Those of you who read this blog with any kind of regularity will know that I’m currently locked in a potentially unsafe spiral of typing and more typing with food, sanity, sleep and all of that other being alive stuff removed to a safe distance so that it can’t interfere – which isn’t really a spiral, now I think of it, more like being trapped in a lift in an abandoned building with – well, with me, in fact. How dreadful.
The disadvantages of this heady and artistic lifestyle have recently involved my developing an exhaustion- and anxiety-induced ear infection and going all wobbly for a few days before the antibiotics kicked in.
And this was the perfect preparation for a week spent talking to creative writing students at Warwick University. It meant I could sit in a borrowed office, facing a succession of bright-eyed and hopeful typists, waving manuscript pages (that seemed to have been both savaged by a dog and copulated-upon by some sort of red-ink-secreting insect) and simultaneously yelling, “LOOK AT THIS ! SOME OF THESE HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ! WHAT WAS I THINKING ! ? WE NONE OF US KNOW WHAT WE’RE UP TO, YOU KNOW ! SCARED ? OF COURSE YOU’RE SCARED. I WAKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF NIGHT, BLOODY TERRIFIED – BEEN LIKE THAT FOR DECADES. THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION – IT LEAVES YOU MAD-EYED AND WAVERING ! NO. I MEAN, IT WRECKS YOUR HEALTH AND RENDERS YOU FRIENDLESS ! NO. I MEANT TO SAY – IT’S A VERY GOOD THING. MADE ME WHAT I AM TODAY !”
Actually, we have another dandy crop of students this year and very few of them are scared of me. Given that all the other lecturers have spent weeks portraying A.L.Kennedy as some kind of Godawful combination of Elizabeth Bathory, Simon Cowell and Bird Flu, I have turned out to be a terrible anti-climax.
Puppies have been mentioned, there have been gifts of baking… my ability to appear even remotely evil seems to have been sapped by rewriting all night and tutoring all day. Appearing unhinged is, obviously, much easier under these (and any other) circumstances – so I’ve aimed for that. Plus, a number of undergraduates seem to have encountered me first as a stand up, so I am settling into my usual role as Temporary Village Idiot.
I did take an evening off to watch the first episode of “The Devil’s Whore” and see a variety of folk in big hair galloping about South Africa. I kept expecting a scene where someone asked Cromwell, “Isn’t that an impala ?”
“No. That’s a typically English sheep.”
“It looks like an impala to me.”
“It’s a sheep. An Edgehill, long-horned sheep.”
“I thought this bit was in Newbury.”
“Well, anyway, that’s not an impala and the thing chasing it isn’t a leopard. It’s a peasant – in a special hat.”
“God, the Civil War’s complicated.”
“Not to worry, that Andrea Riseborough will show you her knees again in a minute and then John Simm will take his shirt off – fun for all the family. And remember the old verse – When Adam delved and Eve span – we had parliamentarians who were willing to die for democracy. You wouldn’t even joke about that now, would you ? ”
There’s nothing like a bit of historical drama. That’s why I loved “Eistein and Paddington” so much – very well-crafted piece about the forbidden love of a remarkable physicist for a small Peruvian bear. This, of course, led to the discovery that God has a moustache. I was moved.
And meanwhile I’m recovering from a big double dunt of Shakespeare and that lovely feeling he leaves you with which runs along the lines of – you’re a hack, you’re a dreadful, weasely hack, you shouldn’t be allowed to touch a pencil, why do you even bother with your unmelodious and stringy bits of syllables and nonsense, you ought to be ashamed and then a bit more ashamed than that and then you might want to nail your tongue to an upper window frame, wrap it round your neck and fling yourself out into the morning – or whatever time of day would be relevant, but I’d suggest morning, that would get it over with.
Of course, low self-esteem and brooding are a narcissistic waste of energy and imagination when you’re engaged in professional typing, but I have to say that a healthy bit of awe and a good, attractive mountain top to aim at are often very useful. And I can report, to the four or five of you who are in any way interested, that I am perilously close to having finished the next book. Huzzah ! Watch this space – by the next blog I should be on to the next whateveritis I said I’d do.
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