Livvy's Life

Getting Here

2011-12-18T23:12:00.000Z

It is almost as though I have had to write, yesterday and today. It's as though if I don't channel the creative energy I have charging around in me I'll combust!

What happened? I keep asking myself. How, how did the shift occur? I hardly dare trust it, but certainly for some weeks now I have been waking without the constant, debilitating sense of failure and fear of the summer months. Instead I have a conscious determination to effect the changes I want to see for myself and Anna-mouse. These changes are much the same as they were a year ago, and six months ago, but somehow they appear to have become attainable, rather than desperate fantasies serving to re-inforce that awful subtext of gloom.

In the middle of August, really not that long ago, there was a day when I gave in: I arrived at the doctor's office, sat with my head in my hands, and wept. When I returned home I sat at my computer and did the best thing I could have done that day to keep myself sane. I wrote to a circle of closest friends and told them that I was not okay.

The robust, steady, loving and practical replies I received in response to my outpouring upheld me at that time when I could barely imagine a well and happy me. And it was the knowledge that I really wasn't alone, even though I so frequently felt it, that kept me walking out. Literally. A cleverer part of me decided that moving my anxiety was better than sitting with it, so every day I took myself to a local playing field and walked around it. Round and round. As many times as I could. Which wasn't many at first, because I was weak and my chest hurt and my body had forgotten that it is strong.

Somehow, I began to lift. After many long and moving discussions with friends about its pros and cons, I decided to put the packet of Prozac the doctor had prescribed me to the back of the cupboard and spent instead an extraordinary amount of money I didn't have on vitamins and minerals and herbs. I began the tortuous mental unpicking of what was left of the Bim and me, to free him for his new love, and free me to accept it.

A glorious person gave me some money. I bought some nights in a luxurious hotel, took hot bath after hot bath, and when I returned from that trip I knew that I could begin the previously unthinkable task of selling my house. It sold!

And here we are, four months, one house sale, one acting job, one school term, one near-perfect first date and one month of daily blogging later, in an entirely different place. I shouldn't be surprised - I mean, it was me who made the journey - but how did I get here? Yes, okay, the near-perfect first date has had much to do with my recent delight with life, because in just half a day the lovely youngish man reminded me that possibility comes in all shapes and guises, and that it comes to me, as well as to others. But now I know that the near-perfect first date might remain a near-perfect only date you might expect me to be diving, mightn't you?

But I'm not - and I don't know why! Inexplicable. Really, I wish I could name the thing which took me from that summer place and brought me here. I want to bottle it so that when the darkness comes again I can unstopper the bottle and take a swig. Or, more satisfyingly, give it to others to ease their pain.

I have a feeling that time has something to do with it. A sense of the trajectory of one's own life is a perspective almost impossible to have when young. Now that I am ending a decade I am struck with an urgency to act. I have a sense that if I don't act now, while I can, much could pass me by. I have discovered that it adds a piquancy to the smallest moment, thinking in this way.

While I live some more trying to figure all this out, I want to record that it is simply amazing, recent morning after recent morning, to wake with hope instead of dread.

Tea Break

2011-12-17T18:15:00.000Z

It was a day full of rain here in the south east of England, last Sunday.

Most of the day the clouds held the water just above our heads: great grey cushions bursting with drops. Finally, around five, they began to fall.

I was outside when the rain began, at the tea tent, because the country house in which we were filming did not allow food and drink inside. The house was somewhere north west of London, buried in rolling fields dotted with sheep. We all 'aaahhed!' when we first walked in. It was the perfect setting for our scene - a library masquerading as a public school staffroom during the First World War.

I had been awake since some ungodly hour in the morning. It was still dark when my driver picked me up. The luxury! We flew around the M25 as dawn pinned the trees to the horizon. These days, when I find myself actually doing the thing I've always wanted to do since donning a pair of fingerless mittens and a scowl to play the part of Scrooge at the age of seven, I am wise enough to savour every minute.

The 'second' met me at Base Unit and guided me across the muddy forecourt of the outbuildings to my portion of a winibago: my own little portable room, complete with shower and toilet! Soon they brought me to make-up; then it was back to shiver at the icy hands of the wardrobe lady as she laced me into a corset. Instantly I am standing straighter, my figure is transformed and once the clothes are on I have become the stern, high-collared person I have been cast to play.

Then begins the waiting, a very special art every actor has to learn - particularly challenging in a corset, when sitting down for too long or in too low a chair is agony.

Just before lunch they call me and the rest of the women in my scene to a 'line-up' for the cameras. We are driven through the estate to the house and ushered into a billiard room, where we run our lines in a mood verging on hysterical.

I love actors, I think. I love the way we get through. I love the way we all know we're dispensable, and make light of it, and deliver, excellently, because we also know that we're better than our parts and that we will make the thing look even better than it already is.

Looking round our characterful shapes and faces, I see that thought has gone into our casting, and I know that it is not often that a chance like this comes around, to work with the best.

Suddenly, we're in the room and 'on'. One, two, three ACT! a favourite tutor of mine used to say at drama school, and it was a bit like that, really. We were there to deliver, almost first time, which is what we did.

A couple of hours later the scene was in the can. There was a little frisson as we realised that a couple of the series' stars were filming in the room next door - they wandered by in evening dress, and for all the world, bar the cables, and cameras, and countless crew, we were there, in the latter stages of the First World War, glimpsing the staircase of a gentlemen's club.

Someone mentioned tea and sandwiches and a couple of us grabbed our coats and headed out into the bitter cold. Lunch had been hours ago, and anyway we couldn't eat much because of the corsets. We grabbed polysterene cups and thick cut, generously filled triangles and giggled our way through the break.

All of a sudden I was the only one out there, nursing my steaming tea, facing the dark as the rain began to fall. Rivulets of water glittered in the headlights of a location truck as they coursed from the roof of the tea tent. I could see my breath.

And I felt happy. Looking through the rain to the black fields beyond, taking a break from what I do best, contemplating the year that has passed and the year that is to come, I was happy.

Update

2011-12-02T23:15:00.000Z

Remember that 'really quite possible first date'?

Happening.

Tomorrow.

Postscript

2011-12-01T22:22:00.000Z

Oh the luxury of not having to post!

But the eagle-eyed among you will note I have not quite managed to stay away...

Readers will no doubt forgive a little slow down before working my way up to frequent posting pitch again.

And a huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone who accompanied me on the NaBloPoMo journey. What a generous, big-hearted community the blogosphere is.

Finale

2011-11-30T23:58:00.001Z

I have to catch the 2255! I shriek above the cacophany that is London traffic on a Wednesday night not long before Christmas.

We are legging it, fast as we can, from Covent Garden to St Pancras to catch the hi-speed home. A fair old walk at the best of times.

These central London streets that I know so well are aglow with Christmas light frippery. Every bar, every cafe, every restaurant and hotel sports its share of winking, twinkling fairy lights. It is mild and blowy, and after the elegance and gravitas of the ballet viewed from the 'gods' of the Opera House, I am crazy with life.

I really can't miss this train! I'm thinking - and I really can't. To write twenty-nine posts in as many days, and then fall at the last fence because I can't make it home before midnight? Unthinkable!

We make it with moments to spare, shouting out short-cuts, dodging day dreamers, hurtling up the escalators and into the train triumphant. We chat happily all the way and I leave my friend one stop before her own, dashing down the platform and into the car park to my car.

Come on, come on! I berate myself when I can't find the car key, throwing the contents of my handbag onto the tarmac.

It's an exhilarating, somewhat hair-raising drive home. I'm gleeful as Kent Town's own lights, tame in comparison with London's excess, fly by me on the bridge, and hold my breath as I accelerate through an amber light.

The cat greets me at the door, I climb the stairs two by two, flick all the switches, press all the buttons... and here I sit in my coat, casting glances at my watch as I have done for most of my twenty-nine posts during NaBloPoMo in order to slip this final posting under the wire before midnight.

The day's sore head and tension have lifted. I am filled with the possibility of all things. In the next few weeks alone life holds a house move to the new place which Anna-mouse will make our own; a really quite possible first date, and the knowledge that I can write, fast, anytime, and people want to read it.

Hopeful, more hopeful than I have been in a very long time, that I have come unstuck and am free to move on.

Ladies and gentlemen, thirty posts, a bow, curtain.

New worlds

2011-11-29T23:59:00.001Z

I keep starting this post and then deleting what I've written.

I've been wanting to muse about love, and the lovely youngish man.

But I'm tired and instead I find myself simply marvelling at what it is - I mean, what's the process? - that the human heart goes through to recover from injury and fully engage once again. It's incredible, this organ of ours. Really, I'm speechless with admiration at the human facility to suffer, recover and carry on.

And when I have a look, I see that my own recovery is far more complete than I thought it was. I guess the Summer had something to do with it: falling into a very black place, seeking the advice and solace of friends, and eventually, slowly, dragging myself out from there.

My despair was fuelled two-fold, I remember: it was sparked by my financial situation growing more and more desperate, and then the bonfire was well and truly lit by the Bim meeting his new love. It absolutely wasn't that I wanted to be with him in stead of her; it was, I later understood, that his meeting Mary left me having to face being, and feeling, completely alone.

It took longer to admit to myself that I was not only alone, but very lonely. I struggle with writing this even today. I'm not sure why I find it such a difficult thing to admit to. I suppose it's because I want to believe that I can be all things to myself, but I found myself alone in the car recently speaking my loneliness out loud for the first time, and I knew then with a heavy heart that sooner or later I would have to look for the remedy.

But then the remedy came towards me on Friday night with an open heart and huge smile and it didn't seem such a scary thing after all, re-connecting with the company of men. And yes it would be wonderful to feel that connection again - but if that doesn't happen the gift of the encounter is immense.

Suddenly, whole worlds out there have come into focus again, and I may not have to experience them alone.

Living the Life

2011-11-28T23:35:00.000Z

I am currently too excited to think, speak, or write.

It's a long time since 'Livvy's Life' was about... well, life.

Real, live, happening right now Life!

Can't stop.

xx

This Weekend

2011-11-27T23:54:00.000Z

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note and a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note; a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse and a house for us to live in.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note; a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse; a house for us to live in and an art gallery in a disused shop.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note; a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse; a house for us to live in; an art gallery in a disused shop and a lovely man inside it.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note; a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse; a house for us to live in; an art gallery in a disused shop; a lovely man inside it and a hour of conversation.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note; a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse; a house for us to live in; an art gallery in a disused shop; a lovely man inside it; an hour of conversation; a glass which was half full and two awards from fellow bloggers for my blog.

This weekend I went to market and found a five pound note; a new pair of school shoes for Anna-mouse; a house for us to live in; an art gallery in a disused shop; a lovely man inside it; an hour of conversation; a glass which was half full; two awards from fellow bloggers for my blog...

...and a large sign right in front of me so that I could not fail to read it which read:
'Livvy, you are going the right way.'

Reviewing the Surprise

2011-11-26T23:58:00.002Z

Quiet. Contemplative. Retreating back into my single space for one and a small, golden-haired half. The happy, glowing bubble in which we stood to hold our conversation seems barely credible today. Did it happen like that, I want to ask?

But it was important. It was momentous! The lovely youngish man I met yesterday re-introduced me to possibility: to connection: to love.

Often in recent years I have looked at what I assumed to be the mountain I would have to scale even to put myself into an available space and dismissed it as unthinkable. I began to feel older, really so much older, and with sadness I recognised that the Bim had taken something intangible but necessary from me where relationships with men are concerned. Something in me shrank so small when I was lied to so many times by the person in whom I had placed my trust.

So yesterday was joyous because suddenly I understood that almost without noticing it I have moved away from that position, and there wasn't a mountain to climb at all! Instead, there was a clear flat open plain with a beautiful horizon to navigate, and all I had to do was decide to step onto it, which I did, when I persuaded myself to enter the gallery alone.

It is possible I may never see the lovely youngish man again. It would be a shame that the obvious connection we both felt would not be explored, but it would not be a tragedy.

Loving another person is such a brave thing to decide to do. Yesterday evening, for the first time in almost a decade, I was allowed to remember how the very first steps to that decision feel. What I was reminded is that sometimes you don't have to spend an ounce of energy making the decision at all. Sometimes, if you simply choose to take it, the way is clear.

I began to believe, then. That love... is a possibility.

Surprise

2011-11-25T23:58:00.003Z

I was tired. I dragged myself there. My friend the Poet was one of the artists exhibiting; Anna-mouse was happily ensconced with her favourite playdate playmate, and the Bim was all lined up to pick her up, so I had no excuse not to go.

I sighed and gave myself a team-talk as I neared the place: Come on, Liv, you can do it... Arriving at social events alone is never the nicest.

I kept my eyes peeled for the Poet and found him glowing and happy in suit and purple tie. I relaxed, and was handed a non-alcoholic beer. And then someone was walking towards me with a huge smile, as if we were old friends, and I thought yes, I met you once, I've no idea where, but I'll play along. He knew who I was, though, and we simply began to talk.

What can I tell you? How shall I put it? Surpisingly, utterly unexpectedly and in an utterly unlooked for way, this person changed the picture. The life picture. My life picture. Just by standing there and talking and appearing to be interested in what I was saying, and wanting to know more.

At one point the Poet asked me to say hello to his wife at the other end of the gallery, as they were about to leave. Reluctantly I did as I was told, and I left my coat there saying I was coming back, and when I looked some ten minutes later, there he was, waiting for me, and I returned to the same spot as before, and with a Hello again the conversation resumed.

Eventually, I had to leave. I was supposed to be cooking Anna-m's supper. I could only think she must be very hungry, but it wasn't worrying me like it normally would.

I said I had to go. I said his name and said what a pleasure it had been talking to him. I wondered how we would say goodbye. He made it easy by stepping into a brief hug. I thought, I like the way his body feels.

Driving home, stopped at the traffic lights, I burst into sad-happy tears.

House Hunting

2011-11-24T23:20:00.000Z

I am looking for a house. The one I live in now is sold. If all goes to plan, I am supposed to be moving out in three weeks time. I won't go into the financial contortions that have brought me to this point. Suffice to say that the immediacy of the move dawned on me with force today, now that The Deadline is over for another month.

Yes, I agree, it's quite astonishing I've barely mentioned my imminent move in (quick fanfare) twenty-three straight days of blogging.

The house that I'm looking for will be up for rent. The house I live in I own. Well, I jointly own this house with the Bim. I won't be owning the house I'm looking for, it's to do with the aforementioned contortions. No, I'll be renting that one.

I did go to see two houses for rent about a week ago. I fell in love with the first one. I suspected I was going to when the property details described it as a 'one-off'. You know something's up with a house when they describe it as a one-off. A 'house with character', they said. A one-off house with character: someone like me (who wouldn't mind being similarly labelled) is going to fall in love with that, now aren't they?

It was the quirkiest house I have ever seen.

It's an odd shape, isn't it, I said to the painter putting the finishing touches to the triangular sitting-room.

Ah, he said knowledgeably, that's because it's a wedge.

Trust me to fall in love with a wedge. He was right, though: the house had been wedged in between two others, like a slice of pizza. Most of the rooms were triangular-shaped, or some other shape whose name I should have learned in Geometry. It would have been useful, living there, for helping with Anna-m's homework. ('Mum, is this an isoceles or a scalene triangle?' 'I don't know, darling, go and have a look at the bathroom').

So anyway, I said yes I'd like to live in this wedge but the landlord cast his vote some other way: probably something to do with the financial contortions and not being able to prove that it has been me, not the Bim, paying the mortgage on our house for years.

The lettings agent, a fierce young man whose untruths I recognised because of my stirling practise with the Bim, took me to see another house as balm for not winning the first one. I was so disappointed that I wasn't going to have to grapple with wedge-shape problems like how I was going to fit my rectangular furniture into the triangular sitting-room, that I couldn't appreciate the second house he showed me. I walked around it, yes, and everything about it suggested that life would be easier there than living in the wedge, but I was heartbroken to have to settle for a conventional second best, and said no, I don't want to live here, thank you.

Today something made me drive to the second house again. I got out and peered through the window and thought Perhaps I could live here. When I got home I called the fierce young man and made an appointment to take Anna-mouse to see it on Saturday.

I'm looking for a house.

Just Imagine

2011-11-23T23:56:00.000Z

The house has that more quiet than quiet feeling it always has near midnight when Anna-mouse is not sleeping in it. Strange, on a school night. I guess this is how it would be if tonight's venture were successful. Rehearsals two or three times a week, it said on the letter telling me that my first audition had been successful and asking me to attend a recall; and whole days leading up to the big night itself.

Logistically, if I'm successful, it could be a nightmare. But I'm working on the principle that I don't need to worry about this until I get the email, which is how they will tell us in six to eight weeks' time, saying 'join us'. The Bim taught me that one. He never worries about anything he doesn't have to worry about (and sometimes not even then). So when I said It'd be difficult, you know, if this works out, he waved away my caution, told me we'd work it out, and that we wouldn't worry about it until it happens. And I know that the reason he is like this is because he does actually understand what it would mean to me. I've always loved that about the Bim: his ability to be on my side.

So here I sit at a quarter to midnight, my body humming with tonight's paces. My skin is warm and my hair is wet because I've just had a bath to minimise the aches I'm bound to have tomorrow morning. There's nothing like this feeling, especially having sat at the computer for days on end. I used to have this feeling all the time, during my dancing days. It suits me, it makes me more... me. Everything tingling, everything alive.

Just imagine what I would feel if my recall audition tonight were successful!

Two hundred and forty-six days from now I would be in the Stadium, performing in the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Deadline

2011-11-22T23:49:00.000Z

It is on these days, these crazy mayhem deadline days, that I know for absolute sure that I, Livvy, am alive and well and truly kicking. On these days I wake already writing in my head, and writing all the time I am making breakfast for Anna-mouse and fussing over her packed lunch and walking her up the hill to school.

By the time I get back to the house I have taught myself (it's taken a year) to ignore the beds, the washing-up, the washing and simply make a coffee on the stove, turn on the computer and... start. This is a true triumph, for me, over procrastination, which has stalked me in the form of a housewife with a wagging finger for years. The house, well yes, it's a tip. But I'm being creative! More than that, I'm doing the self-made job I dreamed up exactly one year ago. Okay so it's not making me any money yet but oh! On days like today, when the cogs were whirring and the phones were going and the keyboard was click, click clicking with my words - who cares?

No that's too flippant. I do care, actually, that although my venture is a massive critical success, it is not feeding myself and Anna-mouse. It is what drives me, the will to succeed with this financially in a way that I have not experienced before.

That psychic I went to, you know, that one I saw in Ireland the week I met the Bim. She always said, sideways out of her cheroot-smoking mouth, that the second half of my life would be successful. The first had held much unhappiness, she said (I couldn't help but nod, although I was trying not to give too much away to allow her to do her psychic thing), but the second - well! She had to light another cheroot and pace the room with it, my cards were that exciting.

Now although that was ten years ago, give or take, I am willing, on days like today, when the blood was racing with the thrill of meeting my self-imposed deadline, to believe her.

Keeping the Peace

2011-11-21T23:58:00.001Z

Several times in recent days I have had the Bim's new love Mary sitting beside me in my car as I drive her to work and continue on to drop Anna-mouse off at school.

Yes, I know, it's a little unusual.

In my defence, if I didn't perform this morning task, Mary wouldn't get to work, Anna-m wouldn't get to school, and, crucially, I would not be able to have the evening off the night before said morning to swan off to London hotels because Anna-mouse stays with the Bim in his new village abode on such nights. Clear?

I've always been a peacemaker. I think it comes of being the middle child. I remember vividly being placed on the (very uncomfortable) middle half-seat on the back seat of our family car, to ensure my brother on one side and my sister on the other did not fight. I attempted to broker peace between my father and sister through all the years they did not talk to one another and I will always try to see the other person's point of view.

This has not, it has to be said, always stood me in good stead. Sometimes I see the other person's point of view so clearly that it cripples me.

In the case of Mary, this is not so. But it does raise some questions as I bob along with her beside me in the car. Like: how much should you impart to your husband's new love about your husband?

This question amuses me frequently. I mean, I know so much that might be of use!

It's all fantasy, I know, but it does cheer me as I perform my taxi task, to assemble a list of Things I Know That You Don't Which Might Save Your Relationship. Chief among these are:

(1) Do not, on any account, open a joint bank account with my husband (and always stash a little bit away that he can't get at).
(2) If he looks at you as if you are stark raving bonkers when you ask him a direct question about something in his behaviour you don't understand and vehemently denies all knowledge, he is unquestionably lying and you need to communicate about this straightaway.
(3) The Bim is married already - yes, to me, but also to his family.

Oh, and (4) He is not a bad person, in fact he is a good one who has a good, big heart. But keep a generous portion of your own safe for a while, won't you. You never know when you might need it.

I say none of this, of course. I remain steadfastly - one might even say stoically - stum.

