Enjoy the longest night of the year...

After tomorrow the days get brighter!

More lavatorial humour

I have seen victorian urinals with a delicate image of a honey bee enameled on the sweet spot.

As any well bred properly educated 19th century english gentleman would know, the latin for bee is 'Apis'.

Not such a po-faced prudish bunch after all.

A crash in the kitchen suggests the mice got into the wine dregs in the washing up.

I'm too snug to go and fish drunken mice out of the washing up. They'll have to swim.

Just survived a dinner party in the cottage

5 adults, two babies, one stew.

That about as many as you can cram around the table and still breathe. The guests arrived cross country by landrover and brought coal - one of the most usual and thoughtful dinner gifts I have ever received.

Stew.

24 hours in advance - take a cast iron pot with a good heavy well fitting lid, hang over fire.

Add oil and diced bacon - sweat.
Add slices of beef shin - I left them whole, like steaks - they'll break apart easily enough.
Brown the beef on both sides.
Add 4 medium sized onions, whole but peeled, 1/2 a pound of mushrooms, a handful of tomatoes (optional), 4 peeled cloves of garlic, thyme, salt, pepper, a bay leaf and a strip of orange zest.
When all this is bubbling, pour on red wine - I think I added a pint and a half.

Clap on the lid and bring up to the boil - then stick the whole thing in a well insulated haybox, wrapped in old blankets, and forget all about it until tommorrow.

Heat for an hour, and serve the soft unctious result with spuds and cabbage, a glass of red wine and a screaming toddler.

Cheers!

Let's talk rude

I was digging through the cupboard in the back room when I found an extra chamberpot (a useful addition to any household where the privy may fall below zero on a sharp night.)

I turned it over to discover the manufacturer's mark.

It is delicately stamped 'PRICK'...

I have a one legged pheasant in the garden.

She's almost certainly a refuge from a shoot somewhere else in the valley, and has survived well over a week here in the garden, hop hop hop amoung the sheep. She gets a handful of extra feed from the bird table every day.

Funny how the solution to writing problems usually involves writing less...

... not more.

Cutting like crazy here.

from the bus - just crossing hadrians wall

Standing water is frozen to 2 - 3 inches and will bear my weight.

There's floating ice in the north tyne river.

The frost has turned even my 30 foot pine white.

I came here for a month's peace and quiet to write, expecting the cold to drive me out in november - i'm glad I decided to stay for december.

I'm not convinced that giggles are the sanest reaction to waking up in an ice cave

But it's so pretty (when I scrape the frost of the wihdows to look) and my duvet is so warm, I just can't help myself.

Perhaps I should be humming the theme from dr. Zhivago instead - you know, the frozen dacha?

Anyway, I woke up with one of the solutions to "the writing problem", so high spirits as permissable. "Sleep on it" is often the best advice. After all the story srarted as a dream, many years ago.

I'm about to hike cross-country to catch the bus to town. I day of shops and coffee and people and library is just what I need.

Hmmm... 8 inch icicles inside my kitchen.

At least it keeps the milk fresh!

Lunch from the ashes

Take an unpeeled onion and wrap it in a sheet of damp newspaper. Tuck the parcel into the ashes of a log fire.

When the paper has finally burnt away the onion is done. Split, scape out the soft core and eat with butter and pepper, or soft cheese.

Yum.

We have the most beautiful still hoar frost under a blue sky. Everything is white, every leaf, blade of grass, wisp of moss or cobweb.

This morning I paused for a few seconds on a large flat rock while walking in the wood over white grass. Within that tiny space of time my boots froze to the rock. It felt tacky, like glue...

Coldest morning yet - delicate flowers of frost etched on the inside of every window

Walking on the bone dry frozen fell behind the house sounds like the
crackle of gunfire. All the sheep have come up to the shelter of my
walls, and loom out of the mist under my trees. I took pictures - I
hope they come out.

Still no connection, so this will be posted sometime in the future -
near future I hope. I am walking towards broadband and central heating
for the afternoon, but right now I am just thawing out with a mug of tea
and Radio 4.

Still no solution to the writing problem. I've tried all the sort cuts
- working on another section, proof reading - I just need to solve the
order of about 10 key scenes, so that I believe that one character (who
I like) would participate in the torture of another character who he likes.

I worry that much of my story is bad science and bad history; one of the
characters is a member of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi's corrupt "Ancestral
Heritage" think tank, who started by faking pre-history and ended up
murdering men women and children in concentration camps in the interests
of "science". They aren't a joke - historians need as much ethical
rigour as physicists and biologists. Perrhaps more, when fantasies of
racial and cultural purity and past injustice are used to justify
mass-murder.

So I am terrified that by writing about Bad Historians in an
entertaining way I am just further muddying a very murky pool.

Actually that may help me - my Character's remorse at the crimes he
commits must be the drive the story needs to drive it to resolution.

I just don't believe it yet.

My domain host changed all my mail passwords without warning...

Me and all other users.

I wonder what security scare prompted that?

They didn't even put a note on the home page. 24 hours and several
attempts to get into the control panel to find out what had happened,
and another day to get a connection strong enough to log-on and reset
the password.

