I’d reduced it all down, simplified it. Two outfits: nondescript. Two kinds of food: bread and rice. I kept the shutters closed. I left the house only at night. I hoped no one would notice my disappearance, my decision to live in a small way.

I maintained a lively interest in the things inside these four walls. I stared at the television and sometimes I slept on the red rug in front of it. I stared at the radio too and enjoyed a steady internal conversation with everything I heard. I read one bad book and one good book every three days.

When I went out in the dark I wondered why I hadn’t taken this decision years ago. I admired Virginia creeper shimmering in sodium light and walked mostly looking upwards: at the moon, the fleeing clouds, the sheen of slate roofs clamping down on other small lives.

It was three weeks. I stopped opening letters; a pretty, quaking, pile of bills collected in the hall. I smirked at them while striding about in one of my shirt-and-trouser uniforms. It was fantastic – exhilarating, even – to be free of all the shit. Still, I diverted my phone to voicemail, what if someone died?

I was pushing rice about on my plate: Day 23. You called. The phone glowed startlingly on the long, clean expanse of table. I listened to the message sent from your linty right-hand pocket. The clock ticking: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. You ruined my small life.

The things I did

The first thing I did was bring him cheese, two kinds: Emmental and Mature. I took off all my rings, my watch and bangle, I tied my hair back, I cleaned his fridge.

I cleaned his fridge with a toothbrush and bicarbonate. There were little mounds of snow but I took away the creviced grey, the crumbs of yellow yolk.

The second thing I did was bring him song, three kinds: for lying down to, for standing up to, for dancing to.
I put them on a disc and on a key. I brought sleevenotes in full colour.

In full colour, I wore the dress of azure swallows, the sapphire stones, stockings with trellised flowers. I stood in a flattering light.

The third thing I did was bring him words, four kinds: long, short, sharp, pitiful. I rolled the wheelbarrow to his door. I piled the words in neat stacks, they blocked his letterbox, some fell through.

Some fell through, put out their inky feelers and scuttled down the hall. Floccinaucinihilipilification, wow, screw, supplicant.

The fourth thing I did was stop bringing: I paused.

I paused with the points of a large silver box prodding my arms, blocking my view.

The fifth thing I did was bring him ears, five kinds: dog, cat, elephant, my left, my right. The specimens were hoary, wrinkled, mummified. Mine were scented.

Mine were scented, with cilia reaching for his breath. “This is what I want,” he said.

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Girl Uninterrupted

I saw you today, I had to look three times, and hard,

At the way you were fearlessly moving forward,

Tongue in cheek,

Toward a future noisy with motes and speckles,

They’re violently present, a rash of them.

 

You must pedal through those light shafts too,

They’ve got the contrary speed and slice of lightning bolts.

One wants to cauterise your lips,

Another, to catch your wheels, upend you.

They are all the things you can’t imagine yet circa 1890-1910,

A gunship on the Liffey, a mistake in Sarajevo,

The Emergency,

Motherhood?

 

You’re looking beyond them though,

You’ve fixed your eye on something that pulls you forward,

Your bib billowing, your hair shearing back,

The white silk of your thigh, bare above your stocking top, unmolested by modesty,

You won’t be stopped.

 

This is how a girl can be:

Singular, free, hungry, unafraid.

I haven’t written poetry in a long time and don’t make any claims as a poet but I saw ‘Young girl riding a tricycle along a seafront’ (circa 1890-1910) by JJ Clarke at the National Photographic Archive’s ‘Small Lives’ exhibition and couldn’t respond to it in any other form. I did look at the photograph three times, it clamoured for attention amongst the many other fine and moving photographs depicting Irish childhood 1880-1970. The exhibition continues at the Archive on Meeting House Square until June.

