Julia Darling's weblog - from cover to cover

It's a rainy Saturday, and I've got to finish the script for my play which is on at Live Theatre in November. This is a play for actors Charlie Hardwick and Trevor Fox, called Attachments, and though it's only forty minutes long I seem to have been tinkering with it for months. Two handers feel very mercurial to write. There is no room for clutter, and I'm trying not to be over lyrical and to just let the characters go. On Monday we start rehearsals for Doughnuts Like Fanny's, a play about Fanny Cradock, that's being produced by a company over in Penrith.

After two days over there I must return to my novel which lies waiting for attention.

Otherwise, my health is good, and I've just finished reading The True Story of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, which is really good. I can't stop thinking about Ned Kelly's armour, which I saw once when visiting Melbourne. Next I am going to read Salley Vickers new novel Instances of The Number Three. I really loved Mrs Garnett's Angel which was her first novel.

This is my first entry into this diary, and a bit of an experiment. I wonder if anyone will read it?

Wednesday 11th September

Just come back from rehearsals for Doughnuts Like Fanny's. It's been good fun. There's a sense of everyone rolling their sleeves up. The play has lots of songs in and a musician called Richard Stone has set them to music. There is something wonderful about writing song lyrics to a naff tune in my head, and then hearing them re-set to a good one. I spent a day with the director and actors tweaking the play, taking out all the unnecessary STUFF that clutters up language. It's very pleasureable, like the final garnishes or something. Fanny would appreciate that. I am never going to write dot dot dot again. My scripts are full of them, and they are nearly always unnecessary.

This morning I had a meeting with Claire Malcolm at New Writing North about Diamond Twig, the small press that I co-edit with Ellen Phethean. We are going to start publishing a series of women's plays. We

spent quite a while trying to think of a good name for the series; one that wasn't corny. I must have spent at least a year of my existence trying to think up names for things. The cafe at Live Theatre has been redecorated and everyone looks different in it. I ate a delicious mozarella sandwich. Most sandwiches are very disappointing, but this one wasn't. Now I must do some writing. The next thing I must finish tweaking is 'Attachments' a play for Live that's on in November. One of the characters is an anaesthetist (change from a pharmacist). Apparently anaesthetists are often very fun loving people. Does anyone know any, and are they? is it something to do with always seeing others on the brink of oblivion? Hmmmm.

Friday 13th September

Last night I went to the launch of Andrea Badenoch's new crime novel 'Loving Geordie'. It was held in Benwell Library in Newcastle, where Andrea had worked with a local history group researching the local landscape for the novel, which is based on the Mary Bell era, when much of Scotswood was being pulled down around people. It was a really interesting opening, with members of the local history group speaking, an exhibition of photographs, and readings by the actor Trevor Fox. I'm looking forward to reading it, although I'm still reading 'Instances of the Number Three' by Salley Vickers.

It feels like Newcastle is waking up again after the Summer. There's hundreds of students wandering around outside with bright tee shirts and big straw hats on. Dingy looking men are giving out flyers about various bars they can get drunk at.

Monday 15th September

It's mad out there! The students are back, and lying in the corridors, whirling things on strings, and being pestered by different societies. I was never in a society when I was a student. Hmmm.

I have heard from others since I last wrote this diary that all the anaesthetists they know ARE fun loving hedonists. Still, I've finished that play now, so now I'll be thinking only of taxi drivers!

Tomorrow Cate Watkinson and I will be putting words and glass together at the Customs House Gallery in North Shields. I like it up there. It's all airy and riverish. The exhibition opens tomorrow.

Monday 23rd September

Since I last wrote this diary we've had the Shorelines launch which was great. Cate's glass looked beautiful, and I have fallen in love with sticky vinyl lettering. I'm about to spend a wek away in a castle with two other novelists writing the Taxi Driver's Daughter. I feel I can only really concentrate when I go away from everything. I love my home, but it's full of teenagers, and although I have a writing room, there are so many other writing jobs to do. However, going on a retreat gives you a real boost, and when I come back it's easier to continue working on a big project because my head will be full of it.

Yesterday I went to the launch of a new book called Leftboobless, by a woman called Sylvia Mitchell, who decided to write about her experience of having breast cancer, and to include lots of writing exercises that helped her. Sylvia is a very positive woman who had organised the whole thing brilliantly. It was the best raffle prizes I've ever seen, although typically I didn't win anything. Andrea Badenoch and I 'launched' the book for Sylvia, and we talked about how writing had helped us get through breast cancer. Frankly I couldn't have survived without writing, or at least having some creative way of expressing myself. The launch was wonderful..packed with people..but it made me angry with breast cancer. You can have a very positive attitude and learn alot from cancer, but it's still a pain in the arse and something I could have done without. If anyone is interested in Sylvia's book email me and I'll tell you how to get a copy. It would be a good gift for anyone who was recently diagnosed.

Thursday 26th September

I really like September. I was on a train last night chugging through Hexham and Wylam and Corbridge, and there was a glowing rustly twilight and a bonfire smell in the air. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else but here in the North of England either, despite all the things we grumble about like the long cold winters and the dog mess. I always feel romantic in September! I'm about to go and spend a week in a castle writing my novel. I hope it's haunted, and that it's got central heating.

Everything is breaking at the moment; computers, boilers, cars etc. I wonder why things always break in unison?

I also managed to do my tax, which always seems like the most bizarre activity. Is there someone somewhere who goes through all these brown envelopes looking at crumpled receipts with 'stagewear' written on them in biro? Writers could potentially claim everything against tax. Life is art after all. Things like turkish baths, facials, therapy, dog expenses...it's all inspirational.

Tuesday 7th October 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.

Friday 11th October 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 Ł27,000 from a faulty cashpoint, taken it home, and then felt so guilty he'd returned it with Ł200 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.

Monday 14th October 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.

Friday 18th October

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.

Thursday 24th October

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!

Tuesday 5th November

Not a nice day for dogs or sensitive children, but otherwise rather exciting. I have re-emerged from my operation at the Freeman. During the course of my stay there I was asked my date of birth nineteen times. It seems the operation went ok, although I feel like I've been in a fight. As usual there was a wartime spirit on the ward and I had some ferocious buddies there, sharing each others ups and downs. The tea trolley crashed into the ward at regular intervals, waking us all up. Everything was a faded yellow colour, including me. Actually, the nurses were amazing. They were so good looking and capable.They came whenever I rang my bell. I was told everything many times. When I got home I quite missed being told what to do. I longed for the sound of distant polishers, and regular administering of pain killers. The point of this operation is to make me feel better, and although I felt fine before I had it, I have been assured that I wouldn't have done quite soon.

Thursday 7th Nov

Tonight Diamond Twig, the small press I co-run with Ellen Phethean, is launching an anthology of short stories called 'Even The Ants Have Names' down at Live Theatre. It's a stunning collection of stories, featuring new writers such as Mary Lowe, Linda Leatherbarow, Sue Rickards, Betty Weiner and others. It's a beautiful book too, in classic Diamond Twig style.

There have been far too many fireworks. It's got out of hand. Also very passive, as at least with sparklers you can wave them around a bit. I think someone should invent a hat for dogs to wear at this time.

Tuesday 19th November 2002

I've come back from another week away writing. Luckily it rained all week so there wasn't much temptation to go out. It's interesting when you remove yourself from any domestic duties. After a few days my whole inner clock changes and I think if I stayed away for longer I would probably stay up most of the night, get up late, probably writing in bed until early afternoon. Also, I realise that however hard I might try to work like a machine, I can only WRITE for about three hours a day. However, it's wonderful to spend the rest of the time thinking and doing nothing, and this is definitely when ideas come. Also being away with other writers helps, as we tended to spend evenings talking about problems in the work and how to overcome them.

While I was away 'Double Lives' opened at Live Theatre, so I didn't see it until it had been on several nights. Charlie and Trevor are fantastic, and they have given the play so much energy. I really like writing for particular actors, and I wish I could always work that way.

I'm stuck for a good novel. I know there are hundreds of brilliant books out there, but I've reached that point when one can't decide what to read next. I long to strike a new seam!

Monday 25th November 2002

I keep meeting people who have read this diary. It's strange because I think I thought hardly anyone would read it, but actually rather alot of people do. Apparently this kind of diary is called a BLOG..derived from web logs. Mmmm. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was because having had cancer alot of people think that one steadily declines, which is not the case. My (breast) cancer was diagnosed in 1995 and I'm quite used to it now. I think of it as an incompetent kind of disease, that sometimes manages to rally a weak drunken army and to attempt to make an attack somewhere in my body. However, most of the time it lies about in a dirty heap snoring. It recurred (the Battle of The Windpipe) in 2000 when a new tumour was found in my chest. However thanks to a drug called taxotere (from yew trees) it disappeared again. I think it's also thanks to acupuncture which I've had for years. Earlier this year there was an uprising in my lower back ( the Spinal Wars) which went on for a while, but is now defeated. I never used to like all this battle imagery, but infact it's rather apt. I do feel like I have to go to war sometimes. There are a few weak battalions hiding out in the mountain areas and forests of my body..hence a recent operation....and I'm sure there are all kinds of ambushes and hijacks ahead, but on the whole I am quite stable now. I have a good team of doctors (the generals?) who all know me well, and I feel quite in control of myself. I don't have to take horrible drugs or anything. Most of the time I forget about it. I suppose its always true that the image we have of a disease is rarely accurate. Susan Sontag's book 'The Metaphor of Illness' (or something like that) talks about the personality of diseases like TB and AIDS. In terms of cancers, breast cancer gets loads of attention and patients get alot of sympathy, unlike people with bowel cancer or brain tumours.

I spent the weekend looking at Art; at Baltic, the new Biscuit Gallery in Newcastle, and then some open artists studios at the Cluny Warehouse. Saw some fantastic stuff. Now I'm back on the novel, but refreshed by so much visual stimulation. Writing is after all, a very visual medium and is all about trying to get the reader to SEE. Attachments is going great at Live Theatre. People laugh alot which makes me feel happy.

Monday 2nd December 2002

I'm working on the novel all the time now. Attachments has finished its run at Live Theatre. It was a very happy production, and I'm sorry it's finished. When writing a novel there is very little you can say about it. Each day you have to step into a made-up world full of pretend people that you feel you know better than many of your friends. Tomorrow I'm visiting a prison so I can get some detail; it might only be a small paragraph, but I think it's worth the trip.

I must say, I do sometimes feel as if writing novels is rather like archeology in that you unearth the novel from some part of yourself. This novel is not at all autobiographical, but it feels very close to me, and I am very fond of the people in it. I wouldn't be surprised if I met them one day on the bus!

I went to a book launch last Thursday for the poets Peter Mortimer and Michael Standen. There was a good crowd there. The singer Katherine Zeserson 'sang' one of Peter's poems beautifully. Peter's book 'I Married the Angel of The North' was published by Five Leaves Press, and Michael's 'Gifts of Egypt' was produced by Shoestring Press. Both books look fantastic. Hoorah for the Small Press, and for Cannongate and Flambard whose publications have both been on major shortlists. The more that Waterstones seems to only stock about twenty best sellers the more important these eclectic, passion run presses are. My own press, Diamond Twig, is tiny but our writers are really like diamonds and our books are very beautiful and collectable. I hope everyone who reads this diary buys books from small presses. Everyone should have at least one they support.

Tuesday 10th (I think)

Days merge at the moment. Tuesday feels like Saturday. Shops are open too late, and it's alright to drink sherry at ten in the morning. I am trying to keep up a routine in all this chaos, plodding to my room every day despite all the tinsel and merry making. Sometimes it seems more orderly to exist in a made up world rather than a real one, especially when the real one is so unruly. At least in my made up world I can have sentences, paragraphs and chapters. Characters generally do what I tell them to. You never know these days when some drunken office worker is going to bump into you in the street. And the streets in the real world are much colder than in my made up one.

Actually, I haven't been going out much, although I did have a sentimental hour hanging things on the artificial Christmas tree. It has less branches than it used to, but I like the way it is recycled over and over again. Soon it will just be a plastic stand and a stalk.

Monday 16th Dec 2002

So it's nearly Christmas. In my family we rent a house, so it's a bit like a holiday, and no one has a monopoly over the kitchen arrangements. Looks like I've finished everything I meant to finish, and it's a peculiarly neat year in that respect. I hope everyone who reads this diary has a lovely Christmas! I'll write more before I go, but now I've got to get in a taxi!

Mental Christmas Cards

This year I am sending cards telepathically to many friends....here it comes....ZIP!

I have finished everything and now I'm going off on holiday to a house by the sea. I hope everyone who visits this site has a brilliant time at Christmas, and let's hope there's no wars in 2003.

Probably about 30th Dec 2002, but who knows?

After Christmas is quite a delirious time. I'm never quite sure what to do. I've cleared up all the Christmas cards. I would quite like to live in a white box for a while. It's a good time for reading. This Christmas I read Jonathon Coe's The Rotter's Club, which I'd started before and lost interest. This time I ploughed on, and I really enjoyed it. Books are often like that I suppose. There's a right moment for each story. Anyway the Rotter's Club is all about the seventies and reel to reel tape recorders, and caring about politics. I was always walking about with a banner in the seventies even when I was about twelve. The only thing about it is I felt there were several unanswred questions which I think Coe intends to answer in the sequel, but which I find I can't stop thinking about now. I don't really like sequels.

Then I read Jackie Kay's Straw Girl, her first book for children. I loved it. It's full of sweet smelling cows and suffering and bravery. It's a fantastic read, and I'm going to give it to every child I know. Then, still feeling childlike, I read The Masters of The Slavery, which is the second book in a trilogy by William Nicholson. Last Christmas I read The Wind Singer. I liked the first book better. This one is rather war like, and reminded me of Gladiator, which he also wrote. I'm not really an action/fighting-loving sort of reader. His books are full of interesting ideas though, about power and societies etc. What shall I read now? A L Kennedy perhaps. Then I think I'll read Middlemarch. And lots of poetry.

I hope all my diary readers had a lovely time. I wonder what 2003 will bring? I'm looking forward to a peaceful writing year and hoping they'll be no wars, internally or externally or anywhere really.

Monday 6th Jan

Epiphany. When everything comes together. In a short story it's the most exciting bit, when all the fragments of the story come together in an electrifying blaze of ideas. Still, it's a very hard thing to explain. I'm not sure novels have the same thing. In a novel it's more like a slow gathering of power as events gather together into one big wave. I'm reading Anita Shreve (have I spelt that right?). It's absolutely gripping...a novel called 'When We Last Met.' It's not my usual cup of tea...a heterosexual love story...but the writing is exquisite, and like all good writing, almost invisible, so that you can really live in the book as you are reading it. It really gathers power and is immensely satisfying to read. Someone gave it to me for Christmas, and now I shall read all her books.

One of my New Year's Res's is to read a new poem everyday, and to listen to what poets are saying. There are so many good ideas in poetry. I'm doing it alphabetically, starting with Armitage, Abse and allnut. I am also going to stop watching crap programmes on tv about success and failure, and abandon mass culture. This year I shall do all my shopping in small independent shops, buy books from small presses, listen to music produced in back rooms, and like the novelist Toby Litt said in the guardian, always put humans before inanimate things like mobile phones, tvs, cars, even nice views.

I'm happily working on the novel, lost in the world of it. I'm also writing some song lyrics. I'm not very good at tunes, but I love working with tune writers.

Friday 17th January

In my last entry I spelt epithany wrong...but am I spelling it right now?I am filled with that vague uneducated feeling. I'm learning how to spell all the time. This is what happens when you leave school at fifteen and think you know everything. I am always trying to catch up. I really enjoyed doing an MA because I got MARKS for writing, and this is something you never get in the real world. I also found that I could enjoy writing essays and that it wasn't so difficult as scholary types like to make out. I am rather missing being educated, and fancy doing another course. For years I felt outside the education system. I grew up in an atmosphere of learning, in the centre of a public school where my father taught. There were boys with gowns everywhere, flapping about, knowing everything. As a teenager I slouched amongst them, chewing gum, trying to be streetwise, which I wasn't. I went to art college in the end, where it didn't matter if you couldn't do joined up writing, and oddly, that's when I started wanting to be a writer.

I'm about to do loads of readings. For the past year or two I haven't been doing any readings at all, partly because of health and fears of having a funny turn somewhere like Barrow in Furness, and also because I've been doing so much theatre and actors can read my words so much better than I can. But it's about to start all over again, as I've got loads of poetry gigs now I have a new collection to read from...oh eek...it's very exposing reading poetry, like tearing oneself apart in public. And I get a bizarre stammer on words beginning with M and A...and wierdly these new poems are choc a bloc with such words. What was I thinking? I'll probably find myself reading from the novel too later in the year..at least with prose if you see a tricky word coming you can change the sentence...but you can't do that with poems. The answer might be to sing the poems, rather than speak them...like Gareth Gates! Oh well...if I can't stand the heat I had better leave the kitchen.

I'm going to be on Front Row...or that other Radio Four review programme. We're recording on 24th Jan, so it will be sometime after that. I'll put it on the website. That will be fun..luckily I don't stammer on the radio!

Thursday 23rd January

January seems rather busy. I'm never sure if being busy is a good thing. I try hard to relax, and I must have tried just about every form of complimentary medicine that exists. My main form of relaxation at the moment is looking at brochures of spas and amazing hotels, though I rarely go to any of them. I have acupuncture too. I find it really works. And I have an awful lot of baths at this time of year. But I'm still too hyperactive and find it very hard to do nothing. I think it's quite an art.

What I like best is going to places where I have no domestic responsibility. I'd be happy writing in a hotel!

This weekend I'm going to London to take part in Front Row, or maybe it's called Saturday Review on Radio Four. I'm looking forward to opining on various films and books. I've been listening to Lou Reed's latest cd, which I really like. He's quite a role model for the older rock star I think...still very original.

Otherwise, I'm reading Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and enjoying it immensely.

Thursday 30th Jan 2003

So I went to London, and sat watching About Schmidt in Covent Garden in the afternoon. In my quest for relaxation it seems that sitting in cinemas is a good wheeze, especially if one is being paid for it. The film was fantastic. I never really liked Jack Nicholson that much, but he's really good in this film. It's so well written. Then I went to Broadcasting House and was quickly ushered into a recording studio, where I did my best to have opinions. It's very hard to converse in those situations. The other participants made statements that sounded very well thought out. I seemed to dart into the discussion with quick quips. Still it was good to have all these things to think about in January, and it was all over quite quickly.

I met my agent and realised that the new novel comes out in June! Usually books take years to reach the shelves, so that you've just about forgotten them by the time everyone wants to ask you questions. June will be a lovely time for a book to blossom.

Now I'm immersed in short plays/stories for Woman's Hour. There's always a deadline on the horizon.

Friday 7th February 2003

I am hurtling from event to event at the moment. Last Sunday we had an evening at Live Theatre when writers read from their work about the North, and picked extracts that explored 'Northern-ness.' It was a really interesting evening, with David Almond, Andrea Badenoch, Margaret Wilkinson and Sean O'Brien. Much of the work looked at our heritage of coal mining and industry, and hardly anyone talked about more recent changes in the Northern landscape. The question which was raised, but not answered, was what it meant to be a 'Northern writer.' All of us were very influenced by the landscape, even if we weren't native to the North East. I have been living here for years, and just about everything I write is based in Newcastle. The Taxi Driver's Daughter is set right in the city, naming particular streets and areas. I have never found that being specific about where something is based stops it becoming relevant to readers who live elsewhere. Andrea Badenoch said an intersting thing; that when you come from a place it is always much more complicated to describe than if you talk about somewhere as an outsider. I often think that my relationship to this city is a very emotional one, like a relationship with a person. Anyway, when we got to the discussion part of the evening the audience were unusually quiet. I wonder what they went away with?

There's been other events too...a reading of the poetry MA students from the university at the Literary and Philosophical Society. It was packed with people. It seems to me that poetry audiences are getting bigger at last. Next week the writers from the university are reading together at the Gulbenkian studio for Valentine's night. This event has involved much talking and rehearsing. We are trying to present poetry in a more inventive way than the usual lectern and shuffling papers method. I think it will be a really good night, with the poems creating a dialogue between writers, all on the wide subject of 'love.' I am going to lie on a sofa!

This Sunday Kathleen Jamie is reading at Live Theatre with Sean O Brien....Jamie is really one of my heroines as a poet. Her work is rich and direct and fiery and full of fearsome women. These events at Live Theatre are Free...what a gift!

I have finished reading 'Cold Mountain.' I can't stop thinking about it. It's a book that is full of hunger and food, and everytime I open a can of something I think about Inman eating a bear over a fire, or nibbling walnuts to stop himself from starving.Now I'm reading Michael Faber's latest book...a great heavy Victorian epic that is impossible to read in the bath as it's so heavy. The title has the words Crimson and White in, but I can't think of the order they go in.

I feel very lucky sometimes, to be able to live in this nest of words, and not have to do a boring job that I would like to leave but can't.

Thursday 13th Feb 2003

I went to see my dentist yesterday who is also a guitarist. I was thinking about how nice it is as one gets older finding the right people to do things to you. I like my hairdresser too, and my acupuncturist. I suppose we all gather a little troupe of people who 'see to us.' My dentist came to the 'Valentines Poetry Reading' that I was involved in last night. There were six poets and two musicians all reading and singing about love in its widest sense. the reading had been directed by the dramaturg Duska Heaney, and we'd done lots of work reading the poems in different ways, like they were shopping lists, or directions to somewhere. She put us all on luxurious looking sofas, and we didn't speak between poems, so there was no rustling of papers, or talking about why we wrote the poems. This helped to make the reading wonderfully short. Poetry readings are very odd affairs...often you haven't the faintest idea what the poet is on about. Still, this one was very successful and we got a good audience. Actually, I think poetry audiences are on the increase. Perhaps it's because everyone feels a bit distressed at the moment and poetry is good medicine for complicated feelings. On Sunday Sean O Brien and Kathleen Jamie read at Live Theatre. It was a fantastic reading. Kathleen read poems about dolphins and whales, and Sean's work was as inventive and brilliant as ever. Poets have so many good ideas, all packed into tiny poems. When I'm writing fiction I think reading poetry is very inspiring. It is where all the best images and ideas come from...where language is being made.

Now I must get on with my radio stories. I keep thinking about the women's hour listeners. Once I went to hear Jenni Murray read at Hay on Wye from her book about the menopause. It was a hot day and the marquee was full of intelligent, grey haired,no-nonsense menopausal women who were all sweating and fluttering fans. Terrifying!

Saturday 22nd Feb 2003

I'm about to go on holiday to South Africa! Yippee. It will be really hot. We're staying in a place outside Capetown by the sea. There are baboons and surfers. Hard to imagine when you're in Newcastle in February. I shall return as a bronzed babe with sand between my toes.

This week I've has a rather busy social life. Wednesday was the PROUD WORDS AGM. THis is a year long festival of creative writing for lesbians, gays and bisexuals and friendly people. There are workshops and readings and other things. I was around when it began about four years ago. Now it's got accounts and a constitution and all sorts. I went down to do a poetry reading after AOB. I got given a beautiful glass bowl made by my friend Cate Watkinson as an award for services. It was unexpected and really lovely. Now I don't know where to put this wonderful objet d'art. I move it all around the house.

Rosie Lugosi, the vampire lesbian did a set of songs and poems on the same night. Although I'm a cocoa and pyjamas girl myself, she was very entertaining with her whip and wig (sounds like a pub).

