Monday, full of momentum

And after my glut of posting, WordPress summarily ejected me and I found I could not post to enthuse about my sober Sunday. A quiet but relaxing day, full of my new passion for food politics, admiring the clusters of pink blossom on a young weigela, playing with cats.

Last night my neighbour Thinus came around to let me know the arrangements for free leiwater this summer. Free water from the Elandskloof Dam runs down the deep ditches on either side of the streets and is channeled into homeowners’ gardens, into plots of fruit trees and kitchen gardens. It is not exactly free because we pay a nominal sum for the service, but gallons and gallons of cold pure mountain water floods my back garden for several hours each week.

Thinus stood there in the dark, self-importantly waving the notifications for water allocation in my direction and telling me how he intends to administer the water in our neighbourhood. As I looked at him in the warm darkness, the mountains scarcely visible behind him in the distance, I realised he was happy. He loves the details of irrigation and neighbourly co-operation each summer. He steals much of the free water on the pretext of starting to run the water early. I looked at him and felt envious of his happiness. I wish I felt happy in that simple uncomplicated way more often. I want to feel the way I did last year, when I was newly sober and floating around on a pink cloud. Before I went to Wales. Before it all went wrong.

This isn’t an easy time and yet I have so much to be grateful for. And I don’t have the daily horror and terrors of drinking, the self-loathing and unconvincing excuses and great big suitcase of cherished resentments that I once packed and unpacked every other day.

Woke up this morning and realised that my central character in the famous novel is to be called Fernanda and she will have lived in the shiftless and magical cities, sea ports, of Luanda and Beira, that I knew so well when I was younger. Her voice is light and low and inflected with a slight lisp. It may drive me crazy, that soft little breathy voice, long beore I reach 10 000 words. But Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost upon me and I have to make do with the characters I have pressganged into staying with me for the duration of the fiction.

Now I am going to eat locally produced muesli and think about why I love Michael Pollan and want a resolarized future. Yesterday I read reams and reams of bad news about genetically modified cowpeas grown all over Africa for enhanced crop yields. The alternative would be more pesticides. I shared all this informed angst with my housemate until she locked herself in the bathroom and turned on the taps to drown me out.

I am lonely, and my uncurbed enthusiasms bore my loved ones.

Perhaps I should send Barack Obama a letter all about the Luo of Kenya and their fondness for beans and pumpkin and cassava leaves simmered in a black pot. His father was Luo and I am overjoyed at the prospect of the first African-American president having a filial connection to Africa.

It is cloudy and cool here among the mountains. I am going to write long emails to the unsober newcomers who write to me, to encourage and bully them, hoping my Good Advice on any aspect of sobriety you care to mention does not drive them back to the bottle. They would rather write to me than sit in meetings with real live recovering alcoholics because they can click Delete and I just vanish into Cyber Limbo whereas human beings tend to hang around and say annoying things and sniff at your ethanol-tainted breath.

Feeling grateful but preoccupied, not exactly staying in the present moment with mindfulness, as my Buddhist friends would say. Sober and scatty.

Notes from a sickbed

That sounds very literary and invalidish, but in fact I have arisen from the sickbed, crammed with flu meds and fuelled with fresh orange juice, and the sun has come out. Self-care is not difficult if one is not pouring litres of alcohol into a sick body and I have a large bowl of oranges and bananas and papayas and tiny green limes on the kitchen table.

Yesterday afternoon I walked down to see the lonely Sheila — the rain caught me in a sudden cloudburst and I arrived soaked and miserable. She was surrounded by friends all eating cream cakes and drinking champagne, and holding court like some hypochondriac courtesan. I was furious. Nothing so irksome as wasted sympathy and Sheila is quite capable of sorting out her loneliness without my help. So I refused cream cakes or champagne, stayed for a short while and then dragged myself home to bed.

Tossed and turned for hours and kept getting up to drink water and refill my hot-water bottle. Had a call from Una, enthralled by an electric thunderstorm with sheet lightning but miserable and wanting to come home. Read some of Thomas Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul which made me feel like a metaphysical sissy.