Sunday London

2011-11-20T23:57:00.001Z

London, ah my London, looked splendid today. I was lucky enough to arrive early enough to find the city still shaking off sleep. The streets had been cleaned of Saturday night, many places had not yet opened their doors to Sunday shoppers, the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue were closed for their one night of rest and I strode with a bounce in my booted step towards the cinema showing the cast and crew screening of the movie we made earlier this year.

When I emerged a couple of hours later, happy and relieved that I had done myself enough credit on screen not to worry about sending people to see it, I strolled down to Piccadilly, losing myself in the crowds and soaking up the city centre streets I know so well.

Every corner spoke to me of former times: of the young me; of nights with loved ones; of days with the baby Anna-m; of early moments with the Bim; of evenings in the company of friends. I wandered the streets like a tourist with deja vue: Trafalgar Square (proclaiming that there were only 250 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes and 16 seconds to go to the start of the London Olympics!); Whitehall; the Embankment; Westminster Bridge; Waterloo.

I took out my mobile phone and took photographs at every turn. Remnants of the morning fog misted the watery sun. The Thames was splendid with life.

Oh London, my London. To say I miss you is not quite so. You're so part of me I can live you when I'm not near.

Drawing a Blank

2011-11-19T23:28:00.000Z

Let me see... Tum te dum...

Nope.

Nothing.

Really not.

Livvy is, officially, unable to post every day.

Back tomorrow xx

Working, alone

2011-11-18T15:08:00.000Z

Three in the afternoon. The low winter sun is filtering through the blinds of the spare room where I work. The day is... quiet. Long. I am supposed to be working - and indeed have been working - but I have become slower and slower, like a wind-up toy whose battery is running out.

I realise that what is lacking for me today, in fact what is lacking for me most days, is a sounding board. I have no-one to talk to. Because I work from home at this new venture of mine, and because today I have no meetings, no networking and no delivering, and because I am not even picking up Anna-mouse from school (to give me, ironically, more time to work in order to save me from ploughing on into the small hours tonight), I have not spoken to a living soul since I dropped her off this morning.

If I had an office elsewhere, or if I worked with others, or if I had a partner perhaps, this would not be so.

It's difficult, being my own sounding board. It's difficult encouraging myself to go on. Today is Friday, and I'd like to curl up in front of the television under Anna-mouse's blue and white checked blanket. Or, I'd like to take a break and meet someone in the kitchen as I wait for the kettle to boil. We'd have, you know, an inconsequential chat, one which would take my mind off the enormous task at hand and return me to it refreshed and re-energised, simply because I have engaged for a few moments with another human being.

Or, I'd like to talk with someone who knows what I'm talking about. Have that kind of conversation where I can savour the tiniest detail of my project with another, rolling the ideas around like fine wine to extract the slightest nuance of flavour. I'd like to sound off my ideas, laugh at my absurdities and check my decisions against someone who would say yes, that's right, or no, think of it another way...

I'm sure self-employed people the world over suffer from this self-imposed solitariness. And to go the whole way with the picture, it is made worse for me knowing that that person is not going to appear at the end of the working day, either.

There won't be anyone in the kitchen making tea tonight but me.

Giving In

2011-11-17T19:48:00.001Z

The pain behind my left eye which has plagued me for days is worsening, the light of the computer monitor is shrieking at me, the burden of just too many responsibilities in different areas of life are weighing me down and the week's accumulative lack of sleep has at last caught up with me.

I'm going to give in, turn off the computer, take some painkillers and go to bed at the same time as Anna-mouse. I might even let her sleep in my bed, a once-a-week treat usually reserved for Fridays. I'll pretend it's for her, but really it will be for me. Nothing like the sleeping form of your own child beside you.

Bar

2011-11-16T23:43:00.000Z

The Gilbert Scott bar at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel is a very good place to drink a glass of champagne.

If you sit on the high stools at the bar, like we did, you can watch the cocktails mixed in front of you. Intriguing fizzing concoctions are swiftly assembled in glass jars and swizzed about with twisted silver sticks by barmen in starched white uniform. Huge, differently sized bells hang the lights from the extravagantly painted ceiling, and my friend has heard that nothing in the bar is attached to the walls, including the bar itself, due to the listed nature of this extraordinary, painstakingly restored Victorian building. One wonders fleetingly about all the silver and glass and mirrors crashing somehow down, and then of course the thought disappears in the fuzzy glow cast by the table lamps, the champagne, and the solicitous nature of the staff.

It's good to take a sip of opulence every once in a while.

The Nub of Things

2011-11-15T21:02:00.000Z

It was early in the morning. We'd had a little skirmish over her new karate suit, onto which I was trying to sew in a bleary-eyed fashion three cloth badges. Apparently I sewed the one on the sleeve the wrong way round. As it was in Chinese, it was hard to tell, but Anna-mouse was up in arms. She had a good shout, flung herself off the bed where I was sewing, and hurtled into her bedroom.

A few moments later she re-appeared with some magnetic words from a poetry kit and began to stick them to the radiator.

The first wonky line of words read:

mum dad and me now

Then she went back to the bedroom to find more words, and when she came back took the 'dad' from the above and placed it in the second line:

I see you but no dad

And then she went into the bedroom, found two more words and returned with these and a photograph of the Bim and his son, her greatly missed half-brother who lives in Ireland. She pointed at the photograph, and then stuck up her final two words:

him too

I have left it there all day, her short, eloquent expression of the nub of things.

Dominoes

2011-11-14T22:26:00.000Z

I love playing dominoes. I love everything about them. I love the sleek, cool pieces. Tiles, they call them. I love turning them in my hand. I love the way our set of tiles comes in an old-fashioned metal tin. I love that once you have chosen your initial tiles and placed them in a strategically defensive line before you, backs to the other players, the superfluous ivory oblongs are put into a pile called the Bone Yard.

I was reminded of all this when Anna-mouse announced that I had to play a game with her while the bath was running tonight. We played on the floor, hugging the heater, because true to form with this house my heating isn't working. It was quite cosy on the carpet round the corner of the bed, which acted as a kind of draught-shield.

Immediately I fell into contemplation mode, which is another reason I like playing dominoes: it calms me. It calms Anna-mouse, too, something we discovered with surprise the summer she first played the game, at the time of her fifth birthday.

It was, in fact, the most difficult summer of all - the first after the Bim left the family home. In one of the many bizarre acts of love and ridiculousness which this separation of ours has engendered, we felt duty bound to honour a longstanding, pre-split booking to take Anna-m to see a performance of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in its live stage show incarnation, which was touring the UK at the time. Given that we live in Kent, readers will understand that it was no small commitment to honour, given that the nearest performance to us was in Devon.

So we booked two rooms in a Bed & Breakfast - a room for Anna-m and me, and one for the Bim - in a strange coastal village across the border in Cornwall.

It was there that our weekend, which was understandably fraught with tension, was considerably mollified by the gift to Anna-m by the owners of the B&B of a small wooden box of dominoes. Suddenly we discovered something which could unite us, something which brought all of us to a state of calm - one might even say grace. I remember sitting round a little fold-up table in the Bim's room, munching snacks and taking long, weighty moments to consider the placing of my next tile.

It was a revelation to us that for the first time our feisty just-five year old chose to abide by the rules of a game with no fuss; indeed took the thing entirely to heart. The July rain slapped the salted windows of the B&B as we played on, oblivious, and we emerged from those games purged, somehow, of our many and various sins.

I was reminded of this tonight. I was reminded how much I love playing dominoes.

Keeping it Simple

2011-11-13T22:42:00.002Z

When the Bim escaped Kent Town with his new love Mary a few weeks ago, it was to a little village about seven miles away. A different world. A good move. And after comforting Anna-mouse through several anxious pre-move nights, it was thankfully a move that has proved popular with her, too.

One of the things the Bim and I tried to do after we separated was to give Anna-mouse the odd day out, when he she and I did something together as the family that we used to be. These occasions were often bitter-sweet, usually pretty successful, and only once or twice too painful for words.

Since Mary and the Bim have made a life together, these occasions have tailed off, but yesterday, with Mary out of town, the three of us found ourselves together almost by accident, attending the village hall's fifty year anniversary fete.

It was a sweet, gentle affair straight out of the 1940s, in a traditional little hall with wooden rafters. Tables manned by locals lined the walls offering raffles, tombolas and craftsy activities for the children. My favourite was a free stall manned by a local gardener, fingernails black with compost, who was showing any child who would listen how to plant up daffodil bulbs for the spring.

The Bim and I were almost superfluous to the wealth of opportunities for kids, and found ourselves standing about chatting as Anna-mouse decorated a CD turned candle holder with glitter, and strung up a necklace. This last activity was run by the local vicar, a compact young man with prematurely greying hair and fraying dog collar. He got talking to the Bim, who told him how 'we' had just moved into the village, and because appearances deceive and with no reason to believe otherwise, the young man assumed of course that I was part of the 'we'.

How strange this is, I thought. Everything apparently the way it was, and yet actually not at all.

I don't mind, I just don't know what to feel when people mistake us for the happy family we are not, which, to our credit, happens more often than not. We have flummoxed teachers at Anna-m's school by our united front, and mothers of Anna-mouse's friends have been astounded when I say no, we're not together. We haven't been together for years.

As we were leaving the fete, the three of us laden with Anna-mouse's spoils and laughing at her dalmatian face painting, a woman caught up in our happy atmosphere stopped to ask us if we were attending the evening's concert. There were two tickets left, she said, but then I suppose you'd have to get a baby sitter, and it is short notice... And then she invited us to attend the family prayer meetings, designed especially for families with children like us and run by the nice young man with the dog collar, on a Wednesday evening. Without even glancing at each other to corroborate our stories, the Bim and I played the part to save her feelings and went on our way. Welcome to the village! she called after us.

Well, what could we have said?

No, sorry, you've got it wrong - this is my husband, this is my child, but I did not move into the village last week. My husband moved here with his new love. My daughter stays here at weekends. This weekend my husband's new love has gone back to see her children. Yes, quite complicated! We are still married, but we're going to get divorced. Quite soon now, actually. No, that's all right, I know what it looks like. We just decided, for our daughter, that we'd be friends. At all costs. Yes.

NaBloPoMo Reality Check

2011-11-12T23:52:00.001Z

So here we are at last. I've hit it. On this, the twelfth day of attempting to post every day for a month, I really, really don't want to write.

Bless my higher self for making me show up grumbling at the page.

Here's the thing: I don't write a tech-y blog. I'm not a geek. I'm not a cook who posts recipes. I'm not a Yummy Mummy, though I am a mother. I'm not a scrapbooker, photographer or maker. I'm not a farmer or a woman who has moved countries and blogs about that.

I'm a Livvy, and what I write about is me. Today I have discovered that some days I want to remain private. It's my Saturday-night-in night, my one very alone night of the week, and my thoughts are many, and ranging, and they run deep. I don't want to mine them tonight.

And I have a terrible suspicion that because I am writing many of my posts very quickly, in order to get them date-stamped before midnight, the quality of the writing is beginning to suffer. And God knows, it's hard for me to offer up anything less than my best - it pains me (and probably holds me back immeasurably in life).

So tonight I'm having a rant at my decision to do this thing - at the same time as knowing that NaBloPoMo veterans could well say that this is the very moment that I must keep going.

And just because I'm bloody-minded, and because doing this is all part of the bigger 'make Livvy's life happier' project, I'm damn well going to.

Things of Note

2011-11-11T23:58:00.004Z

They say that writers are supposed to notice things. Currently I'm noticing that it is twenty-three minutes to midnight, and that unless I write something very fast I won't have a blog post for this day at all. And for NaBloPoMo, that just won't do.

So I thought I'd write about what I've noticed, today:

On my drive over to the sailing barge this afternoon, I noticed that my friend the Poet can't bear to colour a conversation with silence. He must talk through the quiet, and as he becomes more voluble, I make the silences for us both. After a while I crave it, and sometimes I even tell him to stop talking. Luckily, because we like one another so much, he doesn't mind. Today he'd been wittering on for a while when he stopped abruptly and said I'm talking too much again, aren't I? I noticed that he's noticed...

On our drive over to the sailing barge I also noticed the Kentish countryside, and how the ancient trees struck jagged shapes on the horizon in the mist. The colours were khaki and willow green and every shade of brown. I noticed how that horizon soothed me as we drove.

I noticed too how flat the water was in the little inlet where the barge is moored, as if the water would move as one, like a plate, if I had waded in and given it a push.

I noticed how cosy it was inside the barge; how warm the stove makes it once lit; how much I like my connection with the family who run the place.

This evening I noticed how lean the Bim is now compared to when we first met. How much older he looks, how he has lost his baby face for good.

I noticed for the umpteenth time how beautiful Anna-mouse's golden hair is, and how well she threw together her clothes for going to the cinema and how she will be a faster reader than myself, because she naturally skips the unimportant words on the page.

I noticed a lightness in me, all day, because yesterday I did something out of the ordinary, and today I faced a few, small fears.

These things I noticed, and more.

Unsticking

2011-11-10T23:58:00.000Z

I swore that my next decade, which starts so soon, in 2012, the year of so much hope and promise for us in the UK, would be different. I swore that I would use the turning of the decade to bring me change. I swore that it will not be a decade, like the current one, where more things went wrong than right (barring the coming of Anna-mouse, of course, who has always been this decade's most glorious plus...)

I have been stuck for so long. And tonight, like a little prequel to what's to come, I knew that I am 'unsticking' - it's happening, something's loosening and I'm moving and, well, I knew that the decade to come will be the business.

Hoorah.

The Risk Business

2011-11-09T23:00:00.000Z

I've been mulling over risk. I suppose I must be growing, because I have been taking more risks of late, something I've never found easy to do. I think, if I wrote a list of qualities I would most like to instil in my daughter, an ability to take risks would be high upon it.

I imagine I'm not doing very well on that score, which is exemplified in my pitiful behaviour in playgrounds, which have long since been places of stomach-churning anxiety for me. I am the mother hovering pathetically close to the climbing frame in order to be there to break my daughter's fall. I'm the one who can't concentrate on a conversation with another mother if I know Anna-mouse is seven feet up in the air. I see danger more frequently than is perhaps healthy, and find myself thinking ahead to avert it.

I know, I know: I can't wrap her up in cotton wool. I can't stop her from falling. I can't keep her from pain.

In an attempt to mitigate this over-protectiveness I found myself a year or two ago taking a decision to exemplify the benefits of risk-taking by living a riskier life myself. Admittedly, I'm not certain that either the risks themselves or the life this has created are altogether working, but you know what? I'd rather live like this than not: precariously, uncertainly, working towards a future than stuck petrified in the past.

My hope is this: one day, years from now, Anna-mouse will suddenly find the strength in herself to do that thing she is afraid of, take that turning in the road, or that punt on something new, because some tiny part of her remembers how her mother would sometimes turn to her, take her by the hand and say, "Come on, let's do it! What have we got to lose?"

Encounter

2011-11-08T18:46:00.001Z

In a flurry of lateness, hurtling towards an appointment with the optician, I turn the corner of the High Street and there, with his back to me, is the Bim.

I call his name, and as he turns to see me his face breaks into a smile and, unusually, he opens his arms and I step into his hug.

It isn't often that the Bim and I meet unexpectedly. Usually we know when we're about to meet because it's pre-arranged, part of the daily round of arrangements concerning Anna-mouse. We have time to arm ourselves against any residual feelings we might have for one another. We can tuck away the unseemly vestiges of our love; fold it over and under, starched and sanitised like hospital corners, so that nothing ragged remains.

No doubt it will be all tucked up again tomorrow. But today, just for a moment, the future became the present, and meeting the Bim was a pleasure again. One day too much time will have gone by for us to mind the past and this will be how we will greet each other always - genuinely, spontaneously, like old friends.

A Good Man

2011-11-07T22:53:00.000Z

I met my Business Advisor this morning. He’s one of those people who makes you feel better, which is probably why he’s so good at his job. He’s also that lovely thing, a man who really likes women, something he attributes to being brought up in a household full of them. He is silver-haired and charming and always immaculately turned out.

We have become friends over a series of discussions about my new creative business and I owe him a great deal. He ‘gets’ the business; he ‘gets’ me.

I can’t remember how we came to the moment in conversation, but suddenly, flowing on from where we were, he said My daughter was recently diagnosed with MS. I looked at him aghast and told him how sorry I was.

No, well, people know I don’t talk about it, he said, and then proceeded to tell me all about it, which I took as a token of the trust we have built over the past months.

It turns out his daughter is thirty-four, feisty and intelligent, with a husband and two young children. Life certainly does get the order of things mixed up sometimes.

My Business Advisor, who is unerringly positive about most things (and if he can’t be positive, is pragmatic), ended the conversation with But hey, you know, nobody’s died… though there was nothing flippant about it.

One night, he told me, his daughter telephoned in the middle of the night. Something was wrong, something to do with the disease. He sent them to the hospital and he and his wife went over to baby-sit his daughter’s children. The youngest woke moments after his parents had left the house. My B.A. picked him up and brought him downstairs and rocked him and within seconds the boy was fast asleep on his shoulder. My B.A. then fell asleep himself, right there on the sofa. He awoke an hour later with a stiff back and a numb arm where the small child slept. He uses his arms to describe exactly where the child's head is in relation to his when he woke, and lights with the joy of this moment with his tiny grandson.

Soon after this we are discussing my business venture, and he is on the ‘phone on my behalf, making things happen.

All day his family saga has remained with me. All day I thank the arrangement of the fates which conspired for us to meet.

It is not often that you meet a really good man.

Sunday Haiku

2011-11-06T23:57:00.000Z

Bears, dogs and Puffles
swathe your sleep and hold your dreams:
could I love you more?

Remembering November

2011-11-05T23:49:00.000Z

Another afternoon of canvassing, walking the streets, knocking on doors, meeting more kind people, and more nutters.

Especially startling is the man who insists the solution to all our problems is for everyone who doesn't work for a living to be taken out and shot.

One bullet, straight through the head, then up to the crematorium with them, he says.

I try to maintain my professional integrity by not disagreeing with him, while doing my level best not to appear to be agreeing. They really don't pay me enough to have these conversations, I hear myself mutter when I finally manage to escape.

Another house has a large sign up, urging me to go away. It says a 'Beautiful Person and An Old Goat Live Here.' I knock, and am just about to give up when an elderly woman appears. I desist from speculating whether she is the beauty or the goat (but can't help musing that she could be either) and get on with the job in hand.

The afternoon turns slowly from slate grey to black as dusk draws down the sky.  The smell of wood smoke cheers the damp air: autumn is finally with us, now, after October's Indian Summer. The trees are shedding, and crimson leaf shapes stick to the pavements.

I remember a Guy Fawkes night of long ago, when the Bim and I and Anna-mouse still lived together.  In an act of minor rebellion I crept out of our house as the Bim was bathing Anna-m, to find the firework thrills of childhood. What a long, long time ago.

Slowly the lights are lit, and I find that I am knocking on people's doors in the dark. When they are opened, the light and warmth of the interiors rush out to greet me.

After four long hours I turn the car towards home.  It is the first time I have stopped in a frenetic week. I potter about, absorbed in the bittersweet peace of another Saturday night alone.

Love Matters

2011-11-04T23:55:00.000Z

It had been a triumphant evening. In honour of Halloween and Anna-mouse's impressive ability both to cope with new artistic experiences and to stay up almost as late as I can, I had booked us tickets to see an extraordinary, site-specific dance piece in an equally extraordinary 13th Century Manor House.

They gave us torches and little tokens to hang round our necks and every so often plunged us into darkness, out of which a wraith-like figure would emerge to brush past us and be gone. My girl was scared only once, and not worryingly so, and calmed herself by clinging to me and whispering her favourite chant, Can I sleep in your bed tonight? To which of course I quickly reassured her with a yes.

I drove us home in the dark, congratulating myself on the choice of event and on my very special daughter, who was the only child there.

Tiredness had begun to tell on us both by the time we got home. Let's have hot chocolate and a snack and take them upstairs, I rallied, to maintain the festive mood.

As I stood preparing our midnight feast in the kitchen, Anna-mouse stood beside me at the counter, doodling. I looked down and to my horror saw that she was writing on a plastic folder holding some of my precious work with my expensive black liquid eye-liner, which I had left lying there hours before after painting a Halloween spider on one of her cheeks and a spider's web on the other.

Look at this, she says, look what I did for you.

I glance at the writing, and make a snappy comment about her choice of materials.

She dissolves into tears.

But you didn't even look at what I wrote, she wails, You didn't even look at what I said!

For the first time I read her message written in wonky, eye-liner writing:

I love you Mum.

She is howling now, my insensitivity the final straw. I take a breath and remember suddenly where I am, and who I am with, and what is important. I crouch down so that our eyes are level and hold her a little away from me so that she can see my face.

I am sorry, my darling, I say. And you know what? You are absolutely right. Mummy wasn't looking, was she, when she should have been, and you wrote something lovely.

We hug, and she whimpers a little and calms in my arms. And then I straighten up, pick up the eye-liner and write very slowly and deliberately underneath her message to me: And I love Anna-mouse.

