I don’t read the reviews until I put them on my website – so that’s one, long afternoon of feeling fumbled with, paranoid and queasy and then it all goes away again. And yes, ‘I don’t read reviews.’ Does sound as if I’m happily tucked away in my own colon – but book reviews are odd things. They emerge months, if not years after the book is done with, so they’re not that much use to the author. If the book’s a car crash, it’s already happened and we’ve walked or crawled away long ago. They are usually written (and should really be written) for readers, but may on occasions wander off and end up being about the reviewer’s idea of the author, or a literary theory, or even some kind of personal issue the reviewer is working through. (This seems to be quite common in US reviews.) Yes, I personally want feedback on my work, but I get that from my editor and my agent (who used to be an editor) and from readings of work in progress and (extremely) occasionally from people upon whom I inflict sections of whatever heaving mess I’m wrestling with at the time. I get opinions from people I trust, whose judgement I know and understand.
And just try writing a book of short stories. (I mean that rhetorically – obviously there are very few commercially or personally viable reasons for your writing a book of short stories. Unless, of course, you harbour a love of the form, you foolish and adorable moppet.) But if you did try it – and my first ever book was a collection of short stories – imagine how utterly bloody confusing the reviews are bound to be. First opinion, ‘Story A is rubbish, B is okay, C is middling.’ But then you read, ‘Story C is transcendent, A’s okay and F should be illegal.’ And on and on it goes. It’s incredibly difficult to review short stories without mentioning individual stories, and opinions will differ and multiple reviews will simply confuse the young and tender brain of the scribbler concerned. So my first crop of reviews was also my last. My publisher tells me how they’re going.
And, in many ways, reviews are for publishers – are about trying to get anybody to know the darn thing is out there, whining and weeing on the concrete floor of the big Unowned Books Shelter and staring with big eyes through the chain-link fence in the hope of going home with you. (See what I did there? Trying to get you to buy it. Sorry. Inexcusable. It’s been that kind of month. Please ignore me.) And then review quotes are cut out and arranged in ways that will make the paperback jacket read as if the Archangel Gabriel came down to Earth and produced the volume in question with his very own heart’s blood, and anyone who doesn’t buy it is not only crazy, but possessed of a leprous soul and likely to bite the heads off kittens. Sadly, every other book jacket will read like that, too – reducing the reader to a guilty, cognitively dissonant mess on the floor of Waterstone’s café.
It has been particularly easy to not read anything in the last two weeks because I have mainly been battering up and down a rehearsal room, putting the shiny on ‘Words’ in preparation for next week’s previews, and then off we’ll go with a show a day until the end of time. Or the end of August, whichever arrives soonest. This means I am fitter than I would usually want to be, louder and currently addicted to bananas. There’s nothing like seven or eight bananas to get you through a long day of trying to walk and talk simultaneously.
The whole rehearsal process means that I’m exhausted and yet quite cheery. I do like performing the show – partly because it’s an opportunity to talk to people about words and writing and meaning and the silliness of being a writer in an unmediated way. It also means I get to go back to what made me start writing in the first place – hearing and feeling language. Any readers of this blog would, of course, be hugely welcome to turn up and see how it all turns out. Feel free to say hello. Meanwhile, there’s hooting to be done. Onwards.
IX
SO, HERE I am in Edinburgh and it’s my day off. As far as I’m aware, everyone who returns to the Fringe does so filled with balmy memories of the final few days of it all last time, when the show was run in, the audiences were glossy, contented and oozing with art, and your body knew it would be able to relax soon. Of course, we all turn up for the first week of the new Fringe and suddenly realise we forgot the harried running about of the initial days: the technical glitches, the cuts so that we run to time, the finding of dressing-room space, the snaffling of coat hangers, the stuff that breaks, other people’s hissy fits, my hissy fits – not to mention the interesting effect that one hour a day of solid performing has on the human body and brain. I could, for example, now run the show under gunfire or indeed water, but can’t recall my own address. And my spine has developed a whole range of aches that are entirely new to me.