I have invited a friend over for lunch and will make a great vegetable soup to have with crusty bread. If I call the vegetable soup minestrone, I can toss in little bits of pasta and that will take the soup into a higher dimension of cucina peasant cooking from Italy. Let me see if I have some tomato puree in the store cupboard…

Village life in the sun

The ferocious wind dropped suddenly and I snatched up library books and rushed outdoors. The blossom is nearly gone on the ornamental plum trees and the oaks are massed bright green. A group of young truant schoolgirls had taken shelter behind large bushes, petting and cavorting. How do I know this? Because they had taken off their school uniform blouses and bras and laid them carefully over the foliage and I could hear the laughter of boys. Bare-breasted girls frolicking under trees in blossom. Sometimes Africa is a very pleasant place to live.

All over the village there are funerals for youngsters who have died of AIDS, many not even 20 years old. Families dressed in black are walking down to the graveyard or queueng for buses. But life goes on among the young as it always will, irrepressibly. Unstoppably, despite war and plague.

In the library the staff were playing Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Holding Out for a Hero’ loudly and I hummed as I searched for books. Alan Hollinghurst paperbacks with warnings ‘Unsuitable for teenagers’. Books I donated to a library starved of gay or lesbian literature. Nobody seems to have caught on to the indecency of Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet yet. Great hideous flower arrangements of dried proteas on the tables, donated by a farmer’s wife, thick with dust on the feathery pink spikes. Billy Graham and Joseph Brodsky misfiled side by side. The young librarians in headscarves, poor and with bad teeth, bopping behind the main desk. A petition on the front desk that reads ‘Keep our library free of pornography’. The same person has listed all her friends and forged their signatures.

Came back out past the garage workshops blistered with sun and reeking of oil spills. The hot silent pavements, the silence and watching gazes behind shutters. Small towns hold terrors that only those who have grown up in them understand. I never drank as a teenager growing up in a small town of philistine hatred, but I escaped into books and wild fantasies as if my life depended on it, a bad start to life.

And I chose in mid-life to return to a village in South Africa, to live here where the freedom of thought is non-existent and endure again the parsimony and moralizing craziness of my youth.

It doesn’t always make sense. But I lived in the city for more than 20 years, the most beautiful city in the world, with Table Mountain toppling into the mirrored bay each morning, the silver trees glittering above Rhodes Drive, the blue skies and sweep of mountains and enthrallment of a city thrumming with jazz and brilliant printed fabrics, markets selling ebony and planed carved masks from Gabon and Mali, terraces hung with globes at night suspened over the ocean, cantilevered balconies for pleasure, golden globes swimming with moths. An infinitely lovable and heartbreaking city, unique and unforgettable. But I am not a city person at heart. I love the wilder empty spaces of Africa. So that was that.

And now the wind is coming up again in chaff and dust. I am in a house with the curtains drawn against the glare, listening to Stravinsky in a cottage with a field in front of it against a clear view of mountains. The landscape is heavenly, all I need to do is learn how to live with myself.

Breezy Saturday

Got out of bed and went out into the back garden in my pyjamas, thinking vaguely about going for a walk around the village. The wind is like ice and clouds are massing to the north. More rain.

Back indoors, put on coffee and began a biography of the poet Stephen Spender. Our local library is a little short on new books. The church ladies read voraciously and then scribble ‘Rubbish!’ or ‘UnChristian!’ in the margins with blue biro pens, along with crossing out all the ‘swear words’. They would shocked to hear that some might think they are defacing public literature. On the last page of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels, somebody had scribbled ‘Tripe’ and signed her name, illegibly. A volume of Jilly Cooper has the recommendation ‘Full of filthy sex’ written on the frontispiece and underneath a disappointed reader has replied ‘But repetitious!’

It is a relatively quiet weekend in the village, neighbours walking dogs, the African Zionists up on the hill drumming from dawn to dusk, schoolboys playing cricket on the playing fields across the road and Una keen that I accompany her to the Anglican church tomorrow. The old Victorian stone church was thatched for many years and burned down by vandals two years ago. Now it has been rebuilt but has long kikuyu grass growing all around the building so there are fleas everywhere and a very restless congregation.

