The True Faces of the Day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

When a horror comes that is too big, it is hard for the human mind to comprehend. The tragedy turns into numbers ; it becomes almost abstract. Yes, says the pummelled brain, yes, I see; but it is too enormous to understand fully. The stories coming out of Haiti turned my brain into this retreating state. Dead running into the fifty thousands; bodies having to be removed from the streets by bulldozers; an entire state disabled; it was too much to take in. I made an instinctive human reflex of sorrow and regret, resolved to send money, thought of something else.

What I held in my mind, like an amulet, was a desperate Pollyannish notion that it showed the world was still a good place.  I focussed on the money and aid and rescue crews coming in from all over the globe.  Even in the midst of a massive financial crash, tiny broke Iceland was sending help.  I saw a picture of some plucky businesslike Britons setting off to do their bit, and felt an absurd thrill of patriotic pride:

In a fabulously stupid way, I felt rather sentimental about the dogs that were being flown in:

The world is coming together, I thought; everything is not lost.

I can't excuse my slightly detached initial reaction. I think part of it was because I have been getting my news this week from the radio. The trope is that the pictures are sometimes, paradoxically, better on radio, but in cases like this I do not think that received wisdom holds.  Tonight, I sat down and watched the television news. It was the first time I had seen the scale of the devastation in moving pictures. It was the first time I had seen the drawn looks of shock on the faces of hardened, professional journalists, who are trained from the moment they walk into Broadcasting House to remain neutral and disinterested and apolitical. It was the first time I had seen hundreds of people queuing patiently round the block just to get a meagre bottle of water. It was the first time I had seen cameras roving over rows of corpses.

The thing that got to me, finally, that crashed through the instinctive defence mechanism can be erected when faced with too much human suffering, was footage of one small boy being pulled from the wreckage. I know that it is the very enormity of the thing that makes it so devastating; I know, rationally, that it is the idea of tens of thousands dead and tens more thousands homeless, and possibly a whole republic brought almost literally to its knees, that makes this one of those terrifying historic events that everyone shall always remember. But, viscerally, it was one small child that brought the horror home to me, like a hammer to the heart.

It was not just that a two-year-old survived, against all the odds, buried in feet of rubble. It was not just his amazing vulnerability and his astonishing resilience. It was not just the look of absolute, pure delight and tenderness on the face of his brave Spanish rescuer. It was not just the expression on the boy's face when he saw his mother. It was all those things combined, which symbolised a country of millions of battered, terrified humans who are hanging on by their fingernails.

His name is Redjeson Hausteen Claude:

And this is what he looked like when he saw his mother:

There was a lovely quote in The Times about Felix del Amo, the rescue worker who dug the boy out: his boss apparently told Spanish television, 'He is very nice, but also disciplined.'. I don't know why I like that so much, but I do.


Pictures from the AP, and Getty Images.

 

Coda:

It is fashionable to bitch up the BBC just at the moment. The Tories are constantly sniping at dear old Auntie, and Labour's Ben Bradshaw had a mean little cheap shot earlier this evening on Any Questions.

The broadcast I watched tonight was from the BBC News at Ten, and the coverage was the kind of thing which would make Lord Reith shine with pride. George Alagiah, Matt Frei and Matthew Price did stellar work. They were humane without being emotional, lyrical without being sentimental, factual without being cold. Most of all, they did not, at any stage, make the story about them.  They knew very well that it was not about them.  They told it with all their considerable resources, because that was what they were there for. They all looked exhausted, but that did not matter to them, because it was getting the story out that counted. There was no showbiz, no showboating; it was public service broadcasting at its very finest, and I don't take that for granted.

Red Letter Day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

ONE THREE NINE THREE, my darlings, one three nine three.  After yesterday's dispiriting loss, I sternly sat at my desk today until I had bashed out 1393 words.  I managed to remember about the people of Bhutan, and threw in the nomads of Mongolia for good measure.  Then I tore off on a quite unexpected tangent which led to a small discursive moment on the origins of ambergris (the intestine of the sperm whale, if you must know). The theory of this chapter is starting to cohere, although it is still prone to contradiction, diversion, and, I must be frank, occasional waffle.  Still, dammit, I shall follow the muse where she leads, as long as there is life in my fingers.

