Help! This title isn't working!

OK, that is not an attention-grabbing metajoke about titles. My blog site is genuinely doing something weird. 'You request cannot be fulfilled', it says, when I try to type in the title bo-- oh. Wait. Maybe this is metaphorical, after all. Anyway, if I were sensible I'd stop right here and check whether this will post, in case I spend hours writing and then discover I've lost it all. But I'm not. I'm going to write it anyway. (Ever feel like you're really not trying to be metaphorical, but the bloody metaphors WON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE?)

I can't remember what I was going to blog about now. :)

Was it the Stonewall party? Yes, maybe it was the Stonewall party. Which was fabulous. I don't have any photos of the actual place, because I didn't have any pockets and therefore no camera or mobile, but I do have this:

Hmmm, it's very small. It wasn't meant to be that small (obviously today is not a good day for me and techonology*) but you can at least see that we were really overdressed and enjoying it. But then, if we are occasionally overdressed we make up for it by always being immensely overeducated...

Also, we got congratulated by the hotel staff. That was fun. If slightly awkward, in a how-do-you-explain-that-yes-you're-in-a-wedding-dress-but-actually-you-haven't-just-got-married? kind of way. 

And since then... well. Work goes on. It went quickly for a while and now it's going slowly again. As I explained to a friend of mine, it's like watching a video on youtube - if you fast forward you have to wait for it to catch up with you before you can go on watching it. So while I'm not actually stuck, I'm wading a little bit. Although I'm generally quite excited about the book, and I'm not complaining. It's going to be long, though. I'm on 80,000 words and only two-thirds of the way through. 

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. If this posts. Here goes...

* Or typing. 

'There's nothing sadder than a neglected blog...'

So, the summer is over. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and, you know, harvests and first frosts and new stationery and Michaelmas Term is upon us... which means I need to Get Down To Work. I don't know about you, but I think of autumn as the beginning of the year (for which I blame eighteen years of formal education) and October as the beginning of autumn (for which I blame 8-week university terms). So in my book (no, not an actual book, although more of actual books later) it is perfectly fine to take two and a half months off over the summer. No, really.

Rationalisation? What do you mean, rationalisation?

No, but seriously... Then again, I realise it does get monotonous when I start every post with apologies for not blogging enough, so I will stop. Suffice it to say that someone - in a completely different context - did say, 'Ah yes, there's nothing sadder than a neglected blog, is there?' to which I could only shake my head dumbly and inwardly wince.*

The other thing is, I had so much to blog about! All of which has been either forgotten or gently overlaid with other concerns. Here, for your interest, is a quick (and non-exhaustive) list:

- Fifty Shades of Grey. Notably the underlying assumptions of same, i.e. that consensual sex-play with a riding-crop is Terrible and Shocking, whereas a controlling partner who won't let you drive your own car or meet male friends and who calls a doctor to give you a hormone injection because you've forgotten your pill is absolutely fine because he loves you. I am sure other people have pointed this out already, and more lucidly, which is partly why the blog never got written. Plus, a friend of mine insisted that the third book was really feminist (no, really!) and redeemed the gender politics of the first two, and that if I wanted to blog about it, it was only fair to read all three. Which I couldn't bring myself to, so that scuppered that.

- Rereading things from your childhood, especially things that scared the shit out of you. A few months ago I was suddenly reminded of a story I'd read when I was about eight, about which I could remember nothing except that it was bloody terrifying and about a Christmas pudding. So I googled 'children's story christmas pudding' and found it - result! - and it was quite a weird experience, because of course when I reread the story it turned out to be quite creepy, but with nowhere near the haunting, nebulously horrible quality I remembered. It's funny how revisiting somewhere in your mental landscape can be like going back to a place - it felt so much smaller this time round...**

- The brilliance of google. Same story as previous one...