I'm just glad I found a solution.

Radio silence

My normal email account is out of order and my phone battery is about to die and I left the usb charger cable at the bottom of the hill (and even if it had a full charge I don't know how far I could go towards fixing this on a little pda) - this is a major comms disaster!

Luckily I have lots of work to do- I hit another script problem, and I am busy sorting that out - it's just as terrifying as the last one, but I am just a touch more confident that I can stick it out and fix it. (well enough)

Totally stuck again...

I can not get this thing to work... I just don't understand my antagonist, and each time I try a solution, it throws up a worse problem.

Damn you, Conflicted German Guy, why won't you play nice? And I was so close!

To make matters worse there is something amiss with my main email account, so I can't receive...

Arggh!

Opps..

... I am getting through a pint of whisky a week.

Oh well, it's all central heating of a sort. The sky is full of stars and the
windows on the north side are icing up.

I'm within a few pages of completing this draft. Then revision, and I'm done,
(just two months late)...

I'll take a break for Christmas (plenty of background reading still to do) and
then start thinking about the next - full - draft.

Another hour of work tonight, then off to bed with two hot water bottles and a
wind-up radio.

Now - this really is cool...

Just came home by starlight. The grass is already crisp with ice, and it's not even 6pm.

The met is forecasting 4 degrees of frost. You can add a degree to that on the fell. You can bet i've already checked all the windows.

Wayhay! An excuse to open the whisky (again).

No wonder it was a little chilly last night.

I pulled back the bedroom curtain to find that the window was wide open all night. I'd propped it open when I headed out with the laundry, intending to air the house. It certainly did.

Just goes to show how well sheltered the house must be. I snuggled down last night listening to the roar of wind in the oaks, with not an inkling that my nose was only 6 feet from an open window. The curtain didn't even twitch.

It seems to have blown my cold away

Freaking cold...

I am working in fingerless mitts. My face is tingling with cold - it's almost refreshing...

It snowed yesterday - everything washed away over night.

Tip for the day - peppermint oil really works against mice. They avoid any surface wiped with it. And it smells fabulous.

The Night of the Living Deadline - part deux.

Like 28 Days Later this one has a happyish ending. (Sorry if that spoils the
movie for you, but any one with a taste for zombie movies really should have
seen it by now, and any one who hasn't may be reassured enough to watch it).

The realization that I was so many weeks behind my own schedule, and no where
close to a solution precipitated a magnificent "Lost Weekend" - hangover, sofa,
movies, the penultimate episode of Heroes, long into the night, followed by a
few hours of staring into the darkness, desperate to sleep. I mean by that
every sane cell in my body screaming at my stupid skull to switch off and let us
rest, while the skull entertained lurid yet banal fantasies of failure and
starvation and a wasted life. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Even my misery was proving
uncreative and dull.

I ended up re-reading Edward Rutherfurd's London: the Novel, which is one of
those books which is shockingly bad and thoroughly entertaining. It has to be -
it's XXXX pages long. The research is impeccable (and reproduced in bleeding
chunks every 80 pages or so - how to build a coracle, what a kiddle is and why
the king banned them from the Thames, the origins of the whores of Southwark,
etc, etc), and one has to root for a historical novelist who names his 13th
Century heroine "Tiffany" (it is an authentic name, but what cohones!) Tiffany
is 15, oval faced, slender and small breasted. As are the majority of
Rutherfurd's heroines from 55AD to the present day.

So that's the bad place. I realise that the story I have been trying to tell is
probably untellable after all, and because I am 3 miles cross country from the
nearest pub, drown my sorrows in pulp fiction rather than booze.

This is just a long way of saying that crucial breakthroughs always seem to need
a few day of despair.

It didn't come in a flash of inspiration. It came from 8 hours with a note pad
and pen, scribbling, working out, tearing up, pacing, more tearing up (good
firelighters), more scribbling...

By 10pm I thought I might have a solution, but off course, I was delirious from
sleep deprivation, and wasn't sure if any of it made sense, or, if it did, I
would remember it in the morning. I made one last page of notes - in capitals -
that I hoped I would be able to interpret the next day, and fell in to bed.

That was a week ago. The solution I had been seeking for 5 years is in sight,
and the story is falling into a meaningful pattern at last.

So what was the key?

Well, turns out it was the scene that I have never been able to write – for all
those years I have scribbled a placeholder ("X questions Y, Y doesn't break, X
holds Y for further questioning"). What would Y say to X that would convince Y
to X her live it relative freedom for another 5 days? I always put that off,
for the time when I had the rest of the script working. Dumb, huh?

When I finally wrote it – having nowhere else to go – I realised that whatever Y
told X was a lie, and the audience would know it was a lie (because they already
knew what had happened to bring Y to that point.) and at that point the whole
story became a yawn. Everything else I had written to cover that was melodrama
and co-incidence, and could now been seen through. It was trash.

Hence the melt down.

The solution started in exactly the same place – with that troublesome
interrogation, and what each participant thinks they know before and afterwards,
and the story unwinds from there….

It took me another 24 hours to get the spine of scenes down, and now I have to
write or edit them into the step. All the melodrama has melted away. All the
improbable skills and co-incidences are ashes in the fireplace.