You can view JJ Clarke’s 76 photographs here at the National Library’s digital archive and a larger version of ‘Young girl riding a tricycle’ here

It is evening on a summer’s day but cold and grey, more like February. I’ve been walking the stone fields above the cliffs for hours. Below, past the crocheted terraces of stone wall, I see the village, the curve of harbour, a trawler heading for landfall from the murk. I am almost deafened by the wind. It whips in my ears, its sound is billowing flags. A fleck of spume catches on my lip, I snare it with my tongue: salt.

I’m afraid to stand on the edge and look down. I drop to my knees and crawl forward. I am utterly alone. I see it in a series of ever widening aerial shots: me on my belly on the flat rock; me a dark curlicue in a grey field; me a shadow on a cliff-edge in a stone world. The camera bag vibrates, my coat sleeves fill and lift, my hair is a cat-o-nine-tails. I think I might be taken – by the height, by the wind – down into the medieval plague cathedral of scorched rock.

It won’t last. The wind forces the thought between my lips, an invitation to chew or choke. I swallow the stone cold fact of it. The scarf he gave me, tongues of flame in orange chiffon, licks the updraft.

They say the young men here won’t learn to make these walls anymore, so I take photographs to catch the way light filigrees through the limestone mosaic. At the fort that tips the promontory I lean myself in – kissing distance – and bring the lens up close to catch the warp and weft of overlapping slab.

I walk up and down the fields of stone. I stick to the grassy channels that run between the rocks. I am looking for the path back but the ways are labyrinthine. That thorn tree, didn’t I pass it before? An old ankle injury twinges, I feel the bone slide, I stop and force it back.

That’s when I see the slit: a stone, unsheltered, open below the skies. I peer down at it, a perfect vulva, two layers of whorled lacy lip – deep inside, a wink of dark water. Beneath a lowering sky, I place the little tripod straddling it and lie on my stomach once again, I want to snatch an image of this earthy thing. It takes many positions, odd angles but I’ve captured it, I think. The whipping wind grabs a trail of flickering scarf and drops it in the crevice. I lean to look at the stain of water rushing through the fabric. I undo the rest and push it in, flame by flame, until it disappears to darkness. My fingers return wet and cold.

I straighten and turn. I will attempt to find the path again. I raise my eyes. Some distance off, on a hill sloping toward the horizon, a standing figure: a man. A watching man. He doesn’t call out or wave. He doesn’t move at all. I wonder if he knows it’s here. I wonder if he’s seen everything.

It’s 3.30am and I’m standing with my face pressed against the kitchen window. I don’t know why I’m drawn to stare out into the dark, maybe because it seems to answer back. Next door, someone’s watching TV, their window blind flickers in shades of grey: ash, then slate, and back. The big spruce blocks the moon and stirs gently against the night. I see the outline of the ruined window box with its broken geraniums perilously balanced on the roof of my daughter’s playhouse.  A pipe is dripping outside. Tomorrow that will stop; the pipe will be connected to a sink. It’s the last week of the builders.

But that’s not why I cannot sleep. In fact I don’t really know why I can’t sleep, or rather, I can’t be sure. I’m trying to diagnose what’s causing these long stretches of insomnia. The cause of shorter bouts in the past has been stress, working late, too much coffee, but none of that applies now. Yes, I’m living in the midst of major building works but I’ve adapted to the worst of it – the dust, the builders’ daily arrival at 7am, the endless fetching and boiling of water, the absence of a functioning kitchen.

The most dramatic change to my life though is that since the beginning of July, I’ve been trying to write a novel. It’s something I’ve wanted to do all my life and it’s something I’ve left so late it may well be too late. Still, I’m reasonably undaunted by the cruel odds because in very many ways, writing has begun to bring me the deep satisfaction I’ve long sought. It’s as if I’ve finally discovered the secret code to myself and have opened a hitherto undiscovered vault. I must be the slowest of slow learners, but I’ve been fearful too.

And, I am an innocent lambkin gambolling about in this dangerous world of writing. It doesn’t matter that one way or another I’ve written something every day of my working life, this is different, this is fiction. I’m waiting for it to do its worst to me and I know those shocks will come. It always happens when you move to a new country – a terra incognita, in this case – you don’t understand the ways and customs (oh, you think you do) and there are some realities you don’t perceive at all until it’s already too late.

