Writing down the days

Yesterday I went off to my writers’ group. We met in a cellar (converted into a bar and restaurant) with flagstone floors and a great black leather chaise longue on which the permanently tired poet could recline. Reading my own work aloud fills me with despair. I can’t say the feedback was helpful either, although S did say it read ‘as if it was already published’. I didn’t get the feeling that what I was writing was of huge interest to them. To myself it sounded slightly contrived and derivative. One or two good lines.

 

W was the most cheerful, and the worst writer there. He was wearing a green hat his uncle stole from Italo Calvino. (No, I don’t really believe that either.) He brought a page and a half of text he had written two years ago while sitting in a cafe called Nagasaki and thinking about an explosion. Oh tacky symbolism! He doesn’t know how to write and I doubt he has the aptitude for hard work. He likes to think of himself as a writer. The way I might like to imagine myself as a petite graceful ballerina able to stand on her tippy toes and pirouette in a rapid whirl.

 

S had written a good piece but very short and laboured, leaving characters behind in the plot, unresolved dilemmas, a central charcter who remains a cipher all the way to the end. He won’t rewrite, I know that in my bones. The effort of writing appalls him, he only writes if he absolutely has to do so.

 

Both W and S are aspects of myself as I present them here, but I do write. Every day, despite reluctance and aversion. Rewriting mostly, pieces I don’t care for any longer, but reworking and struggling to make them publishable. It is such backbreaking bloody work and there is always so little to show for the effort.

But it was a warm and funny time together despite the awkwardness at moments and we are to meet again in a fortnight. Came back and thought of all the gritty hours of effort that sobriety has given me. No point ever in revising drunken writing, it is rarely worth the trouble. Sentimental and rambling, disconnected, full of unrealistic wishes and maudlin nostalgia, clumsy and lazy prose written under the influence.

 

Now I am doing a belated apprenticeship and developing the skills I learnt in features writing, slowly trying to break into a more serious and considered writing. Creative non-fiction. Fiction, Book reviewing, travel pieces, food history. It is slow and I need to read more, study more, find out how to correct my own errors. Spot those errors, not let them slip through. But little by little I am getting somewhere. And the effort is worthwhile, the satisfaction deep.

 

Another day of promise, building on days just like it. These are the balmy days of recovery and I cherish each and every one of them.

Reality checking: mapwork of the spirit

Had porridge and Fairtrade coffee, walked up to the bus stop, hot and sticky weather — scribbling in my moleskine and feeling a little desperate about the writing not coming together quickly enough, the slow pace of recovery, how clueless I feel much of the time, insecure and travelling through uncharted territory. Sat and looked at at hot golden fields, hollyhocks in profusion, the brilliant scarlet flowers of the runner beans winding up their trellises. 

 

To the library where I took out an early exploration into psychogeography by Iain Sinclair. Rambled around the lanes of the town, then to the meeting, greeting others as I arrived, glad to be out of the humidity of the library and shops. Having coffee and a chocolate-studded biscuit, delicious, sitting in my usual place and smiling at those I have come to know. P saying to me she has discovered her key problem is resentment — feeling a little uneasily that she is feeding that resentment with stoked fury.

 

And then we were into a group conscience and dreary old J saying: ‘I bring myself to the meeting and take my mess to my sponsor.’ We are all messes, sober or not. How awfully pukka and middle-class he can be, a schoolteacher and dry as a bone. We went on to talk about being kinder to ourselves, outgrowing that punitive self that only understands carrot or stick. Talked about the void we find when the drama of drunkeness is gone — moving beyond duality into an understanding that things are what they are. Moving beyond relentless self-improvement schemes into acceptance. Able to simply be with ourselves and others.

 

And then I did the drying up, the flow and grace of that helpfulness between women in the kitchen, the ease of talking and tasking, no strain or resentment. Up to the cathedral, thinking about the young woman living at home and watching her mother drink each night, unable to recall the television programmes she had seen the night before. The daughter tense and fearful and wanting to escape, wanting to have fun and be young again, not trapped in penitence. And despite all the genuine pathos there was also self-pity, a lethal sentimentality that skewed the share.