There is quiet in the kitchen as we stare at our messages, and I contemplate silently that the love of a child is never a given, always to be cherished, always to be earned.

I Can't

2011-11-03T23:02:00.000Z

This post is for someone I've never met.
It's for the woman like me who can't do it all. It's for the woman who has found herself bringing up her child alone. There are people around her, and she is loved, and the child's father is even much in evidence, but essentially, she is alone.
And I want to tell this woman It's okay: I can't do it all either.
I can't be the Mummy, and be the Daddy when the Daddy's not there. I can't run the business and clean the house and feed the cat and take it to the vet and take the child to the hospital and edit the poetry book and be seen at the networking events and play that acting role and be there for my family and do the food shop and be there for my friends and earn enough to support us and sell the house and pack up the house and mow the lawn and put out the rubbish and write for myself and teach the school kids drama and get the car serviced and fix the heating and sort out the wasp's nest and pick the child up from school and cook us a dinner we'll both eat and go to London and smile to order and - I can't.
I can't do it all. I want you to know that. I can't do it all. I want to break the conspiracy, the Superwoman-multi-tasking-super-organised-managing-everything-well conspiracy to which we all contribute by our silence.
Know this, my friend, and take heart from it: you are not alone.
I can't do it all, either.

Evidence of Change

2011-11-02T23:56:00.005Z

It’s an odd thing, but after almost three years of the Bim and I circling each other’s lives on a daily basis because of our commitment to remain amicable at all costs for Anna-mouse, the circles we are having to negotiate have suddenly become wider. I guess that’s what happens. I guess that’s how things move on. And I admit I’ve been longing for it without being able to make it happen, but now the ties are loosening, and certainly his finding a new love so unexpectedly has forced my hand. I have to move on, too.

Friends and family would say this is no bad thing, though I’ve been doing my best, really I have. It’s just that I take a long time to recover from wounds. I like to think that it’s because I’m very thorough about it. Also I just don’t react immediately, it takes me some while to know what I really feel about any given catastrophe. I remember thinking, in the first days after our decision to separate for good, Well this isn’t so bad, I can deal with this – largely because I wasn’t dealing with anything at all. I was immune. Numb to the bone.

Recently the Bim has moved into a modest little terraced house in a village several miles away. Well, he was in a dismal part of Kent Town; the sirens kept Anna-mouse awake at night and when someone was murdered across the street from their flat a few weeks ago, the new love and he decided that it was time to set up their first home elsewhere.

Anna-mouse stayed with them last Saturday night and was brought back to me, smelling of sleep and clutching her Minnie Mouse cushion, early on Sunday morning.

So how did you get on last night? I asked to make conversation as she lounged on the floor before me, not for one moment expecting what ensued.

We-ell, I didn’t sleep very well, she said, in a pretend grumpy voice which made me know she didn’t really mind, but wanted me to hear her little gripe.

Oh dear, I said, playing the game. Why was that?

We-ell, first of all I had a nightmare and it was about spiders and it was reeaaally scary and Daddy had to come and comfort me, she said, hardly giving me time to make sympathetic noises before she rattled on.

And THEN I couldn’t sleep because Daddy and Mary were doing that THING they do - you know!

And before I could unshape my lips from their little ‘o’ of surprise, my seven year old daughter launched into an astonishingly energetic précis of the noises of the sexual act, which involved thumping her body up and down, wailing a bit, hitting the floor a few times and ending with an exaggerated groan.

Then she rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of it all, and looked at me for comment.

Ah ha, I managed evenly, while my features fought to arrange themselves into any kind of expression at all, and my mind embarked on a nano-second race to uncover what I felt about being told that my husband had so very recently had sex with another.

I continued to hold Anna-mouse’s gaze and nod sagely as she raised her hands and made an exaggerated, Woody Allen kind of shrug.

And then, wonderfully, miraculously, after a moment of crazed, Disney-like jealousy that the Bim is indulging while I cannot even remember the last time I was touched, I discovered that I wanted to laugh.

And laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Canvass

2011-11-01T23:52:00.008Z

A woman struggles out of her car, trailing scarves, catching her clipboard in the seat belt, almost tripping over the belt of her coat. She goes to the car boot and puts in her handbag, returns to the driver’s seat to have a last fiddle with some paperwork but within seconds is at the boot again, rummaging in the handbag for her mobile phone. Standing in the street, she sends a quick text message to her separated husband telling him where she is and what she is about to do, because they tell you to tell someone every time you go door-knocking, and although the irony of texting this particular person is not lost on her, she doesn’t know who else to tell. She slips the phone into her coat pocket, clips a badge onto her lapel, makes a last check of the clipboard, papers and pen and, finally, manages to leave the car.

I have been canvassing. It’s one of the more peculiar jobs I’ve had in that long roster of Jobs Actors Are Good At When They’re Not Acting. The first stage was easy. Well, it was supposed to be easy. It sounded easy on paper. Deliver nine hundred and ninety-nine forms over a long weekend.

It should have been okay, but it was during The Summer, and as might be surmised from the dearth-like nature of this blog since June, The Summer was not a good time. I was sick, then, in more or less all ways. Sick of myself; sick with the impact of the Bim’s new-found love; sick of having no money; sick of having to borrow all the time; sick of feeling stuck; sick with an appalling cough I just couldn’t shift, about which my lovely healer friend said, “I’m not worried about the lungs – that’s just the grief.”

So, obviously, delivering nine hundred and ninety-nine forms when you’re that sick isn’t easy.

Recently, stage two has kicked in. I have to go back to all the houses which have not responded to the call to join the Electoral Roll and encourage the householders to fill out the form with me on the doorstep. Of the 999 delivered, there are more than 350 forms to chase.

It’s quite a process (once I’ve actually managed to leave the car, that is, which seems to be a key part of it). Each time I go out I have to fortify myself for the challenge, remind myself that I am doing this in order to be able to afford Christmas, and sally forth.

Knocking on three hundred separate doors is an experience. In fact, if the occupants are not in the first time, I have to knock on the three hundred doors three times each, and meticulously record each knock on a given form, before I can be said to have done the job properly. As Anna-mouse would say, that’s a lot of knocking.

I have to protect myself to do this. I don’t mean physically (although we were given a handy sheet at the start of all this about what to do if threatened by a menacing dog), I mean in the psychic sense: each house approached, each bell rung, each door knocked upon affords multiple glimpses in miniature into the lives of the people who live there. Garden gnomes, gravel, gate latches; steps up, steps down, ‘No hawkers’; door knockers, broken bells, letterboxes; dog barks, cat bowls, litter trays; peeling porches, faded nets and odious runaway smells: all these reak of the effort of living, the attempts to lead individual lives.

I have encountered human nature in all its dreadfulness and glory, on these local doorsteps. I find myself making up stories for those I meet, filling in the blanks, endowing these neighbours with qualities they may never have heard of. I remember the man whose gaze was so direct, expressionless and disconnected that I found myself backing down the pathway before the interview was over; I remember longing to step inside, when the Asian man with the kind eyes and empathetic gaze asked me if I'd like him to make me a hot drink.

Above all, meeting so many people who live within the same small square mile I myself inhabit has caused me to acknowledge quietly to myself that the life I am living, this difficult, uncomfortable life of mine, is also acceptable within the scheme of things: it differs in the details, which are important, but I understand that we all, all of us, are trying to look up, and striving for some kind of purer air, and clearer light.

The Month

2011-10-29T01:40:00.000+01:00

With great trepidation and a tiny leap of the heart, I would like to announce that in order to honour the good and special people who come back to this place time after time to check if there is something new to read - and to honour that something in myself which has never quite let this blog go - I have signed up tonight to NaBloPoMo.

To those not in the know, simply put this is a commitment to write a blog post every single day for one month. In my case The Month will begin on 1st November. This could be the single best decision of my writing life. On the other hand...

I am now going to lie down for the weekend. Because what with raising the child, selling the house, running the new business, recovering from the Bim and trying to get my mojo back, there won't be a lot of time for sleep in the next month. Certainly not after tonight's impetuosity.

But oh, what will this bring?

I love the Livvy that did this. I remember her from long ago.

Decade

2011-06-18T20:47:00.001+01:00

A creaking tree never falls down...

My mother-in-law, who is justabout still my mother-in-law, said this to me last night. We had a conversation on the telephone, her in Ireland, me here. After years of minor struggle, we have reached a place of mutual respect and understanding, and one of the things that we understand is that both of us have lost her son.

I love her, strange to say. I never expected to, but it's true. She once bought a mug out of which to drink when she came to visit and for a long time I hid it at the back of the cupboard when she wasn't here, and looked at it askance, should it ever have the audacity to creep to the fore.

This evening I sought it out. Its silly, flowery pattern comforts me and I sipped my tea hoping that some of her countrywoman wisdom might somehow slip into me.

She told me the story: for years a tree outside her mother and father's cottage would worry and wake them with its noise. Today, the house is long gone, and the tree still stands.

A creaking tree never falls down, she recalls her father saying. Because it bends, I suppose.

I need to bend. I need to stay standing.

Sometimes I count it up, just for fun, the astonishing number and variety of life events of the past decade. Bowed down by my mistakes, I have been close to feeling like one who has failed, recently, and it helps me not to feel like that, reminding myself what this creaking tree has withstood. Some of the events have been chronicled here: it wasn't long after I started the blog that my subject matter went from the mundane to pithy.

Not all the events were bad, of course (and among the horrors there came a strawberry-blonde girl whose presence nothing can gainsay) but it looks like I'll be adding divorce, near bankruptcy and moving house to the list before the decade's up.

I write on a Saturday night. Almost always I am alone on a Saturday night. It's not alright, alright. It's the loneliest night of the week, it has been for some time. I'm too tired to work. I'm too worried, too sad, too alone. I have no money, none, and the Bim has finally gone. The Bim is not alone this Saturday night, he is with Anna-mouse and another.

But tomorrow or the next day, when Anna-mouse returns, I will have the driving force of my life by me again, and remarkably I am not ill. I creak, and I am always tired, but I am not ill. And I have a talent to put words together which has led me to a new career - I have started something which I hope, if life's burdens don't become too great, to finish.

Of the decade's ten years, there are only ten months left. Head down against the mutterings on the wind, I'm going to creak and bend, and try really, really hard to stay standing.

Something, remembered

2011-06-05T01:46:00.000+01:00

I guess posting again after a very, very long time away is a little like riding a bicycle, or dancing salsa, or learning to sing again after losing your voice.

Not that I lost my voice; I just needed it for other things.

So let's give the old muscles a whirl.

Well, having recently been put right by some well-meaning teacher at school, Anna-mouse announced proudly the other day that she has learnt that 'masagine' isn't 'masagine' at all, and that she can at last pronounce the word correctly.

Go on then, I say, steeling myself for the moment I have deliberately delayed all her speaking life (it being the only word she consistently mis-pronounces which I, with equal consistency and an irrational longing for it to belong curiously and forever to childhood, like Peter Pan, don't correct).

Masagine! she says proudly, and instantly looks confused.

I smile, relieved, not at all guilty that the old, precious version is so deeply ingrained. She has another go and gets it right this time. Encouraged, she goes on to practise another long-time stumbler, 'submarine'.

Sumbarine! she cries.

Good, I think. Excellent.

And thus I set these markers, these tiny gems of childhood - my child's childhood - rustily down. They disappear, these gems. We think we will remember, these things which touch us, these unique and secret things, but more often than not we do not.

So in finding myself before a keyboard again, with so much to do and not a thought in my head about what to write but simply that I must, it is no surprise to find that it is one of these gems which I attempt to record.

After all, what else are we? What else remains of ourselves but our memories - and then, finally, those of others about us.

Masagine Accomplished

2010-10-12T00:02:00.001+01:00

The Are You Sure Chart

Success! (well okay, three black days before a return to form).

I even got a few Princess stickers. Can't tell you how chuffed I was.

Anna-m was mildly impressed, too.

Waiting

2010-10-02T22:43:00.004+01:00

Outside it rains. It's so heavy I can hear it above the waltz drifting from the radio next door. My desk is warmed by a small circle of light. The edges of the room are dark.

My head is muzzy, my limbs ache.

It's a Strauss waltz. I think of the concert broadcast from Vienna each year on New Year's Day. My mother Esme always listens. I've just spoken to her on the telephone. She is a long way away. Anna-M and the Bim are snug together at his. They were going to have one of their 'Movie Nights' - popcorn, lots of cuddles, a Disney classic.

I slept the afternoon, after they left. After breakfast, too, I had to crawl back to bed apologetically, slipping into a fitful half-sleep, trying to keep an ear open for Anna-M. Be sensible, won't you. I said weakly, ridiculously, like mothers do. Don't do anything dangerous. She pottered about, got herself dressed, stirred me only to fasten the button on her jeans, like six-year-olds do.

There are some days when you have to give in. You feel sad and alone and your limbs ache, and the skies roar, and the times when life was lived in colour feel light-years away, even though only a couple of days ago you felt that things were looking up.

When I was younger, in my Camberwell days, such evenings floored me. I hadn't lived long enough to know that everything changes. That it is possible to make everything change. That living in colour is a matter of waiting for a different lens.

I'll sleep, while I'm waiting. I don't want to feel any more tonight.

A phrase surfaces: This too shall pass.

Image: Horia Varlan

Star, Butterfly, Star

2010-09-25T23:51:00.000+01:00

At last! I've been given something I've always wanted.

As anyone with a six-going-on-twenty-six-year old daughter will know, a mother's behaviour can sometimes go beyond the pail.

So it was for Anna-mouse the other morning, when I asked her casually if she would be cold without her cardigan.

No, Mummy, she replied dutifully.

Are you sure? I said, as I do. As I always, infuriatingly, do, having asked the question and received a perfectly good reply. Doubly, I suspect, if the question is anything to do with whether or not she is/will be/might possibly not be warm enough.

A small hurricane ensued.

MUMMY! she yelled. I'm a BIG girl now! If I say I'm sure YOU DON'T HAVE TO ASK ME AGAIN!

Honestly, I muttered to myself, I only said 'Are you sure?'.

Right! That's it! she cried, sounding so like me I couldn't help but notice, Mummy, you are getting a star chart!

Really? This I had not expected. I tried hard to sound nonchalant. What for?

But she had vanished, only to reappear several minutes later with a bright pink piece of paper marked up with fourteen irregular boxes and wording as follows:

Mummys are you sure chart

if she says are you sure see gets nothing.

Prize if mummy dosent say are you sure is a masagine

I'm doing awfully well. I haven't missed a day. Every morning Anna-m gets out her stickers and rewards me with a shimmery star or shiny butterfly, filling the little boxes in a satisfying, alternating pattern. Tomorrow I shall get another butterfly, and the day after that, if I'm lucky, a star. Anna-m is impressed.

The prize, I must say, I'm looking forward to. I love a good masagine.

Vigil

2010-09-22T00:55:00.000+01:00

It was dusk. She was coming home after a glorious yoga week in Italy. She had dropped off her daughter and was driving down the middle lane, lights on in the half-light, when she saw traffic ahead. She slowed. The huge, articulated lorry behind her did not.

She doesn't remember much of what happened next. She knows that the car was spun the wrong way into the inside lane. She opened her eyes and saw the traffic coming towards her. She remembers calling out - Don't let me be hurt! Don't let me be hurt! - and then somehow the lorry hit her car again and she was pushed off the road to land, nose-down, in the verge.

The Lithuanian lorry driver thought that she was dead. She knows this because she watched him stumble over to her, his hands covering his face. But he helped her out, and she told him she was fine, and tried to calm him down, and then the off-duty ambulance appeared, and a passing driver, and soon after the police.

She wasn't too bad when I saw her on Sunday. She was shakier today. Instinctively I touched her when she told me, touched her flesh-and-blood arm and said Oh thank God you're okay.

She isn't an old friend, but she is a very dear one, being the closest I have here in Kent Town. We began a spiritual journey together four years ago when we found ourselves the newest attenders at a Quaker meeting and discovered an instant, mutual bond. And so it was for her, really, that I made the effort to re-arrange life and childcare arrangements to attend the Peace Vigil this evening, which she had principally organised.

It was an unexpected pleasure, to sit in silence as the air grew dark around us. One long candle stood at the centre of the table, and as twilight turned to night I became aware that other, smaller candles had been placed on the wooden ledge running along the walls of the room. No-one spoke. For one whole hour fifteen people's thoughts turned themselves to the vast and open question of Peace.

I soon found that I needed to think of Peace with a small 'p'. I couldn't find any hope of making an impact unless I addressed peace as it applied to me, working with the principle that starting with the individual is not a bad approach to changing the world.

I was aware of my bruised, troubled friend two seats away, and wondered how her thoughts ran. Her words came to me again - Don't let me be hurt! Don't let me be hurt! - and it struck me how very much, recently, I have lived by them myself. How fear, not peace, has ruled my shaken heart.

The light around us shrank until there was only candlelight and a warm yellow from the streetlamps outside. Window shadows quivered on the walls.

Little by little the meeting gathered until we became our prevailing thoughts.

The Bim and I

2010-09-19T00:54:00.001+01:00

The Bim has got a thing about me again. I know this by a number of escalating, none-too-subtle signs.

First, I found myself the object of several longing, loving looks. Then he would come to find me in the kitchen (it's often the kitchen), put his once-welcome arms around me and give me a hug. Most alarmingly, he has even once or twice attempted to put a kiss somewhere on my face, as near to my mouth as he can get it before I turn away.

I am beginning to understand that the Bim thinks that if only I were to soften, and we had one of those conversations you see in the movies - romantic comedies, mainly, usually towards the end, after a rather nice night-time montage of the man and the woman alone in their separate houses, pacing the floors and pining at windows to a lovely saxophony soundtrack - if only we were to have our own little epiphany, we could live happily ever after.

He has dropped unmistakeable, unwieldy hints to this effect. I think that he thinks that if I made a huge effort and just decided to give it a go, all would be well. He has done his penance, he has done his time in his nice flat in a horrible place in Kent Town, and a year and a half is about long enough to have dimmed the edges of all our memories about how very, very badly we were getting along by the time the woman said 'Livvy' to me one Friday night in February and handed me the letter which would change all our lives, and it would all just make so much sense for him to move back in.

[I apologise: I always link to that bit, that bit about the woman, and the letter, and the day that changed our lives. I have a feeling that when I am able to write about it without linking it will mean that I have become extremely enlightened and qualified to write a self-help book and make inspirational podcasts].

The Bim's parents have just been over from Ireland, and I could tell that they think it would make more sense, too. They stayed at his flat, as they do now when they come (bringing a great, personal relief that I do not have to have the conversation with my mother-in-law about the best way to get my white sink white again - a discussion which never failed to make me feel woefully wanting in housekeeping prowess), but I was more involved in their visit than I have been of late. This meant that they saw much of me and the Bim in parent action; and the thought wafted clearly through the room more than once: if only he works hard enough at it, Livvy might change her mind.

The Bim understands, now, what he lost. And for understanding, I guess, he feels he deserves to have what he lost restored.

What he does not understand is that Livvy would never, ever have let him leave the family home had she not known that it was forever. She would never have put Anna-mouse through that desperate time unless she was sure. Livvy knew then the toll that the Bim's leaving would take - on Anna-mouse and on herself. Livvy did her thinking/angsting/chest-beating at the time, and in the agonising months before that, so that the woman-with-letter was merely the catalyst, not the cause, for what ensued.

But... for the record, and because I am asked the question alot, actually, by all sorts of people, as we are frequently seen together in our parenting capacity, and because we have to our credit managed to maintain an amicability which astonishes even me:

No, the Bim and I will not be 'getting back together'.
Yes, I still ache to my core to know this and yes I pretend not to most of the time.
No, there is no-one else in either of our lives.
Yes, I know one day I'm going to have to revise the enormous distrust I have developed of the opposite sex.
No, of course all men don't lie, I know that!
Yes, it was as much about what I said, or did, or didn't say as it was about what the Bim said, or did, or didn't say.
No, I don't like the sound of that either: it would be much easier to act the guiltless wronged than take some of the responsibility myself.
Yes, I still love him.
No, not like that anymore.

Yes, I'm going to have to say all this to the Bim.

No. No, not tomorrow.

Summer House

2010-06-02T00:10:00.000+01:00

She has a summer house at the end of her garden. It's where she meets her clients. It's where she meets me.

With this summer house thrown into the mix, there is no going back: this is it, this is the person I've been looking for, it is as simple as that. She and the summer house had me, so to speak, on 'hello'.

Inside the summer house happens to look and feel and even smell like my fantasy writing space. It is wooden, all wooden, and painted various neutral tones - but in shades which speak, somehow, of natural things: of grain, and oatmeal, and pebbles. There is a blanket thrown over a sofa arm, and a box of tissues placed casually on another. The ceiling rises to unpainted eaves and there is a tiny kitchen off the main, floorboarded room. The whole place smells of warm, dry wood.

