It’s good to be reminded of how powerfully we can connect simply by talking to strangers – even quite strange strangers – to know that the blustering man who fears that Christmas cards will no longer show fox-hunting scenes also makes special lunches for his visiting granddaughters, was still quietly surprised by that one time when they didn’t visit, by his loneliness. The father who returns, year after year, to beautiful beaches where he played with his children, who loves Sark, but finds the sand less entertaining when he has no excuse to dig holes in it, no companions to scramble with into caves. The widow who used to sit on the headlands with her husband and who comes now twice a year without him. The visitors’ stories are often melancholy, the pains of people unable to stop time, addicted to familiarity and seduced by an island which seems to offer the impossible: that first sunny weekend, repeating and repeating like the waves rolling back into Derrible Bay. And I will, of course, go back to Sark myself and have my own set of expectations and my own stories. Writers are very prone to having unreasonable expectations of reality and its inhabitants – used, as we are, to manipulating fictitious characters and environments, we can tend to assume that nothing in the real world should move on without at least consulting us.
Meanwhile, I’m hoping – as I always do after meeting genuinely courteous people – that the habits of courtesy stay with me and that my fear of being stabbed or propositioned in wrong ways will not mean I go back to being brisk and/or savage as soon as I hit London. Then it’s back to the typing and, soon, back to promoting What Becomes and the autumn festival circuit. Including a plane to Toronto. Doesn’t bear thinking about. Onwards.
XII
SO. ON TOUR. In my twenties this was all hope and insecurity and gigs that are done and dusted by 9 p.m. and sitting in grey hotel rooms considering the possibilities of self-harm and overpriced in-room porn. In my thirties it was probably about the job, writing as I go and those same bloody hotel rooms. In my forties it seems to be more about meeting people and trying to support the idea of books and reading, the principle of the thing. And, whatever else is happening, touring is about being tired. For the necessary two hours, or three hours, or however many hours with the ladies and gentlemen, not tired – but otherwise – tired. A kind of deep, brain-burrowy, trainy, cary, nicely undefended tired that makes you notice acts of kindness and instances of beauty: Beverley Minster, the Ripon spice bread in Betty’s Tea Room, red kites flying over woodland towards dusk.
First stop was Charleston. They get many brownie points for running Small Wonder – a festival entirely dedicated to that endangered thing, the short story. In some quarters they get points deducted for paying writers with vouchers for their own shop. (Not that it isn’t a very lovely shop. And not that writers – unlike plumbers and electricians – aren’t quite often paid in things, rather than money.) Additional points for warmth, charm, intelligence and providing a number of highly (almost inappropriately) affectionate animals and a seductive and apparently inexhaustible supply of hand-made food, served around a picturesque and culturally significant kitchen table. For those of you unfamiliar with Charleston’s history – it’s a rambly country house in an almost numbingly idyllic setting, where a number of the Bloomsbury Group’s adherents either lived or loitered and, I get the strong impression, occasionally engaged in artistic activities when they got tired of having sex with men/women/themselves/all of the above. Maynard Keynes – an economist for whom I have much time – removed to Tilton House up the road and, as far as I understand matters, shared his new premises with Lydia the Tattooed Lady. They were both very happy.
I was down at Small Wonder to read from Freedom – Amnesty International’s anthology celebrating the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights. Strange to stand in soft and sympathetic surroundings and speak freely about people who can’t – to be comfortable and well-fed and discussing torture and how bewildered and distorted human thoughts and actions can become. It made me want to go back and read Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect again, particularly bearing in mind recent revelations of corporate and individual abuses.
I took a diversion after Charleston to see the revival of Speaking in Tongues It’s always heartening to watch an excellent cast presenting something thoughtful and demanding – and not a musical – in the West End. It’s also grand when women onstage actually behave like women, rather than shrill/squeaky things with the interior lives of plants, so thanks to Lucy Cohu and Kerry Fox for that. Lovely work from Ian Hart, particularly in the rather stronger second half. And it always delights me to see John Simm being just vocally and physically precise, creatively and generously fastidious. I do also try to remember good voices for later use during the very many occasions when my own interior drone becomes sickening and yet I still have things to type. So I have occasionally borrowed a bit of Mr Simm – that deceptively light, brisk melodiousness with a carborundum centre – to get through the initial stage of loathing each syllable as it oozes out across the computer screen like some particularly vile and luminous personal fluid.
My ability to concentrate on the production was slightly compromised by an essay in the programme from a ‘Relationship Psychotherapist’ on the howlingly inevitable loneliness of the human condition. I might suggest that something liable to send me rushing for the toilets to hang myself doesn’t make ideal reading during the run-up to – and interval inserted within – a lovely evening out. (Of course, the toilets in your average Victorian theatre are only small enough to hang a mouse – which renders the whole procedure impractical. I can never even contemplate anyone being hanged like a mouse.) Beyond that, I didn’t at all enjoy being stuck behind an immensely tall man with a head like a volleyball, who sniggered both wetly and at random. Still, the words and humanity smuggled themselves through.
