Friday morning.

More blooming snow last night – already turning to slush, but lying on top of the remains of the previous lot of snow, which is now semi-freddo slush, so at every step you don’t know whether you will come down on firm pavement or on slimey sludgey skiddy stuff. I’ve moved up to using my hiking boots, which is as far along the scale of solidity and grip as I can go, and I am still worried by coming down the slope of Connaught Road.

Last night I was revising some writing, and then watching “The Victorian Farm” on BBC2. For anyone who hasn’t yet caught this lovely series, do! For anyone not in the UK, watch out for it in case a channel in your country buys it in from the Beeb. It’s fascinating.

There have been previous tele programmes based on the same idea of recreating historical living conditions. I remember “The 1940s House”, which was one of the first, here in Britain at least, as fascinating, though my mother was constantly fretting that you couldn’t really recreate the 1940s without the air raids… Some of them have skidded perilously close to the Big Brother model, offering schadenfreude with vaguely educational overtones, and I have shied away in horror the moment I detected this. I gave up on the series a year or two back that was set on a reconstructed Jacobean farm after half an episode because it seemed to be primarily an exercise in watching other folks get cold and wet and miserable. But I gave this new series a try, and was hooked, instantly. I’m rather regretting not having stuck with the Jacobean version, now, because that was presented by the same people.

I think part of the charm is the fact that I can relate so clearly to what they are doing. A lot of my nineteenth century forebears on my mother’s side were farmers and farm labourers; I’ve seen pictures of them and have visited the places where they lived (Eyke in Suffolk, Highworth in Wiltshire) and I can imagine them using this equipment, experiencing these changes and innovations, and so forth. A lot of the skills that are shown have been passed down in my family, particularly those classified as “women’s work”. Alan is always saying I’m the last Victorian, and this feels like proof!

The three historians living on the farm are a nice bunch, intelligent and articulate and willing to muck in – quite literally a lot of the time – and not whinging, even when confronted by the bizarre or the maggot-ridden, or by simple bloody hard work. I’d like to meet them; they seem like people one would enjoy being friends with, and I do rather envy them the experience, bloody hard work and all.

Alright, okay, I’ll confess - there is one further reason to watch. One of the presenters, a dark-eyed fellow by the name of Peter Ginn, is one of the most attractive men on television at present; he could brew me a ginger beer any day… In the most recent episode he just happened to take off his hat for the first time, revealing a mass of tumbling black Byronic curls and completing my downfall. I am now officially a fan. >sigh<>

I think they were filming last summer. It pours with rain a lot of the time and most of the last episode was about the failure of the hay harvest; in fact the fact that PG has only just taken his hat off, in midsummer, is indicative too, now I think of it. Please, you weather gods, send us a decent summer this year!

Out into the dark, over the snow...

... but luckily there are no fallow fawns in the Gardens.

Just quickly to say I'm back in London after getting stranded at my mother's down in Kent by the weather for the last two days. My journey back from Canterbury to Ealing yesterday afternoon took over 5 hours instead of the more normal 2 1/2... And we're having power cuts at work. At the risk of sounding like a tabloid newspaper reader, what is it about this country and snow?!

Everyone I met as I made my stately onward way was friendly and in many cases astoundingly patient, pretty much without exceptions, despite total chaos and a breakdown in communications across the rail network that made Kew look efficient and communicative. The modern mythology of the Dunkirk Spirit stands us all in good stead, I think, in times like these. We stood our ground, we hung on there, we weren't defeated; just cold, tired, confused and hassled.

Going home to the laziest supper I can make, a stiff drink and a bar of chocolate.

Poetry, anyone?

Just a quick note to say - if you are that way inclined - Richmond Magazine is running a poetry competition on the theme "A Poem for Kew". So if you write poetry, or are inspired to by the idea of winning a joint Premier Friends membership of Kew for a year, have a look:
http://content.yudu.com/Library/Azu9u/RichmondJan09/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F27768%2FRichmond-Jan-09
Details are on page 9.

Would anyone be interested in contributing to a poetry-sharing team blog, by the way?

I just ate my lunch: Jansson’s Frestelse (the spelling of which I’m sure is wrong!). Fish, potatoes, onions, garlic, black pepper and cream. The easiest fish pie in the world, and in my opinion the best. Followed by a Delicje malinowe, which is a Polish raspberry jaffa cake. Cor, yum. This is a fairly unhealthy lunch, of course, but I’ve got a cup of green tea and a pile of clementines to finish off with, which will tip the balance back a little towards antioxidants and vitamins and so forth.

Going home tonight to make a cauliflower and parsnip gratin. Yes, making and enjoying good food is definitely one of the aspects of creativity, albeit one which is seldom cited as such. As I’ll have the oven on I may bake biscuits as well…

More and more I feel in sympathy with Rebecca West’s definition of creativity as being a continuum, running from someone baking a good cake at one end to the work of Mozart at the other. Gardening is in there, as well as cookery, and so are all the activities derided by the Fine Art world as “crafts” – knitting and patchwork quilting, making greetings cards (I have a nice range of hand-made valentines, if anyone is interested), making jewellery, clothes-making, pottery and clay-modelling… the list is, to coin a phrase, endless. While personally I think “Clay artist” is an unutterably silly piece of newspeak, and “Craftsman potter” sounds noble and authentic, and altogether rather good, I do heartily dislike the implied minor status generally accepted as implicit in the terms “craft” and “craftsman”.

