In Person
Monday, November 29, 2004
It's been a week of finishing things. I have written loads this week...done first drafts of my all five radio plays, also a radio story set in the Debatable Lands. I've written an article for Mslexia magazine, and set about my manifesto with renewed vigour. I spent the weekend in a busy hotel near Chesterfield with long identical corridors and wild discos in the ballroom. I managed to write all day in this setting ! In fact there is something rather inspiring about a plain room with bourbon biscuits and trouser presses!
My health has felt unsettled. We went for the results of the scans on Wednesday, and my liver has got a bit worse, and it hurts too, like having a swollen bag stuffed in your rib cage. My consultant suggested this new hormone drug, and has gone off to find out if he can get hold of some. I can't think of the name of it...something like fazzleedex. Anyway, later I phoned the wonderful Maggie centre in Scotland and they echoed my consultants thoughts. They also filled me with hope....saying that my liver lesion was 'wee' and that the drug had had great results so far, so I was much cheered.
I've been reading a brilliant Canadian novel by Anne Marie Macdonald called Fall On Your Knees...really unusual writing and a good story too. Also Ali Smith's short stories, which are very exciting...they make you want to jump about!
But apart from reading and writing I seem to spend so much time in the bath I worry about growing scales. It calls me, in the middle of the night sometimes! At least I am easy to buy presents for...bath stuff never goes amiss. I am glad that my symptoms present themselves one at a time. My worst one at the moment is my aching face which roars into action in the middle of the night. The swelling liver is pacified by steroids. Oh blimey, whatever next!
Thank god for acupuncture and chocolate!
Posted by julia @ 02:40 PM GMT
Monday, November 22, 2004
It's hard to think of a title for this week, as it's been rather fragmented. I've been getting to my lovely room everyday, and trying to move forward with a whole host of projects: The Manifesto, Women's Hour Plays, A Short Story for Radio Four about Borders, set in The Debatable Lands, editing 'The Poetry Cure' an anthology for Bloodaxe, writing a short narrative with a film of unclaimed material from Boots shown in the digital cultural lab in the university ( and don't ask me what a digital cultural lab is!) then a trip last weekend to bracing Scarborough to run a workshop and do a reading there, and then last night taking part in an evening at Live Theatre about Sid Chaplin and his work. Yes, I have been a busy writer this week. Most writers I know have fairly bizarre lives. It's not what people think. There's alot of admin involved! It certainly isn't a calm life unless you really make it so, and I have always liked being involved in lots of projects and collaborations, so I am not complaining. However, to get anything done I do have to go away somewhere and make myself focus, and stop talking. I love talking, even more than ice cream. It is important to try and write everyday though...even if only for an hour....or ten minutes. You can get loads done by working consistently and regularly, and sometimes it doesn't feel as if you are working hard at all. Things almost write themselves!
On Wednesday morning I went for a scan at the Royal Victoria Infirmary. You have to drink a whole jug of juice containing some kind of dye before they do the scan. I was in a very chatty mood on Wednesday. I really wanted to talk to everyone in the waiting room, but no one was in the mood. My fellow scanees stared into space with troubled eyes. The scanman was nice though. He was called Phil, and he made me a cup of coffee on a blue tray with biscuits which was rather touching. Yet again it was awful finding a vein though, and my arm still looks bruised and battered. However, because Phil was kind and apologetic I didn't mind so much.
Scarborough was very chilly, though luckily I was escorted from one warm building to another, with brief glimpses of a ferocious sea. The poetry workshop there seems very vibrant, and I had an enthusiastic group of people meeting in the library, then a fish and chip lunch, then readings in the afternoon. I am reading Sid Chaplin's The Watchers and The Watched, in which a young couple go to Scarborough for their honeymoon, so everything tied up. Last night I went to Live Theatre to hear readings from Chaplin's work and to hear his widow Rene talk about her life with him. It was a moving occasion. Rene saw it as her responsibility to help Sid to write, and was a great support to him. The life of the family revolved around his work, and there was something very moving about the way she described their relationship. You didn't feel she was being exploited, more that she was integral to his life and work.
I loved the way Chaplin wrote about the North East, as if it was a person that he grappled with and sought to understand. I feel like that often.It's very icy outside. I am glad that I live in a warm house. I think I might be growing scales I have so many baths. Winter is so SERIOUS. This week I shall try to work more and talk less.
Posted by julia @ 01:02 PM GMT
Monday, November 15, 2004
Jackie Kay
It's been such an exciting week, it's hard to know when to start. Also I am on steroids which is making me feel a bit wired. But I wasn't last Wednesday which is when we launched the new poetry book at the Hatton Gallery here in Newcastle, with pink cava, hot nuts and strawberries dipped in chocolate. It was, in the corniest sense, a night I shall always remember. The audience seemed particularly HANDSOMEwith shining hair and bright eyes, and everyone seemed so alive and in the moment. I had a whole range of all my favourite musicians playing songs and poems, and Jackie Kay was my star celebrity guest. It was much better than a wedding ! I felt really lucky and happy and even relaxed.Signing Apology for Absence
The next day I went to the Turkish Bath and oozed for a while. I am setting one of my new radio plays in the Turkish bath and I keep making lists of all the features in there....cracked marble and paintings of naked ladies. I seem to be writing so many things simultaneously at the moment. My brain is chuntering about like an old amstrad. On Friday all my creative energy was interrupted by a visit to the hospital for my usual drip, but it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare as my liver started hurting, and I got sent for x rays. Pain always makes everything more surreal, nightmarish and bizarre, and for one awful moment I thought I might end up in the dreaded Ward 37 where I once languished in agony some years ago. It has become a symbol of everything I most fear, my dark and bloody chamber where no one hears you when you scream. However, this was averted by some timely paracetomol that stopped the pain in a very simple, unassuming kind of way. But they put me on steroids just incase, which is why I am feeling rather jumpy.
