JULY 2004
Fri 23rd July, 3.30pm
My life is currently mentaler than a mental thing wot’s had mental injections. Luckily Ally’s chicken pox, although obviously deeply unpleasant, wasn’t quite as bad as it might have been, and he seems to have recovered. But now the Big Chill’s Eastnor festival looms (at which I’m performing), and there’s tons of stuff that needs doing in preparation, not to mention all the lingering stuff from all the time recently when I haven’t had time to do stuff.
I am also doing campfire stories at a summer camp in Hebden Bridge next week. So all in all I’m going to have a rather smashing week and really shouldn’t be complaining. Which I’m not. I just have to do lots of stuff in advance, that’s all…
So I still don’t have time to do this blog justice, and will have to make do with disconnected random musings.
I have a friend who puts footnotes at the bottom of all his emails**. I simultaneously love and hate them. I love them because they are generally very funny***. But I hate them because I hate footnotes in general. There you are, happily reading away, all caught up in the momentum of the story, and suddenly the stars appear. They say to you, "Look old chap, sorry to bother you, but there is actually something else I'd like to say at this point. Still I'm not going to say it now - I'll tell you later. It's all right, don't mind me, you carry on with what you're doing, I'll just sit here quietly whistling in the corner."
Well of course your stride's all broken now, isn't it? You could carry on reading, but what if the footnote is really interesting? What if it's vital, even? You're all distracted. You can't focus on what you're supposed to be reading, because you keep wondering what on earth it is in the footnote, and it's only there at the bottom of the email, in fact if it's a short email or you're near the bottom, you might even be able to see it out of the corner of your eye.
I read a wonderfully curmudgeonly article in The Author a few months ago, written by PG Wodehouse, on exactly why he hated footnotes. His objections were similar to mine. Only he probably expressed them better.
There was a feature on Woman’s Hour the other morning about flirting, and whether you had to stop after a certrain age. They interviewed teenagers in the street who thought that anyone flirting over the age of 30 was really rather horrific and obscene. But apparently Honor Blackman is about to join the cast of Coronation St as a flirtatious woman, and she's nearly 80! So there's hope for me yet.
I only listened to WH because I was late for work (I always listen to R4 in the car, but normally arrive at 10am, just as Book of the Day is finishing). And I was only late for work because I was at work until midnight the night before. A fourteen hour day! Which is, quite obviously, ridiculous. But I really really want to catch up on the work I'm doing at the moment, and one of the good things about my job is that it is (believe it or not – I do work in IT after all) quite creative.
I have quite autonomous control over what I do, which means I plan, design, implement and test chunks of software, and sometimes get quite attached to them. But they’re very capricious and rarely behave as you would like them to. There’s nearly always a period towards the end when you are testing, and it keeps not working, and you think "OK then, I'll just fix this little bug and then it'll work beautifully and I can go home." But then another little error appears and you want to fix THAT one, and before you know it, it's midnight and the stupid bloody damn thing STILL doesn't work, you've got spots in front of your eyes from sheer exhaustion, you've forgotten to eat any tea, and you switch your computer off in disgust and go home in a huff.
Then you toss and turn all night, too tired and wired to sleep, wake up late and stumble into work late.
Still, at least it means you get to listen to Woman's Hour. It's also at times like this that you appreciate the full benefit of being caffeine free. I gave up caffeine a long time ago because it made me jittery, gave me headaches and triggered rampant heartburn. I don't even have caffeine in my tea (I am utterly addicted to "naturally caffeine free" Red Bush (and only half the tannin!)). But at times like this I only need half a cup of the strong filter coffee they serve up for free in the office, and I'm raring to go. I eat bananas too. So I can pretend I’m being healthy.