Especially let no-one who wants to be taken seriously as a fine artist permit themself ever to be called a “good craftsman”. To actually be good at the basic skill of one’s art form is the kiss of death, relegating one (in some people’s eyes at least) irrevocably to the ranks of the amateur. How nonsensical that is…

These raspberry jaffa cakes are the tops, by the way. Good old Gudi Food Stores. I love Ealing.

Tell me a story...

It’s Tuesday afternoon and the ‘phones have gone quiet. Conversation has turned to odd topics (kinky-sounding abbreviated names, intra-species breastfeeding…). I’m looking at a picture of a very strange object which someone has sent in – a sort of hollow terracotta tube with a dish-shaped foot – and wondering who at Kew would know what the flipping heck it is. Various theories were voiced as the picture was passed round the office, varying from the possible through the facetious to the downright rude, but so far it remains a mystery. We’ll see what Stewart Henchie makes of it.

Got some more writing done last night. There’s nothing quite like getting on with it to kick-start the solving of what have earlier appeared really knotty problems. After being beaten at University Challenge (admittedly by Corpus Christi, who I think are going to win overall, with something like 350 to my puny 235) I needed some light relief. Writing and playing “Renaissance of the Celtic Harp” repeatedly did the job perfectly. I think I’ve got to the end of chapter two. Whoo-hoo!

I’m very happy to be finding as I write that the whole thing is taking shape in ways I hadn’t envisaged. This is a story I conceived years ago, as a fairly straightforward space-opera, when I was a “Star Trek”~ and “Star Wars”-mad teenager. It had sat quiet in the back of my mind ever since, much as “Gabriel Yeats” did, simply because I liked the principal characters and felt they interacted well. Frankly, I thought the story was the weakest part, but now I’m actually having a go at it I’m pleasantly surprised to find that there is more to it than I’d originally thought. That sounds terribly self-aggrandising – embarrassingly so. At bottom this is still a western set in outer space, a pretty standardised genre which I make no pretension of revitalising. Far better writers than I will ever be already have that task in hand, anyway…

I’m just happy that when I lifted this particular pot from back-burner to main-burner, it turned out to have a bit more thematic substance than I’d expected. Why is the “alien” alien? – and why do we develop, and hold to, the loyalties we do, and let others go?

There’s a large back-burner in my mind where this story was sitting, and others still sit today; the oldest dates from my teens, the most recent from last autumn. They need to sit on a very low hob and brew for a while, like decoctions.

Back in the late summer of 2005, when I was trying to get my new life in London and my new job at Kew back on track after the chaos and unhappiness of my father’s death, I began working through some of the exercises in a self-help book called “The Artist’s Way” that I had bought shortly before he was diagnosed, and had never had time to start reading. The author, Julia Cameron, has written a lot of this sort of thing; I’ve read several of her books. At times she’s a little too breezily Californian for my tastes, and I feel myself getting all British and stiffened in the upper lip in response; and at times her huge self-confidence astounds (and slightly repels) me. But she’s very good on tips and tricks and ways to keep your creative juices flowing. I remember a cold, damp autumnal day when I was on duty at Lion Gate all day (boringboringboring) when I was reading this book and decided to do one of the exercises; it was like opening the back door and suddenly seeing that far from living in an inner city I had the South Downs out there. That was the exercise that got me writing again, after what was by then ten years of solid, dedicated focus on my visual art work. I had forgotten I’d ever had any other creative dreams; in fact in reading the book I was hoping to kick-start myself into some painting after a fallow period.

This was the exercise I did that day. IT WORKS; so if you don’t want to uncover your lost creative dreams, look away now.

Imagine you are a filmmaker, and you have been asked to make a film and given a generous budget, with no strings attached, by an independent film production company. Their only stipulation is that you make work that really matters to you. What film do you make?

Don’t think about it too much, just make notes. If you find yourself thinking about more than one project, make notes on all of them. If you know who you want to cast, note that down, too, together with why you want those particular actors (& don’t worry, “because he/she is hot” is a perfectly adequate answer to that question!). If you know why this or that project matters to you, write that down too. When you’ve made all the notes you can, then and only then do you start to look at them dispassionately and try to analyse what you’ve come up with. What have you written, and why? Why is this the film you want to make? – why is this what really matters to you?

It’s weird; it disarms all those inner restraints that kick in going “you can’t, it won’t happen, that’s just a silly daydream” and so forth. After all, it’s just a game, isn’t it? – you know you aren’t going to make a film. It’s like saying “What would you do if you had eighty million pounds?” Because the exercise is fantasy it frees you to think about things that otherwise you might have buried under a thick layer of muffling insulation. Mind you, if you want to make films in the first place it may work slightly differently…

In my case, I didn’t hesitate for even a second; I instantly began listing stories I wanted to tell. They varied enormously in subject matter. The one obvious connecting factor was that these stories mattered to me; not their content or their meaning or their message, or any idea of their supposed literary merit, just them as stories. All of them were stories I’d “always meant to get around to writing”. I sat and looked at my three pages of notes and thought “So why aren’t I writing them, then?” And the next day, I began to write “Gabriel Yeats”.