It may not be a brilliant piece of writing, but at last it has a beginning, and
middle and an end, and an interesting way for my poor characters to get from one
to other without becoming ciphers or puppets.

Just brought the christmas tree indoors. Far to early, but at least in these tempretures it won't drop before the 25th. Besides, if i'd left it outside it would have blown over the hills and far away by now.

Wonder what the mice will make of it? Apart from dinner, that is.

Tropical skies and deadlines

The advantage of being so cold is that mild mornings like this feel tropical.
At sunrise the sky turned blue, the birds started to sing, the breeze was sweet,
and for a few moments it felt like Mexico.

There is no getting around the fact that I am almost two months behind schedule.
I hoped to have the step outline of the script finished by the end of October.

The whole point of taking time out to write this project was to solve some
fairly fundamental problems with the structure. The story has three time frames,
three protagonists and three major locations. Making that work in a way that is
still interesting, entertaining and meaningful is a bitch.

It proved impossible to do while I was still working full-time as a copywriter.
Even when I was working 50 hours a week I could manage 1500 words a day. I
got up at 6, hopped on a train, bought a coffee and wrote like crazy in the
Caffe Nero around the corner from the office. I left work at 6, or 7, or
sometimes 8, and, headed back to the same bar to hack out another page or so.

Some of those 1500 words were almost good enough...

But there were two overriding problems. First, I couldn't find enough brain
cells and time to revise the structure of the storytelling. It just made my
brain ache. And secondly, every holiday I took was spent in bed with antibiotics
and an interesting opportunistic infection. I would just be at the stage when I
could dress myself and crawl into sunlight when the holiday would end and I
would be back at my desk.

So, there I was, in September, with the miraculous support of Screen WM, able to
take a break from the salary trap and final sort the damn script out.

Looking back, a month was an absurdly short time to give myself. I suppose I had
spent so long wading through separate scenes, sections, sequences that I could
no longer see the who structure at all.

Every day I turned up at the keyboard and tried a new approach. Scratch pads,
flow diagrams, re-reading old drafts, research, long walks, reading other
scripts - even just making sure I wrote 6 pages every day...

I kept coming to the same spot in the script, and coming to a full stop - it
didn't work, I didn't believe any of it, and the patient was dead on the table.

Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, no matter what I did I woke up in the same
place the next morning....

I am surrounded by sex; it's tupping time in the hills, and every field and fell around me is full of randy sheep.

The local crop is hillbred crossbred lambs, which are sold each autumn to lowland farmers for fattening. The ewes are hardy blackfaced mountain sheep - swaledales I think, and they have the look of goodtime girls slightly past their best - narrow sweet sootyblack faces, framed by curly horns like hoop earrings, shaggy white coats, and black stockings. They are up for a good time after a summer as single mums, herding together to eat and natter, buck and fight.

The tups are nowhere near as pretty or as bright. Dumb bone-headed roman-nosed Leicester lummoxes, in short sheepskin jackets. All they need are little porkpie hats at an angle to complete the look.

Two rams to a field, and they never stop doing what rams do. I've been out at midnight, in 3 degrees of frost, the air cracking with moonlit ice, and have found them stretching their huge snouts into the air to sniff out the ladies.

I've been travelling, checking up on home, catching up with family, friends, flatmates and the foremost points of interest in current British Culture (i.e., the Tate Crack and recent episodes of Heroes), and pretty much lost my regular connection to the WWW.

I did however work, and I am very close to completing a step-outline of the script. I'm 30 days behind schedule, and trying not to let that worry me - the structure of the last act took much more sorting out than I had anticipated. I hope the northern breezes blowing through my skull have sharpened the brain rather than addled it, (they do make my fingers a little stiff in the morning, so spelling can be a little eccentric) and that I have a suitable structure to start hanging a film on.

I've come back to the cottage to find that winter has descended from the fell. It was blowing in when I left, stripping the last leaves from the sessile oaks, and tossing the crows about the sky.

Now we have had the whole range of winter weather - including snow, which I missed by 90 mins. My train pulled into Hexham station just as the last traces melted away, leaving only salt.

The colours have all changed - all the yellow is leached out of the grass, leaving that wonderful blue-grey they call "wintergreen", and has fled upwards to the fell where the bracken is the colour of ginger biscuits or a new welcome mat.

It's still wriggling with life - two days ago I saw a weasel, bright red, leaping from the water trough to the old tank and back into the rushes. Adders have been seen (not alas by me) sunning themselves on the walls. My missing frogs turned up in the scrub around the burn, big and fat and old and wary.

Last night was full moon and frost - I could see from one side of the valley to the other, and all of it sparkling.

But inside I am warm enough, and dry enough. I have cracked to the extent that I am lighting two portable LPG heaters - one in the bedroom for 15 minutes before I slip under the quilt, one downstairs first thing in the morning, and on very cold nights after 9pm.