 

Bought a small Hidcote lavender and bunches of bright daisies and a lovely handful of sweet peas, that delicate evocative scent. Mushrooms, some cutlery, Sniffing my flowers, the lilac and blue and pink and cream of the sweet pea blossoms and glad to be letting beauty into my life again.

 

Coming home and planting the lavender bush in a glazed pot. Brimming over with unthinking happiness, the slow getting of wisdom in life. Just to keep going and keep trusting. Not to be so afraid of what is happening on the inside, to simply notice it and let the feelings come up and pass. To live as best I can. Charting the unknown as best I can. The authenticity will follow when I want it badly enough. To let in that wholehearted hunger –

Someone to watch over you

Somebody from one of my groups, three years sober, has gone off on a bender. Not answering calls, not at home, not coming near any of us. I have such a knot in my stomach and wish I could go and search for him, bring him back. The way I used to long to be able to take my yoiunger sisters away from home and give them a better life, used to dream of searching for my dead brother in the veld.

 

And I worry about my other brother, who is severely alcoholic. Lost on a tropical island, sitting watching the surf and drinking himself to death. The new Robinson Crusoe adrift in alcoholism.

 

Words from an old jazzy lyric: ‘I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood/wish that I could/ Find someone to watch over me’  Ella Fitzgerald singing in Berlin in 1963 or so. My parents had the vinyl LP recording and I heard it over and over again on the forest reserves as a child. Haunting and poignant, that wistful voice.

 

We talked about responsibility tonight in our meeting, hot rain lashing the streets as we arrived and then suddenly stopping — but no cooling down, the sun like a metal disk low in the sky. We sat upstairs in the stuffy attic room and talked about our fears around responsibility.  Taking responsibility and making amends. Taking responsibility for children. Setting limits on our over-responsibility.

 

I was the oldest child in the family, the big sister, the eldest daughter. I acted grown-up but I was a child and forever trying to evade the huge burden of responsibility. When I did take on and assume responsibity, it seemed so simple, such a small good thing to do for others. Something I learnt so late.

Hoping my friend makes it back before nightfall, hoping he calls and reaches out. Thinking of him drinking and terrified somewhere, full of bravado or anger or all the other exaggerated impulsive feelings brought on by excess drinking.

 

Our broken human lives, so precious, so easily cast aside.

Down by the river

Up early and the view from my window silver with mist and the faint green outline of hills barely visible –dressed for walking and rambled around the grey streets of the deserted market town before climbing down to the paths alongside the Wye, shining and rippling like a rumpled satin bedspread. Birds very loud in the woodland — I was dismayed to see the invasive Japanese knotweed higher than my head and flowering with small pea-blue orchid blossoms.

 

As I walked along I wasn’t paying attention to what was around me as I usually try to do. I was at time plotting fiction, the rhythmn of dialogue matching the beat of my walk, and I was composing a long post on not being superficial. When I realised that the point of it was to prove how unsuperficial I myself am, I stopped and watched hoverflies over white bramble flowers.

 

All the same I do wonder about those who get their psychology from Oprah and Dr Phil rather than Melanie Klein. Those who have never read Sissela Bok on lying. That lure of the easy and popular. I can see it in myself and my love of glossy gardening books with full-colour images of English country gardens, manicured and colour-themed, so much more enticing to read than DIY books on gardening or botany textbooks. When I have to try and reproduce the glossy images in my own garden, I need the gritty knowhow. The superficial never gets you there –

 

Both S and myself worrying about a friend who wasn’t at a meeting last week and hasn’t called at all. Nearly three years sober and doing well, so it might be fine. But there is a tiny cold dread in us as the silence from him continues.