Then on to the launch of the Warwick students’ anthology, Beyond the Bubble, which I hope will prosper. It was nicely moving to see them giving one of their first readings, beginning the writer’s life, hoping the hopes and rubbing at the insecurities. I can only wish them well. And wish that the UK publishing industry wasn’t floating belly-up in its own sad, poo-and-algae-filled bowl. All kinds of nasty surprises lie in wait to frighten, dispirit and drain the promise from new writers, but I would like to believe that energy and talent and ingenuity and luck will see the words and humanity smuggled through there, too.
Then on to pretty Beverley, a delightful audience and an equally pleasant readers’ group. More of the huge, largely invisible legions of readers who cling on, despite the dwindling variety of books, the disappearing independent bookshops, the expense of all but the hyper-discounted fast-sellers. More words and more humanity in the Minster’s war memorial to the nineteenth century’s soldiers, dead in Afghanistan – and in the book of requests for prayer, the small records of twenty-first-century gratitude, confusion and grief – and the names of new soldiers, dead in Afghanistan.
And now Ilkley: dusty rain, hospitality, chatting about technical requirements, metallic balloons being delivered for a function in the hotel downstairs – hope they don’t have a band – and a show tomorrow. Ely soon, Cheltenham, Toronto, roads and rails and handshakes and people talking about the things that matter to them, writing about the things that matter to them, because how else can we sing out who we are, or were, or could be – all our promises and angers, joys and loves. And now it’s time for bed – then onwards.
XIII
WELL, YOU MAY be as delighted as I was to hear that they did have a band – a band capable of penetrating very effectively through two storeys of a large Victorian hotel, all the way to my previously drowsy bedroom. And it played. A lot. Bad covers of good R&B in a function suite charmingly reminiscent of the public areas in the Overlook Hotel, as explored so admirably by Stanley Kubrick during The Shining. This is, of course, traditional, both for function suites and for me being on tour.
I do love music, have quite broad – although uninformed – tastes and used to miss my favourite ditties
and jingles as I travelled about before the days of MP3 players and iThings. Nevertheless, I am forced to admit that uninvited music, no matter how jolly, burrowing up through my floor between the hours of bedtime and ohmygodwhatanearlystart, is something to which I have never been able to warm. Inn and hotel karaoke nights, marching and/or oompah bands passing endlessly beneath my early-morning window, ceilidhs, shindigs, hooleys, wakes, weddings, birthday singsongs and Functions – they have all rendered me psychotically tired during the past two and a bit decades of tarting myself about across the globe on behalf of my books. (The rest of my peripatetic nights have been disturbed by the usual blend of incomprehensible nocturnal pacing overhead, shuddering and scraping lifts and the 360-degree thumping, shouting and larking about of fellow-guests. I occasionally wonder how they manage to gather the additional energy necessary to ruin my few undisturbed hours by also having sex loudly enough to tarnish the night porter’s buttons, never mind letting us all hear how yes everything is. It’s just showing off. And – yes – whenever I’ve had sex in a hotel, I do insist on a full vocal warm-up before we begin. I have years of resentment to work through.)
Then again, the predictable din from my neighbours simply means I travel with industrial-strength earplugs. They’re always in my bag, along with the blindfoldy thing for lie-ins when the curtains don’t work, camping equipment and powdered food for when the catering doesn’t work, the special pillow for when my neck doesn’t work and enough pills, instruments, bandages and ointments to deal with a month in the wilderness or a minor surgical procedure – because you never know . . .
Of course, you do actually know: touring will be lovely. (And hello to the very excellent ladies and gentlemen of Ilkley – we had much fun. Great festival and sold-out venue, that’s what we like.) But the writer’s immune system will be exposed to more bugs on tour than you’d find in a poorly maintained plague cart. So when the young chap responsible for cleaning my room in Ilkley staggered past looking like an extra from Dawn of the Dead I rightly assumed that his pillow-fluffing and other ministrations would mean that I was basically sleeping in a feathery plague pit and should immediately make my will. Travel back to Glasgow was nasty, sweaty and long, and then what should have been a languid week at home, leading into the next leg of travels, turned into lying in bed having fever dreams too horrible even for conversion into A.L. Kennedy fiction. And the red pills and the white pills and the fawn pills and the inhalations and the endless advice of kind strangers who always assume that I just lie about in my own filth and haven’t tried, for example, a bit of honey and lemon. Still, at least it wasn’t Pig-flu, and after the first few days I stopped feeling as if someone was taking a hand-drill to the top of my head while improvising a lobotomy using dirty biros wedged behind my eyes.
All this feebleness led to cancelled gigs – I always hate cancelling gigs. Not that I think anyone will be particularly distraught if they’re deprived of me; it’s just rude to say you’ll be somewhere and then not turn up. But I got back on track with the very fine Cheltenham Festival, where I have to say that I was anticipating the audience might be the slightest bit reserved and tweedy and maybe even Daily Maily – not so. Highly responsive and warm and hugs at the end. Big softies, they were – in a good way. And very fragrant. Which was handy, given that my mum and her pals and my agent and his (business) partner and his partner’s girlfriend were all in the audience, too, and I was hoping things would go at least tolerably well.