And I have water, blessed running water, thanks to a swift decision by my landlord. The contractor brought a mini digger up to the fell, and for two days this week two men worked in the pouring rain to capture the original spring (using a box, pea- shingle and masses of the sticky impervious bright yellow native clay), dig in a new settling tank 100 yards above me, and run a new pipe down.

seconds after the connected the new pipe to the original, water gushed at at least one bar pressure from the old brass kitchen tap, bringing with it all the peat that had clogged the older one solid. After two minutes of high velocity black mud I had clear water. No more wading through the mud to collect from a stream.

I'm looking out now for a replacement for the 19th C sink, which disappeared some time ago - a shallow stoneware slopstone, wide and shallow enough to stand pans and jugs, wash and prep veg, gut fish etc.

Now that I know that there are weasels in the wild wood, and that I am constant enough to stick out the cold weather, I finally feel more like tough wise old Badger, and less like eccentric fly-by-night enthusiast Mr Toad.

Ahem... Nervously clears throat.

I'm back online.

Border Reivers

I have always felt at home - in the sharp, biting challenge of 'rightness' rather than comfort - in border lands. I grew up in the space between England and Wales, never quite sure if we belonged to the bleak beauty of the black mountains or the enfolded green and red and gold of Hereford and Worcester.

One year I spent Christmas in a house which literally straddled that border, in the village of Clyro. It seemed appropriate, given that I entertained both my parents that year, one on Christmas day, one on Boxing day, as at the time it seemed easier to bring down a wall in Berlin as to imagine them sharing the same space and time.

My ancestors' graves are scattered on either side of that border, both sides partaking equally of Welsh and English DNA. Coal merchants, magistrates, china dealers, farm labourers, army officers, parlour maids, professors, factory hands.

In the years since I have discovered other landscapes that invoke the tooth of recognition - of rightness, home, and only now do I realise that they are all border lands, liminal places; seashores and coastlines and the meeting places of language and cultures.

Some borders are more extreme - the limits of human life themselves; I have slept best in a hammock below the waterline of a ship, the dark Atlantic ocean running inches from the tip of my nose. I have perched in the mast, swinging between the great dome of air and the vast disc of sea.

It's there in the stories I try to write - the meeting of Ethiopia and Europe through the medium of approximate translation, the exchange of culture on a pacific island in 1789, between the islanders who swim, and the men of the sea who drown.

And even now I am writing this in the new border my family have settled in - among the Border Reivers of Northumberland, where boundary disputes still rumble between families with 800 years of cross-border raiding history.

This one is funny....

Monday morning is swimming. I share a car into Hexham, 30mins away at. 7.30 am. But as i live at the top of a wood, this means waking at 6.30, dressing in the dark and cold [no fire] and walking 25 min through the trees by starlight. I have to be 'very brave', [more about the getting up than the walking.

This morning I had a landrover. This does not make things faster as I have to stop to open and close 5 gates.

But when my alarm went off, I Did It.

I put my head down, ignored the pain and the desire to crawl back into my lovely warm bed, and dressed and drove and opened and closed and admired the stars swinging overhead and...
...hang on a mo...
...the clocks went back last night, it should be light by now...
And I checked the dashboard clock with bleared eyes. It was 1.38 am.

Bloody alarm clock.

I had two choices - drive back through those 5 gates to a cold dark house, crawl back between the cooling sheets and do the whole thing all ovee again in 5 hours time.

Or sneak into my sister's house, curl up on the sofa and hope not to be blasted away by a spooked neighbour with a shot gun.

I just been woken by a txt. Swimming is cancelled.

Shocked to discover what a reactionary I am...

... I have caught myself musing that perhaps we got it abiut right by 1750 [industry, agriculture, shipbuilding, music, sanitation, food etc] and it's been downhill ever since.

I'll just go and die of childbed fever to cure myself of this ludicrous opinion.

Today

7.30: woke up to a pale window. Listening to radio 4 in bed while watching the painted cows appear from the mist. It's warm in here, cold out there.

7.55: deep breath, slippers and wrapper on, downstairs. It's still dark enough to need a light. Light the fire, make tea, draft writing plan for the day and tidy up last night's notes.

9.00: wash, dress, make breakfast; bacon and eggs. It takes almost an hour to get the fire hot enough to cook.
I'm still looking for a way of warming plates without cracking them or knocking them flying. There isn't a good place by the fire.
I suspect a hot water container may be the key... will have to look up the reference books to see what devices were being used in the 18th/19th C and improvise around that.

10.00: Write

11.00: Fetch water, top up the filter, wash up and clean kitchen. The mice are slacking. Perhaps they are having lie-ins too. Or maybe they have moved on to pastures new for the winter.

11.30: Writing again - a whole new scene, a whole new character, distilling pages of backstory and exposition into one short conversation that also sets up the next scene and drives my character on. If I've got it right - result!

12.30: Stack firewood. I have a log pile in the yard, and another in the porch, where it dries out before I bring it in. Looks like I will have to order more within the next week - and start sawing my own to make it go further.

1.00: lunch: Chilli beans. The chilli powder is red hot - my nose is on fire! Very satisfying.

1.30: writing again. The next scene is a very old one, a set piece love scene, but it now sits better in the whole structure and drives the plot. (I hope).