You can arrive early, push open the garden gate, walk past the side of the house up the little square stone path set into the grass, to the summer house door. She will not be there until your time, but you may step inside and make the space your own in the ten minutes until she comes. You can make tea, or coffee; take a chocolate-coated biscuit from the glass jar; settle yourself on the sofa opposite the long windows with the venetian blinds, and watch, as I did today, the rain through the slats, and take a breath, take stock of the day, ready for your conversation.

Especially at this time of year the garden is lush, and green, and giving. The summer house is complementary to its setting. It neither hinders nor disturbs, but draws from its surroundings what the people who come here need. Often 'high functioning' people like myself, as she commented the first time we talked, but people who need to make a sense of where they are in their lives in order to move forward.

Because it is a dull day, she has lit the lamps before I arrive. It is marvellous, to step for a moment from the confusion into this clear, open, ready space. I bless the day my search happed upon her website. I know that there is important work to be done in this room. There is rightness in my finding myself here, and though I could despair that yet again, in the second half of my forties, I find the need to find a stranger to talk to once again, I do not. How can I? I'm sitting in the space I want to create in my own life, for different purposes but no less life-changing.

I hear a click as she emerges from the side of the house. I watch her slim, serious form move across the garden towards me through the rain.

Running Up

2010-05-30T01:49:00.001+01:00

So I'm sitting in traffic, and the ceremony starts at six. It's twenty past now, and I'm about to throw in the towel.

I'm not going to win, for God's sake, and I'm tired, and Anna-mouse is at home being looked after by the Bim until I get back, and they don't allow guests so there's no-one to witness it even if I do win a prize, and it's been another long day being pulled this way and that, and I'm feeling as I have done for months, ever since the anniversary of the Bim moving out, really, all out of joint with myself.

Also, the ceremony is being held in the University Lecture Theatre, and for some unfathomable reason the way in to every Lecture Theatre I have ever entered is via a door at the bottom of the auditorium steps. Which means that those Award Hopefuls who, unlike myself, have managed to defy traffic and real life to be there on time will witness Actress Trying To Be A Writer enter, Stage Left, thirty minutes late. And it's a Monday (I mean I ask you), and it's hot, and I'm indignant with nervy rage about the whole damn thing.

But something in me says Go: you must go, no matter what time you get there. All those blog readers don't come back to your (unchanged) page time after time for nothing. They root for you. You must believe in your writing. You must go.

So I persevere with the traffic; and the insanely timed temporary traffic lights round Kent Town; and the incomprehensible parking system once on the University Campus, and arrive finally, half an hour late, to find that the door I am directed to by some very nice lady stewards is, indeed, at the bottom of the Lecture Theatre steps.

But only a handful of faces turn my way. Most of the audience are riveted on the Guest Judge, a diminutive man with wire-brush hair and spectacles, who is about to reveal the winner and runner-up in the section for the Under 18s. It turns out that the Guest Judge is a published local writer of rather strange crime-cum-sci-fi works of whom I have never heard. But he is reading the prize-winning entries well - straightforwardly, with respect, allowing the words to speak for themselves, so it doesn't matter that I have never heard of him, or that he looks more like a member of the Council than a real live writer.

He comes then to the Over 18s, the category most of the audience have been waiting for. By this time I have been hovering for some minutes at the back because I can't locate a seat I can slip in to without upsetting several other hopefuls. One of the nice lady stewards spots my plight and asks a large man a couple of rows down if he would move along. I sit down just before the shortlist is announced.

My name is the first of, I would guess, ten. I am filled with gladness. Not a wasted journey, I think, I can hold my head up high: I've been shortlisted! Just as soon as he has finished the shortlist, he launches into the two winners, and there it is again, my name and the title of my piece, sounding so formal I barely recognise them. I am runner-up to the winner, but there's no distinction as far as I am concerned: my one thousand words, my one thousand words, of more than two hundred other writers' one thousand words, spoke eloquently enough to be noticed. My eyes fill. I look into my lap. No-one knows it is me, yet, because the Guest Judge is reading an extract from my piece, so I have a few out-of-body moments where I sit among the audience unrecognised as they listen to the words I have written, and I listen to the words I have written, and there is both a familiarity and a strangeness to them, but they do ring true and, look, they are making people laugh, and breathe differently, and exhale a little more loudly than usual at the last sentence.

The Guest Judge is asking me to come down now, down the steep steps of the Lecture Theatre, to collect my prize. A warm woman with honey-coloured hair whom I guess to be the one woman on the judging panel shakes my hand warmly and leans closer to tell me that it was a very close run thing, they could barely choose between my memoir and the winning story. I think it is wonderful of her to tell me. I hug this small, not insignificant fact to me as tightly as the framed certificate she puts into my hand. But I understand enough of writing and of competitions to know that my gentle, deft piece about Gerda, our glorious mother's help and friend to all the family, would not be considered weighty enough to sweep the board - and really and truly I don't mind. The piece spoke, I tell myself, it spoke to strangers. It's a priceless nugget of encouragement.

After the ceremony the winners are asked to stay behind for a moment. Our pictures are taken for the local newspaper who have hosted the competition in conjunction with the University. It all feels gloriously amateur. I try to strike up a conversation with little writer man who, to be fair, read my words well, but it turns out any articulacy he might have is saved for the page: I can't get him to string more than two words together, and they are charmless at that.

After the photos I grab a couple of stale crisps and an apple juice and text Fi, my dressing-room companion throughout those winter London performances who is the person more than any other in recent times who has championed my every written word. Then I telephone my father, the writer, and my mother Esme, the actress, and then I go home and tell Anna-mouse and the Bim.

So I am a runner-up. Yes, these days, I certainly am. I run up escalators, and mountainsides, and other people's opinions, and other people's lack of opinion; I run up against my demons, yes again, yet again, to hold on to me and who I am, and the stories I have waiting, and the life-long, undiminished writing dream.

I don't mind being a runner up as long as, one day, I actually arrive.

Bus stop, revisited

2010-03-12T21:57:00.000Z

The Bim and I met eight years ago today. It may be a little tarnished, but the story is still a good one.

All day it niggles away at me. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? I ask. My heart is heavy, my thoughts are sad. And then, blinking back tears at traffic lights on my way to pick up Anna-mouse from school, I remember.

The Bim sends me a text: 8 yr ago 2day. If I knew then what I know now, I'd still go 2 that bus stop.

Would I still go? I ask myself.

I listen to his good-humoured ramblings as he stays for a cup of tea while Anna-mouse and I eat supper. Later, after he has gone, I gather her pyjama-ed body up to mine for a last cuddle before bed. Would I?

Yes. Yes, I would.

Circle, with love

2010-03-01T00:27:00.000Z

I start writing a couple of hours before my self-imposed deadline of midnight expires.  I close my eyes, let my fingers type, weighing the longing to sleep with my desire to set the night in stone.

I'm freewheeling now, eyelids drooping, energies low but happily so, because this sleepiness is due (apart from the champagne and the cointreaus and last night's late night so late the foxes had begun to howl) to a most glorious evening in celebration of friendship. Six friendships, to be exact. No, eight - because one of us couldn't be there, and one of us, the one in whose name we were meeting, is dead.

Deb's dinner, this was, this reunion of souls, conceived on the long journey home from that glassy northern city on the day of her funeral. We thought we would meet in her name, that 'circle' of girls of long ago and it turned out to be a splendid thought.

Nerves were high, we arrived alone or with another and all more or less within minutes of each other.

Cafe Koha is an old, wood-panelled place in St Martin's Court.  I've always loved this alley, it's an actor's dream, with its two stage doors lit by a line of white light bulbs, such as so recently framed my dressing room mirror, lighting the way for tourists and Londoners alike. And at the far end stands J. Sheekey's, inscrutable behind frosted glass. It must be one of the few restaurants in London into whose interior it is impossible to peer and is beloved by me for being the first restaurant my mother Esme was ever taken to when she first arrived in London, bobby socks and all.

We had a window table nestling in the very crook of this alley's arm.   The alley lights cast flattering, slatted shadows through the wooden blinds.   Cafe Koha, too, is not English, never has been in my memory (it used to be called Solanges) and our waitress was a bright young Estonian who understood early on in our five, glorious hours together that this was a special gathering, and needed to be treated as such.

We meet with screams and hugs of relief and gratitude for our being there, together by choice in the wake of our friend's death, to reconsider, renew, and reconvene the circle formed so very many years ago, not so many miles away, at our proper, independent day school for girls.

After the thrill of first gathering, we sit back and can't help but congratulate ourselves on how astonishingly good we all look.

I have to say, I posture proudly, we look bloody good for our age.

Age. An odd thing entirely. Because not only do none of us look our age (even though, when not together we all singularly, sometimes, feel it), none of us can quite encompass quite how many years have passed since we spent our days staring at the same black board.

There is something else going on too, I think. Certainly I acknowledge what I can only describe as a relief in myself to be there, whereas even ten years ago I don't think I would have contemplated such a reunion with half the gusto I did this one. But then, ten years ago all sorts of hopes were still high, all sorts of people were still alive, and we were nowhere near four score years and ten.

Last night, heightened because one of our number is no longer with us, there was a palpable awareness that we are still here, still alive, and a realisation that if we've each coped with our assorted challenges thus far, we're hardly going to fall at the next fence.  It is a bolstering thought.

I find myself doing a quick mental tally. Our joint life experience is staggering - as I suspect it would be between any six friends of a certain age.

Our homes are Switzerland, Swiss Cottage, Hackney, Madrid, Kentish Town and Kent.  Some of us have partners, some of us are alone. We've lived with people; lived without people; near rivers, up mountains, and close by funny little tavernas at the end of the road.  In our drawers we have death certificates, and marriage certificates and medical certificates saying no, it's not too late. We have children, and don't have children and sport physical scars. We've known breast cancer and bowel cancer and suspected this-and-that disease; migraine and menopause and tumours of the brain. We've watched parents die, slip into dementia, fall over, get better, and fall over again. We like drinking, and dancing; we have sex still or abstain.

And we have, all of us, finally come into our own. Yes, there was a metaphorical heavyweight nature to our joyous conversations last night.  We always did have opinions, but at last we're not afraid to speak our minds and claim them as our own.  We still apologise too much, worry what people think, and fret about our weight, our hair colour, or the liver spots appearing on the backs of one or two hands, but when the chips are down, by God - by God! - I'd want one of those girls - any one of those amazing women - to be there, holding my hand.

Happy Valooms Time

2010-02-21T00:09:00.000Z

I used to hate Valentine's Day. I used to dread it. I remember eyeing women carrying excessive bouquets, or teddy bears, or both, going home on the London tube during my trying-to-be-an-actress-temping days, and hating the vulgarity of the celebration at the same time as wishing the vulgarities could be heaped upon me. I remember walking up and down Camberwell Grove one particularly dark Valentine's Day night, the vast, leafless plane trees dripping rain, just to get out, because the street was better than being inside with the howling loneliness that assailed me.

I have never passed a comfortable Valentine's Day. Never, that is, until now. And this was surprising, given the unlikelihood of its being a cheery day, being so very near to the first anniversary of the Bim moving out. And given that, in all the years I have known the Bim, this was the first year he did not send me a card.

But this was a mark of great progress! A card would have been inappropriate. A card was inappropriate on each of those Valentine Days he proclaimed his love for me and as it turned out was placing his real feelings elsewhere. Nearer to some woman whose name began with 'S'. (They all began with 'S', indeed two of them shared the same name. I like this little, meaningless detail. It amuses me, in a not very amusing kind of way).

Even last year, only eight days after the last woman whose name begins with 'S' handed me the letter outside my house which would change my life forever (God, I sound like the soap opera I felt myself to be in at the time), even then, the Bim gave me a card. It was red and gold and not very nice (he never did get the kind of cards I liked) but it was written from the heart, full of contrition come too late. I kept it. It's in my wardrobe. Not because I felt romantic about it but because it was the closest he came in those early days to an apology and that meant something to me.

So I wondered what would happen this year. I was aware that something was going to happen, stage-managed by the Bim over several school nights in elaborate stage-whispers between himself and Anna-Mouse. I feigned nonchalant unawareness as a present was smuggled from the Bim to her one evening, and prayed that whatever it was would be given as if entirely from her. When it turned out to be so I breathed a quiet sigh of relief, and I didn't even have to wait until Valentine's Day itself to find that out, because after a heroic effort to keep her mouth shut, Anna-Mouse begged me to let her show me the present stashed underneath her bed, at the same time as swearing the said showing to secrecy from Daddy.

Therefore on the day itself I received for the second time a milk chocolate heart engraved with the words I love you Mummy xxxx and a wonderful, hand-made card (featured) wishing me a Happy Valooms Time. And, as I say, nothing from the Bim. Only I knew what self-control and not a little growing-up it took for him not to write me a card. I knew that it meant he had come really quite a long way. I knew that he understood that, however much he wanted to send me a card, no doubt repeating his sentiments of last year, it would pain me far more than please.

And this year's Valooms Time, this day of symbols, for me too marked a change. It showed me to myself in a new light. I examined my heart and found that it was not wanting. Literally not wanting. I am often sad at the turn life took this time last year, often so sad I have to weep, but I seem to be emerging intact. I did not spend February 14th longing for a man to complete me, as I have longed so often in the past.

If I am honest I know that too much of my heart is still bound up with my past promises to the Bim, and so I am waiting, simply waiting, for time and my own best thoughts to extricate those parts of myself from those potent vows. Because we have the wondrous Anna-Mouse in our lives, I know that many of them will exist as a contract between myself and the Bim forever - but in a contract between loving parents, now, not lovers.

Someone said to me soon after the Bim went Isn't it exciting, you have yet to meet your life partner! I was astonished: then, as now, I can't quite encompass that thought. I thought the Bim was my life partner. I thought that that was it. As it turns out, he is my life-friend.

Occasionally, when all is quiet, when midnight has passed and we have entered the twilight hours, I allow myself to try on the idea of a new partner for size. Unsurprisingly, I find the idea doesn't fit, that I fidget at the seams and pull at the neck for breathing space, like a child. I find, then, that I am content with waiting. To grow into the idea, or by-pass it altogether, who knows.

Do I feel lonely? No. Do I feel alone? Yes. Sometimes I feel very alone. But they are not the same things. And now that I understand that I am not ready to share myself with anyone again, possibly for a long time, I am beginning to like this waiting time. It's a clear, honest, almost translucent thing, waiting to be wholly Liv again.

Wanted Alive

2010-02-01T00:31:00.002Z

I think about her all the time, my dead friend. She accompanies my days. I've been lucky: I haven't had to lose many people to wherever it is they go; not close people, not old friends like Deb. I'm told that it starts from around now. Obviously, I suppose, as I tread lightly towards my half century, others will begin to disappear.

But the line is very thin, isn't it, between the two places, between here and there? I think so. And all to be truly found out afterwards, after our passing. 'Passing' - what's that about? What an odd phrase.  'Passed away'. Away where? when Deb is sometimes so palpable I can see her, hear her crescendo laugh.    It is wonderful to me, and an affirmation of life, that a person's impact crystallizes and strengthens in death.  No, this may be personal to me - I fully acknowledge - but something has happened to me in losing my old friend.   Something powerful and good.

For starters, I have held the life she found so sharp-edged that she had to drink to numb its edges - I have observed myself holding that life to me like a child who has gone momentarily missing and then reappears alive and well, wondering what all the fuss was about.   I find I have so much yet to do, and Deb's dying has reminded me. The irony that the difference between our attitudes has turned out to be so monochrome in contrast gives me a wry laugh now and again. But thank God I actually want to be here, I have found myself muttering in a myriad of recent situations of varying difficulty, Thank God I want to be alive. Deb's story is at its saddest in that image of the mental health team seeking permission to break down her door, enter with the police, and finding her there, after who knows how many days, alone.

Wanting to be alive, versus not. There's not much hope of improvement, is there, if this most basic premise can't be met. It hurts my heart that Deb, of all of us the girl with perhaps the most energy in those early years, grew to want to die more than she wanted to live. They didn't mince words, the last time she came out of hospital. She knew that if she carried on drinking she would die. She told me that the urbane consultant, the one who recognised how intelligent she was and told her things straight, had told her so.

So, there has been a change in me. It is a positive happening; an opening; a relaxation; an acceptance of the highest order. It is causing me to reassess and re-group, and I am not the only one: the circle of friends so close in those crucial teenage years, to which Deb most centrally belonged, is back in touch again. The air waves are humming with emails, texts, phone calls and new laughter. It is as if we have sloughed off our previous, too-busy, too-preoccupied selves, paused to wonder at what we all lost in losing each other, and have each in our separate ways (and in some cases separate countries) emerged ready to meet each other again, on equal ground. A dinner in Deb's honour is planned.

Anna-mouse has just stirred: her usual, midnight rising to the surface.

Muuummmy! she calls out impatiently. What are you doing?

I slip from where I type across the landing to her room. She is already heavy with sleep again.

I'm writing, Anna-m, I whisper as I tuck her in.

Something else that happened when Deb died.

Old Friend

2010-01-24T02:41:00.003Z

A Wednesday evening, ten days ago. On leaving the theatre after the show, my mobile showed one new message, so I called the voicemail and listened, standing there in the wet.

When I heard Deb's sister's voice I knew that I was about to be told something very bad.

My better self told me to go back to the theatre. Don't hear the news here, it told me, with London roaring and no-one to care. So I hurried back there, so fast my fellow actors were where I'd left them, drinking in the bar; smoking and chatting in the street.

I think I'm about to get some bad news, I said to the chatters outside, one of whom was the dear young woman with whom I share a dressing-room, Fi.

I'm here, Fi said, if you need me.

I went into the foyer and steadied myself at a high, stool-less table. I looked up into the canopy of fairy lights strung across the skylight ceiling.

Please let her be in hospital, I whispered. Please don't let her be dead.

Deb and I met at school, more than thirty years ago: a traditional, independent girls’ day school in the heart of London. For a few years she was my best friend.

We were bright, excitable, intelligent girls full of giggles and hope. Life was exciting and romantic and there for our taking. We shared a tremendous camaraderie and had nigh on impossible dreams. Our energy must have been marvellous.

Deb was funny, very funny, with a loud and wonderful ascending laugh which made others laugh with her. She was popular, brimming with life and excelled at sport and accademia alike. In fact, there was little to which she could not turn her buzzing brain (although, like me, she was confounded by Mathematics).  In many ways she was an idealist, for whom the world’s suffering was a source of great bewilderment and distress. She wanted to know why, and asked many questions. There was a fearlessness about her, too: she was unafraid to show her emotions, or to speak out on behalf of others.

But somehow this bright, bright brain tripped over itself in her twenties, and she never ever really recovered. Who knows why this may be so? You could drive yourself mad wondering 'why?', I've discovered. The disturbance led to strange behaviour, and the strange behaviour led her to come to London one day, with little idea of who she was or what she was doing, and this little idea led to her parents coming and getting her, and putting her into a mental hospital.

If ever there was a defining moment in a person's life, that was it. She never forgave them.

The doctors called her schizophrenic and she was given pills. She met a man in hospital who was charismatic and kind, and lived with him for a while when they came back into the world. But he, like her parents, tried to tell her what to do, and she was having none of it. The glass of wine she'd always used to steady her flighty nerves became a bottle, and the bottle became spirits, and the family despaired, as she despaired of them.

They set her up in a little house in the northern city where they had their home. They needed to 'stabilise' her, they said. The rest of the family thrived, her sister and brother married and had children. Deb felt herself become a black sheep of a particularly dark hue.

About ten years ago she got back in touch with me. I knew her history, and was wary. I'd been holding her at arm's length for years. And then one day something cleared for me in my head, and somehow my heart expanded a little, and I knew that I wanted this old, old friend to have a place in my life.

We began to speak regularly, or sent messages by text. She was a fantastically good, loyal and undemanding friend. She wanted simply to hear my voice, talk about the old days, rake over what had happened; feel connection; feel love. The simple things for which we all crave.

Her drinking worsened. I fell into the habit of answering my mobile, always, if 'DEB CALLING' came up on the screen. At my worst times with the Bim she was the one friend to whom I always tried to respond and lend support. I knew that she was not okay.

She began to go in and out of hospital. They had to drain her stomach of fluid. She compared herself to George Best: she drank in those proportions. She would sit in her little house, in her chair, with her litre of vodka and her carton of orange juice, and mull the days away. Sometimes, she told me, she would hibernate by day and drag herself up only when it became dark. Oh Deb, I would say, Oh Deb... remembering her strong calves, and how she used to run like the wind.

But even at her very darkest moments, she never lost her quintessential 'Deb-ness'. Her humour may have become black but it was there nonetheless, and very funny. She was self-deprecating and grim about the situation in which she found herself, but that didn’t stop us giggling about it. The laugh still rang.

A few months ago her beloved American grandmother died, and because of her state she was unable to go to the funeral. She rang me, distraught. You will come to my funeral, Liv, won't you? she said, over and over, You will come to my funeral? I promised her that I would.