One of the things I like about writing non-fiction is that I have to look a great many things up. In a slightly Rumsfeldian way, this is not just because of the things I know I do not know, but also because of the things I think I know I know, but in fact, do not. And one of the things I love about looking things up on the internet is that, although it can be more fruitless and time-consuming than consulting a book, it does lead me to unexpected destinations.  I follow random links and make new and delightful discoveries.

My discovery today was the great photographer Emilio Morenatti. I should really know about him; he has been in Afghanistan and Pakistan for years, and his work is so arresting and ravishing that it has won him awards.  First I found his photographs, which are heartbreaking and acute and utterly beautiful. Then I looked him up. I discovered that he is Spanish, and that he was blown up in Afghanistan. This rocked me back. His foot was amputated, and the last I can find is that he was being fitted for a prosthetic device in America.  This was from last year, and I can find no news since. I do not know if he is back to work, or has learnt to walk again. I fervently hope so, because he has one of the most brilliant eyes I have ever seen in a photographer.

The picture of the day is his. This was the first one I found, the one that made me want to see more.  It is not his most famous, but it the one that speaks most to me. It is of Afghan girls watching a UN drop of ballot papers for the election of 2004:

By Emilio Morenatti/AP.

And this is of the photographer himself, being wheeled into hospital, still working:

By Enric Marit/AP.

I hope that he is recovering well.

The Gloaming

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It was a rotten day. The slush slushed, and then iced over again so that it was perilous underfoot, and a low, persistent sleet fell from a melancholy sky.  My internet connection filled with glitches. I flew into computer rage and started stabbing at the close button in a vain attempt to get rid of one maddening page that would not shut, the screen flickered, and I had, quite by mistake, shut the file I was working on without saving the changes. It is almost impossible to do this unless you are very drunk, or blinded by fury. Six hundred words were lost. I was in the middle of writing something utterly fascinating about the mountain people of Bhutan. I know they are not really called mountain people, but I think of them like that because where they live is undeniably mountainous. I was getting all smug because I had managed to talk about Marilyn Monroe and the people of Bhutan in the same chapter.  And then it was all gone.

Sarah called, at the very moment of catastrophe.

'Yes?' I shouted.

'Are you all right?' she said.

'No,' I said. 'I lost my morning's work. And I was making that kind of argument that hasn't quite solidified yet, you know the kind you only really understand once you have written it, so of course I can't remember it at all.'

'Oh,' she said.  'Yes I know that one exactly.'

'I was writing about the people of Bhutan,' I said. 'Then the internet started going glitchy and I flew into a temper.'

'It's probably the Chinese,' Sarah said, obscurely.

'Oh my God,' I said. 'The Google.'

We pondered this for a while.

'I don't expect it really was the Chinese,' Sarah said, eventually.

She then made some jokes, cheered me up, gave me permission to take the afternoon off (on a Thursday, it felt so subversive) and said I should clear my mind and start again tomorrow.

At four I went out, still rather grumpy, expecting the horrible weather. The dogs must be exercised though, so on went the boots and the gloves and the hat and the two coats, for insulation. But instead of a glowering sky, I found a magical gloaming, as blue as the sea. A mist was hovering at the base of the hills, and there were mysterious cloud formations in the sky, and the air was as fresh as mountain water. I found myself smiling all over my face.

I had a mild frustration today. I did not, like the people of Haiti, lose my house or my living or my family. I still have running water and a roof over my head and all my arms and legs. I just lost a few words, that is all.

 

This is what I saw:

These ones are a little fuzzy, for which I apologise, but I wanted you to get a sense of the magical mist:

Cheating with split peas

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is nothing lovely to look at outside any more.  The stalactites of ice have fallen from the eaves and the snow is melting and reforming into iced slush.  A thaw of a kind has come, but out in the fields, the snow is still up to the sheep's elbows.  It all looks rather forlorn and grubby.  Because of the wind chill, it feels colder than ever. And there is terrible news from Haiti.

On days like this, my only answer is to make soup. Sometimes I love to get intricate, to chop and mix ingredients and generally play around.  I did not quite have the heart for that today, so I made the simplest kind of thing that would have purists fainting away with horror.