On Thurdsay there was an art opening of paintings by Emma Holliday. Emma paints familiar places from around the area, like the Baltic, the river, buildings etc, and is a wonderful colourist. She is really producing some fantastic work at the moment. I met Clare and Shirley, who I said I would mention in my weblog...they were looking very well, I thought. I was glad to see that Emma had cheese and pineapple on sticks, as lately you seem to get nothing but crisps at such dos!

Friday 7th March

I'm back from an epic holiday on the Cape peninsular in South Africa. It was like being in a wonderful rock garden, with icy blue seas and rolling waves, and an abundance of everything...like fresh fish and mangoes. We visited Robben island where a former political prisoner showed us round Mandela's cell. the prison is more or less as it was, a harsh, uninviting place with a cruel history. We heard about how Mandela and others were treated and how they managed to get through the years. We visited a township too and were shown lots of projects that were helping people deal with AIDS and such. It was really inspiring how positive people were, but also shocking to see a country with such riches and so much poverty. From the top of Table Mountain the landscape is like a John Martin painting..you can see for miles in every direction....all blue and rocky and misty. It was an incredible holiday. I read about snakes and went to a snake farm. Also read The Horned Man by James Lasden...a wonderful and gripping novel which is full of delightful ideas, and Daughters of Jerusalem by Charlotte Mendleson...enjoyed that loads too...and Fortunes Rocks by Anita Shreve which was romantically gripping in a way that I might not have stayed with had I not been on holiday. Now I'm reading Mandela's autobiography.

Back at work again in my room...it's kind of nice to be back in cool England. My eyes ached with that bright South African light. I got my first migraine! Amazingly my body is doing very well though, and hasn't made much fuss at all about having to travel thousands of miles.

Wednesday 12th March

Whooohooo! I'm feeling very giddy and excited after receiving my Northern Rock Writer's Award last night. It was a really lovely night. There was champagne and chocolates,and purple flower arrangements and not too many speeches. There were several writers receiving awards, giving them time to write, or acknowledging potential. I think the approval is easily as important as the money. Writing can be so lonely, and often you don't really know if it's any good or not. And even if you do write something good, you're never sure the next thing won't be crap. So these awards are like little surges of joy and affirmation for us insecure writers. I was very pleased to see all kinds of people winning things....writers who have spent years going to workshops and redrafting novels,like Diane Simpson , and writers who are just beginning, like the brilliant young poet Emma McGordon who read a riveting poem last night. And then there's creative geniuses like the novelist John Murray, who published my first collection of stories Bloodlines when he was the editor of Panurge Press. John lives in Cumbria and his novel Jazz etc has just come out. There's hardworking poets like Bob Beagrie and Maureen Almond who work their socks off doing readings and workshops and making literature LIVE. And there's new novelists who are trying to get there work out there, like the talented Avril Joy. Everyone who got a prize deserved it!

It was all terribly heartening. David Almond, who was presenting prizes said how lucky we were to be living in the North of England. I think we have a rare network of creative people here. Writers tend to know each other and to be very supportive to one another. I must have known almost all the writers who were there last night. We are lucky that there is enough to share, and I hope that most writers feel supported and included even if they didn't win this time.

My award is overwhelmingly generous. It's like being given a wage to be yourself...it's a kind of fantasy that never usually happens. Anne Stevenson, the poet who won the award last year said the difference was entirely psychological. She was able to bask ! Although most things I do are not for money, primarily, the award will give me the ability to stand back and look at the big picture. I have not had a regular wage since 1985! Anyway, what a happy thing to happen! Maybe I've died and gone to heaven!

Friday 21st March 2003

I've reached the end of the whooping period and I am back into mt settled routine. It seems to me it's got more settled since I won the award. It's a very odd sensation to know that I'll have a wage in two years time. I feel calm and purposeful! How long will this last, I wonder? I am just finishing my short plays for Women's Hour, and we record them at the beginning of April in Manchester. I am looking forward to being in those studios again and working with the producer Sue Roberts, who is fantastic. Then, when those are done I must concentrate on the new book, which at this point is full of delightful possibilities, and is of course, staggeringly brilliant..ha ha.

Lately I've been asked to make all kinds of comments about books in the press...my top ten North Books...under rated and over rated books....books that leave me cold...and ones that I would take to a desert island. It's very difficult to choose ones favourites....for one thing it changes all the time. I agonised over the top ten, as there are so many writers here in the North East..if you pick up a stone they all scuttle out. I am always discovering work I enjoy, or else suddenly understanding work that I hadn't connected with before. And if I don't like a book then I usually give up and stop reading it, so how can you criticise something you haven't read properly?

I am reading Ann Tyler's The Accidental Tourist at the moment. Actually, when I got back from South Africa I felt a bit stuck, and couldn't think what to read next. I ploughed through Mandela's autobiography which he wrote on Robben Island. For seven years he wasn't allowed a pen! Still, he got to end of it. It was interesting to read the book so soon after visiting the prison, though it feels quite formal as a book...like he is, I suppose.

After I finished it, I couldn't think what to read next. I hate that with reading...when you suddenly find yourself in a cul de sac. You know there are a million fantastic books waiting to be read, but you can't find the right one. My solution to this problem is to return to something classic. Tyler's novel are more or less perfect as far as I'm concerned.

If anyone out there is reading this please recommend a novel for me to read next. Tell me why it's good! I don't like violence, too much small descriptive print, too many facts, or books that set out to be funny. I love novels that take me to a new landscape...books like Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier) and Postcards (Annie Proulx) Under The Skin (Michael Faber) and books that introduce me to characters who I would never meet in the normal run of things.

It's a beautiful Spring Day. Everything would be fine if they weren't dropping bombs on Bagdad. My daughters are very politically active in the anti war campaign, and they are shocked that the war still goes ahead despite all their protests. I think the new generation will be shaped by these awful events. I was thinking about those caves where Bin Laden might still be hanging out...perhaps Saddam will end up there...perhaps all the baddies will end up living underground, bumping into each other at night. Also, someone said the other night, Tony Blair looks more and more like a wolf.

Thursday 27th March

I'm working on a new novel now. I can't talk about the details incase I confuse myself. It's like starting a long journey..inventing the characters who I will have to travel with, and making an inventory of useful things to take with me, trying not to fall into the traps of other novels. Most important is to give ones characters motivation, because if you don't the whole thing collapses by page 50. Also to decide what one wants the reader to worry about ie the hook. Then to uncover the language and tone of the novel, which is perhaps the most difficult thing of all.

Exciting though...like exploring a new country and working out how to live there!

The other thing that has happened recently is that we've had a rat in the house. This has caused unimaginable disorder and panic. Ratty bites through pipes and wires, and has ruined the cooker. He's made nests out of dusters and chocolate wrappers. It is a very clever rat, but not clever enough to LEAVE now we're onto it. Alan the rat catcher comes round regularly with his buckets of poison in a blue hold all. He says things like...it could have up to ten babies...or, there's nothing like the smell of a dead rat next to a heating pipe....he's put down lots of red bowls filled with blue pellets. Today he is putting down traps, but Ratty keeps going. It has eaten whole boxes of chocolates, and emptied pans of potatoes. We no longer eat at home. It's crazy. I keep telling people I'm having problems with a rat, and they mis-hear me and think I'm saying 'I'm having problems with Iraq' !

Thanks to everyone who recommended novels. Perhaps you can give me some tips about getting rid of rats!

Thursday 3rd April 2003

I'm back from Manchester where we were recording the five women's hour plays. It all went really smoothly, with actors who seemed capable of using their voices to create the most subtle nuances in the text. I sat in the studio next to the producer, Sue Roberts. I love this producer. She has such a clear ear for things and everyone around her feels relaxed. Other people are sitting doing timings and tapping away at computers. It's all very efficient. Every so often Sue says something like, what do you think about changing this AND to BUT? The main thing is getting the plays the right length, and the other thing I needed to do was cut bits when they were too long, which nearly all of them were. Some of the plays are adapted from THE LAST POST which was a stage play I wrote last year. The actors who were in the stage version and the radio version had to stop acting so much. Radio is so intimate. You hardly need to put any expression into a voice to show anger,desire or whatever. Two of the plays were completely new, and I was most anxious about them as I hadn't heard them being read. Thank god they seemed to work ok though. The plays are broadcast everyday from 19th May.

You'll be glad to know the rat has gone. Everything is back to normal, if it ever is really normal. The rat's corpse is in a shoe box in the front garden, as I want to show the rat catcher that we've caught it. It turned up dead, you'll be glad to hear. Our cat dragged it about pretending that it had killed it, but actually it was the poison. But what a drama that was!

I went to see the film Frida last week. I enjoyed it alot. The clothes are beautiful, and I liked the way the film looked at her life and illness. Actually I found it quite

I am about to get really immersed in the new book. I have a story now, but the characters are still a bit misty and vague, like people I don't really know yet.

Monday 7th April 2003

I just went for a hospital appointment with Doctor Verril. This was to get the results of my scan. I wasn't looking forward to it, as in my experience results are usually bad. Also there's no point getting worked up, because the results might not be there, so I am very good at entering a dreamlike state when I go into the RVI. I read an article about Monica Lewinksky. The waiting room was eerily empty and the nurses were twittering and giggling in the corridor. The atmosphere was like a girls boarding school at half term. However Doctor Verril was there and we got called in quite swiftly. He read out the results which showed no sign of any mestatises (probably spelt wrong) at all. It's as if the cancer has dried up. There is a bit of fluid in my pleural cavities, but not enough to worry about. I asked him why and he said it could be anything. Still, good news. It means that I don't have to have any more treatment for a while. I believe that this remission is due to the combination of acupuncture, Doris the healer, and Doctor Verril, and me. Together I think we are a formidable team.

I am going off on another retreat this week to work on the new book. It's forming in my head all the time. I can't stop thinking about it. I keep turning over ideas about Northern Magic Realism too. Last night I went to listen to David Almond read at The Blue Room...his work inhabits a childlike world where the imagination interweaves with reality. I'm interested in that place, where truth and lies mix up together. I love his work. I just read (thanks Joanne) A True Story Based On Lies, a short Mexican novel by an author whose name I've temporarily forgotten. Her work inhabits the same territory.

Monday 14th April 2003

It hasn't rained for months! All my sunflower seedlings are drying up. Is this global warming or what?

I had a brilliant week away. I have realised that it doesn't matter how much time I have, I only write for roughly four hours a day, but what does make the difference is not having anything else to do in between. I really enjoyed lying about in pools of sunlight thinking about my characters. Or not even thinking about the book, just being vague and dreamy. I did loads, and feel really connected with the new book now.

Today it was the academic's writing group. We've been meeting for a long time now, and I look forward to the sessions which are every lunchtime once a fortnight. The group attracts all the nicest people from all over the university(!)...landscape gardeners, geographers,adminstrators, scientists, child psychologists. We meet up and write for half and hour, then read it out. Today we wrote about things that were found at the bottom of a lake. This was because Leazes Park Pond has just been dredged and there is a fascinating pile of muddy things in glass cases at the Museum of Antiquities. In the group we made up things, and one person wrote 'six ornamental gnomes' and nearly everyone wrote about these gnomes. Somebody said 'Well, if you'd told me I would spend my lunch hour writing about gnomes I wouldn't have come, but now I am so glad I did!"

It's all quiet again now the students have drained away. Easter always takes me by surprise. I have the proof of Taxi Driver's Daughter to read. It's wierd now it's a book, not a pile of paper. Books are such beautiful things.

Saturday 26th April 2003

I am back from a week of visiting! I spent days in Brighton with my lovely sister and partner and her three children, seeing my mum too, and Kathy (who asked to be mentioned by name!) lying about eating fairy cakes in Queen's Park, hanging out in wierdy but nice teashops..particular favourite CONBERTS 16 Sydney Street where you could have sandwiches with the crusts cut off and tea served in proper china cups with all the silver accessories, strainers and so on. I had my eyebrows waxed, which has made me look surprised. According to my mum, if you want to say something difficult to someone, you should raise your eyebrows at them, and they won't mind. Mine are now constantly raised so I can say what I like!

After Brighton I went to London and my duaghter and I went to the Saatchi exhibition. One of the exhibits made me feel like throwing up...it was the cow's head and the flies. I also used my new eyebrows to complain about the cloakroom facilities which were your usual British messed up affair with a girl who looked about fifteen laboriously sticking labels onto bags with selotape, while a long, long queue silently fumed! The exhibition was such a mix of things. I was really fascinated by the sculpture Dead Dad, and kept returning to it. I liked the photographic images of Henry Vlll's wives. But some of the stuff looked downright MOULDY I thought, particularly all the pickled animals.

We went to the Tate Modern too where two cans of juice, and a couple of flapjacks cost Ł6.30 !! I loved the exploding shed, and enjoyed looking at old favourites like Matisse and Miro. After that I spent the rest of the time on my friend's sofa. I only like visiting people who I know well enough to lie on their sofas! I like London, but I tend to get lost and to walk in circles. I managed to leave my fat red mother's purse in the back of a mini cab, but the driver returned it the following day. What honesty!

Thursday 1st May

I got a new poetry anthology of socialist poetry in the post called Red Sky at Night, edited byAndy Croft and Adrian Mitchell. I haven't had time to read it properly yet, but it has a beautiful cover and I like the title too. Poets are doing their best to be useful lately, and I was pleased that the poet laureate has been so vocally opposed to the war. I suppose that in times of crisis people need poets to put things into words and to show how everything matters. The poet David Constantine was talking about this at a recent reading here in the university...how the same things happen to poets as happen to everyone...sad things, moving things, worrying things, but poets are compelled to write about it, and to try and communicate their experiences to others. More and more it seems that poetry is being promoted as first aid. There are poems to keep you sane, poems to help you stay alive, anti war poems, survival poetry. I have certainly used poetry as a way of understanding my own experience of cancer. Actually, it would have been very strange to have not had a creative outlet while I was having all that treatment. Where would all my worries and fears have gone??

I spent yesterday lunchtime having lunch with the panel of the city of culture. We had Newcastle Brown ice cream ! In the end I forgot about trying to enthuse about Newcastle, and I had a very pleasant chat with two of them about novels. We were sitting in a room that overlooked everything...the river, the bridges, Baltic, Gateshead. It must be wierd going around all these cities and having people talking to you about their achievements all the time! Still, although I am very fond of Liverpool, I think Newcastle/Gateshead is READY to expand and stretch its steely wings. It doesn't feel like a nostalgic city any more. It feels like a bouncy young person with loads of enthusiasm. I was thinking how we have changed so much in the time I have been living here. We know how to be ironic. We can have twenty balls in the air and not drop any of them!

Otherwise I'm busy on the next book. I am going to take my fictional characters to Brazil. So far I have been getting to know them in Newcastle, but we are going to go to Central Brazil and have an adventure. I am working on poems too, and trying to go into the space where poems are made every day. It's such a relief when one gets there, but very hard to open the door!

Thursday 8th May 2003

I am obsessed with Brazil. I like saying the word to myself. This is because I am taking my fictional characters on a journey in this next novel. Luckily, it doesn't cost too much taking fictional people on holiday! So I've been reading about Brazil, meeting Brazilians, eating Brazil nuts, learning salsa dancing, drinking juice. This takes up plenty of time.

I am also making a stage play into a tv piece which is an interesting process, thinking about the small screen and what we see. It's hard to let go of words though. Nice to be able to get up close to people's faces. I have never had anything on television before, so I feel like a fumbling person who doesn't know the rules. This is a pilot episode for a comedy series, based on the play Attachments that was on last year. It's all about hoovers and artificial insemination. The play was too long so I'm cutting about half of it.

Otherwise I'm growing sunflowers and nasturtiums, and inviting people to come and raise their glasses at the poetry press launch on May 27th. I've been writing poems about salsa dancing and teenagers, and working on the synopsis for the new novel, although I'm not sure what will happen until I have been to Brazil. Everything is growing incredibly fast....

My reading has lost direction at the moment. I have about eight novels on the go and I'm not absorbed in any of them. Tomorrow I have a long journey on a train, so maybe I can get myself immersed then. I am going to Deptford to see an exhibition called INFALLIBLE (In Search of the Real George Elliot). I'm going to write a story for the exhibition's website. I like things like this, that introduce a different element to writing. I especially like working from visual art.

Monday 19th May 2003

It's Monday morning. I am in my writing room with the radio on about to listen to POSTIES. It's funny, listening to things when they are ON AIR....like being part of a huge invisible audience.

I spent the weekend in Leeds, having a break, with my mum. We stayed in a hotel called Quebecs that had very squashy beds and raspberries for breakfast, which I still think of as a luxury fruit. It was interesting being a tourist in a Northern city. I mean you could become a tourist at any point couldn't you, just by stepping out of your life, putting on a hat, walking slowly and hanging about art galleries and craft shops. I am going to do it in Newcastle. Anyway, we went to odd places, like a small independent cinema in Hyde Park with ancient seats and a red dust screen curtain. Before the film we sat in a cafe called Bakara (I think) where students drank mint tea and smoked medicinal hookahs in low sofas. Everywhere we went people were incredibly kind and helpful, telling us how to get to places and giving advice. We also went to the City Art Gallery which is full of sofas and comfey places to sit. There was a model of Anthony Gormley's 'brick man' which is a large angel of the north type sculpture which hasn't yet been made. I was doing a project taking photographs of my thumb in different settings, so I have photos of my thumb in a hotel bed, in the markets, in the gallery and so on. This is my latest idea for a writing workshop...you write postcards from parts of the body in different places ie my Shins in Spain!

This week I am working on the script for the tv thing. It's taking shape now, and is no longer a stage play at all.

Wednesday 28th May 2003

Sudden Collapses In Public Places has been launched. It was a fantastic party, with strawberries in glasses of champagne, and singing and violins, and loads of bubbly people. I really enjoyed myself. Sometimes parties are rather stressful, but this one wasn't. It was great to see people there from all kinds of different places; from the hospital, the medical school, the theatre, the university, and writing groups. There were old friends, other women who have had breast cancer, new friends, poets, children, some babies, healers, people's mothers, artists, scientists...etc etc. And it was quite short, which is always a good thing I think. So now the book has set sail and I can let it go. I like the look of it very much. I think ARC have done a wonderful job.

I am doing the final tweaks on the script for the TV sitcom based on the play 'Attachments' which is being filmed in July. I have managed to cut the original play by twenty minutes, but the wierd thing is, the story is still more or less intact. The stage play now seems like a big baggy thing. I think alot of things could do with a bit of fierce cutting (my hair?).

Thanks to recommendations I am now reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It's very readable, although I feel I need a good stretch with it somewhere, like a deckchair on a shady beach. I long for that feeling of being completely absorbed in a book. Life has been too fragmented lately for much lying about. I am like a wound up thing...I get more and more busy until I whiz out of control and have to do nothing for a while.

Thanks everyone who got in touch after listening to POSTIES on the radio. It's great getting feedback after radio things!

Thursday 5th June

A sad couple of days....Newcastle/Gateshead didn't win the bid, which was disappointing. But I've been thinking about good things about not winning (being an optimist). For example, there will be less car parks, coaches,and less hyped up events, and less tourists. Probably there will be fewer bouncy castles, men in suits talking into megaphones, less fireworks which frighten dogs.There will be less property developers, and luxury flats, and we won't have to say Capital of Culture all the time, which is a bit of a mouthful. Also, it's always true that losers are more interesting than winners...as my daughter Florence said, look at Liberty X ! And why do we need to be picked? Why don't we just pick ourselves and say we're the centre of anything we like. And why are we being so competing anyway? Why can't there be creative cities everywhere. I was thinking about how brilliant Gateshead is, the way they have just carried on doing brave arty things without needing to be approved of by anyone from the outside. That's what I don't like about the Brian Sewell stuff (the art critic who has been bad mouthing Newcastle Gateshead)...I mean, who cares what he thinks? He doesn't care what we think of London. It's a funny, complicated thing, this loyalty to places. It gets you right in your gut. It's how wars start. Thank god we didn't win....we would have got all jingoistic and hysterical. Let's just get back to what we were doing anyway.

Yesterday I did a poetry reading in Gateshead for an organisation called Equal Arts, who do brilliant work connecting artists with older people. This event was part of a project called 'Being There' and the audience were all brought to the venue in free taxis. I was reading from Sudden Collapses In Public Places, and Maggie Thacker and Charlie Buchanan were singing and playing songs in between poems. It was a really well organised, happy event. I would definitely take part if I get old. They will be going all over the place; art galleries, music events. Tonight I am reading at central library with the poets Annie Wright and Linda France. I am getting to know the poems now, and enjoying reading them. They feel quite truthful! I always worry about poetry readings; about going on too long, or boring people. In this case the poems are all about my experiences of breast cancer and hospitals, so I hope I'm not frightening people. I really like doing evenings with music, as it changes the atmosphere.

Got to go....I'm meeting someone for lunch. I keep meaning to write a guide to cafes in Newcastle. I am an expert. Love J

Wednesday 18th June 2003

I've just had a week away again, writing and not doing much else...well, listening to the wireless, thinking, eating little snacks, the odd stroll...It's quite hard coming back from these weeks. I need to decompress or something. It's like walking into a gale of demands. Ordinary life is so complicated, with shopping and phones and trying to be a good mother, and appointments and so on. So many female writers with children are pulled in two directions. A voice inside you tells you off for wanting to go and live in an imaginary world, when one should be dealing with real issues. And one's children are so fascinating and interesting and all consuming! Jane Austen, George Elliot, the Brontes, Jean Rhys were all childless.

I'm reading a book called the Wind Up Bird Chronicle now by a Japanese writer (I haven't got the book with me now, and I'm afraid to make a spelling attempt). It's completely compelling, yet very strange. It's the kind of writing that gathers force as a the reader gets deeper into the book. I really love it, although at the beginning I kept falling asleep after one page. I am also reading Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star which is a fascinating book. I'm interviewing him at Proud Words lesbian/gay/bisexual literary festival this Saturday in the Copthorne Hotel in Newcastle. Proud Words has got loads of events coming up (Sarah Waters, song writing workshops) and they're all free. If you live in the North East and feel a bit bisexual you'd be mad to miss it!

Cold Calling (which used to be Attachments) gets filmed for tv in a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing the set and the recording in front of a live audience. Otherwise I'm just writing the novel and getting ready to go to Brazil. It should be lovely and simple and uncomplicated, but of course it isn't!!

Tuesday 24th June 2003

Of course the novelist I talked about last time (the Wind Up Bird Chronicle) is Haruki Murakami. I'm suddenly aware how famous he is, and how many novels he has written. It's funny when you stumble across a writer you haven't heard of before, briefly thinking that you have 'discovered' them, only to find that they are world famous. When I used to go and spend time writing in Ireland at the Tyrone Guthrie centre sometimes American visitors would turn up, saying they were going to visit a poet called Seamus Heaney.

It's all steamy and jungly here in Newcastle. Summer is really here. I've been working on the new book, and some poems too.I'm very involved with the characters, Honor and Win, in the new novel now. They don't get on with each other at all. They seem to know what they want to do, and I find myself following their lead, rather than the other way round. Soon we will be going to Brazil together, so goodness knows what will happen then !

At the weekend there was the Proud Words launch (gay and lesbian literature festival), where Patrick Gale and Alan Hollinghurst read amongst others who picked excerpts from their favourite books. Alan and Patrick's readings were both very good and interesting. Alan read from an unpublished novel called The Line Of Beauty....a really wonderful bit of writing, I thought. The next day I talked to him about his work infront of a small (and beautifully behaved) audience about writing, editors, publishing and gay literature. I didn't know his work that well before meeting him, but felt I learnt alot about his process and want to read more. Proud Words is a great festival, and it's all free. Sarah Waters comes up next week, and there's lots of other stuff on.

