A series for Lent.

I am grateful that I live in Bloomsbury.

It's come to my attention recently that people actually envy where I live.  My new (ish) work colleagues seem to think it must be fab living in the middle of London.  I've tried very much to convince them otherwise, telling them about the filth, the noise, the dirt, the proliferation of flesh, the litter, the constant drought, the disgusting sidewalks.  
The other day while strolling about in a relatively cheerful mood, I tried very hard to see Bloomsbury through different eyes.  Granted, in spring it does look very pretty, but even a dung heap would look pretty if a tree grew out the middle of it and smothered itself with pink blossoms every March.  I tried to get the "vibe" of Bloomsbury (it has about a million poncy restaurants and eateries) and its youth (millions of students living crammed into ex-council flats ponced up by money-grubbing right-to-buy owners) and its future (Kings Cross is quite happening these days).
But it was only today that I really began to appreciate what I have.  I had to enter a rather hellish part of London to make a desperate purchase (or pay six times the bus fare by ordering it online).  Coming back on the Bus Ride From Hell, I suddenly longed for the "quieter" streets of Bloomsbury.  For the orderly sidewalks.  For the dreaming squares.  I longed to climb up the four stories to my flat and lock the door behind me and move about in the rooms that are now, and have been for nearly twenty years, home.  And, really, Bloomsbury isn't so bad after all.  I don't much care for student life (durrrrr), nor the noise (fuckers), nor the litter (hope the litterers all burn in hell with their mouths stuffed with all the shit they dropped), nor the pollution (I worry a bit about my lungs getting me into old age), but as this is about gratitude and I've missed seven days, I'm going to try my best to find seven things about Bloomsbury that I really love and am truly grateful for:

1. Being able to walk to work in ten minutes
2. Being able to rush home for lunch, bolt some toast, and rush back, curiously satisfied
3. Being able to walk to a supermarket barely two blocks away
4. Being able to see a patch of sky from my top floor flat and, sometimes, a moon sailing across it
5. Being able to walk away from myself and walk through streets of all kinds, to all kinds of places that are nearby, places that I sometimes forget are there, and then being able to walk back again, back to myself and finding that I'm not so bad after all
6. Being able to appreciate that my flat, for all its faults and broken bits and signs of gentile poverty, is actually quite quirky, charming and interesting with its sloped ceiling, heavy crossbeams and bizarre walls (there isn't a single wall that isn't flat - there are peculiar corners everywhere)
7. Being able to write because it's while I've lived in Bloomsbury that I've produced the most work, the best work, the most mature work, ironically, since Bloomsbury is vaguely associated with the Bloomsbury Group (though I wouldn't put too much emphasis on that as it's hardly the same world as it was 100 years ago.)

I'll try to remember all this the next time I get pissed off and wish I could win the lottery and buy a tall thin house in Highgate, where I really want to live.

A series for Lent.

I am grateful for the five days of the week I don't work in my Real World job.
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A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for sleeping.  Particularly in winter.  I call it hibernating.  In summer, I hardly get any sleep what with heatwaves and cacophonous noise levels.  So pardon me if I snooze my way through winter.  It's delicious.

Weirdly, it's also World Sleep Day today!

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for movies.  My mother (a huge movie-goer) used to take me to the movies when I was a toddler.  I used to wander all over the cinema in the dark, exploring, until I was thoroughly lost.  Then I'd start shouting "mommy!" until the manager found me and returned me to my mother.  I wish I could actually remember this!
When I was around seven, we were so poor we could only afford bug houses.  The Skyline is the one I remember best.  I think there was one called the Outspan as well (or was that oranges?)  Anyway, the bug houses, or flea pits, were ancient and awful.  The floor was flat so if anyone taller than a dwarf sat in front of me, I couldn't see.  You could smoke during the movie, so the cinema was full of stinking clouds (I can't believe this used to be "normal").  There was always a double bill and the first movie was always a horror movie.  A somewhat oversensitive child, I had the kind of bloody nightmares that gore-meisters would admire.  A typical combination of movie would be The Murders on the Rue Morgue followed by Some Like It Hot.  If you were lucky, you got something that had shown quite recently, only a year or two old.  It was invariably a James Bond.
Needless to say this was before television (yes, there are countries in the world who didn't get TV until the seventies, believe it or not).
These days I hardly ever go to the cinema.  Not just too expensive but audiences have changed.  They have no intensity, no attention spans, no interest.  They talk shit, eat constantly (well, they eat shit too, come to think of it) and play with their fucking phones no matter how many times an ad comes up and tells them not to. 
I dream of having a home cinema in the basement.  It'll only have one chair in it.  Maybe two.  

A series for Lent.

I am grateful for coffee, cookies and dolphin singing.  Because sometimes it's really hard to get into the writing zone.

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A series for Lent.

I am grateful for the wind.  Particularly a northerly or north-easterly.  So cold that it slaps your face and wakes you up.  So loud it howls like a monster in the trees.  So wild that bits of tree are scattered everywhere.  So fierce you can't go out without a woolly hat, your hood up and your eyes watering.

I love a wild wind.  You don't get much of them in London.  When you do, it clears away the pollution and the filth and cleans the air so that the city feels refreshed.  The sky brightens, the sunshine lights up raindrops like diamonds and that the trees glitter.