- She Stoops To Conquer, which was the most recent play I did. There was no intellectual content to this post but I did have a wig and a costume with paniers, and being the sort of person who gets excited about that I was going to share it. (Ah, actors. It's basically all about dressing up. And being loved.***)

- The Giant Rat of Sumatra. Well, someone should.

- Progress on my adult book. Basically I finished the edits and my agent has started sending it out. As blogs go, this one would have been quite brief, because until you hear back from publishers there is really nothing to say. Although I can tell you that the rejections from the first round of submissions (apparently in adult publishing you can have lots of rounds because there are more publishing houses than in children's publishing, which is great because it means that, figuratively speaking, I haven't been knocked out yet. Although I might be at the bottom of my group. It all depends on Wales and Outer Mongo-- oh. No, wait. Sorry, I'm getting confused with the World Cup) were pleasantly contradictory. ("I wasn't entirely convinced by the Edwardian voice." "It's just too authentically Edwardian." Etc., etc.)

- Basic writing angst. Don't know why I'd bother, really, it's not as if you haven't heard it before. :)

- An update on my New Year's Resolutions. The fun ones are going well. The other ones are... well, still in the realms of possibility. Most of them.

Anyway. There might have been more potential posts, but they obviously got sucked under by the bog of daily life, to the extent that I have no idea what they were. I just didn't want you to feel that I wasn't thinking about blogging, because I was. Really. So there.

And in other news, I have just started a new book. (I am excited. It is going well.) When it's a bit more established, I shall tell you more about it. Promise. :)

Watch this space...



* Obviously there are in fact lots of things sadder than neglected blogs, like forgotten cups of tea and snails that get trodden on and people dismantling the NHS... But it was meant as a rhetorical flourish. Presumably.

** The story was 'A Christmas Pudding Improves With Keeping', by Philippa Pearce.

*** As is the rest of life, really.

Taking stock...

I'm off to Qatar tomorrow for a three-day translation conference. This is about as glamorous as my life gets - even more glamorous, and this is saying something, than medieval-lynch-mob-decorated CAKE - but this post is not simply boasting. Obviously it is mainly boasting, and I'm sure I'll do more boasting when I get back, hopefully with pictures (I'm hoping for a sunlit portrait of me against a wonderful panorama of Doha - think blazing blond hair, white shirt, English-Patient chic - although judging by previous experience all my photos will almost certainly involve lots of squinting, a sunburn line across my nose from my sunglasses, and a ridiculous hat). But... well, maybe it's just me, but I find there's something about flying halfway across the world that focuses the mind on mortality.

I am not a nervous flier. Well, no, I am a bit of a nervous flier (I don't fly very much, and it scares me for much the same reasons that I play Euromillions, i.e. the triumph of imagination over statistics), but I think this particular phenomenon is more to do with the way journeys mark milestones - the way I was strangely thoughtful before I set out for Santiago de Compostela, for example, which didn't involve any flying. Medieval pilgrims always used to write their wills before they left home, and while that was quite sensible, really, because in those days it really was hazardous, I think it's a good tradition. Then again, I have no money, so writing my will isn't really worth the time.*

But instead I have been Taking Stock of my life. And I thought I would share my thoughts with you. Just in case. (NB: this is, as you might expect given the above, a singularly self-absorbed blog-post. Please stop reading now if that's going to irritate you.)

I am thirty.** I have published five books, had seven accepted, written ten. I have had emails from people I don't know and probably won't ever know, telling me that my books have made a difference to them. I have played Juliet, Antigone, the Duchess of Malfi, Cordelia and Margaret Thatcher. I was once accosted in the street after a show by a member of the audience who wanted to shake my hand. (It was in Elephant and Castle and for a second I thought she was going to mug me.) I have walked from Le Puy to Santiago with only a few bus journeys in the middle. I can make vinaigrette, harissa and roast chicken without a recipe. I can throw a pot, replace a zip, speak French - all after a fashion - and I can ride a bike, run a mile, keep honest counsel and mar a curious tale in the telling of it. I have a scar on my forehead that I got in a dagger fight. At drama school I was given a chocolate bar by a teacher because I was the only person to walk past when he was teaching a class and considerately not let the door slam. I once sent a clipping to the News Quiz and they read it out***, which is something I am genuinely proud of.