Before getting up this morning I lay in the darkness, snuggled under quilts and listening to birdsong as I made up another chapter of the fiction I am working on. The moment I begin writing the chapter down it will go wrong and have to be changed and the possibilities will all dry up. That is the reality of writing. But it was such a pleasure lying there telling myself stories as I did when I was a child, the comfort and wishfulness untempered by the need to write it down. It felt as though I was dreaming myself awake.

And back to work again –

Oranges and lemons

Woke up and heard the rain bucketing down, the wind thrashing around in the trees and tried to clear my throat as I turned over under the quilt. The flu is back, my immune system low and I have a fever and sore throat.

Being self-employed means dealing with an unsympathetic boss. So I am swaddled in blankets and full of analgesics, bribing myself to stay in front of the computer with promises of hot lemon drinks and freshly squeezed orange juice.

Yesterday along with Pam and several thousand other lunatics, I signed up early for this year’s Nanowrimo.

Sigh. I hate trying to explain this. You either get the point or you are sane and cannot understand it at all. Some years ago, a few wanna-be writers got together and decided to dedicate a site to National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) and encouraged other would-be writers to try and complete a 50 000 word novel in the month of November. No prizes, no point in cheating, no consideration for the quality of the writing. It was just an ordeal, a marathon of writing to a word count.

Unsurprisingly, thousands of us signed up and Nanowrimo is now an annual Internet institution.

There is a category for ‘literary fiction’ and nothing indicates more aptly quite how absurd Nanowrimo is. You can’t write literary fiction in great chunks of hasty prose. But we all do it anyway –we get our plot outlines ready, we list our characters, we link up with other absurdists and we all commit to this nonsense because it is such fun.

Writing is lonely and the odds of getting a good sentence or two down on paper after a day alone at the computer are slim. But at Nanowrimo, there is a writing jamboree in full swing with everyone spewing out hopelessly bad sentences and all of us promising ourselves we will go back and revise.

The idea is that it breaks through writer’s block. I am not sure it does. It is a junkfest. Everyone plays at being a writer and agonises in forums and offers advice, and nobody is critical of anyody’s efforts, especially our own. The trick is to reach a total of 50 000 words by the last day of November and there is no time for polishing or revising if you want to reach that word count.

Writing fast and uncritically is a liberating sensation. Maybe it does work for some. Novels have been published based on drafts produced during Nanowrimo. Groups of crime writers and sci-fi aficionados get together and encourage each other to the finishing line. There are regional parties held offline, and people make new friends, find mentors, suck up to publishers, fall in love. Writers’ support groups are formed.

As I noted at the start of this post, the concept either resonates with you or it doesn’t. It makes no sense to me at all. But I shall be doing it for the third year running and hope to see a few other sober speedwriters there too…

Now it is raining again and I am going to go out and hang up wet towels and sheets before having some grated ginger and fresh lemon juice with boiling water, a spoonful of honey and clove or two. This is a day for indulging in the absurd. But at least I can sip my lemon toddy and know it isn’t full of Scotch and I am no longer ‘medicating’ myself with alcohol and turning my whole life into absurdity.

The Love of a Good Woman

All afternoon I have been curled up on the sofa reading the Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald and feeling overcome with admiration and sadness. Furious too that the Letters are so badly edited — but what can anyone expect from a fond but clueless son-in-law? Sad for the lost unproductive years treading water in that marriage to the lovable alcoholic Desmond, sad that so many letters went to the bottom of the Thames when her houseboat sank (twice), sad she had to scrabble so for money. But the asides and comments are priceless even at their most nattering and mundane, the mind of a genius given free expression. She was also an Englishwoman of a certain generation and cultivated temperament, and fond of trivia.

I don’t care, I mine those letters for the wry erudite sentences that could only come from the author of The Blue Flower. I loved her novels Innocence and At The Gate of Angels, but The Blue Flower is the elusive masterpiece.