 

Hot and cloudy morning — going back to the battle with fiction and intermittently thinking about my duck breasts with orange sauce, tonight’s supper. Each time I retrun to the story I am trying to write I begin yawning and a delicious sleepiness creeps over me. Resistance takes many forms.

Sunday musings in the Welsh hills

Up early and out for another walk in the market town, loving thr freshness and slight chill of the dawn, the misty hillsides. Up the road to the castle, part Norman and part Jacobean. Stopped to look at old shelves of dew-damp books, honesty bookselling. A man in a cap, not young but sleeping rough, was there and stood up pretended to be looking at books as I walked around. His rucksack next to the dirtbin. An empty can of cider next to the stairs leading up to the castle front entrance.

 

I had been reeading all about Bill Wilson struggling to sober up and the visit from Ebby Thatcher, talking to a ravaged and despairing Bill W about the Oxford Group. I felt sympathy with this lost soul staring at bookshelves and waiting for me to leave. I wasn’t sure if I should go over and greet him but it was lonely and deserted there and I was wary of finding myself faced with drug psychosis. Alcoholism I understand but not the delusions of chemical euphoria or paranoia.

 

So left and walked down to Brook Terrace, Booth Terrace, Albert Terrace; wandering around the grey and lovely back streets with stone-walled houses, sash windows and window boxes of pale blue petunias and bright red and creamy-pink pelargoniums. Thinking as I walked about the difficulties of adjusting to life over here, the feeling of having escaped from a much harsher and more dangerous society, my fears around belonging-not belonging, of being trapped, of being homeless, twisting and turning mentally in paradox.

 

Back home I had salmon with eggs on fresh bread, sitting with Sunday papers at the breakfast table with S. Coffee, reading all about Gordon Brown’s failures as Labour leader and PM. That Madonna is 50 and that fact cannot be reinvented. Nigel Slater being subtle about barbecues.

 

Then rushed back into town for the 10am Mass — dull and dogmatic sermon, kindly priest but not bright at all. Something approaching the claustrophobia I felt in St Mary’s last week. And a painful backache, near my shoulders. A hymn to the tune of Sail Bonny Boat/Over the Seas to Skye.

 

Back at the house, French doors open, heat flowing in, sun bright on the soft green grass outside. Reading more of the biography of BillW — not particularly honest elsewhere but good on the horrors of his alcoholism. Thinking about the relief of being sober and the ‘language of the heart’ found only between those who have experienced the same stigma and despondency and shame of runaway drinking.

 

Sleepy Sunday — lawnmowers, blackbirds in the garden, children laughing and playing next door. The feeling that came to me in church, an echo of Julian of Norwich: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ To trust in this process, to follow my heart.

Walking at dawn

About to put on my walking shoes again and head out. Sun coming up over the hills fast. Yesterday I went up along the road leading into town, quickly around the Butter Market (had the WI reserve a bakewell tart and blueberry pie), up the flights of stairs to the castle, down the cobbled road, along past Swan Inn and its deserted walled garden, past the alms houses, so freezing cold in winter, down the path to St Mary’s, over the wooden bridge through woodland, stopping to drink from the shelf of rock amid moss, an ancient spring, icy water an exlixir — the strong woodland smells of earth mould and flowering trees, curious black birds darting about. Home stretch and  time for coffee.

 

A great way to begin the day. Off I go again. Thinking about the tender vulnerable feeling of being in a new relationship, torn between self-protectiveness and reaching out, risking a little more each day. About growth and letting go of selfish fearful habits in community.

 

Learning to live. Each day a fresh beginning, the sense of renewal, taking up the realities of yesterday, working with the possibilities of tomorrow. Long day’s journey into night — the day ahead a thorny beautiful path to traverse.

 

And birds calling, sharp high cries demanding I get out there before the sun has burned off the mist. How impatient I am to make the most of my own life these days!

The self uncovered

Lively sharing at a meeting last night in Hereford — strange to be there in the evening, the warmth of the day glowing in the skies and quiet city streets. I think of Hereford as a town but it is a cathedral city.