A little while later, when I learned that she had been in hospital again, I asked a promise of her.

Ask your sister to 'phone me, I said, if you ever go in again. She understood that I was asking to see her one last time, if she thought she might not make it, and, a little to my surprise, she agreed.

That's how, when I heard her sister's voice, I knew the news must be bad.

I think you have some distressing news for me, I said.

I don't think Deb's sister had told anyone else, because she was struggling to form the phrase. She tried two or three times to sound the words.

Well, Deb died at home... she said at last.

Oh no... I said, as I began to cry. Can you tell me what happened?

She died at home. She died alone. It took possibly several days for anyone to find her.

I pause as I type. I seem to look up again into that fairy-lit canopy of stars, seem to be once again inside that single moment of knowing which has so keenly defined life for the last ten days.

I kept my promise. I went to Deb's funeral. It took some doing, with a show that night and the northern city many miles away, but I kept it. I even wrote a speech, and read it to the grieving, congregated souls. Someone said it was the best eulogy they had ever heard.   I stumbled mid-way through, delivered a few lines in tears, then pulled myself together and got the end out clearly.  There was no way I wasn't going to get to the end.

You will be at my funeral, Liv, won't you?.

They printed her picture in the Order of Service and I've put it by me in the dressing room. What is she, fourteen, fifteen? Blue, blue eyes. A gentle, lively, hopeful smile.

It comforts me.

Back to the Bright Lights

2009-10-17T23:44:00.003+01:00

Wow.  Life doesn't hang about, does it?

You've had the year from hell, but you've begun to get yourself together. You've stopped noticing yourself all the time and started noticing the squirrel in the garden, and the berries against the leaves, and that sharp tang to the morning air. You've re-grouped and re-organised, and re-drawn the boundaries of your comfort zone in bright, bold highlighter pen. Taking slow, shuffly steps, you have finally begun, in other words, to move on.

And then your agent calls. Your gem-of-an-agent whom you'd really like to make some money one day to repay his endless, Tiresian faith in you, calls and says Never mind if you can't do the job: this is one director whom you cannnot afford not to meet.

More than once over the following weekend, I say wistfully to friends: Of course I won't actually be able to do the job, but I have to go...

So I go to read for the Director-I-Cannot-Afford-Not-to- Meet at a production office in north London on Monday afternoon. The air is dry and full of autumn crisp.  I am a wee bit early, so I stop to gather my thoughts in a smart, mansion-lined street round the corner from our designated meeting place.  I catch a passing local giving me a side-long look: the sort of look I haven't seen for some time, given that I have refused to consider theatre work since before Anna-mouse was born. It's the 'what-is-that-crazy-woman-talking-to-herself-doing-on-that-bench-look' well-known to the pre-audition actress rehearsing her lines.

The script - hand-delivered last Friday to ensure I have it for the audition - is neat and bound in red, with the play title in bold capitals in a little window on the front cover. It is a classic script, a joy to breathe in its papery freshness, thrilling in its quintessential script-ness. Never mind the job, it has been worth coming for this small, all-important confirmation of my status as 'Actress' once again.

Also, I have discovered several other pleasing things. The play is being cast by a true, old-school casting director whose word on quality cannot be questioned; the director-I-can't-not-meet is not only a theatre pro but directed one of my favourite feel-good movies of all time; the project stretches in an elastic line of perfect tension between now and February and there is a West End option should it happen to receive five star reviews.  Just about everything, in fact, about this job smells exemplary - except, of course, for how much it is going to shake up my life with Anna-mouse.

The director is T-shirted, intelligent and kind.  I warm to him immediately.

So what have you been doing? he asks.

I laugh.  There is no uncomplicated answer to that question, and because it is so long since I went on stage I can't boast of recent theatre conquests, so I decide to talk instead about my work at the school which has recently filled so much of my life, and put me right when all else was wrong.

I talk about the children, and the projects I'm managing, and what a joy it is when some seed I have planted bears fruit. The director listens with open face and mind; asks questions; seems to understand.

After a while he asks me to read, and I open the fresh script with its beautiful white pages and find the few lines belonging to the funny strange character for which I have come to audition.

That was well read, he says, and soon after we shake hands and part.

I return to the same bench I stopped at just half an hour before. I am jangly with adrenaline, all fingers and thumbs as I phone my agent for a de-brief.  I can barely think, let alone talk, about the changes ahead if I were to be offered the job.

But some tiny corner of my jumping brain is still, and is saying that the job is mine. I have had this feeling before. I remember it of old. It is a remarkable, instinctive knowing.  That is not to say that I believe it. But by the bench, under the plane trees, it is there.

Twenty-four hours later, when my agent calls, pleased as punch, I remember to congratulate my sixth sense for being so wonderfully, scarily right.

Flying the Flag

2009-10-10T23:50:00.006+01:00

So where was I? Ah, yes: I've just been taken to Paris.

We were lovers, long ago. Fresh from our teens and brimming with expectations – of life; of ourselves.

It was perfect: both beautiful and bittersweet, because we knew that it was what it was, and that it could not last in that form. Temperamentally we were a fitting match and our souls loved one another too - possibly aided, rather than hindered, by our mutual love for lean young men with vertiginous cheek bones.

He was the person I had to ‘phone on the morning of my marriage to the Bim. To make sure that he was okay. To make sure that I had his blessing, however painful it was to him that he was losing me in some way.

I think that you’re doing the right thing, he said. Which was kind, given that he had met the Bim only once and probably found the whole thing incomprehensible. But he knew the journey which had brought me to that place. He knew that I needed to have my chance, a shot, at the ordinary. For it is the ordinary we mostly wish for, I understand now. We simply wish to accomplish the ordinary in our own unique, extra-ordinary ways.

Marriage? I needed, given my parents’ so-called failure, to tick that box and make it my own.

Children? Well, there was a slim chance – I had to try.

He understood that. And that was what he managed to convey, during the course of our wedding-morning conversation.

At the wedding itself I remember little of him except for a shot of his face through some leaves, thoughtful and alone before the main celebrations got under way, and then, much later, that he became very, very drunk. If it had been the other way round, I would have been very drunk, too.

The Bim years, the first Anna-mouse years, I barely saw him. He absented himself from my den of domesticity in a way which I found painful. I challenged him on it, once, after a glass or two, taking a late train back to Kent from my beloved London. He was astonished by my sense of abandonment and finally stopped me dead by saying Anything Livvy Unwin chooses to do has always, and always will be, fine by me. I heard the love, and shut up to await the future.

The future came. And so it was, a few days after the Bim moved out, that I found myself on the platform of Kent Town’s railway station, unable to move for tears.

Can you talk? I texted, out of the blue. Because I knew, although we had spoken barely a handful of times over the past five years, that if he could, he would.

Give me 5 mins, came the reply.

I wept-talked for ages. He listened with all his heart. I felt it, and my heart became lighter to sense his, still beating for me all these years down the line.

So, where exactly are you on the platform, did you say? he asked me gently, in a strangely even voice, during one of my more strangled outbursts.

It was only much later that day, when my equanimity had been restored and I could raise the odd laugh, that I realised the image of me sobbing in despair on a railway station platform had got the better of his fiercely literary imagination, and he had had to take a moment to reassure himself that I was not about to do an Anna Karenina.

Perhaps that's why he suggested Paris.

We need to go away, he said towards the end of the conversation, when I had assumed a modicum of his calm. The odd meal is not enough. We need longer together to make up the years. My treat - a weekend – Paris?

Which is how I was reminded that there is nothing, really nothing, like a friend wholeheartedly flying the flag for you, on those bloody, corpse-strewn days when you can’t even make it to the flagpole.

In Transition...

2009-10-02T00:40:00.001+01:00

Won't be long x

A Different Heart

2009-06-08T20:35:00.007+01:00

Time passes. Things change.

Anna-mouse is nearly five. I am alone again. The Bim is around, constantly, but no longer with us.

Time passes. Things change.

Those few, casual lines of my Profile never fail to sting me now, ever so slightly, when I visit my own pages.

Madeleine McCann has a new face, it is almost unbearable to stare into that older photograph.

I can't come here to write in the same way that once I did, with the Bim safely ensconced downstairs, football and tea at the ready, and Anna-mouse slumbering next door.

I discover when I find myself here that I am not the person I was.

I am a person in recovery from a most turbulent near-decade.

Over now. Looking forward to the next.

So here is a story, and then Livvy's Life will have to undergo a transformation, because I can't hold on to what was anymore.

Be patient, all those who visit. You are dear to me: I am, as the Bim knew and tested again and again, loyal to the bone.

"Mummy can I tell you somethin'?" asks Anna-mouse.

I have found her whimpering to herself in her bed, ages after she should have been asleep.

I take her up in my arms, little thing, cradle her, feel our warmths merge.

We sit together on the bed, speaking softly, trying to unravel the sadness keeping her awake. The sadness her parents have caused.

"You see, Mummy," she grapples for words in a tired little voice, "I love

Daddy."

"I know you do, darling," I say, in my most soothing tone.

"I like Daddy," she corrects, as if she has discovered already the wonder that is loving and liking the same person. "He's my favourite friend."

"I know, darling, I know," I murmur.

"You see, Mummy," she tries again, at last finding the words for which she has been searching: "He held a laugh in my heart.... And when he moved out... my heart was different."

The light is penumbral blue. The air is thick and warm.

At first I'm too moved to speak. Then:

"Now you've made me cry!" I say.

She looks up at me in surprise; reaches up her hand to feel my cheek for tears. Finding them there seems to satisfy her, and I feel her body give a little in my arms. I know she will sleep now, and gently put her back to bed.

Downstairs, I cling to the armchair, trying not to make too much noise as I cry.

That was the wonder of it, the laugh held in my heart by the Bim.

And when he moved out, my heart was different, too.

Anaesthesia

2009-04-13T22:23:00.004+01:00

I have a friend, a very very good friend, who
discovered
that if he took Solpadeine at the end of a night of excessive
drinking, he
could all but eliminate the next day's hangover. He drank alot to
ease
his loneliness, and he took alot of Solpadeine. One day, the lady in his
local chemist held him in her gaze with wise eyes as he paid for his second
or
third purchase that week and asked him gently
Is your pain very
bad?

So it's over. And I am arthritic with pain.

The Bim has gone. Moved out three weeks ago. He's local, it's amicable, we are learner novices at navigating the excruciating mine-field that is caring for a child who would rather have her parents together, thankyou very much; the wound is raw; my being howls.

Out of necessity, and just-for-the-time-being, I have put together a hotch-potch of remedies for the pain.

I wish we could be a THREE family, not a TWO family! shouts Anna-mouse loudly from her car seat, in a voice loaded with resentment, a couple of days ago.

I try to explain via the rear-view mirror that I wish we could be a Three Family too, and that I tried, I really tried not to let this happen, and that this wasn't what I wanted either, but that just because Daddy doesn't live with us anymore doesn't mean we're not a family, or that we love her any less... And my voice trails.

I'll get better at this, I think. I've got to get better at this.

This is why I need painkillers.

They come in all shapes and guises, my anaesthetics: these days you will find me browing the supermarket aisles wafting Chanel no. 5. A scent, a really good, expensive scent has always lifted my spirits. I cannot seem to get the person looking back at me in the mirror to look how I want her to look - so at least she can smell good. Also, in these financially precipitous times (the Bim can barely support himself, let alone me and Anna-m), there's nothing like smelling expensive to remind myself to aim high.

And of course I have discovered that there is no point in saving things for that luxurious time when they may be needed/appreciated. They might never be. I might never be, so I figure I need to appreciate myself.

Harder said than done: another of my frequently-used painkillers is, in fact, the painkiller. You name it, I've taken it in the last few weeks if it's round and small and available over the counter. My body has been beset by pain. I suppose it's not surprising that my inner angst is manifesting physically, especially when I've got so very good at appearing as though nothing in the world is the matter when that particular facade is needed.

My pain gets worse at night. It increases in direct proportion to hours awake, which is many, because unfortunately I have been unable to sleep. I keep thinking that if I stay up just one more hour, my head might suddenly be able to crack it, I might have a 'Eureka' moment, I'll understand what the hell happened over the last four years, put my head on the pillow and sleep like a baby.

This has not yet happened. No. This is where Benylin - blessed sleeping draft! - comes in. That, and the very act of staying up so late that I can't actually think at all, about anything. I find myself bumping into things like a drunkard and know that I can finally allow myself to sink, stone-like, into a cold place alone.

What else? Well, there's the mindnumbing buzz of trashy TV; other people's gossip (always good for a quick hit, especially if their lives are worse than mine) and on a kinder note, nothing beats the fantastic rallying of friends, the extraordinarily generous comments left here in cyberspace, or the odd phrase uttered by Esme, late at night on the phone.

Well, something in the cocktail's working. I've got the nausea down to a couple of times a day; I haven't popped a pill for a day or two, and Anna-mouse left school today with a smile. Of course, my state of being is umbilically-linked to hers. When she feels better, I will. Though I do know the reverse is just as true, just as important.

Sometimes, just occasionally, I glimpse something way off through the trees - a lighter, airier place - and life's circling enthralls me.

Home Movie

2009-02-20T23:38:00.005Z

A couple of days before a strange woman with an intense look handed me a letter outside my house claiming she had slept with my husband, I happened upon an erstwhile favourite film of mine, 'Broadcast News'. It was late at night, I was already tired, but in spite of the dated look - big hair! big shoulders! - I became hooked once again by Holly Hunter's charming portrayal of an intelligent, lonely woman who allows herself just a few minutes every so often to reach for a box of tissues, take the 'phone off the hook, and weep.

So that's who I remind myself of now.

Oh, I operate, I really do. It's incredible, really. I hold down my two jobs; I trouble-shoot my first big community arts project; I deal with innumerable administrative problems; I handle the sensitivities of others; I take Anna-mouse to school, I read with her, talk with her, laugh with her; I applaud her sellotape and string collages: I take her to London, to the hospital to see Esme, who has had her hip done; I try to make Esme's life easier; I discuss logistics with the Bim - flats - the pros and cons of furnished versus unfurnished, and just how very cheaply you can pick up a pan set these days... and slowly, slowly let everyone know who needs to know that we are parting, for good, but that it is amicable, and we are remaining absolutely firm friends.

People are happy with that. It's a nice, pat ending and easy to deal with, and after all most of them are desperately relieved on my behalf - they never quite 'got' the relationship in the first place.

It is not like that for me. I am sadder than the saddest thing. I am a skinful of waiting tears. Finally the anger which has coloured my life for months now is abating, and the real hard stuff is taking hold. I find it much more debilitating, much lonelier, more difficult to contain at the same time as running this busy life. Anger propels; makes decisions shine with brilliance; takes people's breath away when they see its force whip through you - especially when they don't know where the energy's coming from. I got much better at my job when I was angry: I could function - often better than before.

But this. This is hard. The house is calmer, granted, now that the tension which gripped this little family for months has gone. The Bim and I are kinder to one another. He has labelled himself a 'crap husband' but a 'good friend', and I have to concur. I just need to remember I'm losing only the former, not the latter, because at the moment it feels as though everything has been lost. All that I wanted so very much. And all that I tried to keep together for so long.

I don't think I write sentimental posts very often. I hope there's usually some kind of edge. But tonight I've no edge left. Tonight I'm Holly Hunter, playing Jane Craig, playing myself.

Tonight, I so regret to say, I'm starring in my own film.

Snap

2009-02-13T22:48:00.005Z

It's getting dark, a couple of days after the snows, and I'm standing outside my house, finishing a conversation on the mobile with my mother Esme. I've been getting an especially bad work day out of my system before entering the domestic world within.

It's cold, Ma, I'm going to go in now, I say. The curtains are drawn, it looks cosy, and inside are Flo, my salt-of-the-earth neighbour who minds Anna-mouse when I can't, and Anna-m herself, waiting for me to come home.

So I hang up and reach for the porch door and just as I my hand gets to the handle I hear a voice behind me say Livvy.

I turn and there is a woman there - what, my age? Taller, fuller of face, not unattractive, intense. I think she must be one of the school mums, but I can't place her. I rack my brains for how she might know me.

Hello, I say, warmly, pretending greater acquaintance than I feel.

She comes closer, it all happens so fast. I didn't know whether to write this, I'm not proud of myself, I'm really sorry, I think she says.

She hands me a letter, holds my gaze meaningfully for a moment or two longer, then quickly goes.

Something really strange just happened, I say as I walk in the door. Flo comes towards me with a tea towel in her hand. These things, these tiny things, they stick with you, you know? Like Anna-mouse's little face, smiling up at me.

Oh, there was a strange woman come to the door about an hour ago, Flo says, did she look like... Yes, I say, she did.

When she appeared the first time she had knocked and asked for me and wouldn't leave a name, Flo said. Flo had thought it odd, and even odder as the hour went by the more she thought about it, so when I walked in with the letter she said I think you'd better sit down, Liv.

I tried to protest, and, even as I did so, began to open the envelope.

I read just three lines there, with the two of them standing looking at me:

I have been wrestling with my conscience for some time as to whether or not to write this, but have decided to go ahead, so here goes. My name is S--- and I am a work colleague of your husband's.

I look up. I am staggeringly calm. I know that this is it. I know that life isn't going to be the same.

I think I do need to sit down, Flo. Would you just watch Anna-m for a couple more minutes, I'm going to go upstairs.

I sit on the edge of the bed. I read it once. It's enough: a woman has waited over an hour outside my house to hand me a letter in which she tells me she has had an affair with my husband during precisely those weeks I thought he and I were making a huge, ultimate effort to repair our marriage. I don't care if it's true or not (he still swears blind it is not). Enough.

I am getting out of this soap opera, I think, and go instantly back downstairs. I have a daughter to play with, I have the supper to cook.

I am, of course, in shock. My heart is ice. I round the bottom step, and as Flo looks up at me, her big dear eyes full of concern, the moment is set forever as I feel the last tired, frayed thread running between myself and the Bim cleanly, keenly, irrevocably snap.

It's over, Flo, I hear myself say.

We Need Buttons

2009-02-03T21:18:00.003Z

School cancelled, work off, all three of us. We played the snow scene:

‘WE NEED BUTTONS’

Bagged, we keep them,
stubbly as unkempt chins.
Like stones they sit -
cold, silent;
no two ‘poppies’ the same.

To take one middling,
grainy lump he removes
an outsize glove,
plunges deep his Irish hand,
feels the ancient history.

We hear the thud -
a juicy cut makes two
damp stampers
for her to press
into the snowman’s
belly.

She calls him Bert.

Fast Forward

2009-01-28T22:02:00.006Z

So she sits there, with her scraped-back hair and her scooped-out cheeks, and her pale, pale skin, reeking intelligence and rigour. And her eyes assess me as I sigh and weep with frustration, her pupils two fiery pins. And then she begins to talk, and it's like... nectar, it's like honey, it's like drip feeding me hope, and the pieces of myself I have shot round the room during the previous half hour she gathers up with her flaming intellect and determined, life-affirming stance, and reflects back to me, showing me myself and where I have come to, and who I might be now, and I discover that it is really not such a very bad picture of a life, after all.

There is a chance, I say then, after my earlier raging about where the Bim and I currently find ourselves, that I am blaming him for everything - even for things that cannot possibly be his fault, like going to bed too late so that I am always tired; like not, just not, being able to write... In fact, most of what I am frustrated about is not his fault, I say - but it's easy to blame him, isn't it, he has been so very blameable of late, there has been so much wrong to lay at his door.

And she hears this, this odd, deeply incisive person before me, and she runs with it, and she knows before I do that my confession is the turning point of our session - and again before I know it she has led me to find an image to work with, to return to when I need it, which will enable me to sit down before my computer - this very night! - and for fifteen minutes allow myself to concentrate on what I most want to re-connect with, but have been unable even to approach for months - my writing life.

She talks of 'essence' - of Latin words - of the roots of things. How it is to be found in that word 'concentrate'. She says When I think of essence I think of perfume and she encourages me to find the concentrated essence of a delicious scent - in my home, or at a store - and meditate on its concentrated nature, and remember that it is this state I am seeking to emulate when I give time each day, no matter how short, to my chosen passion.

She says no wonder you have been unable to write, you have been, literally, scatterbrained - your being blown to the far corners by the fireworks of the last six months. You are rescuing a marriage; you are nurturing a child.

And she says another thing, in response to my familiar wail about the voices of disapproval which I have allowed to hinder me for years - a wonderful thing which has walked with me all day, comforting my very bones. She says it quickly, in passing, not intentionally the gem of a thing I find it to be at all:

As for your voices, she says: The past is a museum. My brain stumbles, goes back over it, grasps the potential of the image with astonishing speed. Pain, both age-old and recent, assumes suddenly the status of archive, a solid, brass-plaqued exhibit in a marble hall. Not the torturous, nasty live thing I've been dealing with, no, this past is curated, indexed, held under lock and key behind a good oakwood door. I begin to understand how to work effortlessly with something I have been throwing energy at for weeks; how even the very worst days can - will - recede.