** Like this.
*** Not like this.
Wed 14th July, 8.30pm
I had a bloody lovely weekend 'on tour', doing a reading at the Llangollen Fringe, seeing Transglobal Underground live, meeting the band and being put up with them in a gorgeous house in the hills, having my birthday at SoxaN, doing another reading at Gay's the Word bookshop, visiting the "Shhh" exhibition at the V+A museum, chilling out with my sister and baby nephew Joseph, nattering madly with my new friend Francis Blake (and eating his lovely quorn), and finally appearing on BBC London radio in the middle of the night again (while Francis got quietly sozzled outside), leaving me with only two hours' sleep before catching a 7am train to Manchester yesterday morning and going straight to work.
Of course I got back to discover Ally had developed chicken pox, so I don't have time to tell you about any of my adventures, because I'm on 100% childcare and housework duties until he recovers, followed by evenings spent doing the computer programming (yes, the stuff they actually pay me for) that I'm not fitting in during the day!
So this will have to do for now. Normal service will be resumed as soon as Ally's "pooks" (Scottish for pox) subside.
Tue 6th July, midnight
[some of this blog post has been stolen from my emails to friends. again. sorry.]
So, Woman’s Hour.
It's quite a weird scenario. There you are, in this small cosy studio, just you and Jenni Murray, sitting across a big desk from one another. She's not looking particularly glamorous, cos after all it's radio and it's what she sounds like that matters. So there's this nice intimacy about it all. But over your shoulder is another room with a massive desk and tons of production staff, all watching you through a window. Which makes it all feel quite goldfish-bowly. But they were all really friendly and relaxed, and now I want to be a radio presenter!
The desk was just like when you see footage of pop stars in recording studios. And when I recorded the brief reading, we did it in one take. And I wanted to do it standing up, and they were very helpful and got me a mike stand. Listening back though, I reckon I spoke too fast and sounded over-excited.
I did get disproportionately excited about the fact that as I was taken to the studio, we passed a TV studio with open door, in which there was a full orchestra tuning up. I dunno, it all had such a wonderfully backstage behind-the-scenes feel about it. I love being backstage. I love theatres, and stages, and performance, and all that guff. And Jenni Murray is much more maternal than I expected. Not in the least bit daunting. She looked at me over the top of her glasses, but it felt very nurturing. And I made her giggle. I can’t remember who told me to make her giggle, but I did. And she made me guffaw, so we’re even.
My back is much better thanks to Graham, my lovely chiropracter. And he bought a copy of my book. He says I’m his first author, bless him. My cold has also left the building, finally. I’m a bit confused about it, as it definitely felt like ‘flu in Wales, but after a couple of days of mild temperature, it just turned into a bog-standard cold.
I’m not convinced I know what bog-standard means. I always thought it meant common-or-garden, but I heard some people use the phrase on the radio the other day, and the context implied it was more derogatory.
On Sunday we went to the Unity festival in Chorlton, and Felix became fascinated by a giant inflatable gorilla. Wherever we went he would lean back towards that end of the field, shouting “’rilla!” But then when we got close (it really was dauntingly large) he would cuddle in close and say “no like ‘rilla,” but peer out at it with delighted horror.
He also had a go on some stilts, did some headstands, very nearly went on the tightrope and went round the inflatable assault course five times. In the end we had to drag him away from it, kicking and screaming. And Ally DJed a briliant set which made the sun come out. Norman Jay would have been proud.
I’ve finally started being productive, after a brief period of email addiction. I’m trying to wean myself off them again. Really you'd think I'd know better than to keep up long email conversations when my life is already jam-packed to the gills with stuff that there's never any time to do… and the same goes for this blog, really. But no, here I am, waffling on in yet another blog entry.
But waffling is one of the great prevarication activities. That and clicking on web links that you know will probably look exactly the same as the last time you visited, but there's just the tiniest chance that something will have changed, and yup, there goes another few seconds of your life as you watch a little globe spin round and a blue line creep slowly up a progress bar...
Those bloody progress bars are useless anyway. The blue line not only moves at a different speed from one site to the next, it moves at a completely random speed depending on whereabouts on the bar it is. So what can you deduce from the fact that it's halfway along? Absolutely sod all, that's what. It means it's started doing whatever it's doing, but it hasn't finished yet. It might be another nanosecond until it's done. Then again it might be several minutes. It's a hell of a good excuse to waste time, though.
