Tag: Tottenham Hotspur

WHYS AND WHEREFORES: On blogging

Jacky Colliss Harvey2 Comments

 

First question: why blog?

Because writing a book is like cooking a 5-course dinner-party, and really, sometimes, all you want to do is shove a bit of bread and cheese under the grill. It may be – indeed it should be – the most perfectly crafted toasted cheese, with granary bread just the right side of chewy enough to give your jaws a work-out, Cornish Quartz cheddar, a liberal sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper, and be served with cress and tomato on the side. It may be splished and spiced up with Worcester sauce; or before it even meets the bread, the cheese may have been boosted with a little beer or cider – the point is, it’s the kind of thing you can put together on impulse, a small piece of perfection attainable in fifteen spontaneous minutes or so. No tablecloth, no side plates – desire satisfied, guilt-free indulgence experienced, lips smacked, and then on you go with your day. That’s what this blog will be – impulsive and tasty. Tidbits, snacklets and bonne bouche.

But a blog is the saddest thing in the world without readers. Second question : why might you give your time to read this one? What’s going to be on the menu?

Well, there will be plenty musings on food, for a start, because food, like sex, is a thing we have to do, but the gods have so arranged it that we would do it for pleasure anyway. There will be investigations of Zen and the art of slow cooking. There will be philosophical reflections on everything from ice-cream to the perfect pretzel; from soup to nuts.

There will of course be books – the special ones, the ones you never forget; and those still to be cracked open to release their new-book smell. There will be much thinking on the subject of smell, in fact, from that of a Cornish rockpool to that of the first cup of coffee of the day.

There will be cats – mine, yours, and all those in-between. There will be animal life of every description. There will be the shocking manners of Thames waterfowl, and the utter perfidy of wasps. There will be life as a writer, in all its unexpected weirdness, all its paranoias and all its peculiar delights.

There will be big skies and running, and the horrors of being tortured down the gym; there will be TV, and rants about bloody silly adverts on TV, and Tottenham Hotspur (God help me). There will be spirits of place from the Isle of Dogs to the Isle St-Louis. There will be Samuel Pepys. There will be graveyards and echoes and fog.

There will be movies. And museums. And lifting the curtain on what goes on behind the scenes at museums, and what went on behind the scenes in them fifty, or one hundred, or two hundred years ago. There will be the British Library. There will be the buggritts of life, and the manifold buggritts of tech in particular, and of haircuts and bras and all the ills that female flesh is heir to. And there will be meditations on the small and precious joys – new tights fresh out the packet, lying in a hot bath in the dark, eyeliner that stays where you flippin’ well put it, vodka martinis (oh, there will certainly be booze), and new notebooks, just waiting for the pencil.

In other words, the random thoughts of a random redhead. Welcome to the inside of my head.

 

 

ONLY DISCONNECT: On writing

Jacky Colliss HarveyLeave a comment

 

THE LIFE OF A WRITER is a strange and wonderful thing. It is, truly. Here I am, a proper serious grown-up with a very serious birthday a scant two years away, and I spend my time in as much of a bubble as if I were a toddler in a playpen. Writing has disconnected me from calendar, salary, and commute. There’s a fabulously creepy movie from 1962 entitled Carnival of Souls, where the female protagonist (to call her the heroine would undo everything the movie does) simply doesn’t know if she is still in this world, or if she is not, and nor does the viewer. Imagine a benign version, with added cat, of that.

It has disconnected me from clock as well. Hands up all those other night-owls out there – my word, we truly are a thing. I didn’t hate getting up at 7 just because I hated getting up at 7 (although I did) – I hated getting up at 7 because my body-clock wanted me to surface at 10, and then still be awake and tapping away at 2 the following morning. At 2 the following morning on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday…. I used to love my weekends. Croissants on the sofa, big mug of coffee made just the way I like it (I don’t care how you make yours, mine is better), weekend papers spread out all around me, Radio 4 burbling away in the background and at some point Spurs either covering themselves in glory or causing one to wonder how come they were ever in the Premier League in the first place. I loved my weekends. I can’t remember when I last had one. There was a point before Christmas (Christmas being one of those moments when even the most demented scribbler really has to pause) where I realized I had been working for 19 days on the trot.  I am the writer who lives by herself, and all days are the same to me.

For some of them, I don’t even unlock the front door. For some of them, (oh the shame) I lever myself from the bed, as the last and the tardiest of my neighbours are running from the building in a panic that they’ll miss the bus; I pull on an old stained sweatshirt or holey jumper over whatever I happen to have been sleeping in, and that’s me, dressed. I used to wear skirts; I used to wear tights; I used to wash my hair every morning; I used to wear heels in the daytime – not any more.

If I do have reason to emerge into the outside world, it’s a different place to the one I knew before. The tube is empty; the pavements ditto. Shop assistants are chatty, the shops themselves populated by gently drifting flotillas of mothers with young children, and OAPs – two tribes I never really had any contact with before, but with some of whom I am now familiar enough locally to share a nod. And not for me, any longer, grabbing something for dinner on the way home. I can take my time. I can food-shop with a mindfulness that would make Madame Maigret proud. All those hours between 9 and 5 have opened like blooms on a tulip-tree. When the fridge died recently, after one of those lingering fridge illnesses whose symptoms include a dreadful rattling wheeze and a tendency to wee all over the floor, the folk at John Lewis who provided its successor were deeply apologetic about the fact that I would have to stay in all morning to take delivery. ‘Sometime between 9 and 1’, they said. ‘We’re sorry, we can’t be more specific than that.’

Not, I assured them, a problem for me.

And people are so damn nice when they learn that you’re a writer. If I ever venture into the world of the thriller, and the plot demands some character has to justify their presence in some place they have no business being, all I will need them to do is utter the three magic words ‘I’m a writer’. Abracadabra – everyone’s your friend. We truly are the animal that tells stories, and Lord how immediately and positively we still respond to those who help us do so.

There’s a saying (you know it, I’m sure) that everyone has a book in them, but God help us if should that be true. A world with nothing but writers in it would fall apart within weeks. We’re only half the story. Writers need readers. When you come down to it, there are only two reasons for disconnecting as I have done: to get something written out of my system and to get it into that of as many other people as I possibly can. Thank you for indulging me.