There was a day - November 25th - my nadir. The desperate, scribbled note I wrote to myself is still pinned to the fridge where I left it - LIFE WILL GET BETTER THAN THIS SHIT DAY.

And, look, I was right.

Kite

2008-10-02T21:19:00.005+01:00

Little thing of heart so brave and full, she leaves me standing.

Literally, as I let the kite go and it drops and trails and then, as if taken by the sheer force of her will as she pelts at full tilt into the wind, it begins to fly.

It's up Anna-mouse! I scream. Yes! That's it! It's flying!

She glances behind to see the red and yellow ninety-nine pence splendour raised aloft and runs even faster on, on along the cliff top, to keep the thing up there. People stop to watch this tiny wonder hurtling past. She is oblivious to all but the wind. People are clapping now, laughing, and I run behind, catching her plaudits and applause.

Brilliant! calls a man as he gets into his car. Brilliant! he says, as we fly past.

She raises smile after smile, and I am crying out and laughing and revelling in try after try as she gets better and better at getting the kite to fly. Eventually she discovers that if she just believes and runs fast enough, she can get the thing up and flying behind her by herself.

Her perseverance is a wonder to me. All day this moment has been her goal. Never mind the paddling, the picnic, the icecream; never mind those. The thing she wants above all else(following a failed attempt a few months ago), is to get her kite to fly.

It is as perfect a moment of childhood as one could hope to make. For both of us. Its memory renders me almost speechless with love.

All week the image of my four-year-old running, running with her kite on that breathtakingly lit Sunday afternoon pierces my sad soul and heals, each time I think of it, a small, kite-sized piece of sadness there.

Seven times Seven

2008-09-26T00:05:00.003+01:00

Just when my spirits needed a little pick-me-up, I find I have been awarded an award by a reader new to my blog. Bush Mummy, who runs a charming blog of her own, has given me this lovely heart pic and asked me to answer the following seven questions with seven word answers.

It just so happens that I love seven. Seven is my talisman, my number, the way I think. It's odd, it's romantic, it's more than six.

And as it turns out, it's nice to have the chance to write a post which although of course about me, causes me to look at the bigger picture of the person previously known as Liv...

1. WHERE WERE YOU TEN YEARS AGO?
London's South Bank, playing the National Theatre

2. WHAT'S ON YOUR TO-DO LIST TODAY?
Try to get to bed before 1am.

3. WHAT IF YOU WERE A BILLIONAIRE?
I am, in spirit. I have Anna-mouse.

4. FIVE PLACES YOU HAVE LIVED?
Salford, St. Andrews, Camberwell, Cork, my head.

5. THREE BAD HABITS?
Going to bed too late, Procrastination, Impatience

6. SNACKS YOU LIKE?
Olives, crackers and cheese - late at night.

7. WHO AM I TAGGING?
Emergence - a new blog - great spirit, great heart
Reluctant Memsahib - recently discovered, revel in her fine writing
Stay at Home Dad - because I want to read him again

Heart Listening

2008-09-21T21:31:00.003+01:00

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

Amelia Earhart, American aviator, 1898 - 1937

Why should it be that courage comes so much more easily when life appears to be falling apart?

I could just say I don't know. Lately, I have been aware of the insidiousness of those words I don't know. It's a great cover, the fence-sitting, uncommitted, undecided place of I-don't-know. Mad-makingly, it's what the Bim said, when I asked him those raging questions - But why? Why?

I have come to believe that we are often not being entirely truthful when we say 'I don't know'. I think we are more often talking about what we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge or to say out loud. I think that we - I - frequently do know, we simply choose to live parallel lives with the information we can cope with, rather than act on the more uncomfortable knowledge our instinct comes up with all the time. Even good information can feel too much, too outlandish, at times. We seem to have grown rusty in the art of listening to our instinct. We don't live by the moon anymore, and the city cement deadens the voices of our hearts.

Take me. All summer I had an eerie sense of gloom about the Bim and me. I can write it now because I know why now, but although I was aware of this feeling, I couldn't actually live it. I couldn't stop everything, sit the Bim down and say 'Now what's all this about?'. I should have done, of course. I should have paid attention to myself. To us.

This summer's gut feeling was as powerfully negative as it was overwhelmingly positive in the twenty-four hours before I met the Bim for the very first time. I remember walking down Cork city's Shandon Street almost shaking with expectation, thinking This is odd... Because it was such an exciting feeling I was more inclined to go with it than the more recent offering, but even then I could not quite believe, until the Bim was there buying me a glass of Guinness, that some better, higher part of me just knew.

So one small, upbeat piece of news is this: I have started to listen to my instinct. Because of this, in the profound sadness which backdrops my days, I meet moments of peace. Scarily, what I've discovered is that if you listen to your instinct, you frequently have to act on it, too, so true to this discovery the last few weeks have seen me handing in my resignation; making a commitment to writing in a way that I have not previously done; handing in a proposal to get my job back in a form that would enable me to do that (freelance, part-time, doing the bits I like and handing on the rest) and writing my very first magazine article whose commission I got myself. (Okay so they're not paying me, but they're printing me. I'll work out the money thing later.)

And what of the Bim and me? Ah, well, that may take a little longer to fathom. I am listening, but my instinct is still saying 'I don't know'. We have separated ourselves out a little. We move round the house less like lovers and more like friends and we have successfullly put our own troubles aside in order to navigate Anna-mouse through her first ever week at school - but beyond this?

No. I don't know. I really, truly don't know.

Respite

2008-08-29T23:35:00.006+01:00

She talks, and it's like listening to my own thoughts.

We have known each other since we were eleven, and I want to hear, yet can hardly bear to hear, what she has to say. I know that her clear-sighted pragmatism, softened at the edges by her love, will be far too like the words I don't want to bring to the forefront of my brain.

We are in Suffolk on a short break, our two girls asleep upstairs. Each of us is curled up at one end of the sofa, clutching wine glasses and discussing the awfulnesses of the past week in quiet tones. The cottage is like an old friend, too, and I know that I can just about live these moments within its warm, containing walls. When I speak my stomach lurches as I let the words out into the air, but they need to be tested in this kindest of environments, with this kindest of arbiters: I give her a glance and understand what it means that she is allowing them to pass.

Earlier today I swam in the sea. A seagull wheeled above me and a long, long way down the shore one other lone swimmer bobbed. It was not a sunny seaside day. It was grey and blowy. Strangers stopped to applaud my water entry, for God's sake, on hearing my cold water screams.

I thought it might be cathartic, and it was. For the first time since the Bim said those words last week, I felt free. I was not on dry land anymore, where he was. I was somewhere else, separate, swimming, gasping with cold.

Afterwards my hair was matted. My arms were tight with salt. But it was worth it, for those few, short moments of respite.

The Moment of Marriage

2008-08-24T01:12:00.005+01:00

I attended a Quaker wedding today. It was light and clear and mainly silent. Its simple integrity was moving. The bride and groom, who have found one another later in life, were happy. I wore a linen ensemble. People said I looked beautiful. I clean up nice, I said, with a rye smile.

It's hard to write about the past week; I think I'll only be able to do this obliquely:

Yes, he said, when I said I know you're lying and you must tell me the truth now. Yes, I am unhappy and I think I want to leave.

And when were you planning to tell me that? I said, sounding like a bad screenplay. Most of the day sounded like that; most of that day was a bad screenplay.

When I was sure, he said.

I have heard this from you before, I said. I can't go through all this again. I was unhappy for the best part of 40 years, I don't intend to unhappy for the next 40. If you have to go, then go, I said.

And then I went to leave the house myself. You see I had this deadline to get the car to its MOT, which had assumed a vital importance, as unimportant things do in a crisis. It surprised him that I went to leave. It surprised him that I didn't stay to continue the conversation. It was, he said later, at that moment that he realised what he might lose. Er, that would be me and Anna-Mouse and all that I thought you held dear, dear. Though I don't know what I think anymore. It's hard to know what to think when people lie.

I drove with speed up the road. He called me and asked me to pull over. He talked, I shouted. I think every single thing I said for the next fifteen minutes was shouted. It was a shouty conversation. But a couple of hours later I was sane again and he had found someone professional to talk to, who might help with the anger and the lying and he had told her no, there is nothing there, I want to be with my wife and family, and he was looking very very serious.

I went out and tried to get drunk and told him I'd think about it.

The thing is, we married. We had a child. We are married. We have a child. Otherwise, I'd be outta here (it's odd, this urge to bad film-speak language. I think it helps me not to feel).

Part of me wants to behave as irresponsibly as him. Hit back, kick back, go and snog someone, take the child and run. Or make him go back to Ireland and be a very brave single mum. The better part of me, the person who made herself attend the Quaker wedding today, when a wedding was the last place I wanted to be, who had to have a cry in the car park so that she could go into the Meeting House with a smile, thinks this: isn't this type of thing, this very moment of marriage, what those vows I took so seriously were made for? Isn't this why we said those things, to stop us running away at the very moment we most want to?

Something wonderful about a Quaker wedding is that everyone present is asked to sign the Quaker Marriage Certificate, which is then given to the bride and groom as a keepsake. Their vows to one another are also written on the parchment. It is an important touch, I think. I wish I had the same record of the dear witnesses at our wedding. And I'd like to re-read those bloody vows.

When it came to my turn to sign, I found myself hesitating over which name to sign. When I got married I did not automatically lose my maiden name, because it was my stage name and therefore the one I have always used professionally. This occasionally causes confusion when I can't remember which name I've given but generally satisfies the part of me that never wanted to lose my independent identity.

'Livvy..' I began in my best handwriting. And then I watched my right hand spell out the surname I inherited five years ago when I signed my life up to the sad, funny Irishman asleep upstairs.

Cartwheels

2008-08-05T22:50:00.005+01:00

My mother Esme couldn't make Anna-mouse's birthday this year. Some pixie pushed her down the stairs on her way to the loo in the middle of her first night's stay with my brother in his rented Italian villa, and wouldn't ya know it, she fractured her arm in three places and badly sprained her ankle. Ah, the joys of chemotherapy's side effects: it's a bit like that song, 'Your hip bone's connected to your thigh bone'... she falls because she can't feel her feet, and she can't feel her feet because of the peripheral neuropathy and she has peripheral neuropathy because she had chemotherapy and she had chemotherapy because she had cancer, and she had cancer because - gosh, I'd make alot of money if I could answer that one, and maybe save alot of people alot of heartache.

Anyway, I digress. Or should that be, for long-term readers, 'obsess'?

Esme couldn't travel for Anna-mouse's birthday treat this year (a trip to the seaside instead of a party - all that enforced social interaction and themed table napkin stuff just doesn't appeal to my free-thinking just-four-year-old, which, in my recent strange and fragile state of mind, was privately a blessed relief). So I took Anna-mouse to Esme, instead.

None of your Barbie nonsense for Esme! She decided in her inimitable way that it was of enormous importance that Anna-mouse be taken out to lunch at Kenwood House in North London, and thence into the wonderful Adams-designed house to see Esme's favourite painting - a luminous self-portrait by an elderly Rembrandt.

I have always nursed a special affection for Kenwood, with its studied grounds dipping down to the lake; its cake-top house and its small but special art collection. There are rooms full of oils of varying eras, the best of these arguably the Rembrandt and a small Vermeer. I used to come here alone on the 210 bus as a dreamy teenager and wander the elegant halls.

So it is quietly moving for me to come here with Anna-mouse and Esme, especially in my present, reflective state. This became doubly so when we took our slow, uneven perambulation round the house to its entrance - me in the middle flanked by daughter on one side and mother on the other. We have made many such walks over the last year and a half, and I am aware that our mutual progress has slowed as Esme's strength fades, almost imperceptibly, like the air from one of Anna-m's balloons, which bob around the playroom for days after their initial, first-day glory until they die with a desultory pop to my midnight knife.

We stop at a bench framed by two huge pots of agapanthus for Esme to rest. Anna-mouse runs this way and that on the wide lawn in front of us and then comes to flop at her Granny's side. Esme begins to tell Anna-mouse about my gymnastic prowess when young.

And your mummy used to do cartwheels! Do you know what a cartwheel is?

Anna-mouse looks at me no small degree of admiration, and then shakes her head.

I bet you can't still do them, can you? says Esme to me. Can you? It would be lovely if you could show her.

Of course I can! the girl in me cries. The nearer-to-fifty-than-forty-year-old Livvy does a couple of quick, sensible shoulder rolls and then, in a glorious moment of frozen time, I throw myself at the lawn, the challenge and my own, disappeared past and show Anna-mouse not one, but two beautiful cartwheels.

Esme cheers. Anna-m takes up the gauntlet and rolls around the lawn showing her Fifi knickers, shouting But look at what I can do!

After a moment of pain-free triumph, I feel my entire body jar and I know that I'm lucky to have escaped serious damage. Esme and Anna-mouse continue their way to the house entrance with me trailing behind, making 'ouch!' faces, and rubbing my thigh.

But only when they're not looking.

Missing Myself

2008-07-28T23:26:00.004+01:00

I've been missing myself.

It came to me finally a couple of nights ago. Three in the morning, insomniac, seeking comfort in Anna-mouse's room. I sat on the chair at the end of her bed and breathed in the sweet, peaceful darkness.

What happened, I wondered, what happened to you, Liv?

Where's that nervy, excitable, energetic girl who, yes, could be and was plagued by a darker, depressive side but who nevertheless had adventures! Where's that strong, singular creature who danced naked on rooftops in the rain; knew how to move an audience with a turn of the head; smoked, drank gin, made love with more than one man in a day? Where's that flat-stomached, muscular girl who could get away with that gorgeous little sundress - the girl who never, never looked her age?

It's a thoughtful place to be, the mid-forties. It's a reflective time. I've been forced to reflect after a quarter of madness. Four ridiculous months spent in an escalating state of imbalance with myself, my family, my life.

How are you? said the wise lady doctor this evening. I could tell by the way she was looking at me that I must have been very very bad, those three weeks ago when I could hardly breathe. I reminded myself before I went in today that I didn't have to make myself sound better than I am to this person, like I do to so many others. That I wasn't going to worry her if I didn't sound too positive.

I discovered as I talked that it isn't that I'm not positive - just that I have a silken shawl of many melancholic colours of sadness about me. The lady doctor wants to see me again in September, after I have re-started The Job.

Ah, the Job. Well as it turns out I couldn't have decided to make a bigger life-change and - hands-up - I entirely underestimated what its effect would be. Everything about the situation was change, from the Bim and me swopping places (me the main breadwinner, him at home with Anna-m, with all the endless guilt that entails); to being behind the footlights rather than in front of them; to having a pay cheque at the end of month - which, after thirty years of freelancing evoked in me a surprising degree of ambivalence - and finding myself organising for other people to be creative, rather than being the one organised for.

The first, honeymoon weeks were a joy. I couldn't believe my luck, couldn't believe how much I loved the Job. I threw myself into every task asked of me with gusto. Quite how I went from this to working fourteen long, long days on the trot, lurching from one sickening deadline to another and barely laying eyes on my family is... strange.

I hit a wall. One day I was this super-efficient, impressive newcomer, the next I was staring at my laptop quite unable to go on. I have to stop, I thought. I have to stop now.

I walked out to my car and phoned a friend. Go home, she said. You must go home now. My dear, special boss thought a long weekend would do it, but three days of sleeping and weeping later the wise lady doctor was writing me a Sick Note for 'Work-related Stress'. A counsellor friend of mine was appalled: How long have you been in the job? she said. Well it doesn't take very long to lose yourself when you're not looking.

And still I couldn't stop. That's the thing about nervous exhaustion, you may be exhausted, but the nerves run high. (I like to think I've been 'nervously exhausted' - wish she'd written that on my sick note; it evokes a gentler, more romantic age of illness, Katherine Mansfield's, perhaps, or Keats'). I insisted on staggering into work a few more times; had several helpful discussions with lovely boss; by sheer strength of concentration managed to complete a couple of outstanding duties and finally, finally, weary, battered and considerably drugged against the rising panic in my chest, got myself to holiday time.

So here I sit, ten days since. There's a cat beside me, lightning outside and the heat hangs heavy. I shouldn't be up this late - it's part of my new thing, not to be, at least until I come right again - but the words wanted out tonight, and who am I to argue?

The answer is that I don't know.

I do know that love beats keenly in me these days, now that I have the space to feel it. For my extraordinarily beautiful, skipping child. For the Bim. For my two flawed families and, most particularly just now, for my friends. I miss my friends. I miss some of them so much it hurts. Especially the ones who knew that Liv then, the younger Liv, the one I'm trying to reclaim.

There's obviously a trick to ageing. You don't have to know it when you're young - you wouldn't understand it then anyway. It's something to do with holding a sense of the bigger picture - of the long view. Otherwise it becomes all about the moment and the immediate feelings. But I don't think it can be done without review. My review list, the one I might write in the morning, goes like this:

Spend time with husband and child. You feel better this way.

Sleep, eat well, sleep.

Start to write again.

Contact your friends. The ones who shared the gin and cigarettes, who know what you looked like naked, or wished they did, who saw the performances, kept the faith - the ones who will forgive the long silence.

Tell the friends: Liv has been missing herself. Perhaps you could help find her?

Three-and-Three-Quarters

2008-04-16T22:12:00.004+01:00

Is it because I see my child less these days that I revel in her even more?

She is three-and-three-quarters, but if you asked her she'd say three-and-a-half because she likes the sound of it better. 'Three-and-a-half' is bragged about with pride; 'three-and-three-quarters' dismissed with scorn.

She likes to dance (Let's do a welaxing dance to the bathroom, Mummy). She'll rip off a sock and dance barefoot in fruit puree at the drop of a hat.

Magazines are still mazagines, croissants are crustles: I hold on tight to these anomalies, like I hold on to her when she lets me. I don't correct her because I know that her fierce articulacy won't keep her ignorant of them for much longer.

She has a host of imaginary friends, the most vivid of whom is her Uncle Norgat, who has been there, done that - whatever it is, Uncle Norgat's got there first. I am deeply, irrationally fond of Uncle Norgat.

Occasionally, like tonight, when I'm singing the goodnight songs by her tiny bed, she sticks out a hand, asking for mine, and there we are in the dark, hand-holding, sleep-falling, until her breathing stills to a steady rise and fall, and I make myself let go.

I love three-and-three-quarters.

At Home to Mr Shingles

2008-03-21T21:39:00.004Z

My mother Esme looks old and ailing. I am pained by the stories in her face. 'Shingles' ought to be a playground game, or the name of a children's entertainer.

She hands me the tiny volume as I busy to leave: Shakespeare's Merry Wives soft-leathered in miniature.

We both know why, she says.

The job that saved her, all those years ago.

On the cover, four tiny words: The Play's the Thing.

Anthology

2008-03-20T22:55:00.005Z

It's glossy. There are stars! It looks far better than I thought it would.
I knew what it was by the postmark, but it was still thrilling.
It's slim but undeniably book-like: the paper smells new-made.
First timer, that's me!
It's probably my best, sweetest and quietest triumph.

Five Lines

2008-03-19T22:56:00.003Z

What shall I do? I asked dearest Dee over drunken dinner (you can tell it was tonight, that's quite a bad sentence, alliteratively speaking). I love my blog; I love my blog readers. My blog is what taught me to take my writing seriously, it's the best thing I've done in years - and I am stretched so thin I don't know how to keep writing. What shall I do?

Write five lines, she said. Regularly. Commit to that. If you just write five lines...

Dee's good on ideas.

So here they are. Tonight's Five:

I have become one of those juggling people you read about in the papers.
Our lives have turned themselves upside down.
I feel as though I have grown limbs, each one pulled for a piece of my time.
I weep for the moments I no longer have with Anna-mouse.
And I .. ( go on, Liv, say it)... I love my new job.

Alchemy

2008-02-17T22:50:00.002Z

I have been offered a job.

I, Livvy U, who has never had a proper job in my life; who has remained avowedly freelance through thick and, let's face it, lots of thin; who turned down jobs-a-plenty in those faraway days when I went out to temp to stay true to my vocation as an actress - I, who had my doubts, re-trained, and still clung to my Schedule D number, my pathetic list of expenses and a fading sense of myself as a dyed-in-the-wool bohemian - that same Livvy has been offered a job.

A job-job. A titled job! A job-job with a salary!

For those who have never trodden the freelance path, it must be hard to imagine the magnitude of this change, but change for me it would be in profound and subtle ways. These ways drove me to spend most of the week before the interview in a darkened room, holding my head and agonising over just how much, and what constituent parts, of my artist I would be abandoning by taking this job, were I, who had not a hope in a million, to be offered it. Would I ever act again? Did I really want to give up the driving passion of my life before the Bim and Anna-mouse came along? Would there be time to continue writing, my newest-found love?

Then there were the nights spent agonising over the hours. I did not want a full-time, 37 hours a week, 52 weeks of the year job. I knew this. This much was clear. Rushes of guilt swept over me at three in the morning that I could even be thinking about leaving Anna-mouse for this amount of time, let alone compromising the re-built, fragile closeness with the Bim.

