In Person
Friday, May 28, 2004
We had a great night at the Cumberland Arms on Tuesday...a night when I loved Newcastle, and the community of people who live here...all the makers and thinkers, and smilers, and people that join in, and have opinions, and know how to enjoy themselves. I was just sorry that the room was too small to fit everyone in ! Tim Dalling is an inspired performer. He is much more than a musician. He really IS the music. It's hilarious and wonderful to be performing with him, or to have him set a poem to music.
We sang and laughed and had serious bits, and I even shook a shakey orange and sang myself!
I thank my lucky stars that I live in a vibrant community that is so full of people that make things, and think things and it's one of the best things about living here, that there is always an enthusiasm to collaborate amongst artists.
Anyway, I have just got back from the Chelsea Flower Show. I always wanted to go to it. I imagined wandering through vast camp exhibits of roses. But I think, in my imagination, it was always just me and my mum, not the other million thousand garden enthusiasts. It was so crowded, and you had to queue to see everything in a rather claustrophobic fenced in way, and the gardens are much smaller than they seem on the television. We both liked the cascading strawberry exhibit, and there were some beautiful ferny gardens. But God save us from garden ornaments! Why are they so naff? There were so many terrible nymphs and herons.
Also, I was sad that there was so little poetry involved...there were so many places where poems could have brightened things up, and lots of people who needed entertaining.
We only managed a few hours, but had a brilliant time lying about in a nice hotel, ordering scones from room service, and then finally meeting Tiger Darling, my exquisite new neice, who appeared with my sister and who lay gurgling on our laps.
This morning we went to the V and A and saw the Vivienne Westwood exhibition, which was wonderful. It really made you want to dress up and be a bit more audacious in the clothing department. I have never really worn ball gowns, or rubber, or large hats, or unravelling jerseys. We forget that anything is possible really, and that all you need is courage.I am trying to finish a short play based on a body part for Live Theatre. I keep on changing my mind and writing about different bits of the body. Ten minute plays can be devilishly difficult....
But I am very pleased with my own body at the moment. It's behaving very well, and I am amazed at its fortitude ! My next medical thing is a scan on June 8th, lying under the vast white machine with a disembodied voice calling BREATHE, DON'T BREATHE! Then we shall find out if the tamoxifen is working, or if chemotherapy is unavoidable. It's hard to believe that a small white pill taken each morning can stop cancer, but I am sure something is working. We'll see. I will let you know.Posted by julia @ 04:19 PM GMT
Friday, May 21, 2004
I feel much restored after days in the reiver country beyond Hexham. I had a good bout of solitude, then two nights with another writer. I lay in a great brass bed and wrote in my notebook. I ate long breakfasts. I miraculously wrote about five thousand words. I watched Bad Girls. I walked through fields filled with forget me nots and bluebells. I ran away when I saw cows or horses. I ate blueberries, raspberries, kiwi and avocado.
I came back yesterday, and went to listen to Jo Shapcott and Subhadassi reading at the Central Library in Newcastle. Subhadassi was launching a new book with Arc Press called Peeled. It's his first book, and a great occasion for celebration. What huge achievements these little books are! They take years to write, and they are full to the brim of work lovingly made, each word hand grown, organic, and then picked with care. Yet they are so slim! Jo read a poem called Her Book that she had written to wish a book of poems good luck, for as she said, once a book appears it's on its own out there, struggling to be seen amongst so many other volumes. It was lovely to hear Jo reading about her experience of chemotherapy. I felt a profound sense of belonging, of someone talking about a world I had felt quite isolated in. She has written a wonderful poem about baldness and its benefits.
It was a happy reading, the kind I most enjoy, with a great quietness and sense of listening. There was an immense rainbow in the sky last night. I wonder if it covered all of England? Then the wettest , fattest rain you could ever imagine.
I just finished The Lady's Maid by Margaret Forster which is a very satisfying read, and also A Child In Time by Ian McKewan...I don't usually like I.M 's writing much, but this was rather moving, and a beautifully constructed book.
Our basement is like a ancient cave, filled with swamps, pools of water, puzzled looking builders who look more like miners down the pit shovelling piles of blue clay, but my partner, who know about what stops houses falling down promises me that it will soon be a room from which I can sit and survey the blossoming garden. Can't wait!
Posted by julia @ 02:51 PM GMT
Sunday, May 16, 2004
I am just about to go away on a retreat again. I am going to buy lots of food from Marks and Spencers, and some bath oil. It's not faraway, so if there are any disasters, like I drive on the wrong side of the road, or get trampled by cows, or have a funny turn, someone can come and get me! I am going to work on the novel mainly, although I am also writing a piece called SKIN for Live Theatre for their New Writing Festival, and some scenes from the Taxi Driver's Daughter for stage, which will be interesting. I also want to develop the Manifesto for Tyneside as a musical! Actually, even though I have tried very hard to give up most things, and to learn the art of living on a sofa, I am just no good at it. While that amazing woman Jane is riding her bike across Italy, I am addicted to wild ideas and projects, when all my friends and loved ones keep telling me to rest. But what IS rest? Watching tv isn't restful. It makes me feel like my head is doused in smog. Reading is lovely, and so is being brought little trays of tasty morsels, but I have always found it hard to stay still for long. I can really understand why that woman wants to push her body....in the Observer she said, Well what am I supposed to do, sit in a chair and tell everyone my leg hurts?
