(full blog includes a gory pic of my wound!)

(okay, it's not that gory)

I haven’t written much for a few days due to a slight mishap at the beginning of the week.

We were making fruit salads at school. But as knives are dangerous, a responsible adult was needed to prepare the fruit into sizeable chunks...

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In A New Use for An Old Christmas Tree I was thinking of how I'd explain, to someone who doesn't understand, how I can be celebrating that the work-in-progress is finished, when it isn't finished. And the more I thought about the image of having built a house, the more I found that the 'snag-list' metaphor fits beautifully.

I have two friends who routinely use the phrase: one is an architect, and as I said before, I realise that what I've done is build the house. It exists, standing four-square on the ground, with walls and roof, foundations and floors, doors and windows. What I haven't done yet is sort out the socket which doesn't work, the light which needs moving and the draughty bit in the corner of the drawing room. In doing so, I'll probably discover that one of the carpets is the wrong colour, and I know the paint in a couple of the bedrooms needs another coat. I do hope I haven't put the kitchen on the wrong side of the house, but if I realise I have, I'll just have to get out the lump hammer and the wrecking bar, and do some rebuilding. And after that, it'll need a builder's clean: scrubbing windows and washing down skirtings so that everything sparkles, except for the nicely distressed ironwork which I got from an architectural salvage yard. And then I'll put it on the market.

This is, if you like, what our readers want to buy: a whole, small world. I suspect that it's why it's so incredibly difficult to get short stories published as a collection. On the whole, readers - maybe wrongly - feel that reading a short story is like being given a table in a delightful restaurant for an evening; a novel is like moving into someone's house for a week.

The other friend who knows all about snagging is a TV drama set designer, and that's a different kind of creating for a different kind of purpose.

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I’m in a relationship.

It’s very new indeed – only a matter of months - though we spent about a year eyeing one another and plucking up the courage to approach. There was a lot of faffing about, of blowing hot and cold, of agreeing to meet and then standing one another up. Nothing new there, then.

Now, two months in, we spend time together almost every day. I feel more and more attached – and more afraid. I find myself wondering if this can possibly be The One?

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Watching the BBC's 'Survivors' last night brought tears to my eyes. Not because it's an especially brilliant drama; but because of the eerie timing. The dispossessed, teaming up to free victims of a collapsed building; the injured, buried alive under rubble. It was painful to realise that the very same scenes I was watching on screen, the terror, despair and grief, were being played out almost identically, for real, at the very same moment in Haiti.

Inevitably, I felt guilt - what kind of heartless voyeur was I to find entertainment in a catastrophe at the very same time it was being mirrored in reality? - and it caused me to think about the role of fiction and drama in mediating reality. Fiction provides a safe place in which to experience the horrors and the joys of human existence, the extreme emotions and unlikely behaviours that we may never encounter in our own humdrum lives.

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Perhaps it was the Champagne or perhaps because my friend had introduced me as a psychologist, but she started to tell me stuff. How her boyfriend, who she had been with for about a year suddenly left her. That was more than six months ago. How he’d got involved in some quasi-political or educational group, attending their courses more and more frequently. How upset she had been that this organisation swayed him. How she was just starting to get over the guy. She questioned the psychology of someone who could just do that – just up and leave her and leave London at no notice. I was intrigued: there was a story in there and it was mine, mine, mine.


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These legs were made for walking, and that’s just what they did. I walked into Alexandria yesterday, and this photograph is the proof that I was on a pavement. It wasn’t so bad, and only took about ten minutes. Of course you know that my first stop was a café, where I rested with my £1.40 latte and mused at the audacity of this extreme exercise. Then I took out the lovely iPod Touch and had a read of The Circular Staircase.

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Apologies for the poor sound and video quality, but I just had to record this anyway I could. I sort of had one hand tied behind my back – well, not behind my back, pinned down to the desk. You’ll see what I mean when you watch it:

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We usually recognise a poem by the effect it has on us: a good poem hits us “beneath the radar” before we have time to erect our usual defences. A good poem will tell the unvarnised truth about the things that matter: life, death, relationships, joy, pain, desire… And when you read it, you recognise that truth and say to yourself: Yes. That is how it is.

Robert Frost recognised this when he said “The way in is the way out.” What he meant was that the poet’s task is to convey, in words, his or her emotional state, so that the reader can experience the same feeling. In this sense, a poem is, in the words of W H Auden, a “contraption” – a little device which encapsulates a state.

Another way of putting this is to say that a poem is the successful communication of a moment of awareness. Which is interesting, because if the awareness is not present in the first place – if the poet is not prepared to (in the words of Oprah) “get real” and be emotionally direct, no poem can result. If the feelings are artificial or manufactured, the result will not work.



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A belt snapped and off went my Clio to the scrap-yard, to be ripped apart. What health bounds before me on these legs? Shall I walk everywhere or wait for buses? I could stride towards the train; a half-way trip of exercise and relaxation – more reading!

The life of a passenger might not be quite so bad. There, I’ve talked myself into it, a quiet happiness and more money…but then I’d be able to pay my debts so actually less money to me, but a more settled life and future.

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