2.30: clean pheasants for tomorrow's soup. They are a gift from the ruggedly handsome landlord who happens to be my brother-in-law, and leant the cottage a rural film set look for a short while, hanging beside the porch. I've no use for a whole bird, and no way to roast them anyway, so I skin them and take off breasts and legs to cook with raisins and a little wine.

Then I sat and finished a curtain to hang in the bedroom. I bought the fabric in Kelso 10 months ago; curtain making has been a very stop-start project, slowed down still further by problems with a borrowed sewing machine. The onset of winter is more than enough encouragement to finish them by hand.

5.00: write - almost completed a whole section today.

7.00: The Archers, supper, book of the week (The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. Read an interview with the author, who is famously agoraphobic, and so researched the entire novel, which is set in Canada, without being able to visit the country. If she hadn't been open about her illness would anyone have commented on this? The novel is set in the 1860s - she hasn't visited there either. That's what writers do. I like her.
"Why is one of the characters gay?" "Some people are you know."

8.00: write - finishing up for the day.

9.00: Connect up the disc drive and watch the second half of The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

Tomorrow I have a lift to the swimming pool at 7.30. This means getting up and down the hill in the dark. Could be interesting!

Yay! Sleet!

And it's only just past Trafalgar Day...

And island in a still sea of mist. Every blade of grass, every leaf, every berry edged with ice.

I understand now, in my bones, exactly why our ancestors wore caps to bed..

It's 10pm and there is a helicopter flying way over to the south - the only sound over than the fire and the tick of the laptop.

This is a different kind of writing: I am going over a house I first started building 5 years ago, on the limited foundation of a 10 page sketch. As it has expanded with each draft it has grown in scope and complexity, but with flaws – usually sections I have papered over, to bridge a gap, to fill an area that I haven't fully researched because the books were slow coming, or which I needed to cover to meet a deadline. In time some of these were repaired – but others remain hidden under Gothic flights of prose or fascinating scenes, traps just weighting for my narrative to trip over or fall through and bring the whole structure down.

Now for the first time there is time to strip down and find them all, and it is fascinating and challenging.

For example – in the two most recent drafts my protagonist climbs into the mountains with partisans and makes maps. The question is raised – how is a 21 year old graphic designer able to make maps? And why are maps needed?

I look at this and have to be honest. She is making maps because I want her in the mountains, and I want her in the mountains because I have a terrific scene coming up where she makes love among the rocks with a partisan.

Do I go back and make her a mapmaker from the outset, give her an army background (daughter of a military surveyor perhaps?)? Do I weave images of maps into the visual texture of the entire film? Well, no, because that is not what this film is about. (The other film, about the shipwrecked boy who grew up to chart the Australian coast, and who was tattooed from shoulder to knee – now that film is about maps...)

Or do I strip right back, through all the wanna haves and quick fixes and wallpaper bodges that this mountain section of the script contains, and take the time to write it properly, even at the risk of losing my rocky sex scene.

Being here in the hills means I find have time to stop and rip and pull and let the fresh air in, and build a good structure, and only then start to find the right words to make it live. And that's a very new experience.

Cooking: Sloe gin. Found about 20 lbs of sloes (wild plums) in the hedgerows; I started picking on my own but the landlord got intrigued, then enthusiastic, and my two pounds turned into a vast haul in several sacks. They are all in the freezer at the bottom of hill, waiting for bottling. (Freezing breaks down the tough skins, which otherwise need pricking. 1 Lb of sloes, 4 oz of sugar, 1 pt of gin (or vodka – gin was traditionally the only clear spirit available in this country until the 2nd half of the 20th C) Bottle and shake every other day.

After 3 months the liquor is a rich purple, and the dry bitter sloes have worked an extraordinary alchemy to produce the richest, most flavoursome drink imaginable. It can be drunk at once, although it improves still further with keeping.

Reading: Ball of Fire by Antony Brett-James: rats, my copy is damaged, with pages missing just as the partisan leader, Ras Seyoum – a key figure in the film – is launching a wild attack on the Italian fortifications. I shall have to hike to the library and order another copy and hope that it arrives in good time. If not it will have to wait until I can get to the British Library in November.

Watching: The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Lovely storytelling.

Smoke gets in your eyes - and hair, and clothes and lungs...

First time back at the cottage for almost 2 weeks – the leaves have fallen and light is falling on the West side for the first time in months. The mice have been slacking – almost no damage.
Found a hedge of sloes which I will convert into gin for Christmas tomorrow

Falling leaves

Back in Northumberland, nursing the last of the cold, as a guest of my lovely sister and bro-in-law, who have an aga (bliss).

It is the coldest morning to date – verging on frost and with a dense white fog. The Beech tree beyond the door is shedding leaves so fast it looks like golden snowfall, with a similar crispy whisper.

Today is the first day I feel inclined to work again – I am making use of the Aga to stay in pajamas and try to make up for lost time on the step-outline.

I have been working on the same story now for 6 years (not exclusively, of course, but pretty consistently. The thought process is different – a series of small "aha!" as I rehearse the possibilities while walking.