There's also been the gypsy festival at Northern Stage. I went down to hear some free music at the playhouse. There were people from all over Europe there, playing and dancing! Black Eyes Roses is Northern Stage's devised production and it's really worth seeing; full of energy and invention with great stories.

Wednesday 2nd july

I'm doing my tax at the moment. It's a very odd activity; a mixture of nostalgia as one holds up crumpled receipts and remembers having two cokes and a bowl of olives in Athens, and sometimes fury as I realise how much I've been paying for the sodding internet. Then there's a delightful sense of order as the pile of receipts lessens and all the columns of ingoings and outgoings neaten up, and you can start adding up. I still add up using my fingers. I am not very numerically literate at all. Anyway, when all this is done , off it goes to the accountant who will have to check my messy calculations. I like to imagine the tax inspectors perusing my odd expenditures. Does he examine my receipts and tut over my indulgences? I seem to spend rather alot on beautifying my office (rugs, picture frames) and I buy a hell of a lot of stationary (I really do). Can I claim, say, for a bicycle bell as part of my expenses? It's hard to manage a working life without a bicycle bell! And what about reflexology, acupuncture, gym membership? Then there's the vague category of 'research.' Most writers could argue that they are researching all the time. I spend hundreds of pounds on books and I'm hoping they are part of my allowances. It's hard for writers as our incomes are completely unreliable..one year you earn nothing, the next you might get a book deal and seem to be doing rather well. Most books take years to write, so we have to argue that our earnings should be spread out over years. My best tip for self employed people, and the only one I have done consistently, is to write each month on a large envelope and as you buy things stuff the receipts in the right envelopes. It saves days!

Tonight I am going to do an evening at Bishop Auckland Town Hall, talking about writing. I have always been very fond of Bishop, of the people there and the library. There's a thriving writer's group,(Wear Valley Writers) and a constant stream of writers reading and running workshops and book related events. This is all because of the brilliant Gillian Wales who runs the arts programme there. As usual, one person with a passion quietly changes the world around them.

On Saturday I am going to read with Jackie Kay at Hebden Bridge. I'm doing quite a bit of reading and talking at the moment. However Brazil is not far away, and it's nice doing some talking about ones work.

Outside it's raining. I must get back to my April receipts! Is underwear a necessary expense for a writer?

Very late. Monday 14th July

Feels like we're all in the throes of Mid summer madness! I've been up late dancing, and carousing, in the wild gardens of Newcastle, and you don't even need a cardigan! Everyone is sweating, which is nice if you get hot flushes, or less lonely anyway.

And I'm getting ready for Brazil, and have been packing my fictional character's suitcases for them. Also, down at Live Theatre, the play Attachments is becoming the tv comedy Cold Calling. It's been shortened down to 23 minutes (from 45 mins). There's a whole HOUSE been built for it, and a new hoover (the play is about a hoover salesman, sudden death, and artificial insemination). It's been filmed infront of a live audience. It's interesting, this journey from stage to screen. The actors are doing brilliantly (Trevor Fox and Charlie Hardwick), and the characters are becoming more intense, more undiluted, less dramatic and more internalised.

On Sunday it was the annual Pride Dog Show, and I am glad to say that Heidi, the dog who we share with our neighbours, won three rosettes: for looking like one of her owners (not me). For 'best trick' (rolling over) and she did very well on the obstacle course thingy. I was sitting about eating cake and drinking thermos tea. I was disappointed that she didn't do better in the fancy dress...she was wearing tennis whites and carrying a tennis racket....but Harry Potter won, with a 'hot dog' as a second.

I just read Property, the novel that won the Orange Prize. It's a really good read and the kind of book you can whiz through in a few hours. The central character is interesting,fascinating and I didn't like her much. It's the kind of novel that is very heightened and intense. I also read 'The Lovely Bones' in a couple of days (Alice Sebald). This is a very special novel, I think, and beautifully written. I'm reading Murakami's stories which are strange and compulsive. I want to find more Murakami readers and ask them what they think his work is about. I don't know what to read in Brazil. Life of Pi maybe? Maybe I will be too busy doing the samba on the Cococabana?

Monday 21st July 2003

I just wrote this then lost it all, so this entry will be the quick version. I'm in Rio in a long blue internet cafe full of young Brasilians gleefully playing computer games. Outside it's the most perfect balmy day, a sort of golden Autumn, with a slight breeze. Me and my fictional characters are far too happy...it will be hard to make much conflict in this story. We've been cycling along the beaches on rusty bikes hired from a man who just gave us some bikes and told us to leave them outside the hotel. No names, no deposits, no nothings. You can cycle for miles along the beach paths, past people dancing to ghetto blasters, selling coconuts, jogging, showing off their biceps and playing football. You could watch people all the time. It's endlessly fascinating and uplifting. No sign of any gun men, or women, and no one has hassled us at all. The most dangerous thing is a taxi ride...we went the wrong way down a dual carriage way yesterday...but even that becomes oddly normal.

We went up a steep hill, past shrubs filled with flowers like bright scarlet lips, to see Christ The Redeemer who looks over Rio with a kind, bemused expression. You can drink any kind of juice in the world here...cashew juice, seaweed juice...

We've been dancing, trying to move our hips and not our bodies. There's music everywhere. Found out about a church called The Chrurch of Moses Snake That Ate The Other Two. This will, I think, be my working title. More later.

Coming home Wednesday 30th July

I'm in Rio again, after a journey to Brasilia, then up to the mountains where I saw a healer. The visit was odd, and hard to assimilate somehow. A Brazilian friend drove us up to 'the casa' which in a one horse town with one wide dusty road, flanked by garages and bars. It was the kind of place you pass through on the way to somewhere else. We drove down some back streets to a pousada which was clean, very dark inside, friendly and basic. No one spoke English. I have longed to be able to speak Portugese on this trip. Our Brazilian friend sorted out what we were supposed to do. You went to the casa, to see the healer, at 8.00 am, and all would become clear. We were to wear white, and on no account should we wander into the crystal garden without the healer's permission. So, after going to bed at about 9.00 pm ,as there was no night life in this tiny town, we put on our white pyjamas that we had bought at C and A in Brasilia, and found ourselves wandering down the dirt road along with several hundred other white clad people. It was like dreaming, or like we were being summoned by aliens. The casa was a cluster of simple white and blue buildings, rather like a hospital. There was a garden, a cafe, a large hall, and a dispensary. Everyone shuffled into the main hall, waiting for instructions. There were helpers dressed in blue coats who spoke English. Everyone was patient. many people looked very ill, and desperate. there were poor Brazilians, Americans in coach loads, children, people in wheelchairs. I glanced into a room and saw a pile of discarded crutches.

In the large hall there was a film of miracuklous operations being played continuously. This showed the healer cutting tumours, or just reaching into people's bodies as they stood calmly on a platform. It was quite hard to watch. there wasn't much blood, and no one showed any signs of pain. After the operations people were sewn up with large needles. The healer is doing these operations unconsciously...he is occupied by spirits. No one gets infections.

So we waited in queues, divided up according to how many times we had visited the casa. I was holding a red ticket, standing in the first timers queue. We waited for three hours. In the end we shuffled into rooms filled with meditating people. These were called the current rooms. You moved through these, concentrating on positive thoughts, as we had been told to prepare ourselves to meet the healer. In the last of three rooms he sat barefooted, looking quite relaxed and not like a star at all. Apparently he sees each person like a blueprint. He glanced at each of us, then scribbled a note which gave an instruction. This might be to take herbs, to meditate, to lie on a crystal bed, to have an operation, or, like me, to return at 2.00 as he couldn't make his mind up, or the right spirit wasn't available. My friend was told to come back and to sit in the current rooms.

So that afternoon I waited in the 2.00 pm line until 3.30 pm, then was told I would have an operation and to take herbs. This was to be an invisible operation, not a slicy open sort.

Sunday 3rd August 2003

I'm back home. I suppose I could invent all these journeys and be in bed the whole time! But I really did go to Brazil. Honestly. To finish off the story about my operation; I went again into the current rooms, dressed in my white C and A pyjamas. Again the rooms were full of meditating people, all sitting closely together in rows, eyes closed. About twenty of us shuffled through. In the last room there was a young woman sitting hissing like a snake. We were told by helpers to stand with eyes closed with our hand on the part of our body that needed healing. All I could hear were mumbles and hisses. A few minutes passed. Then we were ushered out of the building and told to take a taxi back to our pousada, to rest, to take our herbs, and to avoid certain foods and alcohol. I did what I was told. I was feeling very tired, but hungry too. We went back and played rummy in the dark back room. I lost by five points. Can you believe it? I have never won a game of rummy. Then I slept deeply, still in the white pyjamas. The next day I had been told to stay and rest, but I felt really ill. All that day I was sick. I couldn't move. Eventually that evening we left the pousada and got a taxi back to Brasilia. I was sorry not to say goodbye to the people at the casa. As soon as we got back I started feeling better. I don't know why I was sick....maybe the altitude, the dry air, the anxiety about seeing the healer. Now I am home I keep thinking about the casa. I think it was a place of miracles. Believing this makes my whole belief system feel shaky. So if this is true, so must so many other things be true too....ghosts, reincarnation, heaven, aliens. It's making me dizzy. When you see things you don't understand, like the visible operations, it's easier to blank them out than to really take them on.

Anyway, it's nice to back with PG Tips, marmite, custard, and Bad Girls. Life is sweet, that's for sure.

This week I am going to work on the new novel. After all the travelling I ache to be writing again, or if not writing, just sitting and contemplating the territory of the book. But it's a busy week. Taxi Driver's Daughter is published on Thursday. I'm doing an interview with Jenny Colgan on Radio 4 that day.

Oh, books I read while travelling were...Life of Pi...just loved this book. I am glad it won the Man Booker. It's wierd and thoughtful, and wonderful. Barbara Vine...Dark Adapted Eye, or something like that. Awful I can't remember the title, as I was utterly gripped. It was about a woman who had been hung for murder, set during the war. I woke up in the middle of the night, feverish to read it. Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell is such a good writer...such good descriptions of life and manners in 40s. Also, Interpreter of Maladies (short stories) brilliant stories by an Indian writer, full of heart, joy and sadness. I don't Know How She Does It. This bestseller by Alison Pearson was all I could find in a Brazilian bookshop...I enjoyed it, even though I thought I wouldn't. She writes very intelligently about the guilt of mothering, and I laughed out loud several times, even if the heroine works for the stock market. I'm not surprised working mothers are grabbing it off the shelves.

Tuesday 11th August 2003

I've been biking down the Thames on one of the hottest days of the year with my mum, Vic, and best friend Jan. This is the first time I have been on a bicycle since being ill, and it felt like returning to my old self. We met outside the Tate Modern and whizzed off past the Globe and down towards Greenwich. There is something about being on a bike that makes one feel like a kid again...all that wheeling in between things, bumping over kerbs, leaving walkers behind. We stopped to watch a Nigerian wedding, waited hours for the bride to arrive, because it's supposed to be lucky to see brides. From Greenwich we went through the foot tunnel, which was icy cool and dripping, and came out in the Isle of Dogs. From there we went through Canary Wharf with it's big glassy towers and found the canal which tok us back to Islington. This was like the under belly of London...a long scummy waterway, with fishermen (I've never seen a woman fishing) boys throwing stones at rats, dark low bridges, and bits of industry. Every so often we would pass the back of someone's house where someone was playing loud reggae music. It was a memorable ride. I love exploring the secret parts of London.

Now I'm back at my desk, though about to go on the annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Wight (crabbing, Compton Bay, fish and chips, Yarmouth Carnival sports day) I can't quite jump back into the new novel until I have a big enough space. Cold Calling has been on the telly. Because of the heat the picture kept on fragmenting which was maddening. Still, it was succesful in lots of ways....I learnt alot about television writing...like, it's what's going on INSIDE the actors head which matters most....I have never cut a script so close to its bones. I was yet again overwhelmed by the talents of actors Charlie Hardwick and Trevor Fox.

Also Taxi driver's Daughter arrived in shops on Thursday. I've had some really lovely reviews...one in the TLS that talked about all kinds of details in the novel...the kind of stuff that no one seems to notice usually. For anyone who saw Independent piece...my partner is called BEV not Pat, and I have a very important sister, Josie, as well as three brothers. Also it's the Northern Rock Writers Foundation which is different from the bank. And the poetry is published by ARC not Anvil! For all that I really enjoyed that interview, and liked the journalist very much.

Thursday 28th August I think

I'm on my yearly visit to the Isle of Wight, woken each morning by wild geese flapping their wings and organising their travel arrangements in the marshes next to the old Mill House where I'm staying with my vast tribe of family and friends. I am feeling very grubby, like an old hippy. My hair sticks up and I haven't looked in a mirror for days. The highlights of summers in the Isle of Wight are things like sitting watching sunsets while children catch crabs in the river Yar, riding along the old railway line on my (new) bike; eating huge suppers around a large table each night, then playing games when you have to pretend to be animals (thankyou Jack). I have been reading constantly....The Curious Incident of The Dog At Midnight, by Mark Haddon....this is fantastic...a book written from the point of view of an autistic boy. My sister and I agreed that we felt what it was like to be autistic reading this book. It's quite dark and sad, although you think it will be happy when you begin it. Also Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson...very gripping, set in a place not unlike the IOW. Her language is so taut and accurate. And The Colour, by Rose Tremain...bloody fantastic, like all Tremain's work. She should win the Booker I think.

Anyway, it's been nice being on the Booker longlist. I wonder if I shall put a bet on? I think the Dog at Midnight will get onto the shortlist, also probably Margaret Atwood, Coetzee, and now I can't remember who else is on. We have been discussing it like mad round the table at the Mill. It's great that they don't decide the shortlist until 16th Sept, as it's a long time to go around carrying a little flutter. I am very pleased that my friend John Murray is on with his book Jazz Etc. We can flutter together!

I am dying to get back to the new novel....although I love holidays, towards the end I get a bit nervous. If I stop writing for a bit then I fear I won't be able to do it again! Anyway, I had better go...we're all going for a walk along the cliffs to Alum Bay. Maybe I will brush my hair.

9th September 2003

Last night was the event at APARTMENT, with paintings by Emma Holliday and poems by me. It was a great place, very swanky, with low sofas and cushions. I particularly like venues where I can lie down if necessary! There were hundreds of lovely people there...everywhere you looked. Then at about eight o clock, it suddenly became a night club and all the lights dimmed. I find Emma's paintings very exciting and alive. I hope we can do some more collaborating...I would like to tag along when she takes her easel somewhere, and sit on the grass/sand/a nearby bench with my notebook. I find the best thing about working with artists is that it creates a whole new seam of work that wouldn't happen without the inspiration of another's visual eye.

I am working on the new novel again now, and also beginning the research for a new play for Live Theatre next year about Red Spot Babies. In the forties health authorities realised there were more infant deaths in the North east than anywhere else, so they set up a health survey, taking a thousand babies in the area and following their lives and environments closely right up until today. So there is masses of data and information about all these people. The play could be about so many things. Anyway, next week I am visiting a 90 yr old who was a home visitor/nurse for the project. It's all very interesting, and I have no idea yet what the play will be about.

I'm reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali. It's a marvelous book. I long to return to it. The only thing I don't like about it is that large parts of it are in italics. I really dislike italics when I am reading, as they get in the way of being 'inside' the story...you are always thinking 'Here I am reading italics.'

I have had a cheerful thought about the booker longlist. The writers who do not make the shortlist will be wonderful company as there are so many good books on the list.

I am all over the place this Autumn: Kings Lynn, Derby, Ilkley, Cheltenham, Belfast, Hebden Bridge, Cockermouth, Warwick, Hull and York. Many complimentary soaps, English breakfasts and hand shakes.

Wednesday 17th September

Oh well, I wasn't on the Booker shortlist, but never mind. It was very tense waiting for the announcement....almost impossible not to care. When I heard I felt great relief which was peculiar. I can go back to writing and stop worrying. Still, I think the list is quite an interesting one, although I am sorry that the Curious Incident of the Dog at Night time isn't there. I am enjoying the Good Doctor by Damon Galgut. But I miss the fluttery feeling I had, and I feel as if I have forgotten something.

Now I am back in my room, trying to write 1000 words a day. Actually that's not so much, but it can feel like a mountain. If I go away on a retreat it's easy to write much more than that. I have also realised that I far prefer writing longhand, then typing it up. It's as if the distance from brain to paper isn't so huge than from brain to type.

I have also started research for my play about Red Spot Babies. I have interviewed a 90 yr old home visitor, and been reading through books about the study of 1000 families. There is alot of stuff about mothering, less about fathers. The main result of the research was that poverty killed babies, not ineffectual mothers. It's interesting stuff...but I have no idea yet what the story will be.

This afternoon I am going up the coast with Emma H...she is going to paint, while I scribble notes. It's such incredible, warm weather it seems mad not to get out of the city.

Monday 29th September 2003

First I cut my foot on a shard of glass in a bed and breakfast in King's Lynn. I was about to do a poetry reading, but the glass splinter was embedded in my sole, so I had to get the pale faced proprietress to help me, and she didn't look very keen. But I got out the glass with her old darning needle and limped on to recite poems in a beautiful hall right next to the Great Ooze River, while a russian trawler did a three point turn. But still my foot throbs. Perhaps it is infected.

Then I was running a workshop in County Durham, and on the way there got crashed into by a young man from Spennymoor. I wasn't driving...my friend Maggie was. The noise was incredible. Her car is a write off and our necks are very stiff. But luckily, we are unhurt. In the squealing moment before the crash I thought...how ironic, to die in a car crash after all that cancer treatment! But we are not at all dead, even though I felt my brain shoot forwards in my head, as if it had come loose from its stalks, and later felt a bit delirious. I still carried on with the course. I enjoyed it. It was only later that I felt a bit peculiar. I would probably carry on even if my leg dropped off. I have the most intense work ethic. I can't bear to be late, or to be ill. This is a good and a bad thing. Good, because it makes me quite positive, and I don't tend to lie around much. Bad, because it's often stupid, and shows how much I live in my head, not my body.

The novel races on. I'm writing about Brazil now. Yet I am still deciding what it's really about.

Friday 10th October 2003

Well, that's National Poetry Day over with ! Not that I think it's a bad thing, although the poems on the Today Programme were AWFUL I thought. I spent the morning backstage at the Theatre Royal, holding my newly commissioned poem (Small Things In The Cupboards of Long Relationships) in trembling hands. I got told off for lying on a lavish bed that was a prop for the play, and for whispering. The cast of Arms and the Man read poems alongside me, Bill Herbert, Fiona Ritchie Walker and Bob Beagrie. There were also two schools that had been inspired and ralled by Maureen Almond and Ellen Phethean. There was even an audience! This had all been organised by New Writing North, who had disobeyed the national theme of 'Britain' (thank god) and chosen instead to commission poems about small things, and to celebrate detail, small presses, and how beautiful small things can be. I felt a bit dazed. I had been staying in a cottage in 'the debatable lands' or Reiver country. I had been immersed in the new novel, and thinking about it all the time. Writing became the main activity and everything else fitted around it, like eating and sleeping. So coming back was rather dizzying. Then, yesterday afternoon I was sent off to write about a small place. I cycled up to the West End, thinking I would visit an Asian Sari shop. However, no one wanted to talk to me up there. I think they thought I was a spy. So I ended up in the stuffed birds section of the Hancock Museum, feeling sad about how so many birds are nearly extinct, and writing a poem called Lost Birds of England. Bill H wrote about a barber shop, and had a neat haircut, Fiona RW went to the ladies at Central Station, and Bob B rode up and down the lifts of Fenwicks, then went and stood between giant headphones at Baltic. So we all did it, and read them out last night at the library. I felt much happier once it was all over. I am not sure pressure is my thing anymore. It made me feel quite hysterical. Now I am about to go to Derby, to take part in a festival there. I wish I could write my novel on trains, or in waiting rooms, but I seem to have to cut myself off to get anything done.

If anyone reads Mslexia, I am reading on 4th Dec, not 6th Nov at the university. God save me from botched arrangements. I dreamt about them all last night. I dreamt I couldn't find the train station.

Still, it's not so bad. We have had a new fireplace put in at home, and you just have to push a button for a cozy glow to fill the room. Amazing! And I am glad that Alex won Pop Academy, and that people are voting for larger, fantastic women on Pop Idol. And I am also glad that it's the pumpkin season, and I still want fireworks to be banned. Which makes me realise I have been doing this web log for a year, as my first entry was about hating fireworks. Fancy.

Wednesday 29th October 2003

I am returned from a whole load of readings and hotel rooms. I started off in Manchester library...arriving late and bursting into the wrong room and announcing 'I'm HERE!" It was an adult ed course. When I finally found the right room I had a wonderful audience of smiling people. I really enjoy reading poems and talking about using poetry as part of a recovery process. Reading from the novel is much harder, as it's not really me who is speaking, whereas the poems are all about my experience. In Ilkley I read with Gordon Burn, stupidly trying to read a chapter that was full of dialogue. I read really badly, although I enjoyed the discussion. I am asked to speak about the novel and the North quite frequently. Gordon's book is also set in Newcastle,(The North of England Home Service) although he doesn't mention the place. I wonder what I would write if I lived in London? I do find the Northern landscape inspiring, and the rhythms of speech are completely familiar to me. However, I don't feel part of a school of Northern writers, even though I am a great fan of other writers up here, such as David Almond, Sean O'Brien, Andrea Badenoch, Gillian Allnut, Linda France, Debbie Taylor. I like living here, that's for sure. Anyway, that's what we talked about at Ilkley. Then I went to Cheltenham, and met my mum who came to stay with me in the delicious Kandinsky Hotel, where we ordered sticky toffee pudding and fruit salad late at night and happily watched tv from our huge luxury bed. It makes so much difference when you stay somewhere lovely when you go to do readings, and also having someone you love with you. The Kandinsky was very characterful and comfortable. The festival was good too...we went to see Don Patterson and Lavinia Greenlaw, and Blake Morrison. We hung out in the writers room, eating egg sandwiches and chocolate cake, and bought lots of books. We saw John Agard, Roger McGough, James Berry and Grace Nichols read in a theatre packed with children, and were a well behaved participating audience. Fred D'Aguiar was a guest director at the festival, and it was great to meet him with all his family. It was not like work at all. I did a discussion with Abdulrasak Gurnah and Tim Pears, in which we talked about writing and novels. Although I get nervous about these things I enjoyed this event, which was well hosted by Marcus Moore. After Cheltenham I flew to Belfast for 99p and joined a wild party of women celebrating my partners fortieth birthday. I loved the botanical gardens there, and we even went on a minibus trip to the giant's causeway, like a proper excursion. I spent rather alot of time in the jacussi and steam room. I am turning into a fish...I love all that stuff. Then after a day back home I got on another train and joined the novelists John Murray and Peter Plate at a writer's course at Arvon in Yorkshire, where I was guest reader. It was a very grown up, hard working course, and it was lovely to be there again, by the crackling fire reading in my socks from an armchair. I wish they would get a heater in the bedroom though! Then I was off again to Cockermouth , to read with the poet Henry Shukman. I am a fan of Henry's. I think his work is fantastic and authentic. We had a good crowd, and the next day I ran a workshop on 'Sympathy and Empathy' when creating fictional characters, which is much more complex than you would imagine.