Let me repeat that: I am experiencing back pains I have never had before. After more than ten years of dodgy backness, during which I had assumed that every possible shoulder, neck and vertebral grief possible had been at least attempted, all kinds of new and interesting kinks and wrinkles are appearing, while all of the places that usually hurt are having a fine old holiday. Who’d’ve thunk it. Fortunately, the Assembly Rooms provide cut-price massages for performers and – as they are very good massagists and interested in their work – I like to feel I have provided them with some light relief.
Them: ‘So, where’s the trouble?’
Me: ‘Everywhere.’
T: ‘Pardon?’
M: ‘Go on, just prod your finger there – or there – or I think you’ll like this lump. Or this knot . . . or there’s a twangy thing here in my neck . . .’
T: ‘Oh, my Lord . . . Let me get a chair leg and some embrocation. And the pliers.’
M: ‘Knock yourself out. Or me . . . I don’t really mind.’
But it’s all good fun and lovely to have a pattern to my days: get up at noon, eat a banana, drink as much water as I can fit in, have a bath, eat another banana, wonder if I ate the first one, or forgot – are there fewer bananas? – do Tai Chi, eat a banana, pause to ponder how much I’m beginning to hate bananas – yet their starch, sugar and potassium are so damnably useful – do my hooting, have lunch, get the bus to the Assembly Rooms, drink more water, drink fizzy pop, drink more water, iron my shirt, put on slap, breathe a lot, drink more water, say hi to Mr Draper-Velleut who does my lights, and to George and David who are the techies for the Drawing Room, have a look at the stage, wait for the lovely ladies and gentlemen, perform for the lovely ladies and gentlemen, end show, drink more water, take off slap and shirt, eat something containing no bananas and then go home – actually, it’s someone else’s home – and off to bed as quickly as possible. Obviously, the day also involves peeing a fair amount what with all that water, but it would be indelicate to mention that. I am also building up to seeing more of other people’s shows. Mr Mark Thomas’s current offering is, for example, an excellent thing.
So far, I can only commend the quality and intelligence of the ladies and gentlemen – and their often remarkable sweetness. And, let’s be fair, some of you are also a little eccentric. But, thus far, only in good ways.
The notable feature of this week – apart from a remarkably romantic older couple in the audience about whom I will tell you next time; no, it’s not smut, it would just give away a bit of the show, I’ll tell you when we’ve stopped – was the leaving party for Catherine Lockerbie over at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Catherine directed the EIBF for nine glorious years and took it from something average and regional to what it is today: far and away the best in the world. And I do travel a lot – I know whereof I speak. She’s bowing out now and some of us got to say goodbye and good luck. (The Poet Laureate even brought along a poem – suddenly that job makes a lot more sense.) Catherine is an amazing and amazingly pleasant lady whose statue should be in the middle of Charlotte Square – where they hold the EIBF – rather than the current and, frankly, quite ugly equine statue of a gentleman who I have to presume answered to the name Charlotte at the weekends. He certainly seems to have enjoyed dressing up.
Meanwhile, it’s back to the bananas for me tomorrow and another two weeks of meeting the ladies and gen
tlemen. And gigging a bit with Robin Ince. Huzzah! Onwards.
X
AH, THE TEARS, the hugs – there’s nothing like saying farewell to actors – they’re so good at it. Suddenly the room is full of weeping and, quite frankly, it’s all uncomfortably inconsolable. So that’s the end of the Festival, then: the staid streets of Edinburgh are devoid of unicycles, or flyer-hander-outers, or people eating food they would normally only use to pelt miscreants confined to the stocks.
I do genuinely miss my dressing-room mates deeply at the moment – it’s rare to get a bunch of stressed-out artists in, let’s admit it, increasingly filthy surroundings who can manage to be so deeply, deeply pleasant all the time. They and the enduring immense pleasantness of my audiences means I am now smiling and chatting to strangers as if everyone is my new chum and human beings are a good idea. (Bear in mind that I usually only see people on telly – made by sociopaths, for sociopaths, about sociopaths – or on the front pages of newspapers abandoned on trains. Which can give you a relatively bleak outlook.) And if anybody out there would like to employ excellent performers, I can recommend – in no particular order – Michelle Gallagher, Billy Mack, Alisa Anderson and Gabriel Quigley. The gentlemen dancers of the New Art Club are extraordinary. And Matt Harvey is the nicest man – and poet – alive. But you probably knew that. He is also proof that a human being can survive on wasabi-coated nuts for a month. But he did look quite peaky for much of that time period. Hope he’s back on proper solids now.