Ely was lovely – excellent cathedral with two strangely irrelevant shops, pleasant medieval opportunities for tea and a reading at Topping’s bookshop – which is the way bookshops ought to be, independent, voluminous, friendly and full of readers. Next on the list is Toronto. Which is a problem. Not Toronto itself – Hog City is a more than acceptable place and the International Festival of Authors is a great festival, highly professional and full of Canadian Friendliness – which is like anyone else’s friendliness, but with added layers of eye-contact, sincerity and – well, frankly it’s all a bit unnerving. The problem is flying. I have to fly to get there. I have to get on a plane and let it take off with me aboard. And should I survive that, I have to fly back. Or I could become Canadian and just stay – halve my exposure to airborne disaster. Canadian citizenship is a real possibility. (Although I would fail the niceness test.)
I HAVE TO FLY.
I never did like it and then I spent three years researching a book about a tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber who had a 50 per cent chance of surviving any flight he made. I researched sounds, smells, images, tastes, emotions, the works. I spent three years conditioning myself to believe in that 50 per cent probability of death. And now I do. This would be interesting, if it weren’t bloody terrifying. And if it didn’t make me depressed and unwilling to do any work when I’m anywhere near the prospect of flying. I have spent many an hour reading books on hypnosis and doing exercises and trying to reverse this – the effects thus far have been signally unimpressive. I pray for the intervention of a fork-bearded stranger in a top hat and cloak who’s good at snap inductions – and who won’t then make me work in Variety during the 1870s. Or a flight attendant with dirty biros to hand . . .
I know I actually have a much lower than 50 per cent chance of being mashed to a pulp or incinerated in a plane, or of flying into a mountain, or coming a cropper on landing, or being frozen to death, or asphyxiated, or otherwise murdered by air transport. Then again, the highly improbable is also very, very unlikely to be survivable. I’m more likely to be in a train accident – but I might survive a train accident . . . I mean, I do think about this stuff. A lot. I am flying on my birthday, partly – and partly insanely – because the chances of my dying on my birthday and on a plane are quite low. But not that low. Not low enough.
So, just in case, ladies and gentlemen: do have enjoyable lives, embracing every moment, trying to make a positive difference, and so forth. I hope to blog again, back in the UK and still breathing.
XIV
I AM NOT on a plane.
I am on a train – alive and on a train and on the ground. I am not hurtling miles above my natural height, I am not sweating, twitching and muttering prayers full of shameful bargaining. I am no longer discovering that the proximity of what I feel to be death doesn’t make me appreciate the flitter of every bat’s wing, or the tender hearts of children – it makes me self-pitying and tetchy. I have flown to Canada and back and have no intention of ever travelling in such a horribly elevated manner again. Feel free to write to me/shout at me/punch me gently if I ever suggest it. Yes, indeedy, I am on a train – a train that has been sitting (at a jaunty angle) between two (now entirely dark) fields since it was broad day. It is now 17.40 and we have little hope of moving any time soon. We have been informed that International Rescue are on their way and are free to wonder whether that means marionettes are gangling bravely to our aid, or if the person making the announcement has a sense of humour that will lead to violence later. Panic-buying at the buffet is well under way and several passengers wearing anti-swine-flue face-masks are clearly under the impression that Patient Zero for a whole new strain of doom is aboard and incubating. Given my current physical condition, they’re probably right and should be forcing me into the tea urn for a quick and cleansing boil. And yet still I am grinning like a tired, tired gonk. I am not on a plane. (And I won’t be the first one we eat when we run out of complimentary mini-pretzels – it’ll be the annoying and slow-moving hippy in A23.)
So, as a new religion forms in Coach C and the big-haired pensioner lady in Coach J prepares to become empress of all that stretches between the man watching a Dan Brown DVD and the nasty stain under the bin, I can reflect on the fact that I’ve done no work in almost a fortnight. I don’t see the point, you see, not when I have to fly – writing takes effort, and why put in the effort if you’re about to be toast and bits spread down a hillside?
Not that Toronto wasn’t, in every other sense, delightful and not that the Canadi
an audiences weren’t even more ridiculously warm and generous than I remembered. I had a lovely time. And – rather disturbingly – many Canadians out there have pictures taken with me to prove it. I was being held together with Red Bull and Sudafed, in an evil combination which held at bay my sinuses and jetlag for long enough to perform, and as I didn’t have a heart attack at any point we’ll just call that a win.
I also had time to chat with fellow-authors about the whole travel/festival thing and we tended to agree that, although the events themselves are dandy and talking about books to people who care about books is both fine and uplifting, we do all feel as if we’ve been out of our houses and away from our loved ones (the other writers had lives) for too long. Touring and promoting are more and more important as publishers fire more and more staff, promote less and less effectively and allow sales incomes to be slashed by heavy discounting. This means that when a highly pleasant lady said, as I signed her book, that I must have a wonderful life, she was sort of right – I get to do something I love and am often paid for it, I see wonderful places and meet – briefly – people who might be nice. But, then again, there are days when it would be easy to get churlish, if not tearful, and exclaim, ‘You want my life? You have it, matey. I’m going to die in a plane crash on Thursday, anyway.’ Which would be wrong and sad.
On Writing Page 5