For years, I secretly sniggered at the juncture in book page interviews where an author would talk about characters springing to life. I’d roll my eyes and think how pretentious it was. I secretly wanted to believe but couldn’t. Later, any lingering romantic notions I’d harboured about writing were scuppered by one author interview I conducted myself where the writer archly, and quite crossly, told me that writing was all craft and that the inspiration stuff was piffle.

Imagine my shock then in finding that, on opening the vault, I’ve managed to release a ceaseless parade of characters – they crawl out of the fog on their hands and knees, rub their eyes, stand up, and begin to walk about. It’s the ascent of man meets Terminator meets the mystical bog road in Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey. I have more characters than the demands of story require, I have characters that have nothing to do with the story I’m working on at all, they just hang about looking for a gig. Weirder yet, inanimate objects have begun to develop voices. In the room I use for writing the whiteboard wants to talk to the wall of post-it notes – the whiteboard’s a clever optimist, the wall of notes, a dullard. I can’t sufficiently explain how discombobulating this is when it’s first experienced. Of course, I do know that it’s my own incontinent mind generating all this burble, this chorus of voices, but how it happens both bewilders and intrigues me. It’s as if all the half-thoughts I’ve ever had are now rounded, full-bodied, three dimensional; I’m letting them out when I never did before.

But while some characters begin as real people: Designer Suit Guy, Willum Trevor, the I-Love-You Man (who’ve all enjoyed a life on Twitter which I’m exploring as a short work medium), they soon standoffishly distance themselves from their instigators: they want no truck with imitation or derivation. Others – a slight, curly-haired girl who wears a parka, a pale boy in an ill-fitting suit, a repellent toad of a man in a much-washed shirt – march on stage, fully formed, battling for space, waiting for me to be true to them.

What I am attempting to report here is the wondrousness of what I’ve found in the territory of the liminal because it has surprised me more than I’d ever have believed possible or probable. It makes me gasp at how I’ve managed to be that TV team player all these years, serving a vision not my own while ignoring repeated inner urgings to unbend my will, make my own path. And there’s a price to pay for going against your own grain, a wearying, edgy feeling of not being a true fit, of being an imposter. I’ve been a lone wolf in sheep’s clothing.

How the places come about, is much less mysterious to me: all of them I’ve seen, or approximations of them, either in dreams or in life. And yet, and yet, in their particulars they are all new – the characters see the places through the filters of their own experience, their own personalities – one character is a rationalist, a reporter of reasonably objective fact, the next charges everything with a subjective, not entirely reliable, yet interesting view. And that makes me see the places anew, stops me in my tracks, forces me to follow the trail of breadcrumbs left behind.

And of course none of this is to say I can do credit to the mystery of what I’m experiencing, the gap between my teeming subconscious and my mundane conscious may be unbridgeable. That’s the terrifying thing – I know it’s in there but do I have the rigour or the intelligence to mine it properly? So it is this that brings sleepless nights, I think. Maybe in six months’ time the grind of it will have worn me down, it won’t feel magical or like channelling anymore, it’ll be as mundane as knocking out 800 words of script. For now though, it’s like falling in love – music is truer, colours sharper, and everything I see seems to want to translate itself to me.

The thought processes have begun to shove other things aside too – embarrassingly, three times recently I’ve failed to unearth the first names of people I know, I’ve completely forgotten to fill out forms for various child-related activities, I’ve stood in the supermarket asking myself what I came for. I’ve gone from my characteristic natural dreaminess to outright preoccupation; whole hours can disappear in what feels like a ten minute span. I wonder too if what I’m finding absorbing, almost compulsive, transmits itself as selfishness to those around me. I wonder about that a lot.

