Where the fuck have you been? Part 2
Hello, have you been on the edge of your seat? I though so…so let me continue…
By mid-August I was finishing up Supervision with NAW at Pembroke College (essentially facilitating critique workshops with some inevitable ‘teaching’ in the mix) I worked intensively with two small groups of five students twice a week. This was my second year and, as ever, I learned as much as I taught. I have to celebrate and acknowledge how incredible each and every one of my students were. Week after week they showed up with carefully crafted work, they received feedback willingly and then implemented it. I worked hard - as I always do when teaching because people have put time, money and courage into being there - and tried to do my best for them. Probably the most touching and rewarding thing about the whole experience was how much each and every one of them developed - how much their work improved during the duration of the course classes, seminars and supervisions. As ever, I walked the halls of Cambridge thinking how much it was like something out of Educating Rita…quite often this year I’ve just had to think to myself ‘this is fucking insane’ and then just get on with enjoying it.
Talking of gratitude I am very grateful that I got to take a few days away and spend a Wirral weekend with my pal Simon Savidge (aka Sugar Bear of Savidge Reads blog) and his lovely partner Chris. We went to the seaside, charity-shop spreed and ate like queens with trifle, mac & cheese, fish and chips and more cake than even I could imbibe. I was given a maximum dog petting quota and the chatter was approximately 70% bookish 30% RuPaul’s Drag Race (the latter initiated by me). Here’s a picture of us being, as Simon puts it ‘blown off at the end of Southport Pier’. Check the cagoules, check them.
And then it was time for me to head back to the Motherland…
Oh, Edinburgh in August, you beautiful wee piñata of fun, terrible shows, too much booze, piano bars with near-naked Australian backpackers, beautiful bookshops, excellent comedy and all the carbs you can eat, how I enjoy smashing you open and getting my mitts on your goodies every few years.
Doing Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of the few times that I ever feel like a Proper Writer…it’s Edinburgh Fucking Festival! So it was lovely to start by signing copies of Thirst at the beautiful Kings Cross St Pancras bookshop Watermark Books before boarding the train north which was full of posh people shouting their acting CVs at each other over M&S sandwiches.
I actually started my weekend on a more serious note at the ‘If Scotland’ academic conference at Stirling University. I was a late stand-in for none other than Alistair Gray (amazingly, there weren’t any hackles from the audience along the lines of ‘that’s no’ fucking Alistair Gray’) on a literary panel with Jenni Calder, Hannah McGill and Meaghan Delahunt on how we would look back on the Indy ref Yes and No campaigns. My party line was, and still is, whatever the result, it had reinvigorated grassroots political campaigning in Scotland. That it was joyful to hear people talking about it in fish and chip shops, supermarkets, kids talking about it on the back seat of the bus. This is the way politics should be. All I will say is that perhaps I shouldn’t have opened my talk by joking that I might jump into a rousing musical number if things got slow. Know yer crowd, Hudson.
The morning after (I stayed in halls – they are less fun without other people, primary coloured alcoholic drinks or micro-chips) I had a beautiful walk back through Stirling and with that I was braced for more Edinburgh high-jinx which involved a giant pulled pork lunch and chatter about, among other, things vajazzles with my literary hero. Then my dear writer pal Jenni Fagan cooked me up a feast for dinner (it had been a long while since I’d seen a vegetable at that point and it was only thanks Jenni that I made it through the next few days I reckon) before we bombed it up the road to the festival to see Lydia Davies talk to Ali Smith. The night ended, as nights are prone to occasionally, with a wee gang of us dancing in a piano bar…I know, I know…but one day I will be old and my hips won’t flex and I’ll be glad of all those night spent carousing.
My Edinburgh Festival event was with the outrageously dapper, talented and lovely Simon Van Booy (I’m not ashamed to say I got a little author crush). We were discussing ‘the calm violence of attraction’ (which is a line from his near-perfect novel Everything Beautiful Began After which I highly recommend you buy…). It was a grand event, not least because Simon and I have lots of similarities in our writing and how we get our words on the page (lots of travel, lots of stealing from our own experience) but also because there were so many friendly faces in the audience…it meant so much to me that people came. At one point an older couple I didn’t know asked me, very gently, if writing Tony Hogan had helped me overcome the difficulties my upbringing might have presented. I told them, quite honestly (which I think should always be the way when people have given time and money to come see you) that writing that book, that people’s response to it, had removed much of the (misplaced) shame associated with that type of poverty, that writing had changed my life. And then I thought I was going to cry so I made a daft joke. But it was nice to be able to acknowledge that and especially on home ground.
After the event there was a signing - I will never get used to the singing but I love it, I always want to have a chatter with everyone though…I’m going to suggest serving drinks and a bowl of wotsits and calling it a party in future. Anyhow, then I was whisked away to do this interview Summerhill TV (talking about Thirst and writing) and then…then after a dram or two of Yurt whisky my European city partner in crime (and crime writer) Claire McGowan and I went off to see the inimitable Sarah Waters talking to Muriel Grey (double-crushing) about The Paying Guests. She was marvellous. Of course. I have a signed copy which I got from my own personal ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, Gay’s the Word and I can’t wait to get stuck in.
The next day, slightly broken from a three months of fun, travel and work squeezed into six weeks, I went to my Edinburgh happy places, Looking Glass Books, Mary’s Milkbar and St Peter’s Yard. I signed books at Looking Glass Books (should be still some left I reckon!) had a wee literary gossip with Gillian and filled my belly with ice-cream and cardimom buns at the other two. It was a good way to say goodbye for now to Bonnie Scotland.
Then I got back to London and you’d think wouldn’t you that that’d be enough for one month? Wrong, so wrong! Because the next night I was off to one of my favourite bookshops in London and longtime supporter of Tony Hogan and Thirst, Bookseller Crow on the Hill. As ever Jonathan, Justine and Karen put on a fabulous night. I was nervous because it was a solo gig but people came…we ran out of even the tiny Lilliputian chairs from the children’s section. The audience were so kind, curious, open, they all bought books to be signed and we carried on the chatter after. I’ve done two events at The Crow, the first not long after Tony Hogan came out, and both times I was knackered and overwhelmed, at the end of an insane, emotional rollercoaster of a month. Both back then and this time doing such a warm, welcoming, fun event was absolutely the right thing at the right time. It was frankly glorious and I couldn’t think of a nicer way to end my Month of Thirst.
And now? Now I am in beautiful, inspiring and humbling Sarajevo…but I’ll tell you all about my Balkan adventures, of meat, coffee, writing, cats, gorgeous train journeys, terrible, terrible films and incredible kindness and warmth next time… dobar dan!