Actually, stuff that needs doing does handily wither away and die the longer you leave it. Like, the gardening needs doing. Right now. But if I leave it a couple of years (and I really did, when Felix was born) then I can just have a blitz and it'll all be fine. The longer you leave most jobs, the less urgent they become. The bathroom floor needs cleaning. If it was last done a week ago, every speck is really noticeable. If you haven't done it for several months, then each week's accumulated dirt hardly looks any different than the week before. So you may as well leave it another week. As for urgent pieces of mail, well you either do it in time or you don't. If you didn't then it’s gone, and that's that.
Emails can be left, too. The longer you leave them, the less convinced the recipients are that they're getting a reply, and the more delighted and surprised they are when they do. But I still feel the urge to reply. Because it's better than doing the bloody garden. We have a Russian vine that's "rushin'" up a BT telephone wire and from thence it will take over the world. It's already reached the telegraph pole, and now it's poised to reach at least ten other neighbouring properties. I'm waiting for BT to sue me. We're all right though, our phone's on cable.
Tue 7th July, midnight
I wrote an entry on 28th June about our weekend of 26th/27th June, but then I managed to mysteriously erase it. Here's a new attempt, although inevitably it feels like it's nowhere near as well expressed as the original. It's very vexing. Still, bygones.
Some friends of my parents have spent the last twenty years getting together each year for “The Gathering.” This is the annual celebration of Alan Oberman’s birthday, and it involves about fifty people camping for the weekend in really beautiful Welsh countryside, then having a massive bonfire, sing-song and general get-together in the evenings.
Unfortunately I not only had a bad back but I woke up on the Sunday morning with the ‘flu. I made a vague attempt to pack up the tent, and I did actually get everything into bags, but finding myself faced with the tent-squashing task (folding voluminous quantities of canvas into one tiny bag), I finally broke down and cried. I swapped packing for childcare and left Ally to get the stuff into the car while I followed Felix around ineffectively.
Every now and then people would fall over me and Felix in a cuddle puddle, he oblivious and me wiping tears away. It’s funny how I have no qualms about crying in public and yet I am useless at asking for help. I kep stubbornly insiting that I was all right, and people were forced to just ignore me and go about their business.
Luckily I discovered some Nurofen Cold ‘n’ Flu in the glove compartment on the way home. By the time we reached Manchester I was singing Ten Green Bottles to Felix with gusto. Thank fuck for pseudoephedrine.
Still, it was actually rather a lovely weekend up until the sweating, shaking, headache and fuzziness. Felix was ludicrously cute, and a big hit. We told him we were going on a bear hunt, and he spent most of Saturday shouting “Bear Hunt!” and swishy-swashying through the long grass. We also had tons of fun chasing bugs. We found two baby frogs, which he dlighted in holding. We also found dragonflies, spiders, woodlice, bumblebees and sheep. And an owl.
As usual the socialising around the fire on Saturday night was loads of fun, and we fell asleep to the sublime sound of a very talented girl called Lucy, who gave quite an amazing rendition of Summertime. And the view down the valley from the tent on Sunday morning was quite stunning.
Tue 6th July, 3pm - Juggling
Every now and then, people compliment me on managing to fit motherhood of a 2-yr-old, a full time job and being a published author into my life. At times like these I smile smugly and join in the congratulation.
It is, of course, bollocks. I'm not actually that good at juggling these things. At least one of them generally suffers, in fact usually it's all three.
To be fair, on the motherhood side, the degradation of service applies to all the peripherals rather than the actual parenting itself. Felix gets to spend a lot of time with me, and when we're together he generally has my undivided attention. It's just that we're surrounded by an uncleaned untidied ungardened home, and his feet are filthy.
The rest of the time is spent trying to find time for Novel II, writing this blog and the fun stuff (Llangollen and London this weekend - get in) and then appearing bleary-eyed at work and trying desperately to focus on computer software instead of dreaming about the next chunk of fun stuff, and googling myself.