And of course, it hurts too and it’s not just the niggling pain brought on by doubts but a certain level of mental churning in trying to process the torrent of thought, a desperation to catch slippy ideas before they slide out of view, a feeling of serving a set of harsh masters, myself and the characters. It’s made me feel at times both demented and depressed. I’ve come to a standstill twice. When unable to think forward I’ve imagined the characters sitting around on the floor of a draughty limbo, chins on their knees, fiddling with their shoe laces, waiting for instructions. That stasis is an uncomfortable experience to live through, increases the preoccupation, and is inevitably self-defeating. The more anxious you become the less likely you are to see a way out but when you’re five chapters in and you’re only at base camp, the North Face sneers down at you. Despite the fact that you’re using all you know, everything you’ve got, you’re aware of your puniness in the midst of this gargantuan task. And all the precious, hoarded things you bring to it: your sharpest memories, your greatest loves, all the chain of sadnesses from your own life, the recurring images that are part of your habit of mind can, some days, seem sterile, hackneyed, hopeless.

The fixing of it will only come when it comes and will not be chivvied. Once, it only required the unpicking of a poorly written sentence three pages back. Rewriting that threw forward a solution – then, the words flew down, arranged themselves and sat happily once again. It took seven days to see that solution though. I’m reminded of what my friend, an editor, told me: the book will teach you how to write it. This seems true to me now, not as an abstract concept but as a reality.

It’s three weeks today since I wrote even one word of the novel. Children returning to school, the builders, the endless deliveries of tiles and skips and cement blocks, the difficulty of preparing food in camping conditions, mean being tied to the house. Last week though, I went to the room to print off some school notes. I unlocked the door, smelt its familiar smell, nodded to the Whiteboard and the Wall of Confusion. Sitting down behind my desk I notice there a hurriedly scribbled note I’d made about a character. Unaccountably, my eyes flood with tears, I feel a rush of relief to be here again. I’ve been missing it. This is my life now.

I wrote this post as a guest contributor to the Anti Room blog here

Stuck again. Hoping this will help neurons fire.

Writing Exercise 4:  In which Hansy considers the photograph…

How I’d imagined him seemed vaguely comic to me now. Left to itself the imagination fills in the missing pieces and all in its own image. But empathy, fellow-feeling, they’re stubborn, and though I could now see that he was utterly different to me, I still clung to the belief that inside we were alike. That the clockwork of dominant genes, the mechanism of him, was the mechanism of me.

Those coffee stains below the eyes though, even in monochrome, they were mine too. Our pale faces, his and mine, and that genetic bruising that looked like tiredness or sorrow.

It made me want to think about whether you grew into your face or your face grew into you. To laugh and never look happy, to be informal yet always seem stiffly aware of the flow of life’s seriousness beneath. It reminded me of a photograph of me as a two-year-old, one that Effy loved to snigger at. I’m in the garden of the first house, a rainbow dress, red Mary Janes and I’m pointing at the camera, or rather I’m pointing at my mother behind the camera ignoring, in the left of frame, my father’s outstretched hand. But it’s my face that’s the focal point, a mixture of fear and wonder probably, but the solemn look of someone believing their soul is about to be stolen.

By the time my face gets to those formal school portraits – remember the ones where you lined up outside the classroom and got called in one by one – it’s morphed into the face of a child psychotic. The darkness spreads up from the coffee stains to my eyes, making them black not grey, and the look is now one of rebelliousness, violence. My hair scraped back till my temples ached, the green ribbon all askew, my arms folded grimly on the desk, I’m a cornered, captive creature. And so it was in every photograph afterward. Sometimes, a smiling mouth, but always the gravely serious eyes.

And he had it too. Something of the same attitude and bearing. Spare like me but taller, he looks at camera with an out-thrust chin. Ostensibly the look is frank and fearless but really, a barrier, a gauntlet thrown down.  His eyes are genuinely dark though, and the dark below gives him the aura of an ascetic saint or a candlelight scholar. There’s a slight turn of the body away from camera too, a sort of carelessness, like he’s just arrived or might leave at any moment. His clothes look as if they’ve blown onto him, the wing of a shirt collar caught in his baggy jacket, the droop of his wrinkled trousers over those ugly hobnail boots. He hadn’t even bothered to run a comb through that rumpled thatch of black hair. You’d wonder why the photographer didn’t arrange him better, although maybe he didn’t dare to.