Now I am home, and so pleased with myself for managing all these events without suddenly collapsing in a public place. I am writing a story for the Big Issue now, and next week I am going away to work on the novel. I have a new sofa in my writing room. Life is marvelous.

Monday 10th Nov

Spent last week in what must be the ugliest castle in Scotland. it was pebble-dashed, stained green, with small windows. Like a large, castle-shaped counci house. Inside it was suprisingly warm, but rather like being in an Addams Family film set, with clanking doors, rattling windows, and towers and turrets. I was there with the lovely poet Linda France...we would have been just as happy in a little cottage with flouncy curtains, but the castle had been booked from a long time ago, and there were meant to be four of us there, but various things had got in the way. Strange though. Did plenty of work, and had lots of deep hot baths.

I had the dog, Heidi, with me as Newcastle is like a war zone with firework parties. I'm sick of it. What's it all about? People trying to own the sky?

While I was away I missed a programme ojn the tv called Does Healing Work.....did anyone out there tape it? I really want to find a copy. The new novel explores this territory.

No more news. It's hard to adapt to life after the castle. I keep walking into walls.

Wednesday something of November 2003

You can see I have no idea of the date. No idea of anything really! Since I last wrote this log (that word is very Startrek) I have been to Warwick and Hull. Both were very enjoyable, although it took my friend and I several hours to find Warwick University. The campus hides between Coventry and Warwick in a tricky web of ring roads and lanes called things like Gibbet Hill. By the time we got there I was nearly speechless with fear of lateness, a quality that has always been with me, even when I was a teenager. It must be another category...early or late people, yet I have never seen the question in a quiz. My best category is radiators or drains...although both sorts of people can have drainish or radiator qualities. I avoid drains on the whole, and it's a very helpful way to live. Then there is always the fear that I may be a drain.

Anyway, once we got to Warwick Arts Centre, it was really nice. I had a lovely group of people in my workshop which was all about apples. This is partly because I love the vocabulary of apples, the smell, and the look of them. But although the workshop used apples, it was really about narratives within other narratives, and trying to think in circles, not lines.

Another thing about Warwick was that we hated the hotel. This is for various very easy reasons...

I am becoming an expert on things I don't like in hotels. there is a smell I haven't given a name to yet, of some kind of cleaning fluid, and something else that is awful....but what is it? Infidelity? Loneliness?

So we went on to Hull, which is always a place I have liked. The Humbermouth Literary Festival was a very well organised affair, and we didn't have to stay in a hotel as we stayed with my friend's family (watched Pop Idol...I was glad about Andy). I was reading with Patrick Gale and Jake Arnott, and James Nash...all very interesting writers. We discussed reading habits...Patrick said if you get bored , just read dead people as they are cheap and always good...Jake said his father read obsessively throughout his childhood....I admitted that I can't stand italics. The audience was small, but they were ALIVE...you felt their characters filling the room. Perhaps it was because they were all avid readers.

I left feeling quite rejuvenated. Now I am back in my cave room, with the new sofa and my novel, a short story to finish for the Big Issue, and a pile of reading about the Red Spot babies. And I have just bought a furry jacket from TKMAX which is just the image I am after this Winter...a cowgirl gone to the dogs.....

If anyone reading this lives in Brighton, do come to a workshop I am running on 7th Dec...details on this website somewhere!

Wednesday 26th Nov 2003

I've been spa-ing.....me and my partner went to a luxury serenity qi enhancing ,pampering experience. It was a bit like being in hospital without being ill, and the food was alot nicer. We wandered about in white dressing gowns, and lay on heated couches having oils and creams rubbed in. I am always afraid that I will have head lice or some other embarrassing condition in such moments. Anyway, we ended up completely floaty and vague....I couldn't remember who I was. I particularly loved lying in the outside jacussi with Autumn leaves falling from the trees.

We have also been to London....we saw the huge yellow sun in the Tate Modern...it's a bit like being at the end of an epic film...all smoggy and Londonish..everyone in raincoats lying on the floor looking longingly at the golden globe...some of them rather elderly to be lying on concrete, I thought. Very beautiful, though.

We went to see an exhibition about living and dying at the British Museum. Our Brazilian friend Marcia pointed out that though the exhibition discussed many cultures, and how they dealt with illness and death, it didn't even mention BRAZIL, which is the queen country for rituals, healers, spells and magic. How strange. I didn't find out much from the exhibition. It seemed to be rather general, with big museum writing aimed at school children, but it made me think about my funeral again. I can never decide what I want for my funeral...the songs change daily....I wanted everyone to dance to GLORIA by Patti Smith last time I thought about it. I imagine a kind of party death, roomfuls of friends drinking champagne, but of course that's unlikely when one feels poorly. I would just like an unpredictable death...but not one of those falsely positive ones. Singing would be good, as long as it wasn't too churchy or girly. I suppose in the end death chooses, not us.

I love what Spike Milligan wanted (but didn't get) on his gravestone...I told you I was feeling ill.....Actually, after the spa experience I feel very well, if a little sleepy. It's been over two years since my last encounter with illness and I am beginning to forget about it again. I am certainly spending alot more time with my body than I used to....we know each other quite well now. I am always having it pampered and attended to. I still think acupuncture is the best treatment for just about everything.

I am trying to finish a story for the Big Issue...I wanted to write something jolly, but it's turned out rather sad. Then I will go back to the Brazilian novel. Oh, and I am going to Brighton on Dec 7th to run a workshop about poetry and recovery, so if you live around Brighton and would like to come, just drop me a line.

Marcia's husband Mustaver reads this weblog...HALLO! I never think that anyone reads it. Love J

Tuesday 9th December 2003

I spent the weekend in Brighton. It seemed to me to be the most glittering, magical place, with the floodlit pavilion, and great swarms of birds around the piers. It is the perfect place to set a novel, with lovely street names, and such nooks and crannies! I ran a workshop with a wonderful group of women, who were bursting with creativity, then I did a reading, organised by The South and Arc Press with the Irish poet Tony Curtis, who read and spoke beautifully about life and poetry. It was a very happy weekend. It's funny, because just before I go to places, I often feel a sense of dread and fear, but usually I love meeting new people and doing new things. Brighton was particularly nice because my sister Josie and her family live there. Also, years ago I lived there, after I left art college. I had a job working in the Lanes in a jewelery shop, and my best friend worked as a lifeguard down on the beach. We spent a year writing songs and struggling with the women's movement, being bullied by older girls, and sitting in vast frightening meetings. These were the days when women would storm into ones house demanding that one renounced the penis (Actually, I said I would, but my friend refused). We went on marches to reclaim the night, and stuck up the locks of porn shops with super glue. Now my daughter is doing a project about feminism and violent action ! That's me, I tell her! I was climbing the gates of parliament, and wearing Chinese trousers! Anyway, being in Brighton brought it all back. It was such a chance thing, leaving the South to come up North. I just hitch hiked up the M1, and never left. I wonder if I would have written books set in Brighton?

Anyway, I have a new title for the latest novel, thanks to the writer Bridget O'Connor, who should get an award for her capacity to think up titles...(she also thought up 'Crocodile Soup.') It's 'The Cure For Dying' What do you think?

This week I am working on 'A Film In A Week' down at Live Theatre. I spent the morning loafing about the coach station watching the cameraman and director sorting out angles. In the end I got a bit cold so I came to my writing room. One day I will get behind a camera and make my own wobbly film! Still, it's exciting to have a short script made...even if it is only three minutes.

Otherwise, like everyone else, I am full of Christmas nerve endings, like a faulty set of fairy lights.

Oh, and I finished the story for the Big Issue...it's called The Nest and it will be in the mag this week, or next...

Friday 19th December 2003

Just had a meeting of my writing group for tired and lovely academics. We were writing in slow motion about eating mince pies, unwrapping presents, peeling potatoes, writing Xmas cards etc. I love this kind of writing...it's so interesting to listen to, even though it feels banale to write. It's also my best remedy for being stuck...just take a character and write about them doing anything in very tiny detail...like getting dressed, eating cake, catching a bus. The story is all there in the tiny little bits.

I keep thinking what a brilliant year it has been...I never expected to feel this healthy for so long and to enjoy myself so much. I have really loved writing this year...maybe because it's all got so much simpler since I have had a room in the English School, and had financial support from Northern Rock...or perhaps it's just getting older and knowing what I like.

I just got a copy of the new cover for Crocodile Soup from Penguin. I really like it...as if it's got anew outfit. It's completely different in atmosphere to the first cover and looks really new and interesting. I might even read it again myself! The new book has a title now, and I hope to finish it by mid January. The title is 'The Cure For Dying' and I was given it by the author Bridget O'Connor (who also thought up the title for Crocodile Soup.)

I've been to York since I last wrote this web log. I had to talk about life and work in a basement bar. I always think that most people in the audience have probably had much more interesting lives than me, but still, they all listened patiently to me waffling on. York was the last of a series of talks and readings. I feel rather proud of getting to all those events and not collapsing! Next year it will be all Red Spot Babies and I shall start thinking about another novel.

I am about to go off for Christmas, staying in a holiday house with my family. I hope everyone who reads this has a good time, and that your mince pies are sweet. Let's hope 2004 is a good year!

Friday night, about midnight, in bed with laptop!

This Christmas I cleverly put sparkle on my eyelids and then had an allergic reaction, so I looked like a boxer with two black eyes. But I enjoyed myself all the same. I watched that brilliant animation about Belle Ville. Didn't do any cooking. Walked around the Shropshire countryside which seemed to me to be full of secret hideaways, and intelligent looking cows. I read a Barbara Vine murder mystery, and my mum and sister both read the manuscript of the new novel and gave useful comments. I sat on a step at nights and looked up at the stars. I went and meditated in Hereford Cathedral with my daughter and thought about all the people I care about. This Christmas we had alot of fun with a plastic dance kareoke mat...a chinese version of Kylie Minogue squeaks as you stamp out dance steps on the mat. I also had many frothy baths, in a large and ornate bathroom with the bath in the middle of the room.

New Year was the same as always...parties in our street...more kareoke....I tried so hard to get drunk, but failed. I used to love a good old drink, but now I just lose interest. It was so cold outside, with swirling beads of freezing rain. There is something delirious about it all...I find at this time of year all my dreams and daily life get mixed up. Really I am a routine person....I need alot of regularity to function.

I am very grateful for 2003, (although it's been a horrible year politically). I've been so healthy, something I didn't expect, and it's really felt like a kind of bonus. I was trying to write a poem about it, that sensation when you think that things are winding down, but then everything just gets more and more alive and exciting. Anyway, I'm counting my blessings. I haven't made any resolutions really. I really want to answer mail at the end of the day rather than the beginning, so maybe I will try to do that. I must try to eat breakfast. I want to go and see more bands, also dry my hair with a hairdryer.

Monday January 12th

My friend Andrea Badenoch died on 4th January. Like me she had breast cancer, and she was first diagnosed in 2000. We talked so much about cancer. We used to laugh about the doctors, making up stupid names for them. She was a great support, and we used to send each other emails all the time, about symptoms, and discussing how we felt about life and death. As she got iller we lost contact. Andrea preferred to be private, and discouraged visitors as she became increasingly unwell. She is a real loss. I feel as if a part of me has gone. I've been thinking about the past, about times Andrea and I went away together to write. She was very patient and good at talking about writing. She would worry WITH you about something until you reached a solution.

It is very hard to believe that she has gone. She was still young, with three children, very smart, clever and with many more things she wanted to do in her life. She did everything she could to heal herself, using complementary therapies and conventional treatments. We wanted to write a book about all the people we had been to see between us, some of whom were rather dubious. I am dedicated the Cure For Dying to Andrea...although she is not either of the main characters, she was very much in my heart when I wrote the book.

late on Sunday night 18th January 2004

My friend Andrea Badenoch's memorial yesterday was a wonderful tribute to her. As various people stood up and recalled different aspects of her life a picture emerged of the complex, enigmatic, gifted, unusual person that she was. Someone said how well she combined art and politics, neither deadening the other. Her son talked about her dancing in the front room, another friend talked of her winning a 'Guess the weight of the tortoise' competition at a local fete. There was music like The Tracks of My Tears, and Itchycoo Park, poems, silences and contributions from the many people who had travelled far to remember her. Andrea and I used to talk about funerals and memorials alot. I think she would have enjoyed this one, and the obituaries in the Independent and The Guardian. Although she has been ill for many months, I find I am missing her friendship properly now. She was great to talk to about writing, and she had fierce opinions. She would get furious about arts spending and fickle publishers. You could talk to her for hours, and she really listened. Linda France, the poet, said yesterday that when someone dies we lose the part of ourselves that we invested in them.

January can feel so quiet, dark and dangerous. Today I lay on the sofa and watched 'The Night of The Hunter.' Then I played old records (The Housemartins, Michelle Shocked) on an ancient gramaphone and ate ham sandwiches. At one point I went gliding round the supermarket and bought very bizarre and particular foods: prunes, fresh ginger, goats cheese, a dozen limes, coriander, olbas oil.

In the windswept muddy garden there are some dear green shoots poking out of the earth. Yesterday my daughter saw a large fox padding along the pavement outside our house. I can stare for hours at a crossword clue. It's also that time when we all start sorting out cupboards. Last night I counted all the scrabble letters in four different scrabble sets. Sometimes it feels as if I am not living in a city at all, and that we are all living miles apart in a vast windy landscape. Still, tonight we had a great supper at my neighbours, with lots of other people from the street where I live. I am very lucky to live in a street of people who I would probably travel miles to meet, yet here they all are on the doorstep.

Last night I dreamt I was telling hilarious jokes. They were so easy to tell, I couldn't believe it. Why would one dream of jokes in such a dark, generally unfunny month? Of course I can't remember a single one now.

Tuesday January 27th 2004

It's late afternoon...today I have written a piece about 'The Great British Public' for Radio Four's 'Off The Page.' Tomorrow I go to Bristol to record the programme. I'm also working on the outline for a Sitcom, set in a gym in Newcastle. I am feeling quite dizzy! Nothing is simple this January. There is so much work to do. The new novel still needs alot of work. Although most people who read it find it compulsive I think it needs shaking by the neck. Writing is always difficult, and there are no short cuts. So I am feeling a bit grim and stern.

I just had a great weekend in London though. I went to St Batholemews Church at Smithfield. I ate salami in Carluccios, and sat in a jacussi in Muswell Hill. I wandered round Spitalfields market eating olives. Another reason to be happy is that I sleep very well...like falling into a deep velvet darkness. I wake up completely new every morning, and it hasn't always been like this. I have had months of insomnia! Also, I have stopped sweating. There are many reasons to be delighted. Food is mostly delicious. I have just bought a new Doctor Zeuss like lamp from a Turkish shop. Now I am going for a massage. Will return soon!

Monday 1st February

Last week I tried to fly to Bristol, but spent an evening drifting around the departure lounge at Newcastle Airport, watching snow swirl around outside. I was going to do a thing for a programme called Off The Page, when R4 asks three writers to write short pieces and talk about a subject. We were doing the Great British Public. The airport was the perfect spot to watch the British complaining, being cheery, getting drunk, then finally, when the flight was cancelled, queuing for hours to re-arrange flights. The next day I sat in a recording studio here in Ncle and did the programme 'down the line' which is a bit scary as you can't see who you're talking to, and you have to interrupt in order to be heard, which didn't feel very British. I wonder if it will be obvious when the programme goes out that I was sitting alone with headphones on?

I have been going down to an oak panelled archive to read through the data about the 1000 family study. There is so much to read! However, even in the most boring minutes you can see bits of humanity peeking through. There is something fascinating about it. Every so often there is some amazing bit of information...like the couple who kept their new false teeth on the dressing table, who put them on for the health visitor. There is something wonderful about sitting in libraries and archives, using a lead pencil (no biros) to make notes. It's peaceful and simple. I am also co-writing a poem about lovely things, or things we have loved, with Linda France for Valentine's Day. January is now over, thank god, and February seems quite tame in comparison. I am reading Rachel Cusk!

Monday 9th February

It's a hard bright day. I am becoming more and more interested in my garden, and steep narrow downward strip. With the help of Cath the gardener we are decking and planting and generally making it a manageable place to be in. I want to get a sculpture of a lovely big stone woman to put at the bottom...an anti Atkins goddess that I can worship.

Today we drive to Sheffield to see the one woman version of Fanny Cradock at the Crucible. I have lots of deadlines this February, so it feels like a bit of a luxury. I am going to write a short story based on Rhapsody In Blue for Radio Four. Also I need to finish the first draft of the sitcom, which is called NEW BLOOD. And whenever I am not doing that I am thinking about Red Spot babies and where science and people collide. Infact, that's the theme that holds everything I am doing together at the moment; it's the interaction of humanity and medicine, creativity and health.

For my own nourishment I have decided to have one day a week which is a poetry day, when I write, or work on poems, or just go and BE. I have such a tendency to work all the the time, that I forget to look around me, or just to enjoy playing with words. Writing poetry or song is the best medicine I know.

The other night we went to the launch concert of Tim Dalling's CD BLOSSOM.....he has set many of Louis McNiece's poems to music...it was a really wonderful performance, and I am a complete fan. Like lots of other writers I am mad about the folksinger Gillian Welch at the moment. I also just bought a Landers and Wilson CD that I really like. February is a good month for new music and interesting soups, I think.

Thursday 12th February 2004

Last night I read at Gateshead Library, where there was a floor spot for anyone in the audience who wanted to stand up and read a poem. The novelist Louise Trondeur had turned up at lunchtime...(she wrote a great novel called The Water's Edge, set in a hotel in Bournemouth). We hadn't met before but I think when you really like someone's work, you always feel as if you know them. Anyway, she came along and read which was lovely. She also had all her long hair cut off in the afternoon. It was a day for courage and bravery. The people who read for the first time at Gateshead were incredibly brave. It's so exposing to read your work aloud, and such a victory when you have done it. Some of the poems that poeple read were so tender, about little details of magic in their lives. Anyway, it was a good night in lots of ways. There is something wonderful about a room full of people on a February night who are willing to listen to, or read poetry. Also, bravery pays....you feel taller and stronger and better afterwards.

I am listening to Rhapsody In Blue every day. It's so dramatic, and sounds like the narrative of my childhood ! I'm writing a story based on the music for Radio Four. I thought I would write about jealous old people, but now I am writing about early television watching. What I can't remember is if we watched American films on tv in the sixties in the afternoons. I'm sure we did, but a little voice tells me that maybe tv was just programmes like Doctor Who and odd quiz shows then, and there was probably only one channel. Does anyone remember what we watched on tv in say 1965, on a Sunday or Saturday afternoon???

I must go and eat some lunch. I get stuck in my room and forget to eat. I wish there were more trolleys in universities. A soup round would be wonderful. But I must go and eat a boring university sandwich, and have a plastic cup of tea.

one more thing

Sandra Hunt's version of Fanny at the Crucible was really great. She has created a very powerful Fanny Cradock,and somehow the one woman version is more dramatic than the three hander, even though I enjoyed that too. The play is around the country so you might catch it near you. I rather enjoyed hearing the piece after quite a long gap. The songs had gone, but Sandra uses the song lyrics as poems. I thought I would miss the music more, but the poems manage to change the tempo and give the narrative depth.

Monday 16th February 2004

When I started this web log, it was partly about letting people know about my health, because so often when someone has been ill you want to ask how they are, but don't know how, or you might think they are far worse than they really are, or far better. It seemed a good way of telling the truth, and keeping rumour and fearfulness at bay. So I must BE truthful, and write the bad stuff as well as the good, even though a large part of me doesn't want to admit to illness ever. However, when you have a recurrent cancer like mine, the illness is always there somehow. Sometimes I feel like an unexploded bomb!

My last blood tests were a bit iffy. The ensymes in my liver were abnormal, and my calcium levels were high. However, this isn't necessarily bad, even though from where I am standing it's hard not to think the worst. I've started to get a new pain in my side, like a bad stitch. If I had never had cancer I would think I had bruised a rib, or pulled a muscle, but because I have, my partner and I spent the morning at the general hospital, leaving with a large bag of pain killers, and the thought of a scan tomorrow, and quite a few comforting words. It may well not be my liver. My body might be tiring of the hormone treatment its been on for two years, and needs a new shot of something different. It might be appendicitis. It might be bone pain, which is alot better than the cancer spreading to my liver.

However, whatever it is, the worst thing is not knowing, and imagining what will happen. I was just reading Emma Candy's weblong in the Guardian this morning. She says how waiting for test results is worse than waiting for any exam result, and I know just what she means.

I shall keep anyone who reads this posted, and carry on regardless. This evening I am part of a panel at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle, stitch or no stitch, talking about publishing. Starts 5.30/ 6.00 pm.

Wednesday 18th Feb 2004

Everything is much better. The stitch like pain has disappeared. Yesterday I went for my scan. I fell asleep in the waiting room, and felt very dreamy about the whole affair. It was the jelly ultrasound kind of scan and completely painless. Afterwards I ate a huge baked potato with baked beans that I bought from a counter in the hospital corridor. I got a taxi home with a female taxi driver..the first I have ever met in Newcastle. She told me about an old man who she drove home in the middle of the night. He sat in the back of the cab and didn't speak, just gave her directions, and he lived quite a long way out of the city, so this went on a long time..his dark voice from the back of the car saying.'Turn right at the lights, left,' etc. When they got to a house he jumped out of the cab and said he was just going to get her money. She sat there waiting. then a very angry old woman appeared who screamed 'I told you not to bring him home. he's costing me a fortune. Take him back to hospital!' The old man hovered behind her, shaking his head. The cabbie realised that the man was in his pyjamas.

Anyway, I get the results of the scan next Wednesday, but I feel well enough to go to Barcelona this weekend. Me, and poets Linda France and WN Herbert are going to write a modern Homage To Catalonia to go with the George Orwell Play at Northern Stage. I think mine might be a homage to health. Infact I feel hugely relieved. Pain can be so frightening, and when one doesn't trust one's body it's just terrifying. Anyway, I shall let people know what happens. Thanks so much for all your good thoughts out there. I think perhaps they stopped the pain. My three year old neice sent me a letter this morning that said 'hugs and kiss'...apparently she just said that her Aunt Julia was ill, so she was going to write a letter, even though she knew nothing of all this!

Good times in Barcelona, Bad News at the RVI

I had a great time in Barcelona: I won't go on about it. It made me angry with England though. I loved the way they wrapped postcards up in thin paper, and took such care over small things. I really enjoyed the hot chocolate, like custard. I admired the varieties of lamp shades, and the millions of small businesses down alleys. And it was warm and lovely on our last day. I bought an orange coat and a purple skirt. When I got back I wrote a manifesto for Newcastle, which turned out to be rather fascist and luddite. I was in Barcelona with Bill Herbert and Linda France, writing material to accompany Northern Stage's 'Homage To Catalonia,' that's on in May.

Then this morning I went to get the results of last week's liver scan, and I'm afraid that my breast cancer has spread into my liver. Although I know that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later I still feel shocked. It was, as my doctor said, a real OH SHIT moment.

This is what will happen....more scans first, and god knows what they will uncover. Then a choice of drugs... Vinorelbine ...a drip, that doesn't make your hair fall out..but which makes you tired and constipated..Capecitabine (xeloda) you take this orally...it can make hands and feet dry, and upset stomachs, or back to TAXOL...which worked really well before (from yew trees)...but the doc thinks we should save this up, like a trump card. Or just change the hormone treatment, as my cancer has always been very receptive to hormones. To be honest, at this point, I don't know if I want anything. None of it sounds particularly appealing.