This story has its origins in a sickbed. In 2001 I had been writing short stories for under a year, all arriving as a result of internal conversations, "what ifs" and being resolved into finished pieces within a few days I actually used to rush home from work to complete them in a hot flush of invention. There was no room for any other words in my head.

Then I got bronchitis after a bad winter cold – exacerbated by the fact that my desk at the time was in a basement, which was also used as a smoking room by other employees. The window next to which I perched was thickly coated with tar, so that the light filtering down from street level had a sepia glow to match the 1950s conditions. I had a bar heater on one side and the PC to the other to provide heat. A year later the

It took me almost 4 weeks to recover. When I tried to return to work the smoke drove me straight back to bed within two days.

I was soooooo bored of the hours spent swaddled in bed – upright to relieve the strain on the lungs, listening to the radio, sleepless through the night, listless through the day and living on soup. I doodled as a listened, a woman in a black coat running down a the stairs from a court room, a man following who had believed she was dead, who needed to know why she had disappeared. It was a scene I had created and run through my head for amusement for almost 15 years. I tried to remember where it had come from. A dream about a desert, a crashed jeep, a woman with a rifle and two lovers. For the first time I tried to write it down.

4 hours later I had 15 pages of single line typescript, starting:

*****

INT. WATERLOO STATION. DAY

Ellen alights from the train in the smoky grey dawn light, carrying a small vanity case and a handbag. She passes porters, early morning workers, mail bags being unloaded, two West Indian Airmen with kit bags, international travellers from the boat train, a cleaner sweeping the concourse.

She searches in her purse for change. She is wearing close fitting black leather gloves.

She opens her purse. No change, only notes.

She buys a newspaper with a 10-shilling note. The seller grumbles.

She enters the ladies rest room, and uses a penny to open a cubicle door.

INT. LAVATORY CUBICLE – DAY

Ellen locks the door and lowers the seat. She kneels on the cubicle floor, places the vanity case on the seat in front of her and opens it. Rummaging inside she retrieves the parts of a handgun and assembles it - with remarkable efficiency. She is still wearing the gloves. She puts the gun in her handbag.

********

It's very different now. But so is the rhythm of writing, and that is why I am procrastinating by blogging instead of working!

Suffolk

Suffolk is even more isolated (in some respects) than the cottage up North! I have no phone signal at all her – not for miles, and, of course, no internet. I’m am going to load this into the phone on the off change that I get a signal while walking today.

The studio itself is one end of a thatched barn, at the end of a range that includes a house, a furniture-maker's workshop, a potter’s workshop and a teashop. That sounds crowded and noisy, but it isn’t. In fact we have barely heard a soul since arriving.

The barn has been beautifully converted and furnished by the furniture maker, Graham Hussey and his wife Honor, the potter; it’s all wood, and has a the dry oaky smell I recognise from the 18th Century boathouses at Portsmouth. It’s easy to spot the old and new beams, but not from any lack of harmony between them. Some of the original weatherboard has been reused and lime-washed, and the fingers can trace out the graffito of the 19th children who played here – a complete alphabet, two little boats (the higher the better drawn, as fits the older child) and a date, 1892.

In short, it’s light, and bright, and warm and airy, with great views and striking open plan sleeping gallery. I would recommend it to any one looking for a quiet week with a friend.

In the meantime I am reading the blogs of 1941 – “Private Battles” edited by Simon Garfield, the latest addition to his collection of Mass Observation Diaries, which now cover 1938 – 47. (“Our Hidden Lives”, “We are at War”.

Informative, curious, gossipy, intimate, astonishing – the everyday life of men and women in the 1940s is compulsive reading, and the long dead contributors (“Herbert Brush”, amateur poet, 83, “B Charles”, perpetually pursed antique dealer with an eye for working class boys, “Pam Ashford”, thirty-something secretary in Glasgow with a satirical pen and a difficult canary) will live on in the imagination for years after.

Schedule for the week

Ignore this - nothing here but an attempt to shame myself into sticking to a writing schedule by making it public.

Wednesday 17:
read accounts of battle of Keren 1941; sketch out corresponding sections of step-outline (7,8)

Thursday 18:
rough draft of sections 7,8 (Guerilla activity in the mountains)

Friday 19:
revise sections 7,8; order books from local library; letters

Saturday 20:
Brainstorm section 6 (the siege of Keren/Asmara)

Sunday 21
Reading day

Monday 22
Structure section 6

Tuesday 23
Section 1....

Bugs and dustbusters

The week in Suffolk ended on a snuffly note - I caught a chill walking from
Orford to Butley through the woods in the rain.

Haven't written a word since - too busy hiding under the covers with a stash of
tissues and laudanum reading up on natural (and other) disasters, which always
cheers me up.

My flatmate's awesome mother stayed in the London flat while I was away -
awesome because she scrubbed every room from top to bottom and transformed it.
The bath sparkled, the walls shone. And then she cooked goulash and left in the
fridge for me. I've never met the woman (I have spoken to her on the phone, but
as she speaks no English and I speak less Magyar they were short conversations)
but I want to hug her.

