5 things this week
This week I’ve been:
[image error]Walking… With pigs in the Brecon Beacons. This was planned by my lovely husband as a Christmas present. We stayed in a cosy cottage with a view of fields and sheep, and on Sunday went for a walk with four funny, friendly Kunekune pigs called Babz, Hazel, Willow and Holly. They’ve been on telly, too.
[image error]Watching… Coronation Street. I stopped watching Corrie for a few years, but came back to it recently because EastEnders was getting too stupid for words (all that gangster nonsense, and a lot of chess-playing in sheds). So I’m not entirely up to date with everything that led up to Aidan’s suicide in Wednesday’s episode, but blimey – what a brilliant hour of television, with an incredibly important storyline handled with perfect sensitivity and intelligence. Like the Lucy Beale murder on EastEnders (back before the stupid gangsters and chess-playing), it focused on the reactions of the people left behind, and showed the ripples that a death has right through a community and the different reactions to such shocking news. And David Platt’s realisation that he had to tell someone about being raped before he ended up with nowhere to turn like poor Aidan, and Shona’s sensitive reaction to what he told her, was brilliantly done. Right across the cast the acting was perfect.
[image error]Also watching… Michael Clark’s dance piece ‘to a simple rock ‘n’ roll… song,’ which was on BBC Four. It consists of three segments set to music by Patti Smith, Erik Satie and David Bowie. The dancing is just stunning – it’s all about line and form, extremely precise and detailed, and very beautiful. I’ve watched it several times now and notice something new every time and marvel at the amazing things the human body can do.
[image error]Reading… I’m part way through Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit. It’s set in Berlin, which is interesting to me for a start, and begins with the narrator visiting his father, who’s in prison for manslaughter. The story then goes back to the time leading up to the crime, dipping between the narrator’s early life and more recent events. I’m finding it intriguing, though not exactly unputdownable at the moment.
[image error]Writing… A new character recently turned up in my novel-in-progress, and I’m probably going to have to kill him. And just as I wrote that sentence, something clicked into place about the way I was thinking of killing him, and how it links with something that happened earlier on. I love it when that happens – you realise your subconscious has been working away on something while you thought you were thinking about pigs and soaps and dancing.
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