In Person
Monday, October 25, 2004
Everything looks battered outside. We forgot to empty our wheelie bin and black plastic bags flap in the front garden. I stare out of the window at the long steep garden that I planted this summer, and it looks like a damp shivering wilderness, with slimy decks, and rotting deckchairs that no one has bothered to put inside. It doesn't feel like the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, it feels like the season of rot and needling rains! But I am not down hearted. I am on a comfort cooking binge, which means I am very interested in ingredients, and the kitchen is full of things rising and thickening and reducing...big pans of bubbling herby soups, and apple pies stuffed with cloves, bread that spills over the sides of the baking tins, and drizzled lemon cakes. I think this craze often comes over me in Autumn. Season of conkers and wild children. Season of rotting pumpkin and porridge pans. Anyway, I think cancer is afraid of this sort of food. It makes it nervous, all the smells of nourishment and oily warmth. I eat alot of what they call super foods, like blueberries, and pineapple and pine nuts and any old nut, and raspberries and of course, god's own food, porrdge (which you never sick up), but I am not at all vegan. I am afraid of thinness. Funny how I used to long to be gawky, but now I do everything I can not to fade away, not to waste and shrink, or speak in a quiet voice. Cancer also dislikes large hats, and luxurious bedspreads like the one I bought yesterday with vivid red flowers all over it. It doesn't like loud singing either, and we had a great sing song on Thursday for my partners birthday. We sang all our old LPS, as we don't have a record player anymore. I can imagine this ending up in a box in a toy department, sold as a party game. Most of the games I think I personally invented have ended up in boxes containing a pad , a few pencils, a dice, and a pack of badly designed cards!
Tonight I am reading a new story called The Dress for a short story festival here in Newcastle, inspired by the work of Chekhov and Carver. A bit nervewracking really! I am reading with Ali Smith, Andrew O Hagen and Margaret Wilkinson. I find reading short stories rather like swimming into the middle of a vast lake. Unless they are very good, it can be hard for the audience to concentrate. Last night I went to hear stories by Andrew Crumey, David Almond, and Russian writers Evegeny Popov and Natalia Smirnova...and they were all riveting. I was hanging on every word! I wonder if all this talk and festivals around short stories is working? Are more people reading them now?
I have a swollen foot, and I limp around like Igor, along the corridors of the English School. I am having some more radiotherapy on it next week, which doesn't fill me with glee. Then I am going to Budapest to stay in a hotel that has red bath robes and very wide beds...then back again in time to launch Apology For Absence at the Hatton on the 10th. Send me your address if I don't have it, and I will send you an invite. Numbers are limited, unfortunately. [Update: All the tickets have now gone.]Posted by julia @ 12:28 PM GMT
Friday, October 15, 2004
It's been a week of feeling very visible. A lady came up to me in Marksies (I was buying knickers) and said..'It's Julia Carling!' But the feedback from the television programme on Monday has been very moving and interesting, and kind too. Many people have got in touch via email who have the same disease as me, and who are taking the same drugs, even seeing the same consultants. I feel a huge connection with my compatriots out there, as I normally never meet them. I feel as if we are calling to each other through the pipes or something...HALLOOOOOO....ARE YOU OK????? We talk the same language, and have the same strange relationship with our bodies. So that has been lovely, and made me feel less alone.
Of course when I saw the film, it was the second time I'd seen it and I found it much easier to be less vain and to admire the way the director and editor had put it all together. I liked the simple message of it, and although there were weepy bits, on the whole it showed what its like to have cancer with its good days and bad days. I hope it showed how life goes on anyway. Thankyou, everyone, for your comments. My family survived it, thank goodness.
Most t.v things I have been involved in I have regretted, but not this one.I am feeling very happy at the moment. The effects of radiotherapy are wearing off, and I feel as if my brain is steadying itself. I had a blood transfusion on Monday and that's made me very chirpy. My friend Jackie came to the hospital and we played Cluedo and Connect Four and I won everything!
I've been able to get on with some work, and generally this last week feels as if it has been filled with things like nice cake and deep sleeps and everything that makes humans happy.Tonight I am going to an art opening in Melrose of work by my friend and collaborator, Emma Holliday. I am looking forward to bombing up the A68, which is one of my favourites road. It makes me breathless with excitement! And it's the right light for it too, sort of sharp and pink.
One more thing, a date for your diaries, if you live in the North East. I am launching a new poetry book called Apology For Absence at the Hatton Gallery on November 10th from 7-9.00 p.m, so please come if you are around! [Update: All the tickets have now gone, sorry.]
Now I shall go and make a cup of tea, and then I shall start writing. I wonder if there is any cake in the university staff room?