She writes for the voiceless, not in the post-modern and political sense of those silenced by oppression or marginalised from the First World, but for those who are unable to articulate their understanding of the world, unable to make sense of their own lives. Those bullied and tormented by the knowing and sly and wilfully ignorant. The hapless innocents of the world who somehow come through despte all the odds. Just what one might expect from the niece of Ronald Knox, that great witty Catholic apologist who knew how common and garden miracles might be if you knew where to look.

So she lived in council flats and dyed her hair with teabags and was intimidated by her lunatic publishers and overlooked by the smarter literati. And just went on writing her brilliant novels. Showing all of us how little we really know about the historical novel or human motivations or, the great unmentionable, love.

Incorrigible optimism

Gardening makes me happy. I get black dirt under my fingernails and a crick in my lower back and I am no expert, but many of the plants I put in grow and flourish and almost anywhere I have lived has bay trees left behind, apricot trees, olives, bushes of cistus, lavender and rosemary left to the mercies of the next owner. Indigenous beauties of plumbago, tecomaria, the tree fuschia, confetti bushes, restio grasses. I don’t regret planting trees or shrubs and then having to leave them behind when I move on. It is my paltry offering to a world in need of greening.

So my tomatoes and basil and little silver thyme are all in the right places and watered. I have my old blue enamel pot with sliced baby leeks simmering on the stove and I have spent hours trying to write, getting a little further than I got yesterday.

Oddly, as I chopped leeks nd minced garlic, I found myself thinking about my Scottish grandparents, William from Linlithgow and Jean Hamilton (her maiden name) from Lanark and wishing I had known them. But my grandfather died in a car accident in France as a young man, an amateur golfer, and his widow went back to raise her three children in Edinburgh. I don’t know if she remarried. I don’t know why my father chose never to contact her again after leaving home and emigrating to Africa.

Of course I wonder if she was alcoholic. I wonder too about that fatal car accident near Hyeres and if my paternal grandfather was drunk behind the wheel. Alcoholism seems to have a strong genetic run in my family. The Scottish Jekyll and Hyde split like a defect reaching back generations. I have a small heretical theory that Calvinism emerged as a puritanical control mechanism for alcoholic Scots, those drunk men contemplating the thistle.

But today I am just an ordinary sober gardener, tucking my new herbs into old half-barrels and eyeing the cloudy skies to figure out if it is likely to rain tonight. Somebody I thought was lost in alcoholism and back out there drifting through bars and bottlestores and lost weekends emailed me and I feel very happy to know she is still trying to get sober. So long as we keep trying, there is hope.

Planting tomatoes and basil

One of those prosaic days. Yesterday was fun: sitting in the old farmhouse transformed into the Cuban African restaurant Buena Vists Social Club, all blues and ochres and the famous portrait of Che Guevara, old photos of downtown Havana, Spanish chandeliers, fires lit to warm the diners and too many jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese.

Driving home, dense mist on Sir Lowry’s Pass, we stopped at a plant nursery and I saw a bonsai wisteria smothered in deep blue panicles of blossom, the panicles almost larger than the tiny creeper. Bought silver thyme (a girl can never get enough thyme so long as there is Mediterranean cooking to be done!) and a tray of ‘Roma’ tomato seedlings. I want bushes of ripe tomatoes, juicy and ready to eat by Christmas. Companion-planted with basil, the makings of classic Italian pasta dishes right at hand.

So I shall be gardening this morning, enjoying the spring blossom and trying to detach the ripe yellow lemons from the top of my lemon tree.

Taking each day as it comes. This afternoon, a bout of editing work. This evening supper wth friends. Leaving the past and the future to serendipity. Just dealing with what is happening now, what I can do to hold the balance steady now, live as fully as I can on this particular day. Sober and grateful and keeping the focus on the here and now.

Monday malfunctioning

My computer is malfunctioning and may have a virus. A damp cold morning, roads and fields wet with mist. There is a falcon circling the oaks at the far end of the field, leisurely but watchful movements.