Very sincere and heartfelt thanks, then, to Julia Cameron, for that one. For more of the same, see “The Artist’s Way”.
http://www.theartistsway.com/
It's worth the look...

End of the week already...

It's Friday again. Good grief.

Last night I did no writing. I ate pizza. I drank rum and apple juice. I watched tv. In short, instead of feeding my soul and unleashing my creativity I took time out to do s*d all. Is this the same as procrastination? I don't think so - but then, I wouldn't, would I?. Seriously, there is, I am sure, a big difference between taking a break and never doing anything in the first place. One has to let the cistern refill, if you'll pardon the metaphor (note to self: must see if I can think of a more poetic phrase than that).

It's a sticky issue - on the one hand, one must make that total, Calaf-like comittment, but on the other hand one must stay alive, and although "man does not live by bread alone", man does not live by paint alone, either; nor by words, nor by sitting in the lab staring into the electron microscope until one's eyes bug out... (Please don't shriek at me for putting "man"; I'm just continuing the phraseology of the quotation for tidyness' sake. I have noticed I'm not a man [even if some men haven't!]).

There's a wonderful line in one of Ursula Le Guin's essays; I don't think I can remember the exact wording, but it is something like this.

"Apollo, god of the sun, of light, reason, music and the arts, blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't stare at the sun. Go into a dark bar with Dionysos occasionally."

The ancient Greeks understood this; they wouldn't have had a god of reason, light, music and the arts and a god of excess, of letting your hair down, festive release and drink, and the theatre, if they hadn't seen that these are not opposed but complementary forces. One cannot have order without chaos, or light without darkness. Or work without rest. Complexity is all; only connect.

On a totally different note, here's a funny news item;
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090123/ten-italian-job-cliffhanger-conundrum-so-a56114e.html

Have a good weekend.

Thursday lunchtime

At the risk of sounding like a monomaniac (as if!), I want to report that last night was interesting.

Firstly, on the music-while-you-work strand, I tried “Pelléas et Mélisande”; hopeless. It’s one of my favourite operas, with its limpid, pellucid colours and heartbreaking story, and always moves me deeply, even in the deeply weird and visually stifling production at the ROH a while back. But as music to work to it was useless. I could type, or I could listen, but there was no combining the two, and no drawing inspiration from the one to feed the other. “Pelléas” simply had to take my world over. So I turned it off, and played “The Cunning Little Vixen” instead. I cry buckets at “The Cunning Little Vixen”, at the theatre. Sitting in my own little room, I could relegate it to background music without a flicker, and wrote happily for the duration.

Which would seem to support the “language” theory; I can put to the background what I cannot understand verbally. But I still think there’s more to it than that. The fact that I can’t sublimate “Zauberflöte” is one clue. Another is the fact that I wasn’t really not listening to the Janacek (sorry about the erratic appearance of diacritical marks; I’m having trouble finding the ones I need here). It was feeding me. I wrote on the swell and depth of the music; not simply cut off from background noise by something more pleasant, but uplifted and inspired by it. “Pelléas”, although hardly insistent musically, insisted upon dominance; what happened between me and the “Vixen” was more of a fusing of equal spirits (hah! - and you don’t get to write that every day!!).

On the which distinctly kinky-sounding stuff, I’ll go on to “secondly”!

Secondly, the playing-out-the-scene-before-you-write-it thing worked really well. Really well.

I’d always had the idea that this particular scene would follow a fairly talk-y line. The fact that two of the protagonists are speaking mutually-incomprehensible languages was a snagging point, and I had decided that “playing it out” with that element omitted (so that I would not have to keep stepping out of my role-play to remind myself of my invented alien grammar!) would help me to get it straight. It did; I realised it wasn’t working. The problem was partly too much talk, partly, I suddenly felt, that one of my characters simply wouldn’t behave this way.

I sat down, re-wrote the whole thing, and am happy.

I’ve read other writers, discussing their own work, talking about the way that the characters take on a life of their own and “don’t want to do” what they, the author, have planned for them. It sounds deeply suspect, until one has the same experience oneself. It really is a most peculiar feeling. In this case, it has almost opened out a whole new aspect of the character; how she responds in stressful situations, and how that links into her background culture and her system of loyalties, her general way of dealing with things… I had never thought about this before; I should have done, but I hadn't; and now I have. I'm sure the best thing would be to be an accomplished enough writer to think of all these things straight away, when first conceiving a story. But as it is, the fact that I have thought of this at this stage cheers me enormously. It means my heroine is coming alive, as it were, on schedule.

Maybe, on second thoughts, it would not be good to have everything totally sorted-out ahead of time. Would these people come alive at all, if they were that thoroughly controlled?

So anyway - I am feeling pretty pleased with life just at the moment.