I took some yellow split peas, a pinch of saffron, a tablespoon of Marigold stock powder, a scatter of cumin, two chopped dried chillies, and a dash of curry powder (I know that I am supposed to roast and grind my own spices, so you will have to forgive that), covered the lot in water, brought to a low simmer and cooked for forty minutes.  You may need to add some more water, as the peas expand mightily.  You end up with a lovely thick article, half way between a soup and a dhal.  I know it should have onions and garlic and other crucial ingredients, but if you feel like cheating, this is a perfect way to do it.  It does not look pretty, but it is rich and spicy and feels with each spoonful as if it is doing good.

If you do one thing today

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Obviously, you will be doing more than one thing, so I am being rhetorical.  But do run to the BBC iplayer and listen to Front Row for 12th January, if you can. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pqc5j/Front_Row_12_01_2010/

Front Row, which like all Radio Four programmes, goes through its doldrums, is on a tear at the moment.  Tonight was a particular delight, because of a ravishing interview with EL Doctorow.  I like to think I know a bit about literature.  It is my job, after all, and I have enough of the intellectual popinjay in me to feel a horrible vanity in my ability to quote Auden and Yeats and Scott Fitzgerald.  But I have hideous spaces of blank ignorance.  I can still remember feeling properly embarrassed when I had to admit to Sarah's husband that I had never read Felix Holt.  It's stupid, because no one, not even writers, can read everything, and even if they could, it would not turn them magically into interesting and charming people. 

Anyway, one of my terrible blank spaces turns out to be EL Doctorow.  I have never read any of his books.  I think I rather assumed he was dead. But there he was, really quite alive, his voice gravelled with thought and cleverness. I fell instantly in love with him. Every sentence he spoke was a thing of delight. He sounds quite old now, and perhaps he was always this way, but he has the air of a man who has seen enough not to have to prove anything. There was a slowness in his speech, as if he had no need to persuade. Because of this, he was a thousand times more persuasive than all those people on the radio who shout and cajole and talk incredibly fast, as if somehow that will make them prove their point.  I wanted to follow him to the ends of the earth.

This thing with voices is something I've been noticing a lot lately: the calmer and more low key the speaker, the more ardently you want to listen to them, and the more keenly you believe them. Barack Obama has this gift, with his lovely low thoughtful cadence. The fast high energy voices just sound as if they are trying to sell you something, and if the recession has taught us anything, it is that we should all resist hucksters with every part of our main and might.

If you do go and listen, you get, as a bonus, a hysterical piece on Meatloaf.  I had no idea he was so funny. Mark Lawson has a perfectly heavenly time calling him Mr Loaf, in that very British ironical fashion, just like Jeremy Paxman did when he kept saying, 'Now Mr Rascal, what do you think?' to Dizzee Rascal on Newsnight.  There is also an amusing item on song lyrics. But the shining highlight is the magnificent Mr Doctorow, whose new book I am running out to buy as soon as I can get my car through the snow.

 

Picture of the day is not one of mine. I had to research Marilyn Monroe for the book this morning. (Today's word count 783; not stellar, but not too shabby.) I suddenly realised I did not know very much about her, apart from those iconic photography sessions with Eve Arnold, the sad marriage to Arthur Miller, and the conspiracy theories about her being done in by the CIA.  She gave a long, heartbreaking, last interview to Life Magazine, which has made me view her in an entire new light. Her haunted face is what I saw today:

In which serendipity rules

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I think I mentioned that I saw The Young Victoria on Saturday night. I seem to remember that it got lukewarm reviews, but I rather loved it, and it ignited in me a burning desire for further reading. The mad thing is that Victorian England really was my period; at university, the only things that excited me more than the Napoleonic Wars were the great Reform Act and Peel splitting the party over the Corn Laws. (Also: the real significance of Gladstone and all that chopping down of the trees.) But I suddenly realised that, through all this, I was so furiously concentrated on the politics that Queen Victoria herself was no more than a shadowy liminal figure.  I knew about her famous dislike of Gladstone, of whom she was rumoured to have said: 'he always addresses me as if I were a public meeting', and her flirty adoration of Disraeli. Apart from that, I think I considered her a rather dull, dumpy figure, holed up at Balmoral in her unending widow's weeds. 