But why do people want the ill to stay still? As a mother, I like to tuck up my daughters when they are poorly, to make them be proper invalids. But WHY? I think ill people who move around alot can make others nervous. They are worried they might break in public, and that there would be nobody there for them. Also, the idea of public deaths is really scary. But I know what Jane means about keeping going....the body is capable of such miracles, and you want to trick cancer by not behaving like a patient.
Anyway, I have been learning some simple meditation techniques, and that helps me keep still for a bit. Unlike Jane I am unlikely to run any marathons, but I do want keep on living in the world. We have both had cancer for a long time, and it gets kind of boring as a companion.
I have just been reading Margaret Forsters novel A Lady's Maid, about Elizabeth Barret Browning's servant. I mean look at Elizabeth BB...she spent most of the first half of her life wasting away on a sofa, unable to walk across the room, then fell in love with Robert and had a baby with him and lived in Italy! Minds are more powerful than bodies!Posted by julia @ 01:42 PM GMT
Monday, May 10, 2004
I had a session with my doctor this morning. I am so used to the hospital, I could walk round it with my eyes closed. I always get a milky coffee from the kind ladies who serve at the hatch. Today it wasn't even cold by the time the appointment had finished! My doctor looks well. He's been on holiday in Florida, which is says is full of wild beasts. He was the only doctor in the clinic, and obviously had a huge list of people to see. My tests were all ok...liver function and all that stuff. He gave me more treatment free parole, and just said we would do another scan and see what to do then. He knows that I don't want any chemotherapy. My body seems to have stabilised itself for the time being. I feel more relaxed, more energetic than I did. The cancer cells must have lost their sense of direction for the time being. Or perhaps it's all your good thoughts sweeping them away!
We walked back along the endless corridors of the RVI. There are paintings and photographs everywhere, that remind you where you are. It suddenly felt almost homely and I felt a sudden affection for the dear tea ladies and cleaners in their overalls with their trolleys and polishers and the patients trudging between wards.
On Thursday I did a workshop and reading in Beverley, organised by John Clarke from Wordquake. the workshop was in a panelled municipal art gallery, that smelled of old libraries, and was full of sunlight. I had a brilliant group of clever women, with poetry fizzing inside them, so that all you had to do was set them off and they wrote fantastic stuff. We were writing about bodies and pain, finding new vocabularies to talk about the crisises in our lives. Later I read in Nelly's Pub, surely one of the most atmospheric pubs in England. It still has gaslights, and even though it was Spring, John had lit a roaring fire. I do love flames! We had a discussion at the end of the reading....one man talked about poetry 'healing' language itself. I loved that idea, of poetry fixing all the wounds and tears of sentences and words, finding new images.
I spent the next day exploring Beverley, looking at the minster that is full of delightful stone people grimacing and cavorting and pulling faces. It's a brave, unusual town, full of surprising niches and stories.
Also, I have just finished Colm Toibin's The Master...a novel about Henry James. At first I didn't really get it...but as the novel goes on it gathers momentum and emotional energy, and by the end I was entranced and obsessed with it. It made me feel like writing too, with descriptions of James's rooms and domestic arrangements. It is a book that is about loneliness, and what a writer gives up. It's written so sparingly and quietly...I really recommend it.Posted by julia @ 10:40 AM GMT
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
Just come back from an achingly long day at the hospital, having my first blood transfusion. Now I feel very zippy, and my cheeks are fatter and pinker, like a big fat bloodsucker. I was confused about transfusions. I thought they drained the old blood out then put in the new. I imagined a bucket either side of the bed.They howled with laughter in Ward 36 when I told them this. I am also very curious to know whose blood is in my veins. It feels friendly, and encouraging. I was very anaemic...that's why I had to have the blood. It's true I have been finding hills rather challenging, and tasks like doing up my shoelaces. Still, I haven't been grey and breathless.
Last Friday we had the Flying Homages night at the Playhouse here in Newcastle. I really enjoyed the process of creating the poems, and having somebody direct a reading with actors and musicians. Also, I recommend writing ones own manifesto. Like new blood, it quite fires one up, and makes you feel like charging into the streets. I am putting my personal manifesto for Newcastle onto this site, and would like to know what readers of this log would put in their own manifesto. I like the word MANIFESTO very much. It's powerful and makes me think of women on horses!
Spring is being utterly dazzling. I spent the long bank holiday reading Hilary Mantel's 'Giving Up The Ghost' (what sublime writing, what pain!) and then the Master by Colm Toibin, a novel about Henry James. (Dark, interesting, but I don't feel I know James any better than I did). I also sat in my garden on the sycamore benches and thought. My mum came to stay and we went to see that film whose title I keep forgetting...the something sunshine of the spotless mind...I fell asleep! We also had a picnic on the banks of the North Tyne. It was amazingly lovely.
I am writing the stage adaptation of the Taxi Drivers Daughter (to be read at Live in June), and also a ten minute play about eyebrows. And the novel is coming back into focus. I feel strangely happy.[A webmaster interjects: Julia's manifesto is online here and you can also send her your comments to manifesto@juliadarling.co.uk and read what others have written.]
Posted by julia @ 04:11 PM GMT
Created by Julia Darling and Cornwell Internet.