 

Shared a little myself, caught up in the excitement and vitality of the meeting but afterwards, driving home, wondered if I had shared from a deep and sincere enough place within. I struggle to find language for what is going on in me as the months pass, finding myself in steady recovery and living in Britain.

 

I feel I have somehow lost a vital connection to place through leaving Africa — I hunger after scenes of dust and heat and empty spaces, far horizons. The sounds of the Nguni languages, the smiles and laughter. People here don’t laugh or sing enough.  But I am also getting used to living without the hypervigilance and fear I lived with in South Africa, especially in the cities. The absence of danger makes me almost giddy at moments.

 

My life is in hiatus. I need steadier work so as to feel anchored and secure. The deep insecurity stretches back much further than my present situation. For years I lived without family or any sense of belonging, lost and distraught, adrift in a dark strange universe. Now I am finding a place for myself but losing a place and a relationship that meant so much to me. Loss of place means loss of identity for me. And I lack a regular and sustaining spiritual practice. That will take time because I cannot borrow faith any longer, need something authentic in which I can trust.

 

Now I am going to go out for a brisk walk as the sun burns off the valley mist. Time to embrace the day and get those legs moving –

Take my hand

Yesterday, as I was coming out of a lunchtime meeting In a nearby market town, a newly sober woman stopped me and asked me to help her.

 

We went up the road to sit amongst borders of marguerites and astrantia and honey-scented buddleia., drinking tea and eating a delicious buttery cake or biscuit. I talked about Step One and listened to her quibble and argue with herself. More tea, more biscuits!

 

‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’

 

So simple and so obvious. But for years I cherished the idea that I was only powerless sometimes and did not like to think that my life’s unmanageability was linked to a daily habit of drinking to excess. I wouldn’t admit that alcohol was my solution and escape and drug, that to go anywhere  or any length of time without alcohol made me miserable. That alcohol helped me push aside all the distress and urgency I sometimes felt about so much going wrong in my life, the disappointment and procrastination and missed opportunities, the health scares, the loneliness and failure to sustain relationships.

 

And until I was ready to say that the unmanageability of a sorry excuse for a life was somehow connected to being powerless over alcohol, nothing and nobody could help me. I was unable to save my own life. I still wanted to be able to drink. I didn’t want to stop, didn’t feel I had to stop.

 

Looking back now I can see that the illusion of choice was just delusion. I needed alcohol because I was trapped in alcoholism, had no idea of being able to live without alcohol. It was only possible to go without alcohol  for any length of time if I knew there would be drinking at the end of the temporary abstinence.

 

And yesterday I was so grateful to feel free within — no craving, no fighting  myself within my head ( that endless internal squabbling!) about drinking or not-drinking, no shame, no sense of being unable to cope, no muddle, no unwellness. I could sit and be present and just listen. Bringing her back to the same points again and again, but lovingly.

 

The choice is hers — the effort is hers. But if she reaches out for a helping hand I am more than happy to be there for her. Everything can only get better in sobriety. All I can share is what worked for me: and hope she wants the same miracle in her life.

The agony and the boredom [and the stray pleasures] of writing

A watched pot never boils. A journal subscribed to never arrives.

 

My partner decided to subscribe to the London Review of Books. He doesn’t know it well. I read it avidly online, especially if there is anything written by Iain Sinclair, Hilary Mantel or James Wood (pf whom more later). All of last week I waited for the Royal Mail postman to drive up in the red van with insignia and deliver the latest issue. It didn’t arrive. It may not arrive until we have made a great deal of fuss. I still watch for the postman though because I have a naive and childlike notion of postmen being reliable and likeable men in quaint uniforms. ‘Postman Pat/Postman Pat!/Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat!’ That kind of thing.