And I will miss the assorted kindnesses of audience members – the small notes, the hearty handshakes and kisses and general expressions of affection. What nice, non-threatening and unstalkerish folks, I often thought. (The technical crew tended to circumvent the more mad-eyed, which was sweet of them – I didn’t even need to ask. They simply assumed that wanting to speak to me qualifies you as a nutter, which is, in a way, quite sensible.)
As promised, I will mention the older couple who, as I request in the show, wrote i love you in the air with their index fingers while thinking of someone they cared about. They then spontaneously turned to each other, smiling, and touched fingers. And then there was the couple who linked fingers . . . I mean, I’m trying to be all cynical about this, but there were some startling expressions of humanity and sweetness going on. Which made Jim Kelman’s latest grumbles about the writer’s life seem – though justified – slightly more grumbly than they might have.
Still, enough of the luvvy gushing. I dashed back from Edinburgh last night having only scraped the surface of the Stand Comedy Club Party. The SCCP is now an end-of-the-Fringe institution with threatening buckets of punch, comedians of every type, bad dancing and many opportunities for anyone who wishes to make themselves very ill – perhaps in delightful new company – until round about lunchtime the following day. I would have stayed at least half an hour longer – okay, maybe even forty-five minutes longer – if I hadn’t been aware that a tide of work was seething and coiling in my flat. So I currently have the washing on as I type and try to prioritise all the scripty bits and letters and emails and bills and post that awaited me. On the one hand, this is a comfort to balance the idea of leaving the Assembly Rooms, my stage being torn down before I even got home, while teams in hazmat suits cleared the more mobile corners of the dressing room. Rather than beginning to think – Yes, this is the way of the world, all things pass and my presence here will be expunged in moments . . . a stack of demanding paperwork and enquiries can make you feel – Yes, my absence was noted. I am necessary. I have a purpose to fulfil in ways that not all that many others could . . . That pleasant rush of narcissism is, naturally, replaced almost immediately by a sensation of drowning and an interior wail along the lines of – Bloody hell! I can’t do all of this. I’ll have a stroke. I can only do all of this if I ram so much caffeine into my head that my heart quite literally leaves and goes to stay with a nice transplant patient – who will, of course, use it as a desk toy, because of it being no earthly use as a pump.
But to be calm for a moment and assess matters. I have just spent a month standing onstage every day and telling people that I love my job and that words are important. I liked that. And I think it was a good thing to do. Good for the folk who came – students and readers and would-be writers and already-writers and basically people who love words. It was also good for me. I have just spent a month talking to people, telling stories to people, remembering that this is what I do. I usually do it in the absence of readers, I usually do it on paper, but the stories are the beginning and the end and the heart and the challenge and the joy of what I do. It’s a simple, lovely, human thing. I tell stories. I like being able to remember that.
I have also liked talking to a whole range of performers and finding out about them, and I am hugely and deeply grateful that I do not have to spend my professional life being prey to the whims of fashion and the megalomaniac fantasies of directors – or, indeed, finding that I go from the intensities of Fringe performance straight into a job giving away free flip-flops on the street to people who agree to try a particular brand of contact lenses. And if you are a writer, I think you have to have a soft spot for actors – the best of them are the best readers you’ll meet – they take words and wear them, eat them, make them into real live, believable people with a bit of glory about them that you had no right to expect. Yes, the bad ones I generally want to hit repeatedly with a spade; but if you’re watching a soap opera or one of the few dramas still on British screens and maybe the words aren’t that great, or the camera work’s a bit dodgy – or you’ve gone out to see a play and maybe bits of it are creaky – spare a thought for the poor actors who have to be there, anyway. Even if the ship was always going to go down. Or maybe you’ll see something wonderful, or a great individual performance, and yet no one else seems to have noticed, and next week or next month it’ll be the flip-flops again or temping, minicabbing. Some of them get to be briefly, or longly, famous – and some of them should be, although the problems of famousness shouldn’t be lightly wished on anyone – but most of them just keep on keeping on, in an environment where there is less and less theatre, less and less TV drama, hardly any UK film industry. Our loss. And theirs.