 

Photograph: Found Photograph with Embroidery by Maurizio Anzeri (from the Versions and Diversions exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery). More about the artist here

Inching toward getting a more detailed vision of what this place looks like.

Exercise 3: In which Myles hears a noise…

It had been one of those long evenings. Long for being quiet, which he liked. He’d sat by the big end window half watching television, half keeping an eye on the tents across the field. The German couple who’d arrived that afternoon had lit a small campfire before their tent; he could see the girl’s fine narrow face caught in its light. They’d asked, in fairness, most campsites didn’t allow fires anymore but this early in the season, there was no one much to mind. Galvin, who owned the place, wouldn’t care as long as the money was right and no noise disturbed him at his house further up the lane.

The lake, shaped like a dog’s leg, was narrow here and it glowered in the fading light beyond the tents; cold, unfriendly, grasping its feed from the mountain streams and stippled with angry little waves. It could look so different under a blue sky or the mackerel clouds of sunset, but its most familiar mood was this greyness. He didn’t mind that. He’d grown up looking down at the puddle of it in the valley below and he saw it with an accustomed eye. He knew all of it. He’d told the Germans where to find the kayaks pulled up on the sandy beach, a short walk through the forest behind his caravan.

His own favourite place was further on where a grassy bank ran right down to the water’s edge. The place where his father always took him swimming as a child, the place where he’d almost drowned the first time he’d ventured there alone. He remembered the surprise of it, how his feet suddenly lifted and he’d flipped forward till his own white face met the swaying weeds below. On a hot day though, wading through there before dropping to swim, he loved the touch of those wavering grasses about his feet and shins, intimate, like walking through warm hair.

As dark closed in he could see the glow of the yard lamp at his parents’ house a mile below the crest of the mountain. His father would be out having a last look at the calves before settling down to watch some 24 hour news channel. It used to be his job when he still lived at home, to check on the scuttery calves, aye, and to get the cows in for the milking morning and evening too. No more of that. His mother rang him nearly every day but he hadn’t spoken to his father in half a year.

He was setting about making his evening meal, nothing fancy, a pot of pasta with a few handfuls of grated cheese, when he heard the noise. He stopped to listen, no deer would come this close to the van and a dog wouldn’t be stupid enough to stumble about out there in the low pine brush. It sounded like the regular pace of steps though, maybe those mad Belgian lads with the dome tent who’d been drinking themselves into a stupor for the last three nights. Only a drunk could be impervious to the rub of the thousand tiny branches.

He opened the door and the yellow light from inside lit the steps and another foot or two before bleeding into the night. The vast wall of forest sprang up before him, dark against dark. He waited for his eyes to adjust, then he could see the opening where the forest path began and the leaning tree damaged in last year’s storm. It was windy now too, he saw the leafy silhouette of the little mountain ash shimmer and flounce; the pines groaned and creaked. There was no one out there. Somewhere, probably on the far shore, a fox cried.

 

I’m not stuck this time. I wrote this short piece just for the joy of expressing a thought arising from the pleasure of perceiving light through closed eyes.

Exercise 2: In which Effy has a dream…

Of course there’s no sound, just the familiar pfff of tinnitus. Not seeing is more troubling. Is it a dream where my eyes can’t open? A dream with rules? Through the shutter of my eyelids, a yellow light, directly above, and in an eight-part grid. When will the dream story begin? Can’t I command it?

I’m horizontal though. So, conscious of bed, but I can’t move my feet; cotton beneath my heels just the same. Plastic or something sticky beneath my back, unpleasant. Bare back, why? A shade blocks off the yellow light. Ah, now it returns. A breeze or the after-draft of someone walking briskly by.