We used to have a small dog with long flowing white hair who used to stand on the front step when the wind blew.  She stood motionless, nose lifted up, the wind howling through her long coat.  She had a faraway look in her eye.  I used to wonder where she went.

Today I stood in the wind and was transported to somewhere ancient and wild, a time before concrete and carbon emissions.  

Let the wind sweep you away!

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for editing.  Nothing I write is carved into stone.  It can be deleted, changed, pummelled into submission or reworked into all perpetuity.

Creation starts somewhere inside you - for the sake of argument, let's call it inside your head.  There, your novel, your painting, your composition (any form of art:  from a knitted sock to a rocket to Mars) is perfect.  It's a thing of beauty.  

But when you try to recreate it by writing it, painting it or designing it, it's a lump of hideous, formless, colourless clay.  Occasionally you'll get lucky (when the gods are smiling on you or you've had a seriously large shot of caffeine) and the recreation works.  Mostly, it's garbage.

This is what editing is all about:  you now have to take your formless lump of clay and work it.  You have to pummel it, chop bits out, add bits, go over it again and again.  You have to shape it and reshape it.  You have to sweat over it.  You have to research bits of it.  You have to rethink other bits.  You can even get someone else to inspect it and get their opinion, but, ultimately, the recreation is yours.

In the end, you're never going to recreate that perfect thing you created inside your head.  But you can get close.  And it takes work to get close.  With experience, you get better at it.  With time, your first lump of clay requires less work, less sweat, less tears.  

Editing isn't about fixing up mistakes.  Editing equals Art.

A series for Lent.

I am grateful I can walk. 

There have been many times when I either couldn't or was in too much pain to walk.  I had severe sciatica in my thirties that went on for several years without painkillers or any information on how to deal with it.  It's been decades but I can still remember the pain.  Everything hurt so much that I limped with both feet.

I've had back pain which made it painful to walk.

And I've had foot pain from hell. 

Screaming pain hit my right foot from nowhere.  My doctor (and everyone else) was convinced I had sprained it, despite the fact that I had done nothing to sprain it (you don't just wake up with a sprained foot.)  I was sent to have it x-rayed in case I fractured it.  After three months and increasingly stronger painkillers that did nothing except exacerbate the depression, my doctor finally realised the pain was from a pinched nerve.  Not sciatica (I would have recognised that) but just a general, you know, nerve.  I had an MRI scan (nightmare! never again!) but there was nothing weird going on in my back.  For six months I could hardly walk.  I couldn't put my foot down without it screaming in pain.  I hobbled, I limped, I cried.  I tried a walking stick but that didn't help.  However, knowing that it was a nerve in my back and not the foot itself, I persisted.  I set a target of going to Kew Gardens every month and enjoying a walk.  I walked around the squares of Bloomsbury.  After a year, it began to ease.  My fitness level had fallen to general blobbiness.  So I kept on walking until I got it back.

Then plantar fasciitis hit my left foot.  Once again, I could hardly walk.  The pain was excruciating.  I'd had it before but only for a few days, never months.  There was heel pain as well as instep pain.  Not able to walk properly, I limped, never touching my heel to the ground.  This led to  hip pain, which still, now, after two years, flares up and causes agony.  It took close to eight months for the plantar fasciitis to heal (mostly).  I can now only wear Skechers shoes (because they're spongy) with very expensive insoles to correct my feet.

When I walk now, my speed is twice that of twenty year olds, who drag along like corpses on the sidewalk.

There's pain but I keep going.  I can't run, do fancy exercises at the gym, go on marathons, attempt extreme Pilates or yoga.  But I can walk.  It's enough.

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for my daughter.  I never thought I'd have kids.  My life wasn't exactly unfolding in that direction.  So she turned up as a huge surprise, hiccuping her way into existence.  Two weeks before she was due, a midwife, whom I thought was rather stupid, couldn't work out whether my baby had turned.  A scan revealed she was breech.  An appointment was booked to have her turned but, after MUCH consideration and NO knowledge of what this involved, I changed my mind.  Still had to hang about in the hospital for five hours waiting for the consultant so that I could TELL him I had changed my mind.  The marvels of the NHS.  But upon hearing other's experiences of having their babies turned, I was hugely relieved to have made this instinctive decision.
Because hospitals don't like doing surgery on Fridays (and weekends), my baby was born on a Thursday, the day before she was due.  I requested that the operating theatre be kept quiet and dim, with all voices low and no extraneous chatting.  Into this peaceful atmosphere, my baby emerged without a tear, fast asleep until they poked her.  A single squawk and she went back to sleep again.  She was the most peaceful baby on the (truly horrible, filthy, ghastly third-world) ward and went on to be an excellent sleeper.  
She still is!
I am also, it must be said, grateful to that rather dim midwife.  There was always a different one on duty when I had my check ups and my heart sank when I saw her.  But if it hadn't been for her lack of experience and knowledge, I might never have got that scan, never have found out my baby was breech, never had that peaceful Cesarean.  

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful I have a roof over my head.  It tends to leak.  It gets baked by the sun all summer which means the flat is insufferably hot.  It slopes and I hit my head periodically on bits that I should know are there.  I have to paint all the ceilings every year to cover up the black mould.  There's a hole in the kitchen ceiling the council won't fix.
But it's a roof.  
Consider not only those who don't have one but don't appreciate the one they have.