Armed with drugs I set off to do a reading from the new book at Southwell Festival near Nottingham on Saturday with Elizabeth Smither, the New Zealand poet laureate. We were driven by Tony Ward and Angela Jarman from Arc Press in a very comfortable car, so that everytime I got into it I fell into a deep and delicious sleep. We were reading at a National Trust place called The Workhouse, and honestly, it was SO austere and spartan. It was more plain than even the Quakers. In fact, the Quakers are wild hedonists compared to this place. We were in a room with a stone floor and plain walls, reading from a single chair to a terrified audience....well, maybe not terrified, but certainly muted. It was so different to Wednesday, I wanted to dance and shout. All the poems fell into a pool of silence. Somehow the absence of any sign of the people who had worked there made the place full of ghosts. Perhaps things soak up spirits? I could feel them everywhere. I have never been anywhere so spooky!
More driving yesterday in the sleepy Arc car, to Lancaster and its whirling one way system. I had a great time. My friend John Hegley was there doing his elegant, erudite, unpredictable (run out of words that begin with e) delightful show, and I enjoyed my own reading and felt connected to the audience. It was sad to leave Elizabeth, who I had got to know over the weekend. Do read her poems, they are lovely.
Today I chugged back on the train, from Carlisle to Newcastle, next to the wide river and all the doubtful sheep. Next weekend I am going to Scarborough! My life feels almost wild.Thanks to everyone who came to the launch. I feel we are experiencing a wonderful time for literature here in the North East, as if everything is suddenly alive and moving and truly creative. Is it just me?
Posted by julia @ 03:11 PM GMT
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Budapest is my kind of city. It's elegant and unselfconscious, and you can rattle around it on uncomplicated trams, and it is full of old fashioned light fittings and hidden cafes, and soups with several layers of sour cream, fat and beans, and transylvanian cabbages and things that are red.
We had a very peaceful three days there. It was never too noisy, and we moved slowly around its quiet cemeteries, its hushed bookshops, its lazy coffee rooms.
At the Gellart Baths we allowed ourselves to be bossed around by no nonsense women who gave everyone a white sheet and if you got it wet, then hard luck. Massages were functional, and there was no mention of holistic, life enhancing, meditative anything. Here health is bracing and technical!My favourite trip was to the Statue Park, where all the old monuments from the communist era are exhibited on a bit of wasteland next to a housing estate. They looked so funny, out of scale, and camp as Christmas with their big muscly thighs and noble noses.
It's nice to be back, even though the pets at home seemed rather annoyed, and various bits of carpet had been chewed. Tomorrow we launch the new poetry book, and I am looking forward to sending it out into the world. I am writing my plays for Women's Hour too, and also finishing off The Manifesto.
My body feels rather solid and tough. It managed Budapest without any funny turns, and we must have walked about four miles a day.This weekend I am reading at two literature festivals; Southwell , near Nottingham, and Lancaster. I hope they have nice baths in both places. It's not very good weather, icy spots of sharp rain, not at all like the balmy climate of Budapest, where people were still swimming in outdoor pools.
Posted by julia @ 01:27 PM GMT
Monday, November 1, 2004
I am in the kind of mood when it's hard to remember anything that has happened. I spent the morning at the hospital, having my heel radiotherapised, then waiting ages in a very square, very English pharmacy for my allotment of steroids. the hospital seemed to be full of magazines about the 'new North East' full of adverts for laminated flooring, or National Trust brochures. They told me in the radiotherapy place that they'd thrown away the mask of my face, which was a disappointment, as I had wanted to make it into a lampshade. My heel wasn't fixed down with anything and while the machine was buzzing I had an almost uncontrollable longing to jump away from the beam. But then I didn't. I am always well behaved at the hospital. I make jokes and roll up my sleeve, and do whatever I am asked. I wonder if I will crack one day? Anyway, my consultant warned me of possible flare ups of pain over the next week....(just as I arrive in Budapest, I bet) while the woman in the radiotherapy suite said I wouldn't have any pain at all. This lead me to thinking about suggestibility. I am sure that if I am told something will hurt, it generally does. I think I am the sort of person who should never be given bad news, or be warned of possible dangers. My brain is so used to imagining things that I think I am too good at it. I think I can make things happen! Eeeek
Anyway, nothing has happened yet. I am in my lovely room and I've just had some sushi, and I am about to start the day's writing. I went to a place called Saltaire in Shipley (Yorks) yesterday...a old mill and surrounding community that has been made into a brilliant arts centre and museum. I bought a bright red carpet and a lot of bath stuff. It's a really brilliant place to visit, and there's so much to look at and think about there, and usually I hate tourism, infact in Budapest I intend to spend the whole time in the Turkish baths or on the furnicular railway (because I like the word).
This week my friend Tom Shakespeare has a one man show on at Live Theatre, which I am looking forward to, talking about his father and his genes.
Apart from the hassle and discomfort of cancer I really like my life at the moment. I love where I live and where I work. I wish I could have sorted it out before!Posted by julia @ 01:51 PM GMT
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