Posted by julia @ 10:48 AM GMT
Sunday, October 10, 2004
I think I have had every side effect known for radiotherapy now, from itchy ears, to lack of concentration, to fatigue and migraine headaches. It's not been much fun, but today I feel like a ship that has survived a great storm, and is still floating.
On Thursday we had the Poetry Feast in the ambient, shadowy libraries of the Literary and Philosophical Society. This library was Grahame Greene's favourite of all the libraries in the world, and it is a very particular and unusual place. It has not been refurbished, or computerised or even taken over by the National Trust. In fact, that's quite a miracle, as it is still a working library, used by real people not relics. It attracts eccentric intellectuals and astute older women. It still serves hot chocolate and biscuits, and until recently I think one was allowed to smoke there. It has the feel of a club, or a different, parallel world. This is where we had our Peter Greenawayesque feast around a huge table, with poets reading new poems about food. I wore my Outer Mongolian Hat ! I thoroughly enjoyed myself. In the middle of an odd week, it was like landing for a while on an island of books.There were other islands too. Earlier in the week my friend Robyn Hitchcock came to play in Newcastle, and we had a brilliant time listening to him, along with a whole load of fans that I had never seen in Northumberland Street. His new CD Spooked was recorded and produced with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings in Nashville. Often one doesn't like the stuff friends do, but in this case I am a real fan. It's very sensitive, memorable music, and I think Robyn gets better and better, more refined, more passionate, more tender. That night we stayed up very late, and although I no longer drink much, it feels like a wild excursion just being out and about. I am going to do it more. I have rather alot of plans....to walk from Alnmouth to Holy Island along the beach, to get an electronic bike that goes up hills by itself, to book some time in a flotation tank, to fly to Paris for the day, perhaps to join a choir (not completely sure about that last one, never been great with groups).
I am feeling a bit like never going to the hospital again, because it just brings me down. It's not that everyone isn't very kind and helpful there, it's just that I am not sure that anything they do or say there really helps. I suppose I need the blood transfusions, but do I really need the next load of scans? Isn't it better not to know?
Next week I am interviewing the writer Xin Ran at Durham Lit Fest...I have really enjoyed her books, and I am trying to think of interesting questions. At the moment I am really enjoying Memoirs of A Geisha. I don't know why I never read it before..it's just wonderfully written and I can't stop thinking about kimonos. I'm through with genre fiction now.....I want books that help me travel!
Posted by julia @ 02:45 PM GMT
Monday, October 4, 2004
Last week wasn't any fun. I don't remember radiotherapy being such an onslaught when I had it before. Perhaps it was because it was my head that was being blasted, and the being screwed to my face each day. It wasn't the actual treatment that was grim...all the staff were really kind and nice; I made a hooky and proggy mat in the waiting room, I was whisked in and out with great respect. What was awful was how it made me feel...sick, dim, unenthusiastic, inadequate etc. I think I deal with cancer by pretending it doesn't really exist, and last week was impossible to avoid. I hate feeling ill, and I fall to pieces a bit. I was certainly very weepy. As well as the radiotherapy I had my usual drips, and managed to develop some wierd pain in my leg, and my blood count has plummeted again. Altogether, I felt like a pathetic invalid, a person living in the shade. I wondered if I would ever write again. Everything seemed to be sliding downhill.
Then, att the end of the week I saw the rough cut of the film that is being shown on telly next Monday. That made me weep, but I think it was because my delicate ego was so assaulted by seeing myself on a screen. It woke me up a bit, actually. I am wearing the wierdest ear rings...rather Pat Butcher. I should go on that programme about what not to wear. And why didn't my family tell me to wash my hair? However, if I try to ignore my own sad vanity, I think the team and the director have done a very good job in making a coherent film about cancer, poetry and life. I wonder what you people out there will make of it? Any fashion tips would be welcome.Also last week we launched the Andrea Badenoch Fiction Prize, in memory of a friend who died of breast cancer in January. We read from her work, and toasted her work with champagne, down at the literary and philosophical society. I enjoyed it. I hope lots of women apply for the award. You have to be over 42! But I miss Andrea, so that made me a bit unhappy too. I still keep all her text messages on my phone. I think she would have liked the event though. We had great flowers and nibbles!
Anyway, I am feeling much better now. I spent the weekend with an old friend, and we drove up to North Shields and ate fish and chips on the fish quay. We had lovely talks about life and change. Only an old friend can see the whole picture really. I probably will write again, and already my radiotherapy experience is receding into the past. I am good at forgetting.
Posted by julia @ 02:21 PM GMT
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