I should explain that the flat was a cheerless wreck when I moved in – It had
been trashed by previous tenants and needed to be steam cleaned over two days
before I could move in. This left many corners of grime and dinginess to tackle
and smashed fittings to repair, but as I was in a plaster cast at the time, and
trying to catch up at work, mush of this wasn't tackled at the time.
Redecorating was postponed while we chased an insurance claim against the owner
of the flat above us, which seems to spring a leak every second month. And we
got used to the lime-dulled taps and streaky walls.

It took a skilled and determined woman to put us straight.

Mrs. Ambrus, I salute you. And your goulash rocks.

Score to date...

4 miles of orford shingle
6 avocets
2 heron
2 egrets
2 curlew
1 shelduck
10 cows
5 smoked sausages
3 scenes

Eastward Ho

Having been in the North for two weeks I am now in the east - Suffolk (Orford to be precise.)

It was in a converted pigsty a few miles from here, in 2002, that I wrote the first draft of Translations. I'd been stuck at home with bronchitis and wanted to escape. Foot and mouth had left holiday cottages empty, and so I was able to rent the pigsty (which was very sweet). I took a pound of coffee, my very first suitcase and an elderly 'laptop' running windows 3.1 and textpad. Without a car I was forced to walk everywhere.

The story came out in huge chunks - 4 hours at a time.

This time there are more distractions (i.e., company) but I am gratified to discover that the story is coming in big blocks. Must be all that sky.

Doesn't get much better

Solved some major act 2 problems on the script, the rain is falling past the open door, I have a glass of red wine and a fat cuban cigar. All I need is a sailor on leave to make life perfect.

I just hosted a dinner party in the cottage - with half of the guests under the age of two. It was noisy but entertaining and has left a mound of washing up.

Back to the keyboard in 30 mins.

All the curses of hell fall on the heads of spammers

At regular intervals [say every 2 weeks] some mf spoofs my address to send bulk mail, and my mail box crashes under the weight of returned mail. This is irritating enough when I have broadband, a laptop and a mail filter. When I am on a mountain relying on the webbrowser on a mobile phone it is heartbreaking. I haven't been able to read mail for 48 hours... I can clear it out in the library tomorrow, but right now I am feeling really un-buddhist in my desire to inflict pain on the bastards who have hijacked my mail.

Lunch for the [deputy] landlord...

Baked beans, cottage style.

Two pork ribs, trimmed off a bit to make supper tomorrow, and a piece of smoked bacon, chopped - browned over the fire for 5 minutes or so.

Added a chopped onion, garlic, then a few minutes later, a tablespoon of brown sugar.

Opened tin of tomatoes - and sod it, the new 99p tin opener doesn't work. Curse Robert Dyas then open tin with brute force.

Add 'tin opener' to the shopping list chalked onto the mantel piece.

Added tomatoes to pan. Wiped the fine spray of tomato juice from my face. I probably look like Paul Bettany in Gangster No. 1. The tin died hard...

Added black pepper, bay leaf, majoram - no salt, salt hardens beans.

Added bowl of white beans soaked overnight and water from kettle.

Brought to boil for 10 minutes.

Now, if I had a hay-box, i'd have slid it in there and left it for 4 hours. I don't, so the pot went into the lpg stove in the back-kitchen.

Mmm - lovely smells. Time for breakfast, and a 2 hour stint at the keyboard

Only two hours work today - i'll have to do better tomorrow. Most of the day was taken up with learning to drive a landrover, then carrying stuff up to the cottage in it - an old windsor chair, a zinc chest to store food in, etc.

Home made baked beans taste remarkably like heinz, oddly enough.

Picked a pocket full of blackberries on the way home - i'm eating them with greek yogurt.

Called home to Hereford - it's still summer down there as far as the fruit is concerned.

Reading: Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers. Silly book. Nothing like as strange, funny and moving as The Nine Tailors. Just a lot of unlikable suspects and some train timetables. And almost NO Bunter...

I wonder if I should learn learn to fly-fish. There's salmon in that river..

Bah - turns out I can post to this blog from the cottage, but not moderate or comment - so that will just have to hang on until I have babysitting duties at the bottom of the hill and can use a real computer.

Meanwhile, either:
A - it's a mild night.
B - i'm toughening up.
C - the place is finally warming through.
D - any combination of the above.

I know this to be the case as I just found myself with no clothes on while getting ready for bed. Didn't manage that when I was here in july!

The pop-pop-snap-hiss of a log fire is one of the loveliest sounds in the world. Seriously.

Just clocking off - 4 hours work on step-outline, trying to make sense of the different stories that make up the whole.

Nice egg and a pot of tea, then a few chapters of Bleak House, which i've had on the go since I got stuck overnight at JFK overnight in June.

Landlord climbing up for lunch tomorrow, so I am soaking beans.

Have to remember to borrow the sewing machine on Saturday and finish putting curtains up before I freeze.

I've cracked under the strain of living wild.

I just caught myself collecting sheeps' wool from the gate to leave out for my mice, so they won't be tempted to carry off my socks. Commit me, now.

I will be living for the next few weeks in a cottage on the edge of England – much further north and I'd be in Scotland. It has the potential to be bleak, but it's actually quite a gentle landscape in the eyes of someone brought up within sight of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains. Drier too.

