham University. Which is not in the North, but still got to be a part of our northern tour.

Wot I loved today: WORK GROUP

This is what it was like working in TV:

- A lot of noise, some necessary, most not

- People everywhere, generating chaos and mess

- More than a fair share of utter wankers

- A lot of laughter

- Quite a bit of bullying

- Lots of desperate middle class kids working for free

- Lots of coke-snorting bosses abusing them

- Camaraderie that made your heart melt and got you through the bleakest of crises

- Free taxis (until about 2008, when you started having to carry camera kit around London that was as heavy as you)

- A lot of travel; a lot of jetlag, and the chance to see incredible things you’d never otherwise see

- Ditto for meeting incredible people

- Moral dilemmas, most forced upon you by the commissioning editor

- A sense of indescribable satisfaction when the show broadcast and your name was there in the credits

- A lot of people crying or frowning, saying ‘I hate this industry, I have to get out’

- The same people forgetting they had said that two weeks later when they’d been offered six months filming in New York

- The opportunity to learn loads of clever technical things

- A lot of girls blowing everything they earned on their clothes

- A lot of drinking

- A lot of men being unfaithful to their wives and girlfriends

- A lot of fun. And I mean a lot.

- Funky breakout rooms

- A soundtrack of distant shrieking as some scandal breaks

- A lot of tea and biscuits

- An endless supply of new friends who you know you’ll still want to see when you’re sixty

- A lot of colour and creativity

- And did I mention a lot of noise?

This is what it’s like being a writer:

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- Oh. Just me, shivering in my dressing room in a silent room, writing and writing and writing and writing.

- Occasional trip over to twitter, which is as noisy and life-swamping as TV, and then back to the silent room.

I’m not being fair. To either profession, really. There were some good people in TV. Lots of them. And I knew plenty of men who were faithful to their wives and girlfriends (The Man is an excellent example.) Writing, too, doesn’t need to be all about silent rooms. Occasionally you get out to do some research and see other human beings. But overall, it’s a lonely profession.

And so I feel very lucky to be part of a little co-working group. Three of us, all girls, who can’t take any more of this cabin fever. Every week we work at one of our three houses. We drink tea, we TALK, we ask for opinions on worky things we’re struggling with and we cook lunches. Right now this week’s host is making soup and bread for lunch. Can you imagine? There’s a rising ball of dough RIGHT HERE!

And one of the things I really love – and miss, although you’ll kill me for saying this – is the commute. I love putting on proper clothes and getting in my car and battling with Bristol’s insane traffic. I love having the radio on and feeling like I have a destination. And I love arriving at someone’s house and seeing SMILING FACES, hearing HUMAN VOICES and broadening my perspective beyond trivia like how many words I’ve written or the fact that my romantic male lead is currently as appealing as a jar of mouldy jam.

Hurrah for Work Group. Hurrah for humans. We were not meant to be alone.

Wot I loved today: Whippy Roots, Abel & Cole style

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD THIS IS SO TASTY:

http://www.abelandcole.co.uk/recipes/...

In short – boil or roast some root veg (and some garlic, if you want.)

Throw in food processor with some marscapone, butter or cream. Or a Naughty of your choice.

Whizz.

Eat.

Cry a bit.

So good.

Wot I loved today: being alive

I was saying on my Facebook page this morning how bitingly sad I found the image of Philip Seymour Hoffman at his death – that brilliant, complex and talented man transformed so brutally, so needlessly, into a lonely cold body with a syringe it its arm and a bag of heroin nearby. What a(nother) monstrous waste of genius. What a(nother) monstrous waste of a life.

Resultantly, my Wot I loved Today blog is, for today, not about a cheese I’ve gorged on or a giggle I’ve had with The Man but about the very fact of my life. For this, as Seymour Hoffman’s death has reminded me, is a fragile gift and it is contingent on many factors; some of which I have control over, many of which I don’t.

I’m grateful today for the breath that passes in and out of my lungs without my needing even to think about it. I’m grateful for my heart that pumps oxygen through my arteries and veins, giving life to the complex network of muscles that keep me moving. I’m grateful to my digestive system for delivering vital nutrients to the bits of me that need them, and to my bones for keeping me strong and upright.

I’m grateful for my eyes that see beauty and colour, and my mind for the richly-woven cloth of thoughts and feelings it creates. I’m grateful for my nose, my ears, my skin and my mouth for delivering information that no computer could ever reproduce.

I’m grateful for every moment that I’m here, in this body, in this world of such joy and sadness.

I’m just really, really grateful.

Wot I loved today: lying very still

I was meant to go and see Coriolanus last night, beamed live to my local cinema from the Donmar Warehouse courtesy of NT Live. I was properly excited. Not only is Tom Hiddleston is frankly amazing but my talented friend Hadley Fraser is in the play, no doubt looking all handsome and fierce.

Plus I love Coriolanus. It’s a bloody bloodbath made all the more thrilling by some savagely powerful language. Although I guess that goes for most Shakespearian tragedies. And most of his histories too. Anyway.

I got into my car and started driving up the hill. Then: ARGHHHHHH, my car screamed. I turned off Bon Jovi (radio; not my choice) to listen further. ARGHHHHHHHHHH! it screamed. I had a little think. I could struggle on to the cinema and then break down on the way home, by which point my phone would have run out of battery, and the AA man, if I ever got hold of him, would justifiably call me a twathead for driving a car that was screaming. Or I could go home and roll the car down the hill to the garage in the morrow. (A third option would have been to sulk but I don’t do sulking no more, yo.)

So I went home. I got into bed, because The Man was out, and read 100 pages of Polo. (I’m making my way through Jilly Cooper’s back catalogue at the moment because I’m writing a novel that involves horses and I want to avoid crossover. Although thus far I’ve found none. It’s mostly about damp bushes and pert nipples.) Then I closed my eyes and had a lovely two hours doing absolutely NOTHING. Not sleeping: just . . . being.

And it was glorious. The furiously warring factions of Coriolanus would have been glorious too. But actually, I needed two hours to myself. To do absolutely, totally nothing. No phone, definitely no internet. Just me. By the time I went to bed I was so relaxed you could come and punch me in the face and I wouldn’t have minded.

Over to you, readers. Does two hours of absolutely nothing – other than the sound of your own thoughts – appal or appeal?