So much for achievements. It seems quite a short list.

I have written some quite bad plays, some quite bad essays, and some quite cringe-worthy poetry. I can't hold a harmony or whistle a tune or touch the floor with my hands while keeping my legs straight. At drama school I was held up as an example to the others of how a backbone should not behave. I was a terrible Kvashnya in The Lower Depths. I have done some truly awful auditions, most of which I can now laugh at. I don't know how to change a fuse or make a Word document into a pdf file. I once made garlic soup which stayed in the plate when I turned it upside down over my head. I have never earned more than £10,000 in a year. At infants' school I dropped a guinea pig, and it still haunts me.

What else?

I have 230 facebook friends. Some of those are really friends - including, I think, some of the ones I've never met. That's nice. Five people have declared love to me, a couple more have asked me out, no one has asked me to marry them. (Or not seriously, anyway.) I have been gloriously, blazingly in love once, and less euphorically and intensely in love six-ish times, of which at least two were unrequited. I have never slept with anyone and regretted it. I have regretted not sleeping with people. (You know who you are. Probably.) I have only ever deliberately put one ex-boyfriend into a book, and it ended up being a far more flattering - and much less exact - portrait than I originally had in mind.

I've never stolen an idea for a novel. Yet.

I have never broken a bone or spent the night in hospital (except when I was born). I have never been pregnant or taken any Class A drugs. Two of my teeth are fake. I had my first filling a few weeks ago. All my vaccinations are up to date. I've tried to give blood three times, and the last time I was so much trouble they had to drive me home in the blood van and took me off the donor register.

I have written some letters for Amnesty International, given a few quid here and there to the Red Cross, signed endless petitions for Avaaz and 38 Degrees, written to my MP more times than I remember, and helped wash up coffee cups after Quaker Meeting; I delete emails from Amnesty when they've been sitting in my inbox for longer than a few days, I buy cheap clothes even though I know they're probably made in sweatshops, I'd rather get a laugh than be universally kind, I can't always be bothered to rip the plastic windows out of envelopes so I can put them in the paper recycling, I once held up a love-letter someone sent me to invite ridicule from our mutual friends, and I've done a few other things which I'm not prepared to admit to on the Internet. Morally speaking I'm probably in the red, like most of us. (Then again, they say that when old or ill people are asked what they regret, the two commonest answers are, 'I wish I'd worked less' and 'I wish I'd been less virtuous'. So, given the above, and that I have never had a proper job, I guess I'm doing fairly well.)

So... I can't think of anything else. That's it. My life in a nutshell.

OK, so this has been a really self-indulgent post. But strangely enough, it's made me feel better.



* Although, now I come to think of it, I did do my tax return this week. But that was mainly so I could spend the money I'd put aside for my tax bill. (One of the few advantages of being totally poverty-stricken is that I can proudly say I am not funding David Cameron at all. Take that, Tory bastards!)

** I was going to work in a Tom-Lehrer style gag: 'It's people like that [Alma Mahler] who make you realise just how little you've achieved. For example, when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.' Then I looked it up and found, to my disappointment, that I am still too young for that joke...

*** It was the label off a jar of sweet peppers in oil, which said, 'Why not toss into a bowl of fresh green salad?'

Thank you.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post - I really appreciate your responses. And let me say that I am a) not surprised by the overwhelming consensus from you all, and b) utterly in agreement.

As I said - I have no idea how much power I have in this situation, and as soon as negotiations start it may be indiscreet to blog about them... but for what it's worth - I will do my absolute best to stick to my guns.

I really only wanted to garner your responses, so I've taken the post down now. Given the situation, I thought it was more politic not to leave it there for ever, especially since it's now served its purpose. I hope that doesn't seem cowardly.

And again - thank you all.