On the Saturday before the Monday interview I told the Bim that I did not want the job.

He said, like everyone else, that I must attend the interview. "Ok, ok," I said, in a bad-tempered kind of way, knowing that he was right and that I had to, just to see the wretched process through.

On Sunday night I got out all my old Community Dance Studies files (because I had, after all, got a Distinction, I'd simply never used the knowledge, because I met the Bim and... well, you know). I realised that not only did I love this subject but that it is something I feel passionately about. I was born with the arts in my blood, I am utterly convinced of their power to change and empower people... Why not just jot a bit of that down and have a little think about it so that I didn't disgrace myself in the morning?

And then the morning came, and with it the alchemy.

It turned out to be one of those blessed days where every little thing comes together in support of the bigger picture. I could almost see the universe organising it all for me. I could certainly feel it. A friend had told me to go in 'all guns blazing', and I did - but really it felt as if all I had to do was turn up. The rest had already been decided.

It was an amazing hour. I found someone else sitting on the sofa with me, speaking with vision and passion and clearness of thought. Someone whose company I hadn't experienced before. Turned out to be the person I've become since having Anna-mouse. It seems that profound things happen when you let the profoundest things in life happen to you. I was astonished to discover that the last three and a half years have been working an alchemy within me all of their own. Quite something for the woman whose brain became so fuzzed by the initial shock of childbirth that she thought she'd never think straight again.

They began to look at me in a particular way and I began to realise something was going on here. The objections, logistical, practical, emotional to my taking the job began to disappear. Don't want to give up acting? We have no objection to your going off and doing a couple of jobs a year! Don't want to work nine to five because of your daughter? Of course you'll be on flexi-time! Don't want to work 52 weeks a year? Would it make a difference to you if we made the job term-time only, which was actually our original plan?

I don't want to put any pressure on you, he said an hour and a half later, calling to offer me the job, but we really do want you.

Sometimes you just have to listen to what life is saying.

So I said yes.

The Comeback

2008-02-12T22:33:00.000Z

I shall come back quietly - though life has not been quiet.

I will honour my promise, and curl myself round the Bim's warm, sleeping back at 11pm.

I will write just a few words, dear words, oh-how-they-comfort-me-words.

I remember moments of the last couple of post-less months. I remember that I could not write here anymore, much as I wanted to hold onto the precious, un-met fellow writer-readers who come here and are unerringly kind. I discovered that people you have never met can feel close to you, and vice versa, and that this is bolstering and affirming in troubled seas.

It's true that crisis equals opportunity. We decided to look at it that way.

Following the semi-comic tragedy that was a moment in our marriage, the Bim and I took a long hard look at each other, wondered what the hell we'd been doing, and set to putting things right.

The hurt of it all ravaged my immune system and I spent weeks fighting one thing or another, or nursing Anna-mouse through the night, or holding my migrained head in my hands.

The Bim returned to work after the Summer of the Bad Back and promptly discovered he was being hounded out of the building. One night just before Christmas there was a loud banging at the door and a man handed him a letter, Special Delivery. Come to a meeting it said. You are going to be disciplined. You may well lose your job. A couple of hours later, when Anna-mouse was down and the house quiet, we looked at one another and knew that another chapter was over. He resigned the next day.

Christmas with no income, hmmm!

But mysteriously and wondrously we were happier people for the changes wrought.

Once, the recent past came to remind us of what we had escaped - I met the Woman Down the Road in the street, we managed a pleasant conversation, I just about made it up the hill before collapsing into the Bim's arms at our door.

For several, nervewracking weeks we have clung to the vision of a new existence - and yesterday, quite suddenly, it paid off, in myriad ways.

And of course the girl who drives us continues to run into the wind, her hair backlit gold by the winter sun.

Atishoo! Atishoo! We All Fall Down

2007-11-27T19:59:00.000Z

Does anyone know who might be the God of Good Health? And what I need do to get into his/her good books again?

We are the House of Sickness! I may as well wear a nose bouquet, paint a cross on the door and have done with it. First, there was the migraine (mine), then the wobbles (mine) then the cold-virus-flu thing with the temperature and the sore throat and the funny tummy (me and Anna-Mouse simultaneously - we had simultaneous doctor's appointments with different doctors, too, which made for rather a stressful visit, seeing as only me and her were there, and I could hardly send her off on her own); then came the cough, the dreaded nighttime variety which wakes everyone up as soon as everyone is asleep (me and Anna-Mouse); then came the sinusitis-with-the-worst headache ever (the Bim) - oh please let it end.

We are also the House of Drugs: paracetamol by the packetful, cold cures and herbal potions and can I just say - where, oh where would we be at 3 in the morning without Calpol, other than at our wits' end... And although we've all rallied rather valiantly, we have also had our moments with the generally gloomy spirits that accompany such a pox-filled house.

So having very little but the colour of the four walls to write about, I find myself writing about very little at all. Makes a change from cancer, chemo and marriage wobbles, I suppose. But it feels good to fill the box, press the button, remember there's a bigger world and that in the Big Scheme of Things all this means nothing, nothing at all.

Now, I've a date with a Benylin bottle. There are some compensations...

Quiet House

2007-11-08T21:12:00.000Z

The house is quiet. It is empty but for me, the cats and my thoughts.

The cats arrived this summer – a small, friendly tabby and a feisty three-legged tortoiseshell. I didn’t know she had only three legs when I fell in love with her, but that’s me all over, picking up the waif and stray before I know what I’ve let myself in for.

Earlier in the house today there was piano music. I let the notes soothe and rise. We acquired the piano this summer, too. The gift of a Quaker friend. An old German upright that’s been passed from family to family, wherever the wish arose, the only stipulation being that when we no longer want it we must pass it on ourselves, no charge.

My fingers move creakily across the keyboard. I think of the annual Open Day held in my teacher’s sitting-room; pupils gathered to play their best pieces to parents. I wore my white bell-sleeved lacy blouse and three-quarter length trousers. There was probably a ribbon in my hair. I was thin, studious, seven. A bit of a star pupil.

I play on, giving the Mozart a go, having better luck with the Haydn. It doesn’t come easily anymore, though I can imbue anything with feeling. I think of winter afternoons, then, in the playroom at Malts View Road. My sister Hope and I making up vast concert programmes for my mother to sit through, costumed from the dressing-box, accompanied by me on the piano.

Which song do you like best? we would demand after every show. Pick one! Pick one! You have to choose! I was triumphant when my mother chose Cockles and Mussels for me to sing again. I was a shocking romantic.

Then my piano teacher changed and I got one who smoked and I didn’t like him at all. Plus, I was thirteen and too many other changes were happening. I never took formal lessons again. Over the years I’ll sit down when there’s a piano and not too many people listening and let my fingers make the slow journey back to Clementi’s trills, or Satie’s stillness, but even the muscle memory of those dear favourites is beginning to fade.

So I’m cheering myself by learning some new pieces. I found a bundle of tattered sheet music tied up with string in the piano stool drawer. Most of it’s brown, and dry as parchment, but the notes are all there. My sight-reading is agonisingly slow, but just occasionally I perfect a little run of something that doesn’t sound at all bad. I round off every session with a very loud rendition of She, because it’s the only song my fingers can still remember from start to finish. When the silence is particularly odd, I sing along with it, giving my best impression of Charles Aznavour…

They are in Ireland. Planned for months. We didn’t know those months would fall now, when there’s so much to think about. Anna-mouse is being feted, at the absolute heart of her Irish family, which makes me happy. The Bim is getting another Celtic infusion, too, which he needs. I had plans for when they were gone, painting the house, sorting the garden, that sort of thing. Instead I find myself sitting for hours in my pyjamas, hugging a cup of coffee. The physical and mental toll of the last few weeks is being taken and I am, finally, allowing it to happen.

When I look back at the week I realise the two things of note I’ve achieved are learning how to play O Come All Ye Faithful for Christmas, in a vague but positive gesture towards having a happy one, and sorting my writing papers. That’s all.

It Happens Like This

2007-10-25T23:43:00.000+01:00

It happens like this. One moment you're going along, and you know it's been a difficult year - your mother's had cancer; your child turned three and temporarily lost the ability to sleep; you're been told you're post-menopausal way, way before your time; your husband's been off work all summer with a wretched back injury and an employer with less compassion than a gnat -but you're coping.

You're not only coping, you think you're making it work, and in fact you've finally cracked the writer's block and the confidence stuff and you've discovered you can write words that make other people cry, and in many ways, yes it's been one hell of a summer, but you're personally happier than you have ever been. You don't notice that you've taken your eye off the most important ball. You notice the anger, and the mood swings and the apathy, of course you do, but you don't say hang on, are you still happy, like me?

So then the trees shed one leaf too many and you're bare, bare like the branches, thinking How did this happen? How did I get here? and your husband is sending your brother a text message meant for the woman down the road and it would be funny if it weren't so very close to the bone, shall we say the bone marrow of your family, my family, my life.

Then, there's rage. There's that hour on the bench overlooking the view on the most beautiful day of the year, and those two trees against the skyline with the perfect, little tree in between, smouldering autumn trees which shouldn't be so beautiful on a day like this, when life has taken such a daft, unexpected turn. Weather does its own thing, though. Weather can be ironic.

Four nights apart help. Us, of course, not the child. The child who asks and asks and says and says, even though she took him to the airport because I thought it would make his sudden departure more real. Better than him walking out the front door and not coming back for four days.

So now it's a week later and the world's still turning. It does that, always, it's a good thing to know. The ground I stand on is not firm anymore, but at least I still have a Bim in my life and at least there is talking and love. I couldn't have been more delusional, he said from the country he has longed for all these months, than the strongest narcotic could have made me. And indeed it is clear that his breaking of the faith with us, with me, was the worst sin committed. The woman steered him, even in these early days of friendship, clearly back to me. Which is what you'd hope someone would do.

I look at my year. I look at his. Our lives did not meet very often. We are taking care, now, to make sure that they do.

It happens like this.

All Shall be Well

2007-10-07T00:09:00.000+01:00

I wasn't able to sleep the night before. Probably none of us were.

Faithful Hope, my sister, accompanied her. The appointment was at eleven. They made them wait a long time, though not as long as the interminable six months Esme spent having chemo and the rest of us spent watching.

I took Anna-mouse to music class. A bright, chirpy autumnal morning. The end of a week. And a chapter, as it turns out.

I was preparing lunch when Hope rang, as promised. Pizza fingers under the grill, half the fridge scattered over the counter, a bit of rough chopping going on and several half-touched drinks in the sink. Signs of a distracted morning.

"Hi Liv, you can stop stressing now," said my sister, a smile in her voice.

And with that, and the short, happy conversation which ensued, I learnt that my mother is cancer-free. That the scan result was fine. That she does not have to visit a hospital for three months. That the PICC line was being removed as we spoke (no more showers with the arm in a plastic bag!) and that the many and wretched signs of depletion she has recently been showing are due to the extreme toxicity of the drugs, not a return of the illness they were fighting.

I put down the 'phone. Forget Anna-m's lunch. Leap around. Feel the weight of ten heavy months begin to lift.

I pick up the 'phone. Call the Bim. Go into the garden to feel the briskness of the air, and let the October sunshine warm me as I talk. I note the neglected grass, the overgrown borders, the pots I planted with so much care earlier in the year parched and deadened before their time: something had to give this year, and rather than it be any one of the dear persons in my care, it was the garden I chose to let go.

Just had to tell you, I say. It's my mum. She's fine. The scan's clear. Isn't that fantastic?

And then I burst into tears.

Lithuanian Snapshots - Closing Picture

2007-09-25T01:48:00.000+01:00

Is it time for lunch yet? reads Jay's text message.

It is Monday, my last full day. The weather has turned; all morning it has been spitting rain. I hop in and out of puddles and shoe-shops, trying to find something more substantial than my sparkly flip-flops. I am thoughtful, even a little melancholy. I miss my two beloveds desperately, at the same time as longing for more time alone. I spent so much of my life alone before I met the Bim that it will probably always be a state I hanker after. Time alone feeds me. I remember who I am again. I remember how to think again. I recognise this sort of time now, though (in a way I never did then, when I had oodles of the stuff ) as an important, priceless luxury.

Jay joins me for lunch at Skonir ir Kvapas, a wonderful, old-style tea-room in a picturesque courtyard where we order ginger tea with orange juice and honey. We talk for ages. I feel my conversation unfolding from me in a way I haven't for months. These conversations I've had with Jay throughout the trip are the longest consecutive conversations with a grown-up I've had in a long time. Jay is a great listener, and it feels good.

After lunch we go our separate ways with a promise to meet again for dinner. I go in search of the Holocaust Museum on Pamenkalnio 12, to complete my short investigations into Lithuania's recent past.

The Green House, a modest, green clapboard cottage, is difficult to find. It is not what I was expecting. The door is locked, though the Museum is obviously open: an ominous sign and again, not what I was expecting. No-one comes to answer the bell, and eventually a fellow visitor, just leaving, lets me in. Inside, there is no-one to whom I can pay the ridiculously small entrance sum, so I begin to walk around the house without a ticket.

There is a make-shift, temporary feel to the Museum, nothing like yesterday's exhibition, which was so expertly, expensively put together. This is home-made by comparison. I gather that it is not state funded - that Lithuania is, in fact, in some turmoil with itself about the role its own partisans played in aiding the liquidation of its own Jewish population - and that the Museum is the private project of several Lithuanian Holocaust survivors. Very little of the text is in English, so that I am forced to pick up what I can from the board headings (which are) and the exhibition's many images. They pack a weighty punch.

Pre-war Vilnius was known as the Jerusalem of the North. Ironically, Jews were invited to settle in Lithuania in the 14th Century by Grand Duke Gediminas. In the 19th Century Vilnius became the centre for the European Jewish language, Yiddish, and by the 20th Century it had become the Jewish cultural capital of Eastern Europe. Many eminent Jewish thinkers, artists, writers, scientists and musicians made it their home. Pre-World War II there were 100 synagogues in the city and six daily Jewish newspapers. 100,00 Jews lived here of a total 240,000 in Lithuania as a whole.

Today, there are just 5,000 Jews in Lithuania. And just one synagogue still stands in the city of Vilnius. It survives because the Nazis used it as a medical store. A rabbi flies in from London now and then to officiate.

I'm not a numbers person, except when they become more eloquent than words.

A short way into my tour of the Museum, a door opens and two well-dressed Jewish women of a certain age appear. There is much consternation that I have neither ticket nor a guidebook, and was not greeted on arrival. They introduce themselves by Christian name, insist I retrace my steps to the very front door. Let's start again! they say. Come in, come in! they say, opening and closing the door even though I am already in the building - Now, where did you say you were from? They hand me a well-thumbed wodge of photocopied pages - an extremely wordy, well-written guide to the exhibiton.

I find their kindly attentions extremely touching. I know these women; they remind me of candlelit Friday nights at my childhood friend Shoshannah's house, welcomed into a culture which is not mine but with which I have always resonated. Coiffeured, intelligent, good-hearted women, too concerned for your health and well-being but achingly reassuring. I think of my friend Dee, whose Jewishness seeps through her every pore and more than makes her who she is. I think of Anne Frank, who was born the same year as my mother Esme - how she, too, could have been nearing eighty now. What a body of work we lost there! It was the slim, serious little paperback of Anne's diary, slipped into my twelve-year-old hand, which started my own habit of journal-keeping, which led, perhaps, to here.

There were two ghettos in Vilnius. The Small Ghetto existed for 46 days in 1941. No-one survived it: eleven thousand Jews were marched from here to their deaths in the forest at Paneriai, some 10 kms from the city. The Large Ghetto existed for two years. A few hundred people survived it; some nineteen thousand died. Studying the maps in the Museum I realise how little the streets in the city centre have changed. I make my own, lone pilgrimage to find the streets mentioned. It is a drizzly, sombre little mission. I begin to understand why the comments of Jewish visitors from all round the world in the Museum's leather-bound Visitors Book are so frustrated and angry. The ghetto streets remain largely unchanged, but they pass almost unmarked. I find two or three marble memorial plaques, but blink and you'd miss them.

The Ghettos were made and sealed in the old Jewish quarter, in the very heart of the city. It was impossible not to know what was happening. Indeed, crowds formed to watch the Jews being marched in at the main Ghetto gates. I find myself staring into the faces of elderly passers by, silently questioning: Were you here? I ask them. Were you?

As I identify street after ghetto-street, walk the pavements, touch the walls, I remember a couple of original, black and white posters in the last room of the Museum, advertising theatrical performances. In 1942, over 120 musical and theatrical performances took place in the Large Ghetto. I am ineffably moved by this. Plays, they did plays. And music. They had a Symphony Orchestra. They took up their instruments and played. They took up their instruments and played, learnt speeches and performed. Of course. As an artist myself I understand this in a visceral, passionate way. It is how I have been taught to live, too. And so it is that in the face of this sad, heartbreaking day, I go back to my hotel room, and write.

The next day I leave Lithuania, and come home.

Lithuanian Snapshots - Four

2007-09-15T22:25:00.000+01:00

After lunch, Jay and I visit the Museum of Victims of Genocide, housed in the former KGB building on Gediminas Avenue. It is a fine day, the sky is high and we are cheery after our filming.

We only have an hour. As it turns out I am glad, because atmospheres work on me, and the building was heaving with its history. It is a heavy-doored, stone-staired, long-corridored structure. Eerie holographic hands holding guns reach from the walls.

In the upstairs rooms -which used to be office space to the Russians, then the Nazis, and then the Russians again - is a brilliantly assembled exhibition, beautifully lit, meticulously labelled. The walls are filled with writings and photographs about the various oppressions and occupations this fierce little country has had to tolerate. Cases of priceless human ephemera pinned behind glass like so many insect specimens detail the thousands of lost, deported, murdered lives.

Downstairs in the basement are the torture cells of the KGB prison, maintained virtually untouched since their last prisoner less than thirty years ago. The cells are painted an old, puce green. They boast of the darkest places the human mind can go. The Wet Cell struck me most, a nasty, claustrophobic space with a scooped out floor which would be filled with water which turned to ice in winter. In the centre there is a tiny metal pedestal, the prisoner's only refuge from the wet. Further down the corridor I find the Soft Cell, with its strange, stupid-looking straitjacket hanging on a peg just in front of me. This cell was padded in 1973, the sign says, to stop the torture cries, and the cries from those driven mad by torture, from being heard. Nineteen-Seventy-Three, I whisper, trying to make it fit. My nineteen-seventy-three, the one that I know, held in it Jackie magazine, and the Eleven-Plus, and bell-bottomed trousers.

At the end of the longest corridor, the penultimate cell has been put to a different purpose. It is the Prison Library. Books do not belong here! is my first thought. But then I think yes, yes let there be books. Let there - as with the volume of Shakespeare which Nelson Mandela read and annotated in his imprisonment on Robben Island - be hope. Beyond, a board carries simply a series of black and white photographs, all portraits of dead partisans as their bodies were propped up in town squares against walls and fences, for the people to see. The faces of the dead are beaten and battered, but oddly compelling. I cannot take my eyes off them. In one, the eyes of a woman are like the sewn-on eyes of a ragdoll, so swollen are they. I find myself wondering what act, what atrocity, could have done this to her, and discover that I cannot, literally cannot, imagine.

I step at the last down into the Execution Chamber. I make myself step: there is no-one else around and I make the journey into this brightly lit bowel with dread. The floor is glass and lit to reveal relics of those who died beneath your feet in the sand. Thousands were shot or stabbed in this chamber. I try to say some sort of prayer for them but am so troubled that none comes. I go and find Jay. I've had enough, I tell him. Because I have. Because I can.

I run to hide in the sunlight outside. From an open window in the next building on the Avenue pours a piano solo, someone practising long and hard and strong. I remember that this building is the Academy of Theatre & Music, and almost cling to its walls as I gulp back my tears. This building houses my belief system, I remind myself, my soul.

I walk across the street to a park bench, letting the music work on me, waiting for some sign that it's about love, too, this life: find it in the brief, steadying "Grim" of nodded agreement between myself and my old friend when he too emerges into the sunshine. I put my hand for a brief moment on his arm to pin myself to the moment, here on Gediminas Avenue, beside the bloody geraniums.

Lithuanian Snapshots - Three

2007-09-10T22:32:00.001+01:00

Astonishingly, the work itself, the actual shooting of the actual scene including travelling time and all, took only five and a half hours. I was picked up at my hotel at 7am on the Sunday morning and was done by lunchtime.