I'm feeling quite frazzled at the moment. And if a magic fairy appeared at my elbow and offered to fill in the tax form, chase up the insurance people (who still haven't reinstated my no-claims discount after a no-fault collision with a Spanish driver TWO YEARS AGO, aaaarrgh, no, this is why I won't ring them up, because even thinking about it makes me apoplectic with rage), stop the Russian vine from taking over the local telephone exchange, clean the bathrooms and fix the broken shower-head + dripping tap, well. Let's say I'd be rather pleased. Still, we have a two-week computer- and television-free holiday in the Lakes coming up at the end of August, and after that I'm going down to a 3-day week at work. At some point. Supposedly.
Fri 2nd July, midnight
I suspect this is going to be a bit garbled because it’s been one hell of a week (caught 'flu and did my back in for a start), and I’m knackered. But I’d like to get something down, cos then I can forget about this blog again until Monday.
So. A weird cheaty mish-mash of a blog, this. I’m just going to steal a load of paragraphs from emails I’ve sent to my friends in the last couple of days. I might edit a bit here and there, but probably not much.
On Thursday, as well as being on Woman’s Hour, I was in the brand new issue of New Woman, which came out on the same day. The article is all about bisexuality, and the funniest thing is that it discusses my adolescent problem with vaginismus in graphic detail. I just think it's hilarious that the workings of my nether regions are being discussed in such detail in a national magazine. It was being passed around the kitchen at work. We had to keep sort of passing it over the men. I mean, I don't mind them reading it, but I'd rather not be there when they do.
Next weekend (10th July) is going to be a completely mental weekend for me. I'm doing a reading at the Llangollen Fringe festival on the Friday night, then being put up in some enormous house with Transglobal Underground (who are playing immediately after me in the same venue - I'm their warm-up, fancy that). Apparently the house belongs to “Jeff the Buddhist”. I don’t know why, but this makes the whole thing seem even more exciting. Much more so than if I’d just been told I was staying at “Jeff’s house”.
Then it's my birthday and SoxaN (a London Big Chill-related club night) on Saturday. Then on Sunday I'm doing a reading at a bookshop. Then on Monday I'm on BBC London radio again in the middle of the night, and then I have to catch a train back to Manchester at dawn on Tuesday and go straight to work! I feel like a rock star!
Woman’s Hour went really well. They were all lovely, and the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed, and Jenni Murray asked all the right qus (although I didn't get to talk about sex, which was a shame) – but we talked about drugs! On Radio 4! In the morning!
We also talked about Scrabble. After which I was inspired to put up a Scrabble page on this site.
I now have my very own page on the Radio 4 website, with the following heading: “How an unconventional life was the inspiration for her first novel”. More hilarity. If you follow the link, you can listen to a recording of the interview. Does this mean I’ve made it? Is this the place I’m supposed to be? Fuck knows. Well, I have at least had 6.27 of my fifteen minutes of fame. 8.73 to go.
And they loved me and they want me to go back. Not to talk about the book - I guess they've done that now - but apparently they’re always on the look-out for Mancunians who can just come in and spout about the issue of the day in one of their panel discussions. That'd be me then.... official spouter for hire. I don't know if they pay though. Ally reckons yes - he used to get paid when they got him in to be Official Spouter on R4's The Message (which I always assumed was religious, but isn't).
So there you go.
And now I'm suffering from R4 come-down with a vengeance. And I'm going to bed.
Mon 28th June, 3pm
Oh, how incredibly annoying. A whole blog entry has mysteriously disappeared. I have no idea where it is. Aaaaaaaaaaaargh. I can vaguely remember what I wrote, but there's no way I can reproduce it now. It was all about how I went camping last weekend with a bad back, then caught the 'flu, then kept collapsing in tears all over the place. Oh, how frustrating. I'll just have to write about it again another time.
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Clare Sudbery