The northiness does have quite an impact on the seasons; in Herefordshire summer is only just over – here it feels like deep Autumn. The skies are blue, but there is frost on the breeze, and the grass is dying back rapidly on the hillside.

So far, so picturesque – what I should also mention is that the cottage is over a mile from the road (a brisk climb through oak wood land), has no electricity (wood stove, oil lamp, solar radio (Radio 4 and 3), extended life battery for this laptop, and no running water, (trips to the spring at the back.)

It's not as isolated or hard as it first sounds – I have family at the bottom of the hill, who are being very tolerant in regard of hot showers, laundry and TV. I am updating the blog via the mobile phone (but can't comment on any entries until I hit the wonders of broadband at the weekend.

In fact it's rather blissful; my breakfast is cooking on an iron bakestone (a little bit of the Welsh Borders that I brought up here with me), the coffee is popping over a pot-warmer, and I am planning a day's writing, the third full day since I started my short sabbatical from the world of paid employment to complete the script.

I'm using the opportunity to visit various parts of the family while working – in October Orford in Suffolk, in November back to Wales and Hereford, with research and movie time in London (in time for the festival.)

When I can, I'll post some pictures of the cottage and my desk.

Running a live test

I am updating this by email from the North Cloister of Westminster Abbey (a delightful spot with a healthy draft and a fairtrade coffee offering to mitigate the chill of the stone seating.

It's good to know that the Abbey still resembles nothing so much as a national auction house, the bays are crammed hugger-mugger with beds, chairs, stacked portraits, chipped busts and broken vases, all in magically odd conjuction with each other. There is the same tender shock at recognising long dead affection in the portrait of a child, or a faded postcard from the front, lost in the back of a drawer. Poet's corner is, of course, the book section…

Happy (Ethiopian) New Year everyone!

Wednesday was the first day of the 3rd Millenium in the Ethiopian
calendar (which is based on the Coptic Church calendar).

I spent Tuesday evening in Trafalgar Square, with what looked like at
least 3000 Ethiopians and their friends, partying "like it's 1999" for
the very last time.

September is a great time to start the year. It's still warm enough to
sit out, barbecue and drink wine (or Tej) at midnight.

Words from a Recovering Perfectionist

One of the most toxic proverbs which blight attempts to become better at something (whistling, skimming stones, speaking French, ironing shirts, writing films) is “If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well”.

Not because it is intrinsically wrong, but because it casts an unspoken shadow over an endeavour every time it is conjured. “If a thing isn't done well it is worthless [and so are you].”
I come from a perfectionist background, where if you don't excel within the first few attempts at something, the attempt to learn is abandoned for fear that you will come second, or look ridiculous. The idea of doing something badly because you are learning how to do it well – or even, just for fun – is unknown.

I (re)started writing 7 years ago, during a long summer of semi-employment. I walked into my first screenwriting class in the second week of September that year. And I scored some easy hits – so far, so good. In keeping with tradition I expected instant results, which of course, did not come. I had to learn a great deal first, not least of which was patience with my own ability to write crap.

This patience was a revelation to me – the fact that I continues to enjoy turning up every morning to the keyboard even when the results were shitty, and adulation and/or cash slow in coming, because I was still learning, was liberating.

After the initial excitement from my old partners in perfectionist crime I started to pick up on real disapproval from some of the fellow perfectionists “Oh for Chrissakes – it's been three years! Just how long does it take to write a screenplay then!”, and “Yes, that's all very well, but how do you intend to make money from all of this”.

This comes from individuals who I see crippled by their own perfectionism. They don't do things at which they do not excel, at which they will come second or third, or which might make people laugh. They don't speak foreign languages aloud, they don't play the piano, they don't ride bikes – and I don't do those things either... [yet!]

The point is – you will never come first, if you don't come second or third or 10th while you are learning, and you will never have the patience to come 10th, third, second or first if you don't enjoy the process of learning, and laugh with your own failures.

So my motto now is “If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing.”

Caffeinated author.

I am one of those writers who is most productive in coffee shops. Some people are. Some require calm rooms with clear desks and a window with a view; Virginia Woolf's "Room of one's own". Some seem to need to hustle and bustle of a public table, and coffee on tap.

In my experience the coffee shop writers get the studious types. Some of us even feel second-rate because we don't have the desk and the space for calm private reflection. I realise that this works for many many writers.

But the desk writers don't get us. I have been hectored and lectured by mentors who find the habit of writing over a latte and the chatter of other customers degenerate and disordered. How much more you could achieve if you were disciplined, they argue. How deranged must your mind be to think that goofing off in Caffe Nero for 3 hours is real work.

The fact that I can produce 2000 words in that 3 hours (and usually do) is disregarded. I'm not being serious, clearly.

I felt much the same for many years. It was perverse to produce lecture notes while working behind a west end bar, my espresso habit was a sticking plaster until I could settle to real work at home, like a grown up.

Well, after 5 years - stuff that! This is as valid a way to write as any other. The work I produce is its own testament. This is not a perversion but a civilised and social way to use my city as a huge office. And the coffee is great, too.

(Written in the West End Kitchen, Panton Street over a mushroom omelette and a flat white.)