In Person
Thursday, October 24, 2002
I feel very untangled after Barcelona. We wandered up and down the Ramblas and read alot. It was so warm. My bones got warmed up! I finished Back When We Were Grown Ups by Ann Tyler. It's a fantastic book, and I love the way she writes about the intimate details of people's lives. Only a novel can show us these kinds of details. It's also a book that makes you feel good about writing, as her books show you what good writing can do. Yesterday rehearsals started for Attachments, the short play that accompanies Sean O Brien's 'From The Underworld' at Live Theatre this November. These plays were written specifically for actors Charlie Hardwick and Trevor Fox, who Sean and I admire hugely. Yesterday was the first day I'd heard them read the script together and it was really exciting.
Now I'm back to the Taxi Driver's Daughter. I'm going away again soon to work on it away from everything as there's too much going on around here!Posted by julia @ 10:52 AM GMT
Friday, October 18, 2002
I'm going to Barcelona! Feel very excited. Can't wait to amble down the Ramblas, and eat Barcelona food in restaurants and do Barcelona type things. I need a holiday too.
I'm going to read Ann Tyler's back When We Were Grown Ups on the plane. I love her work. No time to write this now..no doubt I'll rabbit on when I get back.Posted by julia @ 09:17 AM GMT
Monday, October 14, 2002
Since I started sitting in this room in Newcastle University they have nearly completed a whole building opposite. What an achievement. All over Newcastle we are watching buildings emerge. The new music centre down by the river looks like an alien's head! There are hotels sprouting up everywhere for the tourists we are expecting. When I first came here there wasn't a tourist in sight. I found it quite a relief, as I came from Winchester, where there were too many tourists. I was watching the film 'Get Carter' with my daughter, and it was all about that old Newcastle, with shabby bars and alleys, and concrete, and hard desolate landscapes. When I first got to Newcastle I went down by the quayside, with the bridges towering over your head, and the river full of rubbish, and it felt dangerous and brilliant at the same time.Like a dreamt up city. I knew I would never live anywhere else. I think alot of people feel like me at the moment...a kind of nostalgia for something that's disappearing so fast we can hardly remember what it was, mixed with pride at the indisputable beautiful bridge and the sheer ambition of the city.
I went to my friend Tom Shakespeare's wedding on Saturday. I have only been to three weddings in my life, but this was easily the best. It was a quaker do..which means that people stand up when moved to say things and there is no formality. It was extremely moving. It made the C of E look very pretentious and unimaginative. Tom was marrying a woman from Australia who was bravely moving from Melbourne to Hebburn. They looked so perfect for each other. Afterwards we drank champagne and danced. Small children raced about, as they always do at weddings, and older people shook their bodies vigourously. Usually I feel rather cynical at weddings, but I felt completely full of goodwill towards the human race.
Posted by julia @ 12:48 PM GMT
Friday, October 11, 2002
Spent yesterday writing a play in a day for Live Theatre as part of their RSC season of new play readings and new writing activities. It started at 10.00 a.m with coffee and newspapers, sitting with the directors and circling stories. A statue of Adam had collapsed in New York, and Dylan Thomas's shed was being taken apart and renovated, whitethroats were nearly extinct, and a cleaner had got £27,000 from a faulty cashpoint, taken it home, and then felt so guilty he'd returned it with £200 of his own money. Theses stories seemed to go together rather well! I sat in an office with people bringing me coffee and wrote like a maniac. At lunchtime I was beginning to panic. I could see a good idea like a mirage in a desert and it was a long way off. At 2.00 the actors arrived and we had a read through. I did one more draft and then it was rehearsed and performed that night in the theatre, before a reading of Paul Telfer's Poor Kit Smart. My best part of the day was working with the directors and actors. I just wish we'd had longer. Still there is alot to be learnt from writing badly and quickly, and not being too precious about it. Last night, though, I could hardly sleep...it felt like a premature birth or something!
Now I'm back in peaceville and about to get back to the novel; that pleasureable made up world that I control absolutely.Posted by julia @ 11:51 AM GMT
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
I'm back in my writing room after a brilliant week in the castle in Dumfries. We hardly went out at all, and I wrote loads without feeling overworked at all. The castle was more like a big stone tower in the middle of nowhere. Inside it was warm and comforting, with good quality cotton sheets on the beds and shiny cutlery in the cupboards. At night I heard ghosts having conversations in the cupboards, and the others swore they were fast asleep. Bats and owls flew about above your head.
Back in Newcastle everything is very busy. I spent yesterday afternoon going to see a doctor at the Freeman Hospital. We waited for over three hours. I get very frustrated at not being allowed to see my notes and x rays. I make doctors explain things to me. It feels like this is hard work sometimes, but worth it. I MAKE them see me as a person, not a patient. Anyway, I've got to have an operation (on Halloween) to remove fluid from my lung lining. A pleural effusion ...sounds like something Fanny might cook. I feel perfectly normal, so it's annoying to be made to go to hospital. Damn.Doughnuts Like Fanny's is on at the Saville Exchange in North Shields on 29th October. I am suggesting that attendees might like to dress as Fanny (wig and false eye lashes...you could be Fanny classic, or Fanny sixties) or Johnie (easy...jacket and monacle). If you want to come it might be wise to book. On Thursday 10th I'm writing a 'play for today' for Live Theatre. They lock you up in a room with the newspapers and the play is performed that evening as part of the RSC stuff at Live. It's a bit nerve wracking, but I suppose the audience knows that you only had a day to write it.
I'm reading a great new novel by Louise Trondeau called the Water's Edge, about a hotel in Bournemouth. A really lovely book. Didn't like the Salley Vickers one that much, although her first nov was brilliant. I hope everyone reading this diary is well! Bye for now.Posted by julia @ 11:49 AM GMT
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