It appeared I had no biography of her in the house, so I thought I would go back to David Cecil's classic biography of Lord Melbourne, a perfect place to start until the library could come to my rescue. (Part of the reason I have such a huge collection of books is that I get these sudden, imperative freaks: I must read about string theory, or Seabiscuit, or Coco Chanel, right now, this minute.) But the lovely Lord M was nowhere to be found. I was still searching last night, in a furious dogged manner, when my eye lighted on a battered blue hardback, so old that the title had been rubbed off the spine. Even though I have about a thousand books, I know them all by sight - Melbourne is yellow cloth, for example - but this one was unfamiliar to me. I wonder what that might be, I thought, distracted for a moment from my pursuit.

I took it down, opened it up, and to my absolute amazement it was Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey.  I had no memory of ever buying such a book. I have certainly never read it. It must have been sitting there for years, overlooked in its dowdy blue coat, until a cold Sunday night in 2010, when the only thing in the world I wanted to read about was Queen Victoria, and, in some inexplicable act of serendipity, my fingers fell on it, and a mild sense of curiosity led me to take it down from the shelf. 

Well my darlings, it is an absolute barn burner.  I cannot put it down.  Here is a sample:

'The Duke of York, whose escapades in times past with Mrs Clarke and the army had brought him into trouble, now divided his life between London and a large, extravagantly ordered and extremely uncomfortable country house, where he occupied himself with racing, whist, and improper stories. He was remarkable among the princes for one reason: he was the only one of them -so we are informed by a highly competent observer - who had the feelings of a gentleman. He had long been married to the Princess Royal of Prussia, a lady who rarely went to bed and was surrounded by vast numbers of dogs, parrots, and monkeys. The Duke of Clarence had lived for many years in complete obscurity with Mrs Jordan, the actress, in Bushey Park.  By her he had a large family of sons and daughters, and had appeared, in effect, to be married to her, when he suddenly separated from her and offered to marry Miss Wykeham, a crazy woman of large fortune, who, however, would have nothing to say to him.  Mrs Jordan died in distressed circumstances in Paris. The Duke of Cumberland was probably the most unpopular man in England. Hideously ugly, with a distorted eye, he was bad-tempered and vindictive in private, a violent reactionary in politics, and was subsequently suspected of murdering his valet and of having carried on an amorous intrigue of an extremely scandalous kind…Of the Duke of Cambridge, the youngest of the brothers, not very much was known. He lived in Hanover, wore a blonde wig, chattered and fidgeted a great deal, and was unmarried.'

Isn't it perfect?

So, in honour of fate and Lytton Strachey, his old book, published by Chatto and Windus in 1921, is my picture of the day, because it was what I gazed on with the most delight:

See how old and unassuming it looks?

Possibly the chicest dedication ever:

The chapter on Lord Melbourne:

The poor old bashed spine:

Sunday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The snow is still top-of-the-gumboots deep and the stalactites hang off the gutters like something out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. It is utterly quiet. I adore Sundays. The only tiny fluttering fly in the ointment is that I have a sudden urgent desire to read my copy of Lord Melbourne by David Cecil, and I can't find it. (I watched The Young Victoria yesterday, and was rather dazzled by Paul Bettany's tremendous performance as the wily Lord M.)

I'm not going to give you yet another picture of the whiteness, although I can't guarantee what will happen tomorrow. So, today's pictures are a little nostalgia trip. I have old photographs and postcards stuck up all over the walls of my office and I like to look at them while I work. We moved around a lot when I was young, and when I was sixteen my mother and I were living out of a suitcase and our things were stored in a warehouse which burnt down.  All my mother's wonderful photograph books were lost.  But somehow, miraculously, I have still a few old pictures, I have no idea quite how. 

Anyway, this is one of my absolute favourites. There is my mother on the left, and my very naughty father looking just as naughty as he was, on the right. The handsome man with my mother is Dave Dick, a great steeplechase jockey who won the Grand National in 1956. Judging from how young they look and how much champagne they are drinking, this might well have been taken in that glory year. I'm not sure who the blonde lady on the right is; I hope it is Mrs Dick. They were all together in Juan Les Pins, years before the new Russians got there, when you could still find the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald haunting the pine avenues:

And this is my old dad, posing his head off. This was taken by a proper photographer called Dmitri Kasterine, who used to come and stay at our house when I was small:

And here is my mother, with my sister and brother. Check out those hats. Only my mum could wear a hat like that and still manage to channel Grace Kelly:

And here she is again, very young, just married, all hope and blonde hair, working the country lady look:

In which I take a day off

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Quite often I work at the weekends, but today I am having a proper Saturday day off.  I am having a perfectly lovely time doing absolutely bugger all. My mind has gone flat like a mill pond, and has very few thoughts in it. One of the thoughts is: how could I have forgotten that amazing patronising voice of Patricia Hewitt's?  And who was it who ever suggested to her that it was a good idea to speak like that? And why did she ever think that someone who did speak like that could ever pull off a serious political coup? And why did she choose Mr Hoon as her partner, the dullest man in England? (I used to believe that no one could actually be as dull as that in real life, and that really he was just having a little joke with us, and that behind closed doors he was an absolute pistol, cracking jokes and singing show tunes. Now I am not so sure.)

My other thought is: how did a mouse get into the boot of my car, shred pieces of paper it found there to make a little nest, and then disappear again?  The boot was so iced shut that it took me five minutes to get it open today. So how did a little mouse manage it?  I may be pondering this for some time.

 

Today's picture:

The weather, on which I am in danger of becoming almost as dull as Mr Hoon, has changed again.  The temperature has rocketed up into the minus ones, and there was a sort of snow fog all day, out of which a tentative sun attempted to shine, before giving up the ghost and going away to do something more productive.  This is what it looked like:

 

And this:

And this:

This was at eleven o'clock this morning.  See how eerie the light is? Observe slightly puzzled dog:

And this is a heavenly bit of lichen, because I love lichen:

And this is just entirely random:

In which the temperature drops

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It was minus fourteen last night. This morning, even with a glorious winter sun gleaming out of a cerulean sky, it is still minus ten.  It is that kind of cold that I can only walk in for about fifteen minutes; after that, my face starts to hurt. The tremendous freeze has scattered little crystals all over the snow, so that it glitters and shimmers in the light. The trees look as if some creative giant came in the night and carved them all into ice sculptures. (You see that this kind of beauty brings out the whimsy in me.)

Meanwhile, I defy the weather and put on another nine hundred words, and have a low, humming sense of achievement. I know that many of those words will get cut in the second and third (and fourth and fifth) drafts; I know too that they are nothing like as good as they should be, because they never are, at the beginning.  But something is coming out of nothing, and there is a keen pleasure in that.

The other lovely thing is that I do not have to do this alone. I have my partner, who calls up three times a day. Sarah rang today at eleven.

'I am having my elevenses,' I said.

'That's nice,' she said.

'I am having fried cod's roe,' I said.

There was a pause.  'That is quite odd, even for you,' she said.

'Need the protein,' I said, with my mouth full.

Then we talked about Dante, St Augustine, the art of the Renaissance, closed orders, Camus, Balzac, Madame Bovary, the depiction of women in fairy tales, and religion in general. I would love to say that this is just what we talk about every day, because we're those kind of girls, but this was work talk, for the book.  This is what we do: we discuss every single thing that might be at all relevant to what we are writing about, we shoot off on tangents, we test out ideas.  I wander off into the endless prairies of abstract thought, and Sarah brings me gently back down to earth.  We get slightly over-excited and shout at each other. (Actually, that is mostly me; I have a fatal tendency to yell when I am over-stimulated.)  Then I rush to my desk and make notes of everything we just spoke about.  The heaven of it is, I do not have to do my thinking alone. I had never worked with anyone else before Backwards, and the joy of having a sounding board is like getting an unexpected present in the post. Because she is so clever and professional, Sarah makes me better; it's like raising your game when you play against a chess master. And there is also a whole Jack and Mrs Sprat thing going on.  I know a bit about 20th century literature, feminist theory, and Jungian psychology; Sarah is an expert on the Italian poets (Dante is absolutely her boy), the Renaissance, and French novels, where I am horribly ignorant.  Also, she makes me laugh.

And just in case you think we really are too poncy for our shirts, I would like to state that we also discussed the wonders of the John Lewis haberdashery department. 

 

Now for the picture of the day. I did have a thought that I should be tremendously disciplined and do only one each day; there is a purity about that which appealed to me, in this new mapping the year in photographs idea.  But it was so magnificently glorious outside today that I feel profligate; I want you to be able to see every single one of the ice trees. Forgive the indulgence.