Off on holiday now – to Sark. Onwards.
XI
APOLOGIES FOR THIS being a slightly-later-that-usual blog – it’s not that a good Calvinist like me could ever have got into holiday mood so deeply that I just plain wouldn’t file; it’s that Force Six gales and changed travel plans have meant that my movements were a little irregular during the earlier part of this week. And if I had a fiver for everyone who told me, ‘Well, of course, you could just fly . . .’ when another boat failed to appear, or arrived late, or threatened to be bouncier than usual – then I still wouldn’t have enough money to go through the extensive course of hypnotic reconditioning and brain surgery it would take to parcel me into an airport after a lovely break away from all vehicles that move faster that trotting pace.
Sark was magnificent, thanks for asking, and is still pretty much unscathed by its recent alterations and trials. (Beyond there now being what looks suspiciously like a helicopter landing pad tucked away on the coast facing Brecqhou . . .)
There is nothing like scrambling up and down vaguely dangerous cliffs for hours and hours a day – with a bit of impromptu abseiling – to turn off the brain. Otherwise I get anxious. Well, I get anxious anyway – about a week into any break I am overwhelmed by a dreadful sense of mental constriction: surely I should be writing, surely there is a part of me which must be shouting and blathering on at all times, for ever and ever, expressing an internal queue of amorphous people intent on having a local habitation and a name. . . I take holidays so rarely and work so much of the time and, as it happens, enjoy my work to such an extent that holidays do prove something of a problem. They’re a nice problem, but, all the same, the only way to quieten everything down is to be exhausted, over and over again – just knackered – incapable of thought. This m
eans my vacations often involve signing waivers to say I won’t mind if I’m killed/crippled/dented by forthcoming activities and/or bears/whales/eagles/horses. In Sark it means walking past signs that politely say things like ‘Use this path at your own risk.’ Or ‘Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.’ Or ‘Sheer Drop’ – there’s something just gleefully informative and inviting about all of them.
So think of me, Dear Reader, spending days and days at the edges of a tiny island, watching peregrine falcons, or kestrels, cormorants, buzzards, gulls, descending and climbing, climbing and descending, surrounded by shapes of sky and sea lights that would sorely tax anyone’s descriptive abilities – things that stretch the mind and teach it humility and let it be content.
I won’t bang on about the benefits of feudal living, or the inherent evils of change. I am aware that a fair percentage of the people who enjoy Sark do. They are vociferously and strangely threatened by the UN, ‘riff-raff’, gels who wear trousers, alterations in the Book of Common Prayer and a whole regiment of looming horrors predicted in a number of newspapers and daytime television programmes. I will say that, as far as I can tell, the Sarkese and Sark-lovers care for their environment, are ingenious, resourceful, collaborative and can be gentle and incredibly friendly. And they do like to talk. There are, of course, occasions when conversation is unusually necessary in Sark – it just doesn’t feel right to be walking along a night-time path on an island with no street lights and to pass a fellow-traveller without at least a comforting ‘Evening’. Sark isn’t a museum or an experiment (leastways, they probably are their own long-running experiment), the island has mobile phones, televisions and the Internet, but it also has a remarkably stimulating and pleasant environment and a population that still finds people interesting – that still gossips and asks questions and is moved by the interiors of others’ lives. It’s wonderful to spend time in a gorgeous setting, but equally delightful to meet people who are not just passive consumers of pre-packaged entertainments, whose environment is largely non-virtual and unaccompanied by backing tracks and the sweaty-eared isolation that gets many of us through our days.
On Writing Page 4