A cold sliver in the back of my left hand. I know what that is, a needle. I have a picture to go with that. I see my warm, risen, blue vein and the tiny ridge the needle makes inside. Does my blood pour and fill a plastic vial? No, something colder floods in, pulsing. There’ll be a bruise.

I hope I remember enough of this light to paint it. I can say I was given it in a dream. Filtered through my eyelids it’s sometimes yellow, but sometimes a purple corona with a mauve heart or a cerulean corona with an indigo heart.

Smells. Far off, a smell like dinner or no, is it tea? Sausages. Closer to, disinfectant and maybe, urine. Ugh! Wait, Hansy’s perfume! Lime, sandalwood, musk.

Lips on my forehead. A brush of curls.

So, two weeks later and I’m writing for a few hours almost every day. As you might expect, problems occur. You couldn’t call it writer’s block, it’s more that mood or train-of-thought disappear and it’s difficult to get back on track.

A friend, writer June Caldwell, gave me some good advice and that was to put a character in a situation unconnected to story and write about that. In other words, when unable to go forward, go sideways. This jump-start technique gets the writing going again, frees things up, lifts the gloom.

Following, a few paragraphs I’ve written about the character Hansy. Beyond its usefulness as an illustration of process, I don’t necessarily assume that anyone other than myself will find this interesting. In the manuscript itself Hansy appears in the first person and is not yet at home in the flat described below.

Exercise 1: In which Hansy considers tidying her bedroom….

She pulled back the heavy damask drapes. How long had it been since she’d done that, maybe six months, maybe more. A drift of dust motes streamed into the light. Outside, and from this angle, the garden and the street beyond looked surprising; still drab of course, but newly revealed. She could see the crooked wrought iron gate and the stairs that led to the basement flat. There was no tenant downstairs now, no scrape of chairs, no smell of hickory bacon. It was damp and dark, the stairwell littered with sweet wrappers and petrifying condoms and works made from sawn-off Coke cans. She often heard the junkies there at night, they spoke in groans: was it pleasure or pain?

She gathered the ancient amber quilt tightly about her. It had been her father’s. Hansy could smell childhood nights off it – measles, nightmares, accidents with her mother’s perfume. She longed to pull the curtains closed again and waddle back to her rumpled sheets: the familiar fug of bed, the scurf of dead skin, to lie against the warm bulk of the months old pile of jeans and coats occupying the empty half of the double bed.

But where to begin? The slide had slid so far the task now seemed monumental. How quickly I’ve acclimatised Hansy thought, realising that she couldn’t remember the room tidy, ordered. But things had accreted; there weren’t enough shelves, wardrobes, cupboards to contain the sprawl. The dressing table beneath its film of dust had become a work station: two laptops, a camera, a tangle of wires all competed for space with a hairbrush furred with curly wisps, five broken cigarettes, a scattering of matches. A stream of spilt moisturiser spread an oily puddle across a photograph of her sister causing a crazy green and pink corona effect about her head. It settled around the base of a cup containing 7-month-old coffee, the milk skinned and thickened. She’d been drinking that coffee when she’d heard. She shuddered and blinked away the unwanted pictures.

To the right of the bed, just past the little hillock of discarded shoes and before the sea stacks of listing novels, stood the clothes horse. It was nothing more than two curved mahogany uprights spanned by a bar. Simple and elegant she’d thought, not that she could see it anymore. Hansy felt a certain reluctance to relieve the clothes horse of its burden; she loved the way the orange and flowered dress lay across the swallow-patterned blouse, the flash of the carmine satin dressing gown beneath the soft mauve of an angora cardigan. Really, if she could, she’d live amongst flowing banners of such patterns and textures – gingham, polka dot, tartan, floral, silk, lace, grosgrain, tulle – even the words were delicious. Stowed in a wardrobe they’d never give her a daily dart of pleasure. And anyway, who was to see that she lived like a streel?