Ice tree:

Little ice bush:

My favourite stand of Scots Pines, turned quite white by the weather:

Dogs:

Frozen avenue, with dogs:

My garden, looking due south:

Look at that sky.  I'm not sure there are even words for that colour:

More avenue and dogs:

There is no excuse for this last one at all. It's not as if you don't know what my dogs look like, by now. But did you ever see anyone more ready for her close-up?

I'm stopping now.  Really.

In which my brain hurts

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Here is what I had forgotten about plunging into a book: the brain fever.  For the last few months I have been pitching (Sarah and I had to do several pitches before we hit the exact right one), pursuing an on-spec secret project, writing a few articles, doing the blog.  Although I was working, it felt like a curious fallow period, a little limbo. In the old days, I would finish one book and at once start another, and just hope someone would buy it.  As a result, I have several unloved manuscripts still in my bottom drawer. (Unloved, that is, by everyone except me; at the time of execution, I thought they were works of genius; or, at least, quite good.)  There was never a time when I was not writing. 

Now I have a wonderfully strict agent who disapproves of any word being written unless it has been bought and paid for.  (I have a sneaking suspicion that she does not even quite like me doing this blog, on account of the utter lack of cash payment.)  This is categorically A Good Thing.  I am no longer in my feckless twenties; I can't just run around doing stuff that no one will ever buy.  But it does mean there is this curious stop-start nature to my working life.  Now I am in full Start, and my mind, which was noodling along like an old lady out for a stroll, has to, almost overnight, transform itself into Usain Bolt.  I swear I can actually feel my brain aching. 

It is not just think think think, all the time, from the moment I wake in the morning to the moment I go to sleep at night.  My friend the Man of Letters and I have a little joke that even when we are in the supermarket we are still working. Doing the washing up: working; walking the dogs: working; lying in the bath: working. (Actually, I get some of my best ideas in the bath, which is an absolute bugger, because it is impossible to write them down because the paper goes soggy.) It's a silly self-referential writer's thing, but it makes us laugh because it has a mark of truth to it.  But the thinking is only half of it.  There is then the trick of getting the thought to run down the arm, through the fingers, and onto the page.  Transcribing what seems like a perfect honed idea from my mind to my typing hands is sometimes almost impossible.  It was all there a moment ago, like a perfect little egg, and I can't damn well get it out.  Someone once said a brilliant thing about this: after page three it is all damage limitation.  What he meant was, and I think it was a he, is that the ideal glittering book exists in your head, and then you start writing it down, and it goes at once from Olympian to second-rate.

But this is not a complaint.  I am back doing the proper work.  There were another thousand words today.  They are not especially glittering words, because today was more sticky and dogged than yesterday, but three thousand words now exist where there were none.  In the little flights of fancy that I occasionally allow myself, I think of that as a kind of miracle.

 

Picture of the day:

I can't give you another shot of the snow and the dogs, although I would like to state for the record that we now have SEVENTEEN INCHES of accumulation, so today is more mundane.  I need to eat a lot of protein to keep my strength up for all this contemplation I am doing, so I made a heavenly frittata with courgettes and pancetta and spinach, and I must admit I did gaze upon it with delight.

In which I say Pah to the Fear

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Well, my best beloveds, I finally got a grip.  I looked the terror in the eye and said B for Be Off.  (B for Bugger off, actually, but this is a family show, and my mother tunes in.) That sounds frantically proactive and admirable, but of course it was much less tremendous than that.  I think I just got bored of being such a wuss.  I have an old theory, which you will find in Backwards, that the thing the comes along and rescues you most often from heartbreak is boredom.  It is so deadly dull to go on yearning for someone after a while that you just wake up one morning and think sod it.  The same thing happened in this case of paralysing self-doubt. I don't think that I summoned any great moral fibre to combat the Fear. I was simply dying of dullness.  Also, I did sign a contract and I don't want my agent to get cross.