The thing to remember is that I am the same as I was yesterday. I feel fine, maybe a bit tired, but absolutely fine. It's just my head that has changed. One thing I am sure about....this is the last Jan/Feb I shall spend in Britain. If I am still here in 2005 I am going back to Barcelona.

I shall keep everyone posted...and don't worry if I have made some arrangement with you...I'll let you know if I can't do things.

Life Is Suffering !

Life is suffering, but not all the time. I spent the weekend at the MalMaison Hotel in Clerkenwell with my mum, ordering sandwiches and tea from room service. I ate mussels and three different types of chocolate ice cream. We watched a Woody Allen film in bed, had many baths, and did the crossword. We had aromatherapy treatments and smelt like pot pourri.

At one point we went out. It was quite cold on Saturday, but not as cold as Newcastle. We went to St Bartholemew's Church, then Carluccios at Smithfield, where the hot chocolate is thick and the bread extremely fresh and the waiters smile alot. Then , in a sudden burst of zealous energy, we tramped down to Aldgate to see the new women's library in a place called The Wash House. I think we were expecting sofas and welcoming arms. Actually the library is a rather sombre, intellectual affair made of red brick. My mum and I got told off several times...for not putting our bags in a locker, for wanting things that we were not allowed to have, for generally being noisy and chaotic. Finally we got into the hushed 'reading room,' and realised that there was nothing, at this point, we really needed to know about the history of womankind, although I was very impressed by the archive of women's magazines. After this we wandered around Brick Lane, remembering my great aunt, Edith Ramsay, who had been immersed in the Jewish community in those streets. She loved the buildings and their histories.

Anyway, you can imagine that after this we were quite beside ourselves and very cold. This is, infact, my main symptom...a kind of awful exhaustion, cold bones, and sense of inner 'crashing.' Yet, I imagine many people who don't have cancer feel like this. Also my situation is very like being old, when things start decaying and declining, and you know that you haven't got long. The only difference between me and an old person is that I am still quite young! (what a profound statement THAT is!) Also all my friends are mostly alive, so there are plenty of people to come to my funeral. It must be rotten when you live longer than anyone else.

On Sunday I met my oldest friend and we talked about life and death in the British Library. There is the most fantastic collection of woodcuts there, if anyone is passing by. Anyway, in the end we decided that 1. Everone is alone 2. Life is suffering 3. You might as well be happy.

On the way back on the train the light was pink and gold. I talked to a lost South African girl from Johannesburg. She wasn't really prepared for a Northern February, and as the landscape became more and more icy and bare she looked increasingly dubious. Then the train didn't even stop at Durham, where she wanted to get out, and the Glaswegian guards were all jolly and kind, but she didn't understand a word they said. Where is she now in her t.shirt and jeans?

There are no more complaints from the liver department though, but thanks very much for thoughts and emails. It's such a wonderful antidote to the loneliness of illness, this weblog. I recommend it. The next thing medically will be loads of scans...but I shan't think about them yet.

Misty Friday 5th March

I am having a recently felled sycamore tree in the garden made into benches. You should see the new wood. It is moist, banana white, delicious and I feel like eating it. Since the latest session with the doctors I feel more and more concerned with getting the garden organised for the summer. I have always wanted a swingy sofa that creaked slightly. I've written before about wanting a sculpture of a lovely big woman, and I've got various plans for that. I am going to make a wild flower meadow, and yesterday a parcel of dusty, grassy seeds arrived. It's a very long steep garden, and when you are sitting in it, it's like being in an echoing and magical valley. It's a big green dip in the city, a 'nature corridor' and I like to think that it's full of beasts, of badgers, foxes, hedgehogs and worse.

On the cancer front I have been thinking about these drugs I am being offered...it's not really a CHOICE because one has no idea what any of the drugs might do, and no one medical will make any claims at this point. I feel like offering to rewrite the information sheets they give out at the hospital, because not one of them says anything good about any of the treatments. There is an awful lack of HOPE about all of it. I mean, I know they must be careful what they say, but there must be something good about these treatments. Which would you go for?

1. V (Vinorelbine) gives you nosebleeds, anaemia, constipation, tingling in extremities, fatigue. Given as a drip. Got no idea how well it works.

2. C (Capecitabine) nausea, diahorrea, dry hands and feet, fatigue. No idea of its track record either. You can take this in pill form.

3. T (Taxol) Joint ache, fatigue, nausea, hair loss. I have more of a relationship with this drug, as I took its sister drug taxotere before and it had very good results, so I feel more positive towards it, even though on paper the side effects are just as bad. It comes from yew trees. You take it once a week for 3 months as a drip.

4. Acupuncture. Although I would do this anyway, maybe it's time to turn my back on chemotherapy and just have acupuncture, which I completely believe in....and all the other things.....faith healing, nice food, juice, massage etc etc

5. Just keep taking the tamoxifen, which I have just been put back on, and hope it works.

The other thing to consider is that it's not as if I am in pain. I haven't really got any symptoms apart from tiredness. I can see that pain would drive one to chemotherapy.

This decision is all about quality of life and all that stuff. My geatest fear is the long groggy fading away, but I also realise that death isn't nice really, or at least it's a bit like birth and can go any number of ways. I feel that I must be firm with my doctors and make them talk about death in a hopeful way. These medical conversations are full of silent chasms that are so hard to climb out of. Is it because of fear of suing?

Other conversations are so much more uplifting. Doris, my healer, said that THEY don't want me yet. She said that it would be fine when they did, but I had a while to go. I agree with her!

Today I am running a writing workshop with people who work in primary care. I am looking forward to it. People have such interesting lives, although they often don't realise it! On Sunday I'm doing another workshop about mothers and daughters. This is a dangerous subject...explosive! I have been thinking of ways of treading carefully, like tiptoeing across a minefield, so that we can write without too much pain. At the end the library at Bishop Auckland is providing us with Sunday tea ! Let's hope there are tissues too.

Wednesday 10th March. A Bad Time With Needles. A Good Time With Maggie.

Yesterday I went for a bone scan. I am very familiar with some parts of the hospital, but often quite dismayed when I have to go somewhere as a stranger. I've had bone scans before. They are long and droning and the department is a bit brown and boring. You have to have an injection two hours before the actual scan. A rather bluff, dull eyed doctor told me to roll up my sleeves, and I said that most of my veins were hardened and didn't work. He didn't listen, and poked with the needle at main veins making me jump, and failing to draw blood. I don't know why, but when this happens it always makes me want to cry. Generally, I am quite stoical, but it was so horrid, him telling me to keep still while he made a mess of my arm, and sighing when I yelped. Then he suddenly turned away and left the room, without saying sorry or goodbye. A smiling nurse suggested I soaked my arms in hot water. Then an older, strict looking women in a white coat strutted in, obviously sent by the first man. She zoomed in with a new needle. Then, the nurse said, as if I was a dog at the vets 'This one's a bit of a jumper!' and the older woman tutted and carried on with the injection. She didn't say a word to me. It was ridiculous to get upset by this small, everyday NHS scene, but I found it absolutely humiliating. I find I keep writing letters of complaint in my head.

Today, I had a very different experience. My partner and I drove up to Edinburgh to Maggie's Centre. My friend Jackie Kay had told me about these places set up by a woman who had died of breast cancer. They are basically information and support centres for people with cancer, where you can talk about what's happening, and get help with things like treatment choices, nutrition, relaxation. Of course I knew about places like the Bristol Centre, but that had always struck me as being rather Laura Ashley and therapy based. I really wanted to talk to someone about the drugs I've been offered. Anyway, it was a lovely, calm house built of wood in hospital grounds, but completely unlike a hospital. It had gardens, and plants, and smelt of cooking cakes, and an atmosphere of quiet easiness. But it wasn't do-goody either. We saw a very handsome cancer specialist called Andrew who sat with us as if he had all the time in the world. We talked about my options, and our whole discussion was completely led by my pre-occupations. He certainly made me feel much more hopeful. Andrew felt that I was being offered the right things, and that there was a good chance that the tamoxifen might work for a bit. He agreed that Taxol was my best bet if I have more chemotherapy. We got a clearer picture of the whole illness, and I realised that it's not inevitable that I go downhill from here. I could easily stabilise again for a good amount of time. I felt really replenished. Actually, for the first half hour I was quite weepy as everyone was so nice, but it was the kind of place where you could weep and not feel embarrassed.

Anyway, I will return there soon, and I can phone up and talk to them any time. I feel as if I have a new ally and confidante.

Afterward we met our friend the actor Monica Gibb for lunch. Monica was in the first play I wrote about cancer called Eating The Elephant, years ago.

Otherwise, I've been doing a review for Mslexia Magazine about three books on writing by writers. Although I'm not a huge Atwood fan, I do think her book NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD is a fantastic collection of essays about what it means to be a writer. She's witty and elegant and perceptive, and puts her finger on so many truths about writing. Also, I have just consumed Zoe Heller's NOTES ON A SCANDAL. THis is a brilliant, gripping, almost perfect novel. Her writing is so lucid and accurate it makes me gasp.

Last night the teenagers were sitting out in the garden, on the new sycamore benches playing drums. The sound echoed all over the vale. It was lovely. The garden is filling up with growing things, frogs, new paths, newly made spaces. There's an awful lot left to do!

Tuesday 16th March 2004

I have just come back from listening to the poet and novelist Anne Michaels read. It was very restful and pure as a reading. The audience sat quietly listening, not clapping between poems. Anne read in a soft, but perfectly audible voice. Sometimes poetry readings are a bit like Quaker meetings, like ministries. Poetry has never been a good seller, but it seems to me that dressing it up as something else doesn't help much either. There were lots of people there, not coughing, not wriggling, just listening. The poems were very good, and everyone knew they were.

Otherwise, things have been quite uneventful on the health front. It's like that with cancer...ages when nothing happens, then suddenly everyone is rushing you about sticking pins in you and asking you your date of birth and next of kin. It's rather like publishing I suppose! I do feel rather tired, and I wonder if this is because I know I am supposed to be ill. I long to lie about in ordered, gentle rooms, but as I live with teenagers this is difficult.

I keep prodding my liver, trying to work out what is going on, but it feels the same as it always did.

Next week I am going away to a cottage in Yorkshire to work on the novel again. I long to get into that daily rhythm again. It's rotten for children who have writer mothers, as they are always trying to disappear into made up worlds. Still, my youngest daughter was eighteen yesterday, so I can now say my children have both reached adulthood!

Otherwise, I have been writing manifestos about Newcastle, and imaginary repercussions of the manifesto. For example, how would our lives be changed if we all napped every afternoon? These and other works inspired by the Barcelona trip will be read at the Playhouse in Newcastle on April 30th.

Friday 19th March. March Winds and Bent Daffodils

This wind is making me dizzy, everything rolling about and clattering! I have just had a CT scan at the hospital. It was very painless, and we had no trouble with needles this time. The only bit I don't like is when you can see the experts studying one's insides through the glass partition, and it always seems to me that they are shaking their heads!

Still, I feel that the tamoxifen, the acupuncture, the milkthistle, and your good thoughts are working. I feel somehow stronger and better, and the sense of fear and dread I had a few weeks ago has really evaporated. I went to London this week, travelling First Class as I wanted to try and make the journey really relaxing and easy. I have never bought a first class ticket before and it felt sort of wicked and delicious. However, there was a bomb scare at Stevenage, and we all had to pile off the train and stand shivering on the platform. They were going to put us buses, but suddenly changed their minds and put us back on the train. Because of the chaos, everyone sat they wanted, so First Class was completely packed and not at all luxurious. This should have made me really grumpy, but there was something so jolly about it all, with all the British people being nice and enduring in the face of difficulty, that I ended up rather enjoying myself. On the way back the train was terribly delayed again, and I found myself talking to businessmen about their lives. By the time I got home I was oddly rejuvenated! I am going to put the piece about The Great British Public that was on the radio onto the site, as several people have asked for a copy.

Lately I have been very focussed on what I want I am going to do with my time. Sadly, I am giving up a number of things that I found fascinating, but exhausting. One of these is the play I was writing based on the Thousand Family Study, as it felt like so much work, and I feel it's better to hand it on to other writers. I am left with the novel, poetry and some short fiction...in other words, the world of my imagination. Happily, because of the Northern Rock Money, I am able to survive without doing anything else. Suddenly time is not hemmed in and prescribed, and this is very liberating. I feel like writing in the middle of the night. Or sleeping all morning, then working all afternoon. But I am sorry about the people I won't be working with, as I love the social side of theatre.

I have just bought some provisions for the week away...blueberries, raspberries, chocolate and custard!

Oh the Terrible Gloom of My Body, and The Optimism of Daffodils!!

The Dales were wonderful, a different colour to their Wintry look, with the rivers all bubbly and the lambs leaping in the fields. I finished a story about a very large girl called Gloria working in a call centre in Newcastle, and wrote a whole new bundle of poems. And I grappled with the voice of the novel and fastened down its hatches, and set it on a new course, and I think it's shipshape now.

Coming back from a week of quiet isolation was hard. Retreating is addictive and I feel sorry for my family having to put up with my irritability after such weeks. I want everything to be in my control, and to have that same level of compete peacefulness you can get in the middle of nowhere. Domestic family life is very tricky, with all the doors opening and closing, the kettles boiling, dogs barking, and so many tasks, piling up, one after another...like, feed the dog, water the plants, hang out the washing, eat lunch. It's exhausting !

When I got back I had volunteered to speak at a day assembly here in Newcastle of gay and lesbian and bisexual people telling the council what we wanted for the city. Why did I volunteer to do such a thing? At ten thirty on Saturday morning I was faced with a lectern and a sea of expectant faces. Being in a manifesto mood at the moment I was able to list a whole load of things I wanted for the city, like lesbian happy hours, lesbian and gay old people's homes, monuments, banners over the Tyne welcoming us to Newcastle (sewn by the town leaders). Maybe one of the good things about my dodgy health is the worse the news is, the more outspoken I am able to be.

And the news is fairly bad. I just spent the morning seeing my Doctor, having more x rays, blood tests etc. We looked gloomily at scans of my insides, which are full of shadows. There is the spread in my liver, extensive bone cancer, some dodgy bits in my pleural cavities, and something odd about a kidney.

But, I don't feel that bad. I feel the same as I did yesterday. Also, the cancer in my bones is non- threatening as it manifests as hard little patches, rather than holes, (which would mean breakages etc.) The pictures were actually rather beautiful. The Doctor says he wants to give me Vinorelbine.....a kind of not too toxic chemotherapy. He's afraid that if he leaves it much longer I may turn yellow and then it will be too late.

Yet, the more I think about it, you could look at these results in a number of ways...you could say...'Isn't it amazing, Julia, that you look and feel so well?' and 'These results show some slight changes, but nothing too terrible, a bit of treatment will help to stabilise things.We've got so much choice these days....and these are BRILLIANT drugs.' Or even 'You have done extremely well, and we look forward to helping you have a very dignified and happy death!' I would be happy with any of these statements.

My other approach is to try and forget all about it, to pretend I haven't got cancer, and go and live in pretendy land. This works very well on the whole.

For now there is still chocolate to be eaten, books to be written and mad arrangements to fulfil, and daffodils everywhere. What wierd flowers they are, like they were made in a plastic's factory by aliens.

About to Eat A Boiled Egg In Sussex

I've landed in an extension of heaven! I am staying in a tiny cottage in Sussex, nestling into a hill, surrounded by primroses. Slept in a four poster bed last night!! Some kind friends have let me stay here, while I wait for the arrival of my sister's baby, Tiger. Tiger is due this week in Brighton. I can't wait to meet him/her.

Also, my doctor has gone on holiday, so I am sort of on holiday too. Last time I saw him he said that my liver function test was ok, so I could carry on without chemo for another month. So we are all in a delightful bracket of time when we can do what we like! There is not one thing in this cottage I don't like. I like the eggcups, I like the stairs, I like the knives and forks, I like the way the light filters into the rooms through small windows.

This week I am going to learn a poem that I can recite at parties. My daughter wants to learn all the words of a ballad. We will gain friends and influence people with these new skills! It was fun driving down here with my daughter. We pretended to be foreign and talked for ages in a sophisticated manner.

Reasons To Be Euphoric

A couple of weeks ago I asked my doctor if I could have a lethal injection. He laughed merrily, and so did I, but a part of me feels exhausted at the prospect of more treatment. You have to really believe that the treatment will work, and increasingly, chemotherapy feels like slapping another coat of paint on a collapsing wall. But you also have to have things that you really want to do, like go up in a balloon (no thanks) or swim with dolphins (not that either). And of course we want to stay alive for everyone else, because goodbye is just too final.

Today I did something I have always wanted to do. I went to Charleston, where Vanessa Bell lived,

(and died of breast cancer). I am not very good at museums. I always want to do things quickly...and as my mother said recently, most things go on far too long (poetry readings, dinners, parties, boat trips, church services, plays, explanations...the list is endless). Today we had to go on a one hour guided tour of the house, and we weren't allowed to touch anything either. I am not that bothered about ornaments and furnishings, so when the guide told us about the history of tables etc I went a bit blank. She wasn't bad, as guides go. She told us quite a bit of anecdotal rumour, and although my sister and I agreed we would have liked to have known more about the sex and the cooking arrangements, she was very interesting about Vanessa Bell and her children, and I ended up feeling nothing but admiration for her (Bell, not the guide). Actually when we first got to the house I nearly got terrible giggles, as there are many Woolf/Bell lookalikes wandering around looking as if they have been schooled in vagueness. Also the shop, with it's forty five pound battered felt hats, and loopy jewelery made me feel slightly hysterical. But I loved the house and the garden. I liked the way the Bloomsburys painted everything they could lay their paintbrushes upon....perhaps as a sort of displacement activity. I liked imagining the chaos of it all, and the poor servants trying to keep house. I loved Vanessa Bell's bed, that looked out upon the garden, with a bath in the corner of the room. Here was a woman after my own heart. The house reminded me that we can live how we like, and attack our walls with potato patterns and make lampshades out of cooking utensils. It made me angry with IKEA!

Anyway, there have been several wonderful moments on this holiday, that make it worth having some more chemotherapy, as who knows what else might happen. Like, my daughter and I driving along the sea front from Brighton to Shoreham at sunset, past all the dirty boats, and rusty bridges and places selling fresh fish, and Janis Joplin singing 'Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now Baby,' on the radio.

Or sitting all afternoon in the Duke of York Cinema in Brighton, eating pork scratchings, watching films, with no adverts in between.

Or listening to the cd that arrived in the post this morning of some of my poems set to music by Tim Dalling.

Pink Flamingos, Sweet Dreams

Did I say that Tiger, my new neice, arrived last Tuesday, so she is now a week old ? It was a calamitous birth, involving ambulances, devices like sink unblockers, long agonies, but thank god for my sister, it's all over now and there is a lovely baby. What an amazing business it is! And how delicate and complicated!

I am back in Newcastle in a cancer limbo. Actually, I am developing a theory that the hospital has muddled me up with someone else, another Julia Darling who is terribly ill, but they keep telling her that there is nothing the matter with her, whereas I am being told the opposite, but seem to be able to get up every morning and do up my shoelaces, and go to the shops. They will feel awful when they find out, especially as I have ruined my poor body with all these potent drugs!

I am taking so many things at the moment...tamoxifen, milk thistle, floradix, progesterone cream, fentanyl patches, pamidromate, and rather alot of neurofen. Most of it has no side effects, thank god.

This weekend I am getting on an easyjet plane to Palma on my own...I want to disappear for a bit. I used to do that alot....just stepping out of my life and going to some strange place where I know no one. Of course, you can end up feeling like a mad person, stuck in a strange smelling hotel room, miles from everyone you love. But these journeys are oddly liberating and memorable too. For a start, no one will know that I've got cancer, and that's quite a relief.

Yesterday I went with my friend Emma Holliday to look at pink flamingos at Washington wild fowl park. They are unreal. Who thought them up, with their swollen red knees and bizarre hooked noses? And what a brilliant colour they are, but a bit bitchy looking, like thin drag queens pecking at each other ! Emma has an exhibition in June at the Biscuit Factory in Newcastle, and I am going to write some poems....perhaps one about flamingos. I forgot about birds laying eggs while we were at the park, and suddenly imagined, probably because of Tiger being on my mind, ducks being in labour. How bizarre! Is my brain decaying?

Been reading like mad....The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory is a very juicy read....now reading Lucky, by Alice Sebold, which is well written, but I can't get into it after the court of Henry 8th and all those corsets and flirtations. Just bought Hilary Mantel's autobiography, and Paul Durcan's poetry collection 'Greetings To Our Friends In Brazil.'

Tuesday 27th April 2004

Majorca would have been lovely, had I not hired a car and driven off on the wrong side of the road. I had a headlong crash with two very cold German men. I was very lucky that I didn't meet a bus though. It would have been curtains, that's for sure! As the woman at the hotel said, arms in the air, 'You are BORN AGAIN!" I felt really silly. I was even in the local newspaper. I was staying in a hotel in Deia, where Robert Graves lived. It was beautiful, with terraces, lemon and orage groves, the smell of jasmine and orange blossom. The hotel was a bit boring...full of old people and couples who seemed to never speak to each other. I read several novels from the hotel libary. there are some good stories left languishing in hotel libaries, that some writer has sweated over. After my crash I felt quite depressed...my poor body felt so sore and jolted, and my neck was, and is stiff. However, the next day I forced myself to go sightseeing (in a taxi this time), and was remarkably cheered up by visiting the monastery at Valdemossa where George Sands and Chopin stayed one Winter. Her book 'Winter In Majorca' is an account of one woman's period in hell, where the local people stoned her children and stole her food. She didn't behave properly...rolling fags and walking in the cemetary in the moonlight in men's trousers. Choipin was sick all the time, and the monastery was freezing, with winds rattling the doors and whistling round the cloisters. She was over the top in her literary fury. At least I could come home on Easyjet.

The day I went it was warm and lovely, as it was for the whole of my stay. I had some fabulous pre-crash walks amongst the scenty groves with the sheep bells clanking.

I was getting really bad headaches just before I went, but since the crash they have disappeared. Perhaps the trauma has cured me, and next time I go to the hospital they will shake their heads in amazement.

We are rehearsing this week for Flying Homages, the reading based on my trip to Barcelona with Linda France and Bill Herbert. We've got actors and musicians, and backdrops and all kinds of things. It's rather exciting. Yet, I so want to get into a rhythm with my novel....we parry about each other like fencers....I so want to plunge, but the days get fragmented with sore necks and acupuncture appointments. I know the cure...you just MAKE yourself do some everyday and gradually you get absorbed.

New Blood and Manifestos

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.

Monday 10th May. Reprieve!

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.

Minds Over Bodies and The Impossibility of Resting

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!

Back From the Debatable Lands

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!

Awful Garden Ornaments, and Luxurious Moments

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.

Hot Drowsy Days

It's been a bit of groggy week. I have felt a kind of unidentified malaise, and an awful lack of energy. I hate this languid feeling. I have been saved by historical romantic fiction, and have read yet another Phillipa Gregory novel full of corset ripping and women on horseback with whips. Her books are so compulsive you could read them walking down the street. Actually, the one I am reading now is making me feel a bit sick, and I have wrenched myself from it to come and do some writing in my room.