My neighbour Tienie brought round a copper samovar he found at an auction sale in some warehouse near Cape Town docks. It is dented and ugly. Tienie loves collecting old unloved objects he calls antiques. He has a pink and yellow rose-patterned chamber pot he insists is genuine Limoges. It may well be Limoges, he paid a fortune for the damn thing, but it is hideous. I looked at the samovar and pointed out that it is non-functional because there is nowhere to put hot coals and no cylinder for heating water, no electrical connection point. It is a copper-plated ornament designed to look like a Russian samovar. Tienie ignored me and said it looks very old to him and he intends to hammer out the dents and burnish the copper. Nice teapot but no tea.

On Wednesday I shall be leaving for my 10-day retreat. Before I go I would like to write something decent for the third chapter of my fiction manuscript, but ‘decent’ needs inspiration. Nevertheless, I labour on.

My housemate wants a supper of tandoori chicken, grilled, with poppadums and chopped coriander and creamy yoghurt and spicy potatoes. That will take care of the afternoon. While I was away she lived on fried eggs, ketchup and toasted sndwiches, gave herself heartburn and didn’t look at a vegetable or make a fresh salad, not once.

This morning I woke from an odd dream about trying to fix up a farm belonging to my former editor, to find a glass of just-squeezed orange juice on my bedside table. Sweet and delicious, such a wake-up alert. Then I sat up and read some John Banville (The Sea) and some passages from the BB, hokey and earnest, but true. Mention of the still suffering alcoholic and I said a silent prayer of thanks that I am not still there, arguing with myself and scheming about finding ways to drink secretly, needing to pour drink down me and in denial of that needing it, lying to myself and others, using up all the time and energy available to me in the day on thoughts about drinking or not drinking or trying to stop drinking or not being able to stop drinking. Addiction is so tiring and monotonous and takes up so much time.

Hard work is tiring, but in a different way. Boredom is just boredom. And if I am lucky, there will be new opportunities and a phrase or two that makes the writing worthwhile. I might even get to see the falcon swoop down through the branches of the oak, that precise, deadly, but beautiful pounce.

The hard durable beauty of the unanaesthetised life.

Rowing upstream

Woke from a nightmare I can’t recall and just lay in the dark with my eyes closed and praying to get through another day.

And as if by swift grace or a sprinkling of magic, the mood shifted and I could get up and drink coffee, standing at the living room window watching the wind tear across the fields, hearing my housemate sing tunelessly in the shower, seeing the little feral cat grooming herself on a low sunny wall. I hope she is not going to attack all the new baby birds, sparrows and house martins, that learn to fly in the front garden, hopping from verandah eaves to the wall to the ground.

So difficult to feel this churlish within, a mix of irritability and dull misery. So ungracious. It isn’t as serious as depression, but rather like trying to row a heavy boat upstream, working oars against the current or incoming tide.

The answer, of course, is to go out and do something for others, something simple and practical and useful. And not to make much ado about it, just to do it. So I shall help out with the homebased carers and cook a large split-pea soup and then sit with those who might need some help being fed. It isn’t much and I am not good company but I won’t be self-stuck in my unhappiness all day.

Then I shall make an Asian supper with pork, grind up coriander seeds and star anise and fenugreek, chop lemongrass and garlic, play around with fish sauce and soy and sesame oil, squeeze fresh lemons, mince root ginger. Heat up the big electric wok. When I was in the UK, so much was readymade and prepackaged that almost nobody made their own food from scratch and that was very offputting. Sitting on the kitchen step and pounding spices and herbs in a mortar with a heavy granite pestle is the most heartening therapy imaginable.

What I really need of course is AA offline; to be able to sit face-to-face with others in recovery who are telling my story and reminding me why I need to stay sober and how they managed to do it. How I miss those draughty meeting rooms with old latticed windows that creaked and stuck, the dingy halls and circle of uncomfortable chairs, the nicotine-stained gurus, those palely loitering and despondent newcomers, the smiles and hugs and heart-rending confessions! No real-life nittygritty AA here and I am lost without it. But at least I have online AA and I am more grateful than I can say for the supportive emails and comments.

So I settle back onto my seat in the boat and take up the oars in their rusty fetlocks, resume what alcoholic poet Anne Sexton called ‘the awful rowing towards God’. The ‘awful’ is about us, the hope is all to do with God and coming home. At least I’m struggling in the right direction.