 

The Private Eye has not arrived either but it is the London Review of Books that I long for. I may have to go out and buy a copy, prompted by the funniest quote I have read in years from the LA Times:

 

‘But there is vast anecdotal evidence of subscribers to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books reading Wood’s essays huddled in entryways, coats and keys and umbrellas still in their hands. He has earned a rare and awesome cultural authority.’

 

That’s me! Well, no, it isn’t. I couldn’t finish reading Wood on Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker online. Vast anecdotal evidence? Hilarious. And now he is writing on Aleksander Hemon’s fictional lives and I have to work out how to roast a Barbary duck breast for supper and can’t manage both Wood and duck. Too mentally exhausting. But I do like to read the London Review of Books and wish it would arruve.

 

For one thing it would mean that I could stop trying to write fiction and just read about fiction for a day or two. The odd thing is that I enjoy writing. I blog and post and do emails and work out features articles without too much distress or procrastination. But fiction is my own personal demon. If what I wrote was no good, I could cheerfully think, ‘That’s that!’ and move on to nonfiction and write  that. But some lines and paragraphs are tantalisingly satisfactory. So I persist.

 

The low-level depression is still there but shifted or displaced a little by a lively phone conversation with a new friend from the rooms. And an exchange of emails witha nother transatlantic friend from the fellowship. And a slice or two of locally cured ham, mild but spicy, lashed with Dijon and piled on buttered bread.

 

Another friend, a blogger,  wrote and said.’Are you lonely, sweet thing?’ And instantly Sweet Thing was less lonely. The human community’s collective miracle, that we need one another.

 

But now I must be thankful I have not read James Wood on the Making of Fiction — so intimidating! — and can get back to a short story that began as a novel and may end as an epigram.

 

Wondering too why somebody who typed in ’sexual life’ on Google arrived at my blog. Technorati seems puzzled too. It isn’t that my sex life is not hot (she said coyly) but I don’t think it is anybody’s business but mine. The mysteries of blog-conspiring in the Aquarian Age of the Internet…

Trudging not skipping

Writing to Una back in South Africa yesterday I admitted that I was feeling depressed and flat, very demoralised about the writing going so slowly and feeling isolated over here, the future very uncertain. I have never suffered from clinical depression, but years of blotting out emtions with alcohol have taken a toll.

 

I am not very good at living a balanced life even if I share a life with somebody who has established a routine of meeting others and spending time with friends, hard work and plenty of outdoors exercise. The need to write takes up hours each day, and when it goes well I feel energised and happy. When it goes badly I want to crawl into a hole.

 

Moving here was not a geographical escape but it hasn’t been easy — sometimes my life now feels very unreal and uncertain. I don’t miss the Cape — well it is early days for that — but it is an effort adjusting to this society and the climate, the very different way of life.

 

There seems to be something missing at times and I can’t seem to access my deeper feelings except every now and again there is intense despondency or fear. I need to persist and try different ways of establishing a life and working on finding that balance. Making friends, talking more to others in AA. Perhaps I could speak more to Polly tomorrow when we go up to the cathedral gardens after the meeting.

 

I am afraid something will happen to Una, that things are not working out here. But the fears seem unbalanced and not unlike chimeras, erratic and fleeting, not grounded in realism.

 

Sunshine outdoors, the garden needing to be watered. I will go down and tidy the kitchen shortly. Have breakfast and read the Guardian. Then come back up here and try to write. Line after line, paragraph by paragraph. So many false starts and dead ends. Breaking stones, that is all, and I have to keep going.

 

This inner flatness is something I don’t quite know how to deal with — it makes me realise how I depend on my fertile imagination and the abundance of energy usually there early in the morning. This is the way I often feel towards the end of the day. But somehow to keep going and hope for a breakthrough.

 

Staying in the day, sober and learning to live sober, learning to write in a long-delayed apprenticeship, learning to live with somebody else while living with this dull self.

 

Perhaps a walk by the river might be a good idea — or some gardening. Mundane but life-restoring routines. Or perhaps I should find somebody to talk with, break the loneliness. The mood will pass, it is just a question of patience and common sense.