I had my pamidromate drip for my bones on Tuesday, and they told me that my blood count is low again, so I should maybe have another transfusion soon. Although I try to be existentialist about this illness, sometimes it just feels like an endless series of appointments. You get tired and bored of it. And I have so much that I want to do at the moment. I finished the Body parts play for Live Theatre. I wrote about two old women in a turkish bath, talking about their doctors. I am also working on scenes for the stage adaptation of the Taxi Driver's Daughter, which is on as part of Live Theatre's New Writing Festival. It's interesting adapting your own novel....you have really let go and invent new things, and not be too literal about the book. Nice to know what the story is though!

Anyway, it did occur to me that everytime I have managed to do some work, my body has felt better. That's why resting isn't necessarily the best medicine for me. I need the stimulation of invention, and talking to other people. The body influences the mind, and the mind influences the body.

I have decided to make a television piece with the BBC, for a programme called Inside out. They have given me a camera to do a video diary, and we will be filming some hospital visits, and workshops with GPs. I want it to be about poetry and health, and how writing can sustain someone through illness. Also I have started working with an artist called Peter Furlinger on a kind of 'thankyou stone' instead of the usual sad gravestone from the bereaved. I am agonising about what to say on it at the moment. I have booked a plot too, in the Old Jesmond Graveyard in a really lovely spot. Peter said he had never worked on a headstone with someone living before! I think some of our discussions might be included in the TV film. It feels like quite a nice thing to do, and something I can do quite slowly. It certainly doesn't feel morbid! I worry about telling everyone this, incase they think my death is imminent. It doesn't feel that way. I still have a tremendous appetite, and I quite often eat snacks in the middle of the night. My body feels extremely solid, and not at all withering. Anyway, who knows....maybe I shall start a trend of 'thanking stones'...and soon we shall all be making them !

Birdsong, Poems, and Very Nice Ice Cream

I am in the wing of a stately home, rented at the last minute as our house was full of builders and drilling. Actually, I was meant to go to London, to a Royal Literary Fund do, then to be welcomed as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow at a party in Somerset House. But I felt too weary to face the London underground. Although I feel generally well, I find I don't really like being too far away from a sofa, a bath, and a kettle. It was the right decision, I think. I am all alone now with my old friends, bubble bath, tinned pears, the laptop, and various novels. They sell really amazing ice cream in the organic bakery down the road in little tubs. I have been there several times, and I feel I am getting a reputation in the village with my old green coat and unbrushed hair.

I've been working on poems mostly, putting together a new collection. At the moment this is called APOLOGY FOR ABSENCE, but this may change. For a while it was called PROBABLY SUNDAY, and before that INDELIBLE, MIRACULOUS.

On Tuesday I had a blood transfusion and I feel lovely and plump, like a cat full of cream. It was a funny day at the hospital though. I had a scan first, in the large white machine. BREATHE. DON'T BREATHE! They are seeing if the tamoxifen is working, and if I need to start chemotherapy. Then I went up to Ward 36, but they sent me off for a bone x ray, because I had said idly to a passing doctor that my leg hurt a bit. They are very attentive in Ward 36, very kind, but I almost wished that I hadn't mentioned it, as my leg didn't hurt that much. Actually, most of my aches and pains are transitory. I ended up waiting for hours in X.Ray. They said it was a new digital system and nothing was working properly. Then they put me in a box room and told me to take my clothes off and wait, which I did for ages. Then I had the xray, then I had to wait again. I got really impatient and decided to get dressed and get out of the box. I hate it when the hospital makes me feel vulnerable. They were a bit huffy with me, and that made me even crosser. But why should I wait in a cupboard with nothing on??

Anyway, eventually it was all right, and I got back to my favourite spot on the bed by the window, and got my new blood, and my friend Dominic Slowie came to visit with lucozade, and the jolly tea trolley came rattling round, and all was well.

It's lovely being here. It's very unspoilt and peaceful, surrounded by misty Cumbrian mountains. I wonder what goes on in these villages though. It feels very feudal. Infact this house was the squires place. When I got here the green was filled with gypsy caravans and horses, here for the Appleby Horse Fair. I kept on humming...Oh She's Gone With The Raggle Taggle Gypsies Oh....I used to love that song when I was little. This morning I went ambling round the graveyard in the village church looking for inspiring gravestones, but they were mainly conventional ones, with dearly loved and much missed epitaphs. I want mine to be more characterful!

The sun comes out, then disappears, and it rains enthusiastically, and the sky turns deep grey. All can hear are rooks cawing, like a radio four play!

Tomorrow we are reading the new Taxi Driver scripts at Live Theatre, for the reading on 16th June. I think the paperback must be in the shops by now, with my first novel Crocodile Soup. They look like siblings, although the two books are so different.

Thankyou, Uncle Peter, for the article about the Tree of Shoes in the Nevada desert. Isn't it fascinating how easy it is to start up a bit of magic!

I shall return to the floaty day. I think it might be time for a tub of ice cream. Perhaps I shall brush my hair.

Scan results, and the amazing power of tiny pills.

Today I got my latest scan results. It was a complicated morning. I had agreed that the BBC (represented by a very nice person called Andrew) would film the consultation, so that it might be used in the short film I am making with them about cancer, writing and life. But I was dreading it all a bit, incase it all got too emotional,and this morning I felt quite frail.

We met at the hospital at 9.30, and Bev ,my partner, joined us there. She's been overworked lately, trying to finish the building work on our house. Cancer puts pressure on everyone in a family. She wants to get the new room ready before the summer ends, so that we can start lying about in it and enjoying ourselves, but at the moment home is one long list of Things To Do, and she takes the strain. Sometimes I think we should just go and live in a hotel!

It was a very busy clinic, with an ambience of delay. Also a nurse announced that there would be strange thumping and drilling sounds, and that we were not to worry. Then another nurse told me very sweetly that my results were mislaid, so we would have to wait while they found them. So we sat with the strange thumping sound, sipping our tea from plastic cups. Bev and I had prepared ourselves for a morning of gloom. My test results are rarely good, but I was determined to be philosophical, and quite prepared to be told it was time for more chemo. In fact that's what I expected.

But then the drilling stopped, and we were ushered into a quiet sunny room, and my consultant Mark came in, miraculously carrying the results, and told us that the cancer in my liver has shrunk, and that all the other things had stabilized! Tamoxifen, that radiant and clever pill, was working! Or perhaps it's not the tamoxifen, perhaps its all the healers out there, or the poetry I have been writing. Or wouldn't it be wierd if it was something simple, like blueberries?

So I don't have to have chemotherapy yet, and I have another three months grace before the next scan. I said to Mark how strange it all was, the way my body looks as if its on the verge of collapse, and then rejuvenates itself, because this has happened over and over again. Of course he said it was all to do with drugs, even though Tamoxifen doesn't usually work very well on liver spread.

It was a nice moment to film....a happy cancer consultation, Bev and I cheering, and Mark grinning.

Afterwards I went down to Live Theatre and spent the day working on scenes from The Taxi Driver's Daughter, and doing some last minute writing. Tonight we present the work we've been doing to an audience. I have really enjoyed being in the theatre again. It's all so busy and buzzy, and so different to the world of writing novels. I get wildly excited too. I love watching actors developing characters, and playing with the nuances of language.

So it's been a happy day. I've been let off, and I can forget about things for a bit. Thankyou, everyone, for your good wishes, for I am sure they have helped.

Wet Thursdays and Tired Knees

I've been busy being better, although a part of me won't crow with delight about shrinking cells as I feel that my role in all this is to be steady, to hang onto a kind of mid course so that when the hospital is gloomy I don't plummet, and when they tell me good news I don't whoop either. I just keep on straight ahead! It's been a very active week....last week we had the reading that explored adapting The Taxi Driver's Daughter into a stage play. I really enjoyed working with actors for two days, trying out things and looking at the book through new eyes. The event was interesting. It showed how much choice there is in an adaptation. I ended up feeling that one had to not be precious about it, and to change whatever I wanted, but then that's quite a broad canvas to work from. I am keen to do the play though. I think it will work for younger audiences. The Manifesto is also being developed with Northern Stage as a musical. We are aiming for a script in hand reading in December and a production early next year.

Then last night I did a reading with a new novelist called David Nicholls who has written a very funny book, picked out by Richard and Judy, called Starter For Ten. We were discussing writing novels and deadlines, and how we worked etc, infront of an audience. Then I had some squid in a restaurant!

And the football has been ridiculously exciting, and I don't even really like football that much!

Monday 5th July. Endless Rain.

I am about to go and teach an Arvon Course. These courses are run in isolated and beautiful places, in this case spooky Heptonstall in Yorkshire. Sixteen students spend five days with two writers, eating round a long wooden table (plenty of garlic bread, cream and salad dressing) and discussing writing around log fires, or doing workshops, or walking up the valley, talking. I'm running a course with the poet and playwright Amanada Dalton, who is a lovely warm person, so I am really looking forward to it. Lesley Glaister is our guest, and she'll be reading one night. Funny to think of sixteen nervous people packing their bags, about to embark on a week of strangeness. This course is called 'Starting To Write' so we won't have lots of novels to read, just very nervous people! I feel very at home at Arvon. There are plenty of sofas, and you can open the fridge and eat what you like. I hope it doesn't rain all the time though. I am sick of this sluggy month. Everything smells damp.

It didn't rain in Edinburgh at Jackie Kay's bust unveiling. It was gloriously sunny as a group of family, friends and business men and women watched Jackie reading an explosively lovely poem, with such aplomb that the bust unveiled itself prematurely in a snatch of wind. It was a great project...they've done twelve bronze heads of Scottish writers, lining a lovely lake just outside Edinburgh. In the same business park there are poetry bus shelters ! Afterwards we stayed at a posh hotel and floated about in a rooftop spa. It rained then, but it didn't matter, as the water was warm, and the icy rain felt nice on one's face.

I am feeling ok, longing for a good writing stretch, although running Arvon's makes you feel like writing so I don't begrudge it. I want to get on with the novel and the manifesto. I have been enjoying making the BBC film. Last week we filmed me and a stone cutter, Peter, looking at headstones in Old Jesmond Graveyard, talking about lettering and who memorials were for. It's an interesting process, this film. I also like doing the video diary, which is by my bed. I tend to do it in the mornings, so all my hair is sticking up. I found myself talking about those cancer adverts on the tv when they say "I've got the all clear!" and how irritating that is for me and several other million people who know that the 'all clear' is out of the question. Can't they come out of the consultation room and say 'It's SHRUNK A BIT!"

Otherwise, been watching musicals to get inspired for the manifesto...Guys and Dolls yesterday. Now I must finish my packing.

Monday 12th July. Home Again

You come back from running Arvon Writer's Courses in a very odd state. I spent yesterday on the sofa watching meaningless tv. The courses are so intense and absorbing, and you get very involved in the participants. Amanda Dalton and I had a lovely group, who were mainly new to writing. They really worked hard and blossomed. We ran workshops in the mornings and then they had to get on with writing in the afternoons. We also had a guest reader, the novelist Leslay Glaister, who was wonderful, and a surprise celebrity guest, Jackie Kay, who popped in to run a workshop. I only left the house once! Lumb Bank is a wonderful old house..the gardens look out over a great valley, and it's a very epic place. I have been there many times over the last twenty years, and I love working there as you can be as odd as you like and no one tells you off! I wonder what all our students are doing now, and if they are ok?

So now I am home in the wet Summer, and I have written a list of things I am trying to finish on the blackboard in my room...EEEEK. It's very quiet in the English School, with no students, and rooms being refurbished. It's kind of nice. I have just bought cream cakes from Marksies to have for our tea. When will it stop raining?

In the country with a novel to write

I am in a cottage again, about to start on the novel. It's a brilliant sunny day, and outside there are bright, overgrown flowers everywhere and loud birds. It's lovely to be away. On the way here I stopped and bought punnets of raspberries, and lovely creamy cheese and juices, and bread and butter. Yum yum.

I have been feeling a bit energy-less lately, as if all my vital juices are draining away. It's rather like a battery slowly running down, and everything must be done slowly. At home the DIY continues, and I keep getting stuck in the house waiting for workmen. I long for the rooms to be settled, and for things to stop moving around.

On Sunday I went to Durham sculpture day in a lovely green park with a lake. I lay on the grass listening to a brass band playing. It was delightful, and I suddenly understood why people love brass bands. There were lines of elderly people listening in deck chairs, gently tapping their feet. Apart from this outing, I have mainly been at home, eating ice cream and watching videos, so I am really longing to do some work. If I don't write for longer than about three days I start to feel really odd. It's a basic need, like eating.

My eldest daughter has moved into a flat. She's made it really nice, and she seems very grown up. My other daughter is on holiday in Rhodes. My children are disappearing! It's a funny time; a time of re-positioning or something. I am surprised how much I am affected by the girls leaving home...even though they are around alot too...it is the end of an era, and a time of considering the harvest of ones first forty something years. There is also a sense of looking around and seeing the world again....thinking things like, I could live in a shack on a beach, or I could be someone else now. Parenting is a wierd thing, it passes in a WHOOSH and you can't believe that your children are grown up. I wonder what we should be doing at this time...maybe going off and sitting in a cave, or doing a pilgrimage. Anyway, wish me luck in my reclusive cottage.....

Tuesday 27th July 2004. Craving Blood !

Just come back from ward 36 where I had my monthly drip of pamidromate, which is a very benign drug. They checked my blood and it's rather low again, so I am having another blood transfusion tomorrow. Can't wait! Now I know how vampires feel. I really want some more energy. I have been invited to speak at a writer's conference in Mauritius, with the poet Sean O Brien. We are both able to take our partners, and in the second week of the visit we can just be on holiday. I've been to Mauritius before and it's very idyllic, but much more than a tourist resort. It's a very passionate, political place. I am so pleased to be able to return. Before then I am spending a week in AJP Taylor's old Mill in the Isle of Wight, lying on the squashy sofa by the window watching children crabbing in the River Yar. It's always the same in the IOW. That's why I like going there. I can see my father who lives there, and we both celebrate our birthdays in August. There are many parties, carnivals and late night sing songs. A lot of pasta gets consumed.

I knew my blood was thinning. I felt as if I hardly had the energy to unscrew the lid off a marmalade pot. I got rather grumpy too. I kept on having odd dreams....I dreamt I was taking a GCSE in IDEALISM but that I hadn't done any work. I also keep on having wierd waking dreams, when I wake up and find oddly shaped animals on my bed, but then I realise I am dreaming.

I am just about to have a meeting about an anthology of poems to use in a health setting that we are going to publish with Bloodaxe. We've chosen lots of good ones, but if anyone reading this wants to send me any others please do.

One More Thing

Just had a very pleasureable afternoon with Neil Astley from Bloodaxe Books and the poet Cynthia Fuller,reading poems. There are so many brilliant poets out there. This afternoon we were looking at Selima Hill, Sarah Wardle, Leanne O Sullivan, Jane Kenyon, U A Fanthorpe, Kerry Hardie. Most people haven't heard of most poets, but there is such alot to be found in contemporary poetry !

Anyway, I wanted to tell readers of this website about Penny Taylor, who I go to for various pamperings...facials, having my toenails painted, neck rubs, feet rubs, eyebrow tinting...everything really....Penny has just moved her practise to The Holiday Inn in Newcastle...she's really reasonable, and she's looking for new clients...I recommend her. Her mobile no is 0793 131 4255 email penny@pennytaylorescape.com

August In The City

I think, because I was raised in a school environment as my father taught at a public school, I find it very odd staying in the same place in August. We always went to the Isle of Wight in the Summer, leaving any thoughts of organised work behind. Now, I am working in the university during August, and it's very strange. Rooms are being painted, carpets being laid, and yet everything is rather sleepy. I feel as if I shouldn't be here, but there is something quite relaxing about it too.

At home I'm reading 'The Clan of The Cave Bear'..the first book of a deliciously long series of stories about cave people. I have just bought a hammock! I am really looking forward to travelling to Mauritius. I remember saying that I thought my travelling days were over,,,well, they're not. I love Newcastle, but it's at its best in the Spring, or the Autumn. I am even looking forward to the airports and tickets.

But I must work very, very hard for the next two weeks. I have so many Autumn deadlines..and things I want to get finished. I have been writing new poems for the next collection, which I hope will be published this year.

This morning, for the first time in my life, I phoned the council to complain about the rubbish in the streets. They were very polite. There are quite a few things I feel like complaining about. It must be something to do with aging. I went with my family to see Farenheight 9/11 at the cinema, and even though I think it's a very manipulative film, I still feel furious with the white male world that has led us to drop bombs on innocent people. It's been a despicable period in history. I must get on with the manifesto and put all my furies and feelings of injustices into that.

The blood transfusion has left me feeling much better, and more patient and positive. One of the things I hate about energy loss is that it makes you feel as if you don't care, and also very difficult to live with. Suddenly the DIY doesn't seem so irritating, and I generally feel like a nicer person. I have a hospital appointment this week. I assume we will set up another round of scans. Oh yawn!

Latest Health News

Just had another appointment with Dr Verril. A busy waiting room, filled with people with odd names, like Stepenganger and other ones I can't remember. I told the doctor about the sensation of numbness in my jaw and he thinks it's worth zapping the back of my neck with radiotherapy incase it gets worse. I am so anti treatment these days. I don't like being reminded of illness. I am delighted that I don't have to have chemotherapy yet. Anyway, we had a nice chat, but when I left I had a surge of anger towards the illness. I really hate the way it needles away at my immune system, even though I know I am strong, and my body resists everything the illness throws at it. Bloody breast cancer, bloody appointments and injections and night sweats and all of it.....why can't I just be a menopausal woman, though I suppose that has its drawbacks.

Still, I am really looking forward to Mauritius, and I also think I'll plan a trip to Budapest in Autumn. The manifesto is fun, and the new poems keep on surfacing. And I have a new green carpet in my writing room, and we are having an armchair covered with artificial fur. Life is sweet, even if it does go downhill.

Incredible Rain and Plagues of Wasps

I have taken to listening to farming news at 5.00 am. You find out about things like plagues and lettuce. There are too many wasps in the world ! I fell back to sleep and woke up feeling awful, as if I had been stung by a thousand wasps, and as if I would never make it through a day of stairs and intentions. But as the day progressed I realised that everyone had a terrible night last night. It was a horrible, muggy, nightmarish night, and I am not the only person who feels ill in the mornings sometimes. I am much, much better now...quite sparky in fact. This could be thanks to acupuncture, which can make me feel much more fluid and happy. It can make me more creative too.

I was talking to my acupuncturist about how some doctors can make you feel hopeful and others make you feel hopeless, even if they are giving you much the same information. Often I can carry around a random phrase that a doctor has said to me, repeating it to myself and exploring it. This can be quite negative, and of course if the mind effects the body, it can do so in a negative way too. I am very fond of my doctors, but recently someone said I was tired because I was 'carrying alot of tumour'. This phrase haunts me. I see myself bent double under the weight of some terrible malevolent sack.

I want my doctors to congratulate me, to tell me the best things that can happen, not just the worst! Actually, I am doing very well! But then I was thinking about how much authority we give doctors, who are tired and trying their best to do the right thing, yet we, the patients, are so wired up to everything they say we get oversensitive. We also remember the things teachers and headmistresses, or anyone in authority said to us, but maybe we should take responsibility for ourselves a bit more, and not believe what 'experts' tell us.

Thanks everyone who responded to the Guardian piece. I got sent lots of great poems, many of which were written by people who had been bereaved, or suffered some illness. Poetry really can sustain and save us!

I can't believe the rain outside. It's almost biblical! I am gathering a whole list of novels to take to the Isle of Wight and Mauritius....Diary of An Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster. The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. More of the Cave Clan series by Jean Aoul. I am so enjoying reading at the moment...it is by far the most relaxing, imaginative, illuminating part of my life.

Mauritius Tuesday I Think, In The Spar Shop by the Beach

I feel very remiss about not doing my web log earlier. It's been hard to find an internet cafe, and I have been a bit travel dazed and bewildered. I remember writing this log from Brazil and it felt as if I was making it up but I really am in Mauritius, and the sea is very close with its glittery waves palm trees and glass bottomed boats. I am running writing workshops every morning for a group of sweet intelligent Mauritians, who all speak at least four languages and who do every mad thing I ask them to.

Yesterday I asked them to write, alphabetically, twenty six descriptions of sky. That's hard here, when the sky is usually blue.

Last week we were all over the place, at a writers conference then at the university, and meeting and greeting and sight seeing. My poor body didn't really know what was happening, although it survived the flight rather well, it began to flag and eventually crumpled into a heap on the fifth day. This state I am in requires all kinds of attentions in order for it to remain balanced. I bargain with my body, trying to give it so much rest in exchange for something I want to do. Sometimes I get really tired of this constant fielding of symptoms.

But I wouldn't have missed coming here for anything. It's so much more than a tourist resort with its mixture of cultures and peoples. My partner and I walked along the bach to the grand hotels with vast colonial lawns and everything on a tray...you could spend a holiday there and never see anything else. We've been taken to a Hindu wedding and watched older women dancing and drumming, and we've met all kinds of people and talked to them about writing (I am here with the poet Sean o Brien and his partner Gerry). I like the vanilla flavoured tea, and the tasty snacks. In the evenings this week I have been watching Bollywood films, chortling at the hilarious sub titles. Somehow the Olympics has seemed more poignant from a Mauritian point of view. I so wanted the Mauritian runner to win!

So I am fine. Infact my bones are warming up and feeling stronger. Thankyou everyone who responded to the Guardian article...I have had some very interesting post...will write this again very soon!

Monday 5th September. Travel Weary and Rather Autumnal

The flight back from Mauritius was interminable. It was creakingly uncomfortable, and I felt like 'self loading baggage' the term that is apparently used for economy passengers. Still, I wouldn't have missed the trip for anything. My highlight was watching older Hindu women in bright saris dancing in a small room before a wedding. My low point was a migraine during a sight seeing tour. Actually, I'm not so keen on sight seeing. I far prefer talking to people, and I met some great characters. I also saw my friend the novelist Lindsay Cullen and her husband Ram. Lindsay's latest book is called 'Boy' published by Bloomsbury, and she is a very interesting woman and writer. We had an evening at their house eating oddly shaped vegetables from their garden. It was my perfect night out, a sofa, and someone bringing me a tasty snack every so often.

Still, I am back now. There's no point talking about trips away unless they are interestingly awful, and this one was such a mixture of things. I feel as if I have glimpsed paradise, but it's nice to be back with marmite and PG Tips.

This morning I had to go up to the hospital for my pamidromate drip, and they did a blood test and said my blood count had sunk to new depths. No wonder I feel a bit weepy and useless. We would all be crying if our brave red blood cells weren't marching about doing their job. Or is it the white ones? Today it's a grey, sullen kind of day, and I find I have so much to do it makes me dizzy. But it's rather busy and optimistic in the university, with people coming back from their summers, and all the workmen's ladders tidied away.

Tomorrow I am running a workshop with GPs about the vocabulary of pain. I really love doing these kinds of workshops. They feel rather useful, and always remind me of the power of words. We'll be doing writing exercises and reading things out, and hopefully everyone will go home with their vocabularies sharpened up, and their ears too. Then on Wednesday I have to have another long, boring blood transfusion. The thing I hate most about my condition is the time it requires. I suppose it has taught me to be patient, to learn how to do nothing, but I find it difficult.

I have read The Secret Life Of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, which is delightful, and bound to become a feel good movie. Also Jill Dawson's Wild Boy, which is a fascinating read. She wrote a book called Fred and Edie which I loved, and is I think a very talented writer. And more Phillipa Gregory, and Clan of the Cave Bear, which I have thankfully nearly finished. It's a bit like binge eating, somehow, this kind of obsessive reading. My head is filled with salacious sex scenes!