So now, miraculously, there are two thousand words of the new book.  Once I started, it turned out I had several things to say, you will be astonished to hear.  I even made up an entirely new theory about the evolutionary nature of beauty, which took me quite by surprise. (I now have to go and look up the science, to see if I have any peer-reviewed evidence to back it up.) One of the things I like about writing is that I quite often find myself transcribing ideas I did not know I actually had.  I think this is why some writers can grow a little mystical about their work, because every so often they get an unexpected bullet from the subconscious or the subliminal or the collective unconscious (at which point, they all rush off to brush up on their Jung).  I like to be quite stern and ruthless about the act of writing, even though I have some romantic notions about literature and language generally.  I believe that it is not a matter of magic or inspiration, but application and perspiration.  I always loved that line of Nabokov's, when he was asked about the idea of characters in a novel taking on a life of their own: sheer balderdash, he said (not in so many words); 'my characters are like galley slaves'.  That's the spirit. 

After all that I feel: happy, relieved, industrious, galvanised.  I am acutely aware that it is only 2,000 words, and there are 88,000 to go.  But as Caesar said, of building Rome: brick by brick, my citizens, brick by brick.

 

And, as part of the fledgling my year in pictures project, here is what I saw today.

I'm afraid the snow and dog theme persists.

Hedge:

Running dogs:

Woods:

My little garden gate, which for some reason captivated me this morning, with its delicate covering of snow:

Coming to terms with human frailty

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Oh, it was all going to be so perfect.  On Monday morning, I was going to be like a finely tuned racehorse breaking out of the gate. It was a new year, a new start, and, the most creakingly hoary of clichés, a new me.  I was going to start writing the new book, and entirely reinvent the blog. It would be all shining and excellent and novel.  It would blind you with its brilliance. I pictured myself as one of those great prima ballerinas of old, the proper divas, bending gracefully to pick up bouquets as they were thrown to the stage by a roaring crowd.

Instead of which, I got hit by the Fear.  It came roaring down the track like an out of control truck, ran me over, and disappeared ruthlessly over the horizon.  For two days my fingers have been paralysed.  I could not, as my most charming friend Stephen likes to say, write fuck on a dusty blind.  I pretended to do 'research', while all the time feeling as if I were crouching under the desk waiting for the terror to pass.

Sarah called this morning. 'I think I have the Fear,' I said.

'Yes, yes,' she said.  There was a pause. 'Fear of what?'

'Well,' I said, talking quickly so as to cover over my utter idiocy. 'That we shall write a very bad book.'

'Yes,' she said, sounding distracted. 'That's not really very likely is it?'

'Isn't it?' I said.

'We are both professional writers,' she said, calmly. 'We have done this before. We have a good idea. Unless we are both struck by accidental lobotomy at the exact same time, I think we shall be all right.'

'I see,' I said.  'You are saying that statistics are on our side?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Oh well,' I said.  'That's all right then.'

Sarah has occasional fleeting visits to the irrational.  Her default mode is, however, bracingly practical.  I have never done practical in my life.  I get all twisted up inside because in my secret heart I think if I try hard enough, and think hard enough, and work hard enough, I might just, one day, write something that comes close to Mrs Dalloway.  Sarah does not care a whit about Mrs Woolf.  She is an absolute pro. I am, from now on, going to attempt to emulate her.  THAT is my new year's resolution.

PS I read somewhere once that someone did a lovely project where they just took a photograph a day for a whole year, so that they had a visual record of their daily life. The pictures were not an aesthetic festival, just plain snapshots of an ordinary life.  I love that idea.  One of the things I do want to try and do this year is have a picture a day. It might get dull or repetitive, I may get bored and give up on the whole thing.  But, for what it is worth, here is what I saw today -

Snow on the trees:

The sheep, just visible through the starting blizzard:

One of the dogs, running down the beech avenue:

And the other one, hock deep in snow:

That snow, by the way, is not a drift.  There has been no wind for two weeks.  That is just how deep it is. For your reference, here is my flower pot, now entirely submerged, with its ever-growing cap:

Happy New Year

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

A slightly belated happy new year to all you lovely readers.  The new year has brought a new snow. Everything here is quite white and silent, as great fat flakes of snow fall from a sky the colour of doves.  My plan for the day is to turn up the heat and be grateful for the great gift of electricity.

The garden, this morning, as the weather set in:

Just so you can see how many inches we have had, here is a little submerged flowerpot, with its undisturbed cap of snow:

I had friends to stay for the festivities, and they have set off for the south in what is fast turning into a blizzard.  Keep your fingers crossed for them.