Her phone began to hum; it was on silent so as not to wake her and vibrated like a wasp in a jar. Who could be phoning at 9am on Saturday she wondered and anyway, where was the phone? She made no attempt to find it but stood rapt and listening till it stopped. She heard it make another little hiccough: a voicemail. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow I’ll listen.

 

The last time I tried to do this was nine years ago. It was summer too. It was summer and I’d just finished a TV contract, a six month spell of eating, breathing, living, work. I was skidding into summer with no plans made, no holiday booked and the vague feeling of dizziness that comes with living life at the remote level of an automaton. Deprogramming is required in such instances – a deliberate weaning off news radio, newspapers, television, phones, list-making. It takes about three weeks to decompress every time; to get out of the hyper-alertness that comes with vast amounts of information-churning in a low-staff, no-time environment.

To be honest, and it’s been said to me, there have been times when I’ve been no fun on holiday. This has always occurred when I’ve gone directly from a ferocious work schedule into the dog days of holiday. What to do with all this useless time? What to do about the compulsory having of fun? To the antsy, wired me it can be an assault of inertia:  suffocating and overwhelming.  I’m ticking. I’m still looking for reliable news in English or where to get a dependable internet connection or an International Herald Tribune that isn’t a fortnight old. Given time, I come down from this. I come down realising anew that the monstrous, work-addicted, easily-irked me has been left alone at the controls for far too long.

Now, I’m not without insight into this – it’s a pathetic way to live, of that I’m aware. To get to the stage where you’re too hard for holidays is a big slice of your soul to sell for a 6 month contract. Equally, I fully accept that other people do not experience work in this way. The only conclusion to draw is that the part of my head that does output is the all-or-nothing department and everything gets pulled into its slipstream. It’s a design flaw, it could even be labelled neurotic but it’s a habit of self that I’ve come to accept. In fact, it’s the most steady aspect of myself that I can remember right back into childhood: it is my core.

So, nine years ago, in summer, thinking all the above, I sat down to write a novel – to let the work-addicted, obsessive, cussed self do something genuinely useful, genuinely productive, for a change. Something, as I then thought, that would stop me having the itch I couldn’t scratch. Two weeks and about 10 pages in, I began to feel tired and sick, sick and tired. It couldn’t be, or was it? It seemed calamitous news at the time, I was pregnant with my fourth child. It wasn’t self-subversion – what a callous and self-deluding let off that would be – but something genuinely, shockingly, not on the plan. Now, I would have four children under ten years of age. I confess, I sank. I sort of gave up. I saw that first scan of my daughter, bean-shaped and beating inside me, and I knew, with a rush of love, that she would have me body and soul for the next two years. I walked down the corridor of the Coombe Hospital that day, heavy-footed and with a sense that some giant hand had moved me on the chessboard. It was a sense of futility, of cruel fate: like billions of other hapless women since time began, a rogue egg had been my undoing.

Looking back now at those nine years gobbled up in a miasma of mothering and working, I wouldn’t be without any of the four interesting, funny children I’ve helped put on the planet. They have been delightful daily – more delightful than not in fact, even at their most truculent and tantrumy. The bean, the brown-eyed girl, is now eight and with her, the giant hand sent the sunniest, most irrepressible little tyke.

So here I am at the place I started, crashing into the summer after a frenzy of work. This time though, I’ve laid some groundwork. There’s this blog which, begun in unemployment, was always intended to be a limbering up process. I wanted to see if I could write any kind of personal narrative consistently. I wanted to test some suspicions I had that the tyrant could most happily boss herself.  And that has been the revelation – the now-and-again writings here provide weeks of satisfaction and a kind of peace that I haven’t known from any kind of work; an easing of the itch. The chemistry of the last two years of my life has pushed me here too – losses and consolations too personal to write about in this guise but ones that rearranged some internal connections. Now, I have a room of my own, a window over a narrow street, a smell of wood and of baking bread. Here, I am going to try, once and for all, a task too long postponed. I go fearfully but not in dread.