Off To Ibiza

This week I have had a pamidromate drip, a blood transfusion, and an acupuncture treatment! My body takes so much tending. But I seem to have got myself in a good state for Ibiza, and I am looking forward to lying next to the pool, and having a proper holiday.

The workshop on pain on Wednesday was so interesting. The GPs and patients that attended were all such creative, open people. I know that it's always the radical forward thinking people that come to things like this, but it does give me such hope.

There were a few interesting things that came up, via the doctors and in discussion.

A 'shooting' or 'stabbing' pain is rarely used to describe a gun shot or knife wound.

People who are having the worst time with pain often describe it as an aggressive person ie I feel as if someone is stamping on my chest.

It is incredibly difficult to describe pain. We say things like 'it was a nightmare, it was indescribable, I didn't know what to do with myself.'

However, if you find a vocabulary or metaphor for pain, it can be really powerful, and help you feel in control of it.

We talked about asking questions in consultations like...what colour is your pain? What animal is it?

It's all soft and sunny outside, and the students are back again, in bright yellow t.shirts, holding plastic cups full of beer. I am about to go to a meeting about my friend Andrea Badenoch's , who died in January of breast cancer. We are launching a prize for women writers in her honour. You have to be forty two to enter, the same age that Andrea was when she began to write.

PG Tips, baths and coverlets

I am finally returned from the merciless sun, slightly redder than before, but not much as I always sat in the shade.

I enjoyed my holiday in Ibiza immensely, but I am very relieved to return to England, land of hot water bottles,closed windows and heavy eiderdowns. Holidays are not very interesting unless something drastic happens, and on the whole it was accident free, so I shan't go on about it. It's not as if I went to Pacha every night. I have noticed that everywhere I go I compare it to the Isle of Wight, which shows how utterly English I am.

It is nice to be home, and I am feeling excited about Autumn and everything I am supposed to be doing. We have nearly finished the BBC film, and it will be shown in October. I am starting to regret the fact that I haven't brushed my hair much lately, and I probably could have done with a bit of lippy, especially on the video diaries. Never mind. I shall probably shut my eyes the whole way through anyway.

Over the next few weeks I have to have a quick blast of radiotherapy on the back of my head which I am not much looking forward to. I am worried that my brain might fry. However, I know it is very effective for bones, and worth doing. Otherwise I am feeling fine, especially now I am back with my lovely deep bath tub.

In early October , for National Poetry Day, I am hosting a 'poetry feast' at the Literary and Philosophical society in Newcastle. Lots of poets have written new poems about food, and we shall all be sitting round a long dinner table leaping to our feet and doing recitations. I am looking forward to wearing a new red velvet pointy hat that a friend brought back from Outer Mongolia. It seems absolutely the right moment for it.

I am thinking of writing a short handbook about how to behave with the ill. It would include useful tips like...'Do not squeeze the upper arm of the ill person' and 'Don't say HOW ARE YOU?' in a meaningful way. Also don't say 'You look well, much better than when I last saw you.' I think it could be a best seller. I hope you are all looking forward to the season of floating carrier bags and scared dogs. Love to all.

Films, Head Moulds, Autumn

I went to the hospital this morning to have my head moulded. You go in a little room with a hard couch in the middle of it, lie down, and a man puts a warm elastic mesh over your face that cools and hardens to the exact shape of ones features. Then the mould is used as a way of positioning ones head during radiotherapy. It looks quite interesting as an object and I think I might use it afterwards as a lampshade.

This week I am writing a short story for a festival of stories, based, or inspired by Raymond Carver and Chekhov. It's a bit daunting to have the great masters looking over ones shoulder, but I don't want to do a pastiche of their work either. In the end I am not sure if my story is anything like theirs, in fact I am sure it isn't. Also the film I have been doing with the BBC is nearly finished. I did a reading with the musician Tim Dalling on Tuesday to a dummy audience who pretended it was night time. They were mainly media students from Ashington College, and they hadn't been to a poetry reading before. I felt quite worried about them! Imagine being faced with two middle aged people who told you their inner thoughts! They were quiet, but polite. The film is being broadcast on 11th October. I feel worried about my mad video diaries, as I can't remember what I said, and I certainly didn't wash my face or brush my hair. Vanity never completely leaves us does it?

It's very bright and buzzy in the university. My corridor is full of writers and there's a smell of restless artists in the air! I have a sore throat and I feel as if I have swallowed a cold golf ball. Tomorrow I have a head scan, next week radiotherapy. Help!

Dahlias, Songs and Face Moulds

As I write this I am being filmed! It's the last bits for the Inside Out film, so the team are in my room watching me looking as if I am concentrating, or writing great poetry. It's been an interesting process, and as we get to the editing stage the whole thing has tightened up and got more focused. I haven't seen the rought cut yet, just read the script which makes alot of sense. My fear is that it will be weepy...that however one presents cancer it has a built in misery factor. Incidentally, I have found a way to stop oneself from crying in public, which is, when the lump in the throat moment occurs, to visualise a stupid cat. Stupid cats are the opposite of tears!

I have been out in County Durham photographing dahlias with Sharon Bailey, the photographer. Also antimacassars, mantelpieces, and fruit bowls. It's a project of images and words about how people make artistic choices in their ordinary lives all the time. Mainly, it's provided Sharon and I with some fantastic days out. We walked along the swelling sea at Seaham Harbour, and went to the very peaceful church next to Seaham Hall. Aren't dahlias amazing? They almost make me believe in god, they are so unnecessary, yet full of euphoria and joy!

I'm sorry about the error in the last web log. I am not having chemotherapy, and the face mould is for keeping ones head still during radiotherapy. I went for my first blast this warning, and had a pleasant time in the waiting room making a hooky and proggy mat with the resident arts project. It quite transforms the experience of waiting, and I am quite looking forward to getting back to my 'seascape' tomorrow. The treatment was straightforward...a long buzz, while I lay on a hard bed with my moulded face tightly screwed to my real face.

Last night I heard the 'first drafts' of the musical settings of the poems in 'Sudden Collapses In Public Places'...it was a lovely experience, a gift. The music gives the poems new life and atmosphere. They will be performed at Live Theatre, sung by Zoe Lambert, with Dave Scott and Neil Blenkinsop and other musicians on 5th December.

Dazed and Brainless

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.

Poetry Feasts and Some Delirium!

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!

After the telly!

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.

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?

Tatty Monday, with a swollen foot.

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.]

Monday 1st November.

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!

After The Thermal Baths, Home Again

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.

Hot Nuts and Workhouses

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 HANDSOME

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?

Writing Like A Maniac, Scans and Trips To Scarborough

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.

Some Swellings but Otherwise Rather Productive

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!

Blood and Songs

I spent two days in Manchester last week with my friend Jackie Kay, happily getting on with some writing. Some people are really easy to write with, and Jack and I have had many happy weeks in houses and cottages all over England. We just get into a routine very quickly, interspersed with the odd tasty meal and chat, but on the whole we are both very hard working. We don't watch TV, or drink, or even stay up late! So that was a very happy couple of days. Then I came back to Newcastle, feeling a bit weary, and the next day at my regular hospital drip of pamidromate I found out that my blood was at an all time low. In fact it's amazing that I was still walking about at all. So they said I must spend the night in the dreaded Ward 37 and have three bags of blood. I'm afraid of Ward 37. It's where I've met demons and been in terrible states of crisis. I managed to think positive thoughts about it, and got through the night without any grumbles. I didn't sleep a wink though. I watched late night murder films on the new flashy telly above my bed. I ate an incredibly awful meal of yellow soup, followed by black brussel sprouts and a kind of mushroomy mess of sauce and herbs, then rice pudding. It made me want to laugh.

After the transfusion I felt so much better, pinker and bouncier. I am very grateful to the blood donor out there who gave me this boost. I even managed to go Christmas shopping! If I hadn't had the blood I doubt if I would have had the energy to read last night at the Northern Rock Writers Prize Launch, standing at a lectern in the flouncy cinema, between Ann Stevenson and Tony Harrison, who are both Northern Rockers like me.

Then Bev and I scooted down to Live Theatre where Zoe Lambert and Dave Scott and Neil Blenkinsop and cellists and bassists and trumpeters were playing a song cycle from Sudden Collapses In Public Places. The theatre was lovely and full, and I found the event completely rivetting. There is something wonderful about having ones words interpreted by gifted musicians, and Zoe sang so magically, yet without over milking the pudding, which is so easy to do around cancer issues. It was, for me, just a lovely night, and I so hope that it can be repeated.

A Rattly Week

What a mess of a week it's been! It's midnight on a Thursday night, and strangely my energy seems to have returned, so I'm writing this in bed, drinking a tasty mug of Horlicks. Outside a lonely dog is barking somewhere in the Vale, but otherwise it's dead quiet. Yes, everything has gone pear shaped this week (that's a great expression I think, whoever made it up!). I was put on some new drugs with unpronouncable names last Friday, all with the best intentions, like to stop my face aching, but I kept on falling asleep and having delirious thoughts. One thing I thought was that you could send soup by email, as an attachment, and I believed this completely for quite a while! I was also on drugs to stop the side effects of the first drugs, and these had other side effects, like being dizzy and sick. Altogether I feel that my cancer, and probably any chronic illness is all about finding a balance, and that any change can set off all kinds of things. It's like that game Spillikins...one wrong move and the whole edifice collapses! Yet I also know that the aim of most medical people is to help, and that everyone wants me to feel better. But I am a real Pavlov's dog when it comes to taking pills. I have all sorts of mental prejudices, like I don't like yellow pills as they remind me of chemotherapy and make me feel sick, and I can take against a drug for all kinds of reasons, like the name or the packet. There are also drugs that are very much my friend, like tamoxifen (O Hail The Goddess Tam!) which saves me, and pamidromate which strengthens my bones (apparently chronic bone disintegration has almost gone now thanks to pamidromate). I have mixed feelings about steroids, but I will take them, and I have high hopes for the new hormone drug fasledex (spelt wrong I am sure) that I may soon be taking. Lately I have been unable to take some Chinese herbs because they smelt of poo, but I am sure I am not alone in that!

Anyway, things really felt wrong this week, although of course it could be the illness flaring up as well as the drugs. On Wednesday I woke up unable to put any weight on my left foot, so I had to crawl about on my hands and knees. The cat liked me in this state very much. Doctors came round. There were many phone calls. It's being suggested that I go to the hospice for assessment, which is probably a good idea, but it makes me feel a bit like the end is nigh. My sister who works in a hospice says that dying is only a small part of the work of a hospice, and that it's very satisfying having people come in with all their muddled drugs and symptoms and sorting them out so they can cope with the world again. Also the food is supposed to be lovely and I can't be that close to dying as I am very interested in food.

If I do go to the hospice I shall write about it in great detail, so that other people who are scared about it will see what it's like too. Perhaps they should stop calling them hospices and call them something else instead like refurbishment centres.

Anyway, today Bev and I were sent up to casualty so that they could do an xray and see if my foot was fractured. I had to be carried up the steep steps of our house in a firemans lift, or a queen's seat!

We waited for three and a half hours in an awful waiting room with extremely loud childrens tv on, though there was not a child in the room. I rarely sit up in hard chairs these days, even in nice restaurants with people I love, and I felt so stiff and uncomfortable. Finally we found out that my foot wasn't broken. They gave me some paracetomol and some crutches.

Now I am home, and my foot is wierdly better. I am just feeling so annoyed with cancer and the way it steals the days. There is so much I want to do and write, and I suppose I am no good at being ill. I'm not very zen. When things go topsy turvy we all get unnerved and upset, though usually things pass and restabilise.

Good things this week have been ..... listening to poems and plays on the radio. making an extremely tasty chocolate cake (a nigella recipe) , spending time with my daughters...writing poems...dreaming.

The television really makes me feel sick though. I don't care who wins the X Factor, and the jungle thing was very boring I thought. The only thing I quite like is Richard and Judy and playing You Say We Pay. I hate those Place In The Sun programmes. I am sure all those people who go and live in vineyards get too hot and homesick. I'm ranting. Tomorrow will be better.

Sleep and Drugs and Sudden Recoveries

I am getting on top of all my ailments, thanks to the hospice twiddling with my drugs. There are still some twiddles going on, as I am either too exciteable, or too sleepy, but my aching face is much improved, and my foot is all right. In fact I think I am nearly a normal person again, so thanks again everyone for the avalanche of soup recipes and good wishes that seem to keep me afloat!

Do you know they tried to rename the hospice....to call it The Marie Curie Centre? But they couldn't raise so much money, so it went back to being a hospice. I have been thinking up names , such as Centre For Balance, House of Love and Drugs, Palace of Improvement (now I am getting silly!). I doubt if anyone would donate money to a House of Love and Drugs. Anyway, I spent Tuesday there while they did the twiddling and it was very pleasant. The walls were pink, and there were the usual flower pictures on the walls, but what was I expecting...Jackson Pollock? The food wasn't as exciting as I was hoping. It was quite hospital shaped on plastic plates; roast parsnips, mashed potato, steamed pud. But I did realise that I didn't need respite. By the end of the day I was aching to go home, full of beans, pacing the quiet corridors.

I've got lots of stuff on the radio in early 2005. On Friday 21st January I've got a story being read by Gina Mckee (the one from Our Friends In the North) at 3.30 on Radio Four, and Appointments are being broadcast on Women's Hour in Jan/Feb. I will post up the date as soon as I get it. In early January I am going to Manchester to take part in the recording. I love radio work, and meeting actors, and being on the spot changing stuff. Can't wait. And I am staying at a posh hotel next to the BBC with huge baths and chandeliers, so that will be very appropriate.

New Years Eve 2004

mmmmmm......I have crept out of the country of Christmas and come to my room in the deserted university. Everything looks a bit dusty, waiting for instructions or something. It's all been very happy though. I was staying in the Somerset levels, a place where villages were once islands, called Isle Abbots and Brewers and where i assume people rowed to see each other. We stayed in a warm, low cottage with pink walls and old beams, and ate red cabbage and goose and lay about like a tribe of happy monkeys. I got Patti Smith's album The Tempest and Nina Simone, and a lovely zippy top, and bath stuff and interesting sweets and a beautiful home made cushion, and Bob Dylan's autobiography. I read Bernice Rubens Nine Lives over Christmas, which was a bit frightening, but very good. I slept in a large iron bed, got up late and went to bed quite early. hardly watched any telly.

My face continues to be a bit of a problem. It feels as if it's wrapped in an icy sheet, or that someone is poking small sharp pins into random parts of my cheek. It makes it hard to concentrate. Chewing is strange too. Also I keep on falling asleep. I think this is to do with fiddling with drugs. Sleep is so delicious though. I really love it. My insomnia days are quite gone. It's a cave I can always retreat to.

Today, on New Year's Eve, I am feeling quite tip top. This evening I shall wander around my street eating other people's old mince pies.

Truthfully, I am frightened of 2005. God knows what will happen. It's best not to think about it too much. I never thought I would get this far to be honest, though my legs still seem very beefy, and I have lots of things I am looking forward to this year. Poems are buzzing around my head like brightly coloured insects ! I am not going to make any resolutions. One day at a time, I reckon. Turn up the music!

I hope everyone out there is approaching 2005 with a sense of amazement. It's not even cold any more! Outside it's all light blue and pink. Have a good time tonight!

Fresh and Januaryish

Just had a lovely facial. I am feeling really well after some fantastic sleeps...the kind of sleeps that make you feel as if you are floating in a field of feathers. I have had some good negotiations with my face pain. I think this is how one must deal with symptoms...sit them down and talk to them, and work out what gets them going. I reckon I have been giving my face too much attention. It needs a hot water bottle and a stern attitude. It hasn't been half so bad recently.

Gradually normal life re-establishes itself...writers are drifting back into the English school where I work. Computers are humming, waste paper baskets are being emptied.

I have taken up knitting. It gives me enormous pleasure and I am sure it works as well as meditation. I am knitting scarves with holes in them for every member of my family!

This week I am going to Manchester to record 'Appointments.' I'll be taking the knitting and a range of bath stuffs so that I can have swift recuperating breaks. I'm reading Bob Dylan's autobiography....god, he was a bit of an old grump....not exactly a bundle of laughs. Yet, in Chronicles, there are some astounding passages of description and opinion. It's worth looking at just for that. I was thinking how the song lyrics that we listened to as teenagers are ground into the core of our hearts, much more than any poem. I can recite Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Patti Smith, Joan Armatrading. Songs are so important..we carry them with us throughout our lives.

My New Year was delightful. I danced up and down the street with the neighbours and hung out with glowing friends. I really enjoyed myself, drank alot of cava and ate large amounts of sweet cake.

But I like this January spartan feeling...I love clearing up the tinsel and baubles. I like the bare, hard look of things. I have bought a black jumper. Roll on 2005!!

I thought people got worse in January!

I am in a really good mood. My blood count is going up, and my face has stopped hurting, and the old woman who haunts my bones has gone on holiday. But the question is, why? What has happened in the last week to trigger such a marked improvement? Well, it could be that I have taken up knitting and that it has helped me to relax. I have spent several evenings knitting shapeless squares. Or it could be something else entirely. I wish I knew. It's a lovely feeling, this warm boned, light weight sensation. I am really bouncy. And I'm not even taking any drugs in particular.

Perhaps it was Manchester. I spent three days in a very odd hotel next to the BBC called the Palace. It's the colour of melancholy, old grey tiled and ragged carpets, creaking lifts, heavy chandeliers. The tune 'Ain't nobody's business if I do,' played constantly. My room was right next to the railway line, which I enjoyed. I love the sound of trains chunting past. I had a vast, wooden floored bathroom, with strange plants in tall vases standing on a small table. At nights I couldn't sleep at all as my face hurt, so I ambled around knitting in my nightdress, providing a surreal image for anyone passing on a late train.

During the day we recorded Appointments at the BBC. The producer Sue Roberts, is just fantastic. She makes everything and everyone work seamlessly. The actors all gave their best, and in two days the plays transferred from my muddled brain to radio. They are being broadcast on the week beginning 21st Feb. For lunch we all ate things like rice pudding and mashed potato in the BBC canteen, which serves a high proportion of comfort food. I expected to be exhausted after Manchester, but actually I felt rather rejuvenated.

Tomorrow I am meeting my consultant to discuss the new drug he wants to give me. I feel like saying 'Don't worry, I'm fine, ' but then I might not be tomorrow. I am writing a piece about waiting for Radio Three's The Verb. I know an awful lot about waiting, maybe too much. I shall take my knitting with me to the waiting room tomorrow anyway. Maybe knitting is the new chemo!

Faslodex, Knitting and Sweet Dreams

Today I am going to record the story for Saturday's The Verb on Radio Three. I'm doing it down the line from Newcastle, which is a shame because it's always nice to meet people face to face, but the journey is so long and impractical. The other guests are Tom Paulin and Tony Harrison, and I have a feeling that my piece about knitting will seem rather fluffy!

My health is still good, with fantastic deep velvetty sleeps, although the face ache comes back sometimes. I'm less interested in baths, because my bones have warmed up, and generally more energetic. On Friday, I start the new drug, Faslodex. I'm a bit nervous, as it means saying goodbye to my dear friend Tamoxifen. You have to believe and trust in drugs for them to work, I think, and Faslodex is a new aquaintance. Still, it will be great if it does work. They give you an injection once a month, so it's not too gruelling. Side effects are minimal too. It works hormonally, stopping cancer cells from being able to grow by sort of starving them. I love the thought of them gathering around feeding troughs to find nothing there. Ha Ha.

This January I am feeling very decisive. I am going to finish my Brazilian novel this year. I've been offered a retreat in an Umbrian Castle in early summer and I think it will be a really good opportunity to work on the book. It sems to have taken ages, but actually, I think I needed to distance myself from the trip to Brazil before I could write about it. Things have to grow in an imaginary way before you can make them into fiction and Brazil felt too real. Now it's a vague memory and I am free to make stuff up.

Here in Newcastle I am rather busy....running workshops and doing readings and cooking soups and knitting things. In the frosty garden all kinds of things are beginning to sprout. I am working on a first aid kit for the mind...a box of poems and images and spells and recipes, with the artist Emma Holliday. We're going to produce a limited number of boxes that people can use to get through crisis situations!

I'm just writing a critique of poems written in response to the Guardian Online Poetry workshop. I love them. They are all in the form of instructions. Do go to the site and read them if you get a chance.

My best bath stuff is Dr Hoeky something (in clear botles/ looks very clinical)...sage bath....written in german though as SAGE BAD. Costs a fortune, but smells amazing.

The Last Day of January 2005

Here I am again. Sorry I have been a bit quiet. I hope no one has been worried. It's entirely due to my latest obsession with knitting which has absorbed me for weeks. I have knitted three things now ( a baby's scarf, a teenager's scarf, and a shawl ) and although they are holey and incompetent I think my state of mind is much calmer. I have also spent much time in wool departments, smelling and touching lovely wools, and saying words like alpaca and fair isle. I want to make a strange blanket next. I think I might be more of an arty knitter than a crafty one. At least, I'm not very good with patterns. My attitude is very similar to my feelings about writing actually.

Last week I had my first injection of the new drug, faslodex) in my poor bottom! The nurse said the hypodermic was terrifying , and I got myself into a right lather worrying about it in advance, but it didn't hurt at all thanks to Emla cream. And now I am feeling much, much better, although that could be coincidence as it's very early days. I'm also having a course of hypnotherapy on the NHS that I am enjoying very much. I have never been very good at relaxing, but what with my affirmative tapes and knitting I feel like a sponge pudding of peace.

I'm getting very excited about The Manifesto For A new City that I have been working on with Northern Stage. This is opening at the end of March, and it's a night of songs and opinion about my city and how it has developed. It's a rant against property developers and capitalism really. Predictably, I want everyone to take up knitting and eat porridge and ride a bike. I want us to do more than consume coffees in expensive bars. But that doesn't mean I don't approve of the lovely Sage Building (did I tell you I have joined a choir), or the Baltic, or the elegant bridge. I just feel that my world has gone out of control when planning permission can be obtained to build a glass tower of luxury flats that blocks the council tenant's in the Byker Wall's view of the River Tyne. I know that I am not the only one who thinks this...there are lots of people opposing all kinds of things, but the manifesto is my own personal utopian rant. I shall put up dates on this site soon.

Last week I went to Cambridge for a Royal Literary Fund day, as I have become a mentor for an emerging novelist, and all mentors and mentees met for a day. I am proud to be a mentor, though I still don't really know how to write a novel myself. There is no easy formula. Still, I hope that I won't do any harm, and I always found that being allowed to talk about writing to a listener made me feel excited and positive, so I shall do my best. The main thing is I love my mentees work, and long for the next episode.

On the way back from Cambridge I got on a scuddy little train with the poet Gillian Allnut who is also a mentor, and guess what? The queen was on the train too! It was the most silly, unlikely thing. So we travelled with her Maj to Ely, when we got off. I mean she had her own carriage and police and everything. Fancy! What shall I do with this strange experience?

If you live in the North East, I am reading at the Blue Room in the Bridge Hotel this Sunday at 8.00 p.m. It's a good night, and there's some other brilliant writers on ...Paula Cunningham, Helen Burke, Tess Hudson, and musician Steve Jinski and his band. I shall probably read my new instructions poems, which are pouring out of me like volcanic lava!

I am about to read Small Island..the book that has won two prizes. I am nervous about starting it. It must be so very, very good!

Otherwise, I am listening to Nina Simone, growing narcissi on the mantelpiece, and trying to work out how to write, or type onto bandage type material as I want to make some 'poetry bandages.'

