New Year’s Eve

I’ve just learned my father has been taken into hospital in Bangor with a stroke, which at the age of 93 has to give cause for real concern. This follows my mother’s death four months ago. My parents separated nearly forty years ago, but my mother asked my father not to divorce her, and he did not, despite going on to live with a new partner. A month after my mother’s death he married his partner, both of them aged 93. His second wife, my step-mother as she now is, phoned to tell me of my father’s stroke, and I asked her how she was coping herself. ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘We’ve talked it over, and we’ve accepted it. We both feel we’ve been very lucky.’ Both had lived through unhappy first marriages, and have been grateful for the tranquillity of their long life together. I have immense respect for their undemanding approach to what may soon be the end of that companionship. My mother died angry and disappointed. My father faces the end feeling lucky.

I plan to drive up to Bangor on Saturday, unless his condition takes a critical turn for the worse.

Over the holiday period I’ve used my early mornings, before the family gets up, to do revision work on a new novel. ‘Reckless’ is complete, and will be published in a month or so. The one I’m working on, the seventh is my sequence, is currently called ‘Triangle Street’. It tells the story of two interwoven love affairs, one contemporary, following a character from the earlier books, and one in the family of Emily Dickinson in the 1880s. Emily Dickinson is buried in a cemetery on Triangle Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. My publishers have asked me to consider some other title, something that conveys more emotion, so I’m puzzling over that. Apart from the title the novel is now done, which means I can start the new year planning the next book. For those who read this who think of me as a screenwriter, you should know that it’s the book-writing that is my first love. It allows me my own voice, and  keeps me sane.