I hope you are all well out there! Didn't we manage January well? Ha Ha hypotherma and cold bones..you can't get me!

Saturday Night with my mum

We have just been listening to the cd of Appointments — the radio plays that are on next week. I really like the way they have been produced, and the Sue Roberts has done some great effects. The whole cast is doing things like playing football in the studio. I am playing receptionists and small parts. The end is really joyous too. Anyway, my mum likes them and that's the main thing. It's very different listening to something with the rest of the world..very jittery...like sitting in the audience when a stage play is on. I am doing a thing on Women's Hour on Thursday, talking to Jenni M about the plays.

I am ok. The good news is that my blood count is getting better and better all by itself. But my liver is a bit swollen that makes me feel very portly, like I have eaten too much pudding and my face is still driving me nuts. I wake up in the night and wander the house. Someimes I clean out cupboards. Custard powder and vanilla essence from the late nineties are the main hangers on. People tell me my face doesn't show, but it feels so weird, like a faulty circuit or something.

Knitting is going very well. I am feeling more ambitious. Damn it, I could knit myself a friend, or a house!

Otherwise, I am busy doing all kinds of things. On Sunday night I read at the packed Blue Room at the Bridge Hotel, along with some great new writers....I love the room. It's a pub built right up against the railway and the trains shunt by. I must have been born to the sound of shunting trains..it's a sound that makes me happy. On Wednesday I gave a talk in a village called Wylam to a group of elderly, intelllectual men. I don't know why I agree to do these things, but I genuinely enjoy them when I get there. We had a debate about line breaks in poetry, and some of the audience weren't keen on modern fashions in poems. One man told me he had written two hundred sonnets for one woman! Imagine that! They were courteous and sweet anyway. I have also been editing my plays for a book that will be published this year. This is really good news, as many plays don't see the light of day after a first production. Plays like Eating The Elephant, that I wrote after I was diagnosed with breast cancer, will be in it, as well as the Last Post, and most of my radio work.

The university has been busy too, and I want to run a course about using poetry as a cure if I can maintain the energy.

Happily, I have got a retreat coming up in Umbria, so I can concentrate on finishing the novel then. Sometimes it's hard to concentrate in this whirl, with an achey face and a puffy liver. I am going to the cinema now..to see Sideways. Back soon.

A few more thoughts

Take a look at Jane Eagland's poem The Knitted Woman on this site. I really like it. It's funny how knitting has connected me with a whole community of wool sellers, pattern studiers, women who know the vocabulary of needles. My mum even told me about a dying friend of hers whose last request was that she should be allowed to knit whilst gasping her last breath! When you trip into another world like this, you wonder what else there is going on out there. For instance, cake making, or pressing flowers, or painting eggs...who knows what goes on in these quiet creative worlds?

I am on Women's Hour on Thursday, talking to Jenni Murray. I am a bit nervous, but I do love the programme, and she is such an experienced interviewer that one is steered through any choppy waters. Also some of this blog is being published in The Times Weekend mag on Saturday. The editor has picked some interesting bits over the time I have been writing it, full of ups and downs, trips to Rio, symptoms, achievements and miseries.

Otherwise my face is still hurting. Doesn't anyone know what to do about neuralgic pain? The NHS says I have tried all the drugs available. Most of them send me to sleep. I am sure there is something out there. Hot wheat bags, acupuncture, neurofen, facials, hypnotherapy all help a bit, but nothing gets rid of it. If anyone knows of anything let me know. I have chased off many symptoms, but this one is stubborn and mysterious. But the fact that it comes and goes makes me believe I can shift it!

In A Dreamy Snow Storm

Yesterday I spent the day in bed writing, being a delicate writer. There is no shortage of ill writers..infact being bed ridden rather suits the writing profession. I listened to my radio play, but of course the phone kept ringing as it often does when you are trying to listen to the radio. Outside great fists of snow were falling and the room felt soundless and wrapped in bandages.

I was writing poems (spells and recipes) for my 'First Aid Kit for The Mind,' and pieces for A Manifesto For A New City, which starts rehearsals next week . I am also putting together a book of my plays and remembering the context in which they were written. They should be coming out in July. It's amazing how many versions there are of everything. It's all a terrible muddle! I feel as if I am tidying everything up. It's nice, and so is the snow.

Being interviewed by Jenni M was a bit daunting. I had been to the doctors earlier for my faslodex injection, then zipped up to the BBC to do the interview down the line. They were really slow getting me hooked in and the interview felt rather sudden. Also, Jenni never said hallo, or goodbye, so it was a bit like suddenly playing an intense game of tennis with a virtual stranger. All the other radio things I have done one talks to the presenter for a bit. Anyway, I got through it, but I had to go back to bed and get up again and start the day again.

I have had so many interesting, uplifting emails from people who either heard the interview, or who read the Times piece, ( I would call myself more of a hiding-under-the-blankets woman than a warrior woman! Still I thought the editor, Jane Wheatley, did a wonderful job selecting excerpts from this blog) or who are listening to the plays on Women's Hour. I have tried to reply to everyone, and I really hope I haven't missed anyone out. It's so encouraging to hear from other people with cancer, or poets, or people with ideas about writing and health. And thankyou for all the tips about face pain too. I am going to try a russian treatment called stennar. Not sure what it is yet..perhaps a contraption you lie in, like a space machine !

I had a very quiet weekend. Everyone else was away and I sloped around the house scribbling things in books and knitting (a blue and white blanket) and staring out of the window at our long steep garden. I feel like a bulb that is thinking about Spring. I am still reading Small Island. It's really good, but I don't long to return to it. I am not sure why. Dreamy days ! Thank god for porridge, yogurt, manuka honey, the radio, my ridiculously amusing cat.

New Symptoms, Tricky old February Days

February is going pear shaped. The good news is that the russian treatment..skennar (though I keep getting the word slightly wrong..is it stellar, or the chair lift word? Stannar?)) seems to work. It's early days, and I just had the one treatment, which is a bit like having a tv remote pressed onto various points in the body relating to chinese chi), but I had three face pain free nights which was lovely and miraculous. It's coming back a bit, but it would be wonderful if it worked long term after more treatments.

But the bad news is that my belly is swelling up and up, like one of Thomas Hardy's sheep, and I have to have it drained, and no one knows why it's doing it yet. When a new symptom manifests it is really scary. It's like a new cowboy riding into town, and you don't know the size of him, or if you are stronger than he is. You panic a bit, and think the worst. I have to find a way of naming him, of working out what he's doing here. I need to rally the opposition.

I have had so many symptoms, many of which have disappeared, but I always wonder if this is the mighty one who won't turn back. Tomorrow I have to go to the hospice to be drained. That sounds so serious, but really it's the time it takes up that I resent. I like it there now, much more than the hospital. They are very kind and you can literally get anything you like...they'll do anything for you!!

Meanwhile,the manifesto is in rehearsals. the actors are learning all the songs, and it is great hearing them sung out loud by a choir. Really joyous! Yesterday I was on my way to the hall where they are rehearsing and blow me, I tripped and ended up lying in the middle of the car park with my face in a puddle. All my things were scattered around me on the tarmac. No one was around. I wanted to wail and stamp, and of course I felt stupid and embarrassed. I got up and limped to the rehearsal and sat quietly nursing my gritty cheek, but felt very sorry for myself. Why is falling over so humiliating?

I had spent the weekend at a luxury spa, having holistic treatments and eating pudding in bed...the opposite of lying with ones head in a puddle. perhaps it has something to do with balance? You can't have pampering without a fall.

Anyway, I haven't got time to be drained, or to have most of the treatments that fill my week. I want to get on with my First Aid Kit for the Mind, with my novel ( I was thinking of knitting my novel) and with more poems. My body gets in the way of everything! You see how unbalanced I am!

Thanks so much for emails about the plays. I really appreciate them, and try to answer them all, but sometimes I fear that if I don't do it straight away they get lost in the inbox. I feel as if I am part of a huge creative community of knitters, poets and cancer survivors..a great sea of positive people!

Staying Still, Feeling Peculiar

I am fine as long as I don't move too fast. This has probably been true all my life but I just didn't realise it. I used to worry about lots of things that weren't important. My swelly belly dislikes jumps and turns. It doesn't like sitting up much. I am very lucky to have a job which involves a sofa and a community of very nice people. Imagine driving a crane in this condition! Don't worry Manchester, I am going to get there tomorrow...a crane would be useful actually. I am being put on a train at newcastle, then picked up in Manchester. I am really looking forward to going to the old library. Last time I went there I was late, and I burst into an adult education class (were they studying family trees?) yelling 'I'm here! I'm here!'

No, I can't claim that it's been a time of health and bounciness. I have had some lovely communications though. I just limped upstairs to the staff room in the university and found a delicious envelope with ruby sunflowers in it, and a painting.

The snow has been a bit overwhelming, but it's stopped now. All the daffs are closed, and mean looking, and I can't think of anything I feel like eating. I only like ice cream and yogurt. My face is much better since I started the Russian treatment, so that's great, and I sleep blissfully.

The Manifesto for A New City is in rehearsals as I write this. Eleven actors are singing their hearts out. The show tours Hexham, Newbury, Alnwick, The Customs House South Shields, The Arc Stockton, The Tron in Glasgow, and probably other places I have forgotten. I don't think I have ever had so large a cast since the days I wrote for youth theatre ! It's very exciting....and loud!! I am keen on loud singing. It clears out the dust. And stamping. I like stamping.

Otherwise, this weekend me and my family are going to Paris with little old easyjet. In my manifesto I ban easyjet! I shall probably spend most of my time lying on a different chaise longue.

I long to feel less swelly. Tomorrow I am seeing my consultant, but I doubt if he will have a magic cure up his sleeve. I need popping!

The First Aid Kit for the Mind is developing..I will let everyone know when we launch it. At the moment I am searching for things to make it smell nice...vanilla pods and cinammon. I am also sorting out poems for the cubicles of the local hospital. Also, the Bloodaxe Anthology is now orderable and looking beautiful....see Bloodaxe's catalogue on the web.

Love to all of you out there, may all our symptoms behave themselves and our nights be sweet as Manuka. Does everyone out there know about Quinoa....bloody marvellous stuff, keeps you regular!

This is turning into Nurse Julia's column. I shall aim to be more literary next time.

Sunday in the Hospice

I am in a perfectly pleasant small pink room with curtains with flowers on, pictures of tulips on the walls, a clock, a noticeboard, a hospital type bed and various hoists.

Through the windows there's a designer garden with several water features and sometimes little children run around over the little bridges. Whooping and jumping. It's really very pleasant. It's Marie Curie hospice. They tried to change the name to Marie Curie Centre but had to change it back because no one gave them any money.

Really they do anything they can for you. I've eaten most of the ice cream supply, had 2 jacquizi baths and set off all the alarms when wandering about at night looking for the Chapel of rest. There are plenty of cream cakes and jelly; the diet is homely rather than holistic. The truth is I feel pretty terrible and I look like a modern art painting with stick legs and a bowl belly. This is because my liver is distended and we are trying to work out how to drain off this fluid.

Both Manchester and Paris were lovely except I was sick in the Louvre. I am sick of being sick.

Everything seems to be falling apart a bit. I'd love to tell people to visit but I have the concentration of a goldfish. I am dictating this to Bev and the difficult thing is that really we don't know what's going to happen. I just want to be a pubescent girl riding on Tennison Downs in the Isle of Wight but then we don't know what will happen. You should have seen the Eiffel Tower at night it looked really pretty with its twinkling lights.

So don't try and visit as my vanity can't stand my appearance but do send healing vibes as they always seem to work.

I am surrounded by kind people who rub feet and plump up my pillows. I am terribly pleased that Gillian Allnut won the Northern Rock Writers Foundation Award and I thoroughly enjoyed the ceremony on Wednesday, with all looking so alive and poetry in the air.

I just want to feel like a normal person again but maybe it will never be! There are not many solutions left really as I don't want more chemo. x x.

Thought It Was The End, But Now I Am Not So Sure.

What a unbelievable week it's been! Cancer is a disease of mountains and ditches, and I suppose this has been a particularly deep ditch. The hospice sorted me out a bit. They fiddled with my drugs, decided that I was allergic to one, (which I had never liiked anyway). I was rather delirious...very worried about Shelley's death on Emmerdale. Infact I think it was my main subject of conversation. I hated the thought of falling into icy water! And of course I was concerned about the rehearsals for A Manifesto For A New City, which had been going really well. I have such a work ethic that I find it impossible not to feel bad about doing my job properly, but of course no one minded at Northern Stage, and everyone just stepped into place and took the load.

On Monday I came home, swollen and loopy, to my wide bed and with a great sense of relief I climbed back into my old personality, which felt baggy and ill fitting.. A large part of my family arrived..mothers , sisters, daughters, babies, and took up nursing positions in armour all over the house. Doctors, palliative friends,district nurses, brothers, other friends all visited. My support team womans the trenches. The verdict is this: the new drug...faslodex, which is the hormone one, isn't working, so I am returning to the goddess Tam ( Hallo Jo Shapcott, I should never have left the temple, please let me come back). Even if I wanted to ( and I don't) chemo is no longer an option. My consultant has passed me on to the palliatives. So the best option is that TAM stabilises the situation again, ( which it has done before in 2002) but my liver is worse, I'm a bit jaundiced, and I feel as if I am wearing a heavy iron belt when I walk, and my arms look like something left after a chicken dinner. Why is it that cancer makes one look so weird? I think it's philosophical thing...we have crossed the line of beauty and only people that love us can still see it. However, I do look much better today, a week after the crisis hit. Acupuncture has been miraculous. I am having it every two days, and it has got this tired old engine working. The health service is actually being very helpful, but generally people like me go downhill quite fast. But my body has this strange rallying spirit, and acupuncture triggers this into positive energy. I am not deluded, but I can feel my mind taking control of my body, and the blood moving through my veins. I am still hungry, thirsty. I love the flowers, cards and music people have sent. It has all got delightfully vivid. Last night I invented a dance to go with a song I wrote with the Tulips about Wheelie Bins. I even have plans for The Wheelie Bin Ballet!. It's very difficult for everyone aound me, as we are all in an up and down state of shock, but on the whole I am not depressed. I feel as if I am at an absolutely GRAND party and I don't want to go home. Dying is like dumping a world that one loves. I am not quite ready yet. I'm not sure how it will go, but I might not go down the expected route just now.

I want to launch the First Aid Kits For the Mind with Emma Holliday for one thing. I want to see the Manifesto Play..and I want to get to Umbria!!! I want to finish knitting this blue shawly thing. And see the plants grow up in the garden...And today I got copies of the wonderful Bloodaxe Anthology THE POETRY CURE (please order from Amazon or Bloodaxe) that I edited with Cynthia Fuller at the university.

I am afraid that visitors are difficult to fit in with such a large family. And talking gets too tiring. Letters are lovely of course. It's only tonight that I have been able to get to my email, so I am sure that lots of people think I am dead or dying. I shall keep you all posted. Thanks so much for all your thoughts, that are playing no small part in this feeling of recovery!!!

A List of Sustaining and Odd Occurances That Can Happen Whilst Bedridden!

I am still mostly in my bed at home, but things have quietened down as the family have gone back, and a kind of routine has fallen into place that involved baths and small lunches and active bits and slow bits. I stay up so late, mostly night dreaming, but not asleep, about things I want to tell others or writing stuff that needs to be put in order, and presents that I want to give people. But here's some of the weird and peculiar and nice stuff that has happened.

Earlier in the week I was given the catalogue from the self portrait exhibition at the British Portrait Gallery. In this hub bub of ointments and pills, friends, tears and cranberry ice drinks, this book has given me immense pleasure. How we see ourselves is endlessly interesting and the text is fascinating, telling us about the artist's lives. Just looking at the portraits, you catch this feeling about the intensity of life..and most of them are dead now, but there they are, caught in time, staring back at me. In the First Aid Kit for the Mind that I am making with Emma there is a small pad and pencil stub, and a poem about how to draw one's portrait. Everyone should try and make one at some point I think.

The wooden lady, one of those bendy artist's model, that stands at the bottom of my bed moves when I am asleep. Her pose in the morning gives me a clue about the nature of the day. This morning she looked as if she was setting out on an sea of ice. I haven't moved her, but something has. There is, I think, a spirit in my room.

I don't like soppy cat stories much, but my cat Tigzi has been an incredible companion, kissing me often, hurling my earrings around the room, sniffing and chewing the beautiful flowers that arrive, never wanting much but displaying a range of theatrical behaviour I have never seen before. What is he trying to tell me? He is certainly not sorry for me at all.

Ice, and its many mutations. Someone has lent me their silver ice crusher. It looks like a 1920's cupboard and makes a sound like a concrete mixer. Drinks have become piles of glistening pink, yellow, and orange icy water.

God, the music! Why don't we all just give up TV and sit listening to music all night. This week I have delighted in John Martin's Solid Air (ice?). The voice solo from The Dark Side Of The Moon, Van Morrison's Ladbroke Grove, Gillian Welch singing about Elvis Presley, The Crystal Ship by the Doors. So much stuff that can take me anywhere that I want to go. Why didn't I go there before?

From Sean O Brien and Gerry Wardle, sachet's of Mauritian Vanilla tea which allowed me to remember the long warm beach of Flic en Flac we sat on this year. That tea is for me the essence of Mauritius (we were all there together doing workshops). Then as I raise the cup to my lips, the organiser (Jaysing) of the trip, who I haven't spoken to since the Summer, rings up.

I am definitely more stable,(physically, maybe not mentally) but the question is, where will my stability land, and how well will I be? Well enough to see my new play? Well enough to fly to Italy? To finish my novel? To become a figure skater? Or just well enough to have a good death, like a good birth.

Julia in Bed Dictating To Bev

It's ten past 7 in the morning and I have just finished my cornflakes and milk which has turned out to be my favourite food after all these years. The Po sisters are playing. In the last week I have discovered so much new music through compilations people have sent over. Sharon Bailey brought me the 2004 world music concert which I was sorry I missed. A neighbour brought round Rufus Wainwright, and I have been listening to the golden oldies like John Martyn and Dark Side of the Moon. The walls are covered with drawings and portraits that people have done or I've painted. Sharon has also been sorting out the cover of the new book Eating the Elephant and other Plays which we both like very much. Claire Malcolm at New Writing North is sorting it all out it's ever so complicated like all books especially books of plays, it's all that proofing and stuff. It's been like an office in here looking at fonts and post card designs for the 'First aid kit for the mind' with Emma Holliday and Smart. The first aid kit will be launched mid April (very soon), hopefully you will all find out where.

Last Thursday though I hoiked myself out of bed and went with Bev, Karin Young and Jackie Kay to see the dress rehearsal for the Manifesto for a New City at Hexham. Although I say it myself I really loved it. Jim Kitson's acapella arrangements are blissful and I liked what it was saying as well. It went down very well with the audience on two subsequent nights. It's sad that it's not on in Newcastle, though it is showing at the Customs House and Alnwick and later at the Tron in Glasgow. Usually when my plays are on I lie on the floor and feel like icy daggers are plunging in my heart so I must have done something right. It owes a lot to Duska Heaney and Alan Lyddiard but especially Jim Kitson.

I don't think I am going to be up out of my bed again, that's a funny idea. The last two weeks I've been surrounded by love and I've had everything I could possibly need but it's really nearly time to say goodbye and I'm not afraid of death just very sad about the people I leave behind. I'm not in pain which is as they say ' a blessing'. I get a bit sick of nurses peering at me. There are several things I would really like to have gone to but I don't think it's going to happen. So can I send my thanks and best thoughts to everyone out there because it's really a very incredible world. You end up talking in cliches at this point so I'll stop before I go really doo lally.

Friday Night 8.15 staying alive

My body is just incredibly shocking. I can't believe it can look and feel so different so quickly and in such a short time. Both legs are very thin like twigs with podgy ankles and swollen toes. My tummy is like a children's toy or a Dickensian gentleman's pot belly. My upper body has thin chickeny arms and sticky out bones, and I am completely yellow, especially my eyes which are a livid ochre yellow. I could frighten children - and I like children. My little niece Ester and her sister Naomi came to see me today bringing drawings and books of activities to do when I was bored. I imagined what it must have been like to see this scene from a child's view from the ages of 5 and 8. It could be quite traumatic and a strange thing that one finds oneself writing about in a writing class years ahead. Then the nurses arrived and gave them lots of attention which would add to the general strangeness of the incident.

So what's the prognosis? I really really really want to get to the launch of the First aid kit for the mind at the Biscuit Factory next Thursday the 14th. I am using that as a focus to take me forward. Of course no one can tell me, or ever could how near my death is, but surely a body like this doesn't belong on the earth. We've bought champagne for the box launch and goodies and Emma and Smart have done so much to make postcards and posters. So if you are praying for me pray for me to have next Thursday - rather shallow though that may sound.

So much can happen when you lie in bed doing nothing. Although we've cut down on visitors I still really want to see people, but like in glimpses just to tell them how much they meant to me, for them this is like a boring santa's grotto with no presents (or they bring the presents). So don't all rush round. I must say every card I have received has been different. There's been no replicas, which I think is an amazing thing and I appreciate people searching through card racks, getting out the crayons, making home made books, and really eccentric funny presents that have made me laugh, and of course the music which I sometimes listen to all day and night as I drift through half dream conversations that I'm often not sure if I've had or not.

I hate cancer. It's taken me away from such life. Tonight I'd like to strangle it the way that it is doing to me but I must look at the dark horizon of chimneys out of the window and imagine what is beyond. But count your blessings - a. No pain unless I try and dance the hokey cokey. b. fantastic cusine cooked by my mother. c. No family arguments. d. No fear. e. Cornflakes and milk. f. Trina's ice cream. g. my new NHS bath seat and squashy mattress. h. You only have to do death once.

I know everyone worries and may have trouble finding out about what's happening and there are times when it is just really hard to talk on the phone or be bothered to check email but I am still here.

Sleepy and tired

I am writing on behalf of Julia again, not being dictated to this time so you will have to bear with my lack of creative pizzaz that you are used to on Julia's web log.

It's really just to let people know that Julia won't be able to attend the launch of the boxes on Thursday night as she had hoped. She said to say that she is very sleepy and tired now but hopes that you all go along and have a great time. We received the first box hot of the production line tonight, and it not only looks fantastic but is packed with little treasures and ideas, along with postcards of Julia's poems and Emma's paintings.

Thanks to everyone who's being praying (including all the atheists) and for all your emails and cards.

End

Julia died yesterday afternoon at about 4.30pm. As a final word from Julia we all felt that this poem from her book Sudden Collapses in Public Places summed up the scene. Although there hadn't been rain just a bright blue sky and spring breeze tripping down the Vale.

End

Eventually, I was placed on a bed like a boat
in an empty room with sky filled windows,
with azure blue pillows, the leopard-like quilt.

It was English tea time, with the kind of light
that electrifies the ordinary. It had just stopped raining.
Beads of water on glass glittered like secrets.

In another room they were baking, mulling wine.
I was warm with cloves, melting butter, demerara,
and wearing your pyjamas. My felt slippers

waited on the floor. Then the door opened
soundlessly, and I climbed out of bed.
It was like slipping onto the back of a horse,

and the room folded in, like a pop up story
then the house, and the Vale. Even the songs
and prayers tidied themselves into grooves

and the impossible hospital lay down its chimneys
its sluices, tired doctors, and waiting room chairs.
And I came here. It was easy to leave.

Julia Darlingin Person

From cover to cover

Saturday 7th September