My old friend Jay was sitting waiting in the people carrier when I came down from my room. Neither Jay nor I had got much sleep, this being my only, and his first, day of filming. We greeted each other with that wide-eyed, butterfly-stomach, first-thing-in-the-morning-actor look I've come to know so well. We were taken to the unit's base camp which was in a leisure centre car park somewhere to the north of city centre and given a warm welcome by one and all. One of the actors remarked that film units look the same the world over, and we laughed agreeement. I felt a little flutter of excitement as we pulled into the midst of the service trucks - winibagos for the actors; hair and make-up; catering; the food tent. Several of the crowd eating breakfast turned their heads as we arrived. Many of the crew had been out there for some time, and were probably as glad to see us as we were to see them. Or as curious, I should say: there's an awful lot of covert curiosity about everybody else on a film set.

The director met us, shook our hands, looked weary and warm. The last time I had seen him was at the interview, somewhere in Central London. It was somehow reassuring that he looked exactly the same, down to the shorts and sandals. He asked the Second Assistant to show us where we needed to go - she showed us the breakfast tent and a winibago for each of us, with our character names printed on A4 pieces of paper pinned to the door. Another, private little flutter! Inside, fruit, bottles of water, our costumes. I got mine on and then, with as much dignity as I could muster without feeling reeeaaallly silly, had to phone the 2nd A.D. on my mobile to come and open my door, as I had accidentally locked myself inside... (Note to Self: Film Star Status not achievable until winibago doorlock mastered).

The filming itself, I am happy to report, went off with little incident. It was fun, and interesting, to be part of this international crew for a day. I gather this was the source of not a little tension on set, but I barely felt it, so glad was I to be working, and working with Jay. It was different, working with someone I knew and trusted. And we both come from stage backgrounds, feeling our way into some kind of a performance in front of a camera (later in the trip we spent an evening recounting our Most Cringeworthy Television Moments). I don't think my tiny scene was my most glorious hour on film, but I don't think I disgraced myself, either.

While I was waiting to be called, going over my lines and trying to keep my concentration (a priceless talent to an actor), Mick the Sound Man came over to wire me for sound. For those not in the know, this involved putting a little furry thing with a sticky back (the mic) between my breasts - Mick himself didn't do this, just suggested it in as tactful a way as possible and looked away as I dropped it down, then guided the wire and little adaptor box from my front to my back and tucked the box into the belt of my jeans. As we performed this intimate little operation, Mick chatted away about Lithuania, because he has worked in the country several times.

He says that he finds it a fascinating place. He says that it gets very cold in winter and this, combined with its painful history, is one of the reasons why the suicide rate is so high. He says that the Lithuanian women are fantastic - and indeed, their beauty was noted (several times) by my fellow actors the night before - but that there are two or three women for every man, so competition is fierce. I think of the band of brides encountered the day before, and of a startling statistic in my guidebook - 57% of Lithuanian marriages end in divorce. Hmm, something not adding up, there.

Through the window, across a sobering vista of Soviet-era high-rises, he points out the TV Tower where Soviet troops killed 14 Lithuanians defending their right to broadcast independently only 16 years ago in 2001 - just months before the USSR finally recognised Lithuanian independence. He tells me about the racist attacks on one black crew member; how the skinhead right is not so very underground in certain places; how difference is not very well tolerated here: the rougher, underbelly of the country which has been nicknamed the 'Baltic Tiger'.

That night I choose to stay in, order Room Service and ruminate on what I have experienced thus far. I am deeply struck by what I am learning; while I'm not sure that I like Lithuania in the same way I could without reservation say that I liked Italy, say, when I first visited, I am intrigued by it. And it seems to be working a curious magic on me. Words pour out of me every time I sit down to write. With no thought. With no problem. In the same way that others have a compulsion to photograph, to record visually, I feel a compulsion to write. To mark-make. Set it. Not in stone, but in words.

It's the feeling I've been looking to accompany my writing for - well forever, really.

Lithuanian Snapshots - Two

2007-09-09T22:24:00.000+01:00

I'm pretty good at taking on a new city. I know how to walk the streets with a cheap map until I get the feel of a place and the taste of its smell on my tongue.

When I was 18 I spent a month doing just that. It was my Gap year, though nobody called it that in those days. It was called Taking-a-Year-Off-Between-School-and-University, and you didn't have to consider good causes or save the world or anything like you do now (though I have to admit this would have appealed mightily to the Do-Gooder in me). No, in those days you needed an Inter-rail pass, a copy of Thomson's European Railway Timetable and enough hutzpah to go off and actually do it.

I was supposed to do my month round Europe with a horsey-looking girl whom I didn't know very well called Victoria, but luckily for me she broke a leg at the last minute. I remember stomping downstairs as only a hormonal 18-year-old desperate to have a few more Experiences can stomp, bursting in on my mother and declaring with bravado that if Vicky couldn't go then I was jolly well going to go on my own. To my astonishment, without a flicker, Esme said I think that's a very good idea, darling, and then I had to go.

So it was that one summer in the 80s I was waved off at King's Cross station with my Inter-rail pass in my pocket and a very large, unwieldy back-pack on my back. In the course of the next month I managed to see a great many European cities, stay in lots and lots of hostels, whack alot of people with the back-pack and have some truly unforgettable Experiences.

And now here I am in Vilnius, Lithuania having another one, and I am reminded on this first morning in the city of those younger days. The Old Town is a surprise of beautiful, baroque streets and cafe culture. This is a country which is finding out how it feels about itself. It's like a new-born colt trying to get up, I think, succeeding for the most part, with the occasional whimsical fall. It's an interesting place for me to be with my first allowed time alone for ages. Memories assail me, flittering like moths, one moment nowhere, the next everywhere, coming at me, my face, my hair. I can't shake them; stop, in fact, trying.

I take a seat on a pretty, flower-laden terrace belonging to an up-market hotel on Pilies gatve. I feel awkward that I don't know the language. I know in fact only one word - the word for 'Thank you' - which sounds exactly how Anna-mouse would say a sneeze - 'Aatchoo!' - so I sprinkle it everywhere, in the vain hope that smiles and sneezes will buy me and my country a good name.

My morning's perambulations have been marked by a curious phonomenon: brides and their bridal parties all over the city. When I first left the hotel and saw my first bride I thought aah, how nice, a Lithuanian wedding. A few moments later I saw my next bride, waiting to go into the Cathedral as the first one came out. Then I saw the third couple, married a good ten minutes before, doing their bridal pics on the Cathedral steps - and then, well, it went on. I became obsessed with them. I started photographing them. I'm thinking of doing a photographic medley of Lithuanian brides in my next post. Even when I left Cathedral Square and took to the side streets I came across wedding party after wedding party. Leaving church. Going to church. Clearly, Saturday is bridal day.

I eat my feta salad on the hotel terrace and listen to a boy busking by the market stalls further down the street. Elvis isn't at his glorious best played on a recorder.

Oddly, towards the end of my meal, as the Second Assistant for the shoot calls me on the Lithuanian mobile I've been given to check that all is well, a tiny moth lands on the tablecloth. It is the colour of parchment, archaic, as old as the hills. I stare at it for a long time. It's as if it holds the meaning of my morning, if only I knew what it was. The next moment, before I know it, it's gone.

Lithuanian Snapshots - One

2007-09-06T07:01:00.000+01:00

A happy journey, squished against the window in Lithuanian Business Class, demarcated by a rather shabby cerise curtain between rows 2 and 3. The moon rises, coming into focus as we fly into night over a cotton-wool bed of cloud.

We are flying over Denmark, my co-traveller in the next seat informs me.

We strike up a conversation. He is a 28 year-old Lithuanian IT consultant who works at Canary Wharf, going home to see his family. He is pleasant enough, but by the time we touch down at Vilnius International Airport (a cosy little hanger) I am more than happy to join my fellow actors again. Of Lithuania and all things Lithuanian he is fiercely proud - and this is justifiable, given that this little nation has pulled itself up by its bootlaces, shaken off centuries of occupation and oppression and achieved an impressive economic turnaround in less than two decades.

Of England and of London he is quietly scathing. Dr Johnson tickles my ear (When you're tired of London, you're tired of life) as this jaded young North European talks to older, excitable English me in his low, serious voice. I can't help but wonder if he hasn't been hanging out with the wrong crowd. I also recognise in our short little trip together a kind of microcosmic version of history. Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest of late suddenly becomes crystal clear...

My old friend Jay - unseen for 15 years or so, as happens in this odd acting profession of ours - is in the row in front of mine. We share a giggle when he gets up from his seat and bangs his head on the overhead lockers. Jay mutters a joke about Lithuanian Business Class needing to sort out its headspace, which makes me giggle even more. My Lithuanian companion is non-plussed. He wants to know why we are laughing. He wants to know what is wrong with Lithuanian Business Class. I get a sense of the inscrutability of different nations' humour.

In my mind's eye, Jay and I descend the aeroplane steps wearing red noses, fuzzy wigs and very very big shoes.

Bon Voyage!

2007-08-23T16:21:00.001+01:00

As life and luck would have it, my acting star is taking me to Lithuania tomorrow.

That bigger part I went up for a little while ago? Didn't get that, but out of the blue they phoned my Agent and said Would she consider a much smaller part - and by the way it films in Lithuania...

So I'm off to Lithuania tomorrow, did I say that? I need to write it down alot to convince myself it's really happening. Imagine. One minute life's all fish fingers and peas and the next it's brave little Baltic states and Vodka. (I suppose. Not very up on my Lithuanian nightcaps).

Full report next week.

Kisses.

Happy Bloggerversary to Me

2007-08-17T22:51:00.000+01:00

Precisely one year ago tonight I wrote this, my first blog post,
sent it out into the universe and began a journey that has changed my life.

What a ride it has been.

As a novice blogger, I remember the euphoria I felt every time I hit the PUBLISH POST button (my heart still leaps at it today).

I remember the lovely freedom, knowing that no-one but the Bim knew that Livvy was out there - and then my growing dismay that this probably meant that nobody was reading her, either.

(I have a reader! I yelled at the Bim when he got home, the night of my first comment. Somebody reads me!)

It took me ages to get the whole commenting phonomena. Small wonder nobody was commenting on my own blog when I was lurking away and never thought to join in the conversation. It took me, in short, quite some while to understand the way the web works. Even now I would love to spend hours surfing, popping in and out of all those lives I've come to know, love and admire. But time, or rather the lack of it, has been the common thread winding its way through this most interesting year.

But oh, the joy of a fresh-faced comment falling unexpectedly into my Inbox! Some blogging joys are constant, and this is one. I will never fail to be in awe of the fact that people return to read what I have written. Small wonder I call it my drug of choice.

And then a quite unexpected bonus - the steady flow of encouragement and support I've received through people's Comments over the year. There were at least a couple of moments of despond, both personal and writerly, from which I was lifted by the generosity of my cyber friends. My readership has never been large (though it's more than two-and-a-half, now, which is encouraging) but goodness it's loyal! International and eclectic, I'm proud to say, too.

What have I learnt? I have learnt to keep my eyes open way past midnight in pursuit of the right word. I have learnt that the great, world wide web has far greater importance and significance for all our lives than I ever imagined. I have learnt that I need to write like fish need air.

I have learnt much, too, about others' lives - how very similar we are in most regards, whatever our colour, wherever we live, each of us marked different and unique by the details. The blogs I read are full of detail. Blogging is a marvellous piece of detail in my life. It has taught me how to show up at the page and let the words go, even (especially) when I feel them to be awkwardly chosen, or incomplete. I don't quibble with them so much anymore.

It's late. I'll have to tiptoe to bed, again. Perhaps as so often happens I won't even make it to my own bed before Anna-mouse cries out and needs me to settle her. But I don't care, I often think to myself around this time, because I've done what makes my heart sing tonight: I've written.

The Fourth Age

2007-08-16T23:29:00.000+01:00

A dear friend of mine, Richard, the Strolling Player, has written such a beautiful post about memory, and where he finds himself to be now, that I can only hope all who read this will click on my title link, whizz over there and enjoy the read.

Stay with it; it's a slow, simmering burn.

Launch

2007-08-15T21:56:00.000+01:00

Outside the bookshop, the light is drawing in early because the sky is so low. Traffic worms its way home and every so often the red of a London bus breaks up the grey with a swoosh. It's a rainy winter's evening in August.

Inside the bookshop, it's summer. The light, the faces, the gleam on the wine glasses - all these seem to glow. If ever proof were needed of the power of friendship, of community, of celebration, this is it.

Five years ago, my mother Esme began to write poetry. This evening we are gathered together for the launch of her first pamphlet. It's quite an event.

I can't believe how many people she's invited, my sister Hope and I say to each other, worriedly, over the past few weeks. We have our daughter-carers' hats on, speaking in that over-protective way daughter-carers do. But really, the actress in me knows that the actress in Esme will triumph: she may be exhausted tomorrow, but Doctor Theatre will get her through the reading and beyond.

Plus, she won't be alone up there: the bookshop people are greatly impressed that Esme has managed to come up with not one but two celebrities to share the platform with her. Hope and I will be doing our daughter bit and bringing up the rear, reading two poems each. (The night before, Hope gets cold feet and calls me for a team talk. But I'm the only amateur! she wails. I tell her she'll be fabulous and, whatever else she does, to practise reading the poems out loud. She does, and she is).

So never mind that Esme's three-quarters of the way through her six month stint of chemotherapy, has had two blood transfusions in the past month and can't stand up for very long - she's invited every person in her address book. Twenty minutes to go, it's already standing room only. People are sitting in bookshelves and bagging best spots on the floor. The nice woman behind the counter goes to Somerfield for more wine. It's a party atmosphere, the poems not even read yet.

And it is an extraordinary mix of people, from all the many and varied strands of her long life. Esme may have lost a couple of husbands along the way, but by jiminy she made - and kept - one hell of a lot of friends. Now here they all are, out in force, saluting the grit that got her here.

The poems are a triumph. Each of us readers step up to the mark and let the words speak for themselves. There is a hush each time a new poem is begun, and the air quivers appreciatively at each poem's end, with laughter or murmurs or sighs. Sometimes applause breaks from our audience without a pause, at others there is a thoughtful silence. A few tears are glanced at with backs of hands.

From my possie on the floor slightly to the left of the 'Bestsellers' table, I can watch both Esme and her audience. She stands up to read only once, early on, which is how I know how weak is, but it matters not a jot. Her beautiful, RP tones combined with the Scots of her childhood carry perfectly to the back of the room. When she is not reading she listens from her wicker chair, almost motionless. She seems to me to have arrived at some hallowed place tonight, emitting a most clear, fulfilled energy. She appears to be existing in a place of grace. And because of that all present are touched, too.

After the reading people mill and chatter. Hope tells me that three of Esme's chemo nurses are here, too. They came after work, straight from the hospital. They clutch their signed copies of the pamphlet, and one of them, the male nurse, has even brought his mum. Hope, who knows all the nurses intimately because of the long hours she has spent with Esme on chemo days, takes me to meet them. To both their amusement and bemusement, I am so moved by their presence that I throw my arms around their necks as if they are long-lost friends.

Oh thankyou, I manage to say, thankyou.

When Esme and I get back to her flat, I have Earl Grey tea and a biscuit and she a chocolate brown brew of herbs while we chat happily about the night. I notice a small piece of paper with her signature and nothing else on it. She must have practised it before the reading! I realise. But there is something different about it, too.

I discover the next morning that, to her delight, the best and only positive side-effect of Esme's chemo has been the complete loss of a bad tremor she has suffered in her hands for years. She holds them up for inspection, and we marvel that they are steady as can be.

I glance again at the signature and realise that it is this curious phonomenon which has changed it from a previously frilly affair, to a proud, straight-backed kind of hand.

Esme Peal, it reads, the only flourish a curved line underneath the name, as if to punctuate its simple effect. As if to say - Esme Peal: yes, I'm here.

Brains

2007-07-28T21:35:00.000+01:00

It's a blowy, cloud-racing day. It's always breezy in that playground down by the river. Following a week of broken nights, Operation Exhaust (The Child - At All Costs) is in full swing, so I don't immediately clock the funny little girl in the slightly old-fashioned outfit playing with her grandmother.

She's probably about four, quite slight, with a huge, pink sunflower hairtie holding back her dark hair. Her granny is attempting to persuade her to wear a white floppy sunhat. It's too big for her, I can see that from here, and anyway it's way too windy. Anna-mouse's hat never even made it out of the bag.

Anna-mouse is hell bent on a heart-stopping manouevre which involves throwing herself off the edge of the climbing frame, hoping to catch hold of the fireman's pole on the way down. I am a wreck, challenged but happy with her increasing physical confidence and the sheer level of application to her task.

The other little girl is attracted by the climbing frame, too, which has all sorts of ways to climb. Her granny briefly catches my eye and smiles broadly, nervously, wanting to be friends. I smile vaguely back, one eye still on my kamikaze kid.

A moment later the old-fashioned little girl does something - I don't see what - which causes her grandmother to say Oh, that was good, wasn't it.

Yes! The girl replies, delighted with herself. I'm clever!

To which the grandmother, who knows I am listening, hastily - sharply - replies We'll have to see about that.

Will we? I think to myself. Why? Why can't the funny little thing be praised for being clever and - more importantly - for thinking herself so? Why is it so important for your grand-daughter to be modest, at the age of four? What special quality was weeded out of you at that age?

I am quite sure that had the girl said I'm beautiful! her granny would have had no problem agreeing with her in public. It was the attribute of cleverness which so troubled her. This tiny moment touched an enormous nerve in me. As one who could never have boasted I'm beautiful! as a child (I was convinced I was plain for many years. Sadly, I look at photos now and think 'Gosh, I wasn't'), and who never felt her intelligence was great enough to say I'm clever! either, I try daily to infuse Anna-mouse with a positive sense of herself. It has taken me half my life to have any real confidence in my brain, though there never was anything wrong with it. Please God may she already have it!

Oh, let our daughters be clever! Let them trumpet their talents at any age, at all ages. Let them know what it is to know that they can outsmart anyone in the room - or playground.

Haiku x 3

2007-07-22T23:34:00.000+01:00

My tutor said lots of good things. One of his best ideas was this:

Write a Haiku journal for a week. Every day, use the discipline of the syllable rules of the haiku (5 - 7 -5 over three lines, for those not in the know), to encapsulate your day.

I haven't managed to write much since. I haven't done my Portfolio writing yet, the stuff that needs handing in on Friday. I've barely written a shopping list. I haven't, as you know, written here. (If I simply state the words 'Leaks, Ceilings, Scaffolding, Insurance and Toddler Parties' a picture may begin to emerge...)

But I wrote three haikus. On three separate days. Here they are.

11.7.07:

Last day of class I
throw my hat into the ring.
Contending, at last.

21.7.07:

Roof man did not come.
Fractured our day. But our child
hugged us, and we laughed.

22.7.07:

New painted wall speaks
of sea. Sweeps 'Sorry' away.
We make up again.

A Notice

2007-07-14T22:47:00.000+01:00

"Livvy U. would like to announce an unprecedented reaction to the previous week's events, something akin to the development of a nasty rash, only on the inside, in her being and brain, which has been preventing her - along with a go-slow by her computer - from communicating in this space in which she so loves to communicate.

She begs her readers' goodwill and will resume service as normal, as soon as she can decode her errant thoughts and make some sense of them.

In this last week, she has glimpsed a wider world and been thrown by it, after spending almost three in the wilder, but known, world of Domesticity. She is wrestling with metaphorical demons and is hopeful of victory, but has presently lost her poise.

Some would advise, never attend a potentially life-changing Creative Writing course in the same week as:

(1)an interview for a television job which would substantially up-the-ante in terms of your acting career
(2) seeing your mother-who-has-just-had-blood-transfusion because so very weak perform in playreading;
(3) receiving your first daughter's first written assessment (Music Class - 'Anna-mouse is a delight to have in the class');
(4) getting drunk for the first time in who knows when;
(5) not getting the acting job;
(6)writing stuff - actually writing stuff - and thinking, I can see it, I can see the future if I choose it to be so - and getting scared witless.

Livvy U. is not known for her capacity to deal with change.

Livvy U. feels like crying. She used to cry an awful lot (she was known for it, much to her annoyance). These days she has to remember how to do it.

She's not unhappy. She's just seen the Future and is scared by it.

Thank you for your indulgence."

Book List

2007-07-02T23:29:00.000+01:00

I rise insanely early, feeling like a kid. So early I'm washed and dressed even before Anna-mouse's sing-song cries break the coolish air (Daaaddy, oh Daaaddy!). As ever when we're both around, she is suitably non-plussed when I appear at her door, not he.

But I said... she begins.

I know, I know, you said Daddy. Well it's sooo early he's next door sleeping, so I'm here instead. Good morning!

Can I go and give him a kiss? she asks. So sweetly sleepily I've melted already, and the day not yet begun. No time for sentiment this morning, though. I take her through to the Bim. She curls into the nook of his big arms and deposits a kiss on his sleeve. I note with relief that I won't have to worry about Anna-mouse today. They're reading the one about George, the scruffiest giant in the world as I slip from the house to catch my train.

After numerous changes and waits on windy platforms (won't do that route again) I get to the university site with just twenty minutes to register. It seems I have, magically, appeared at exactly the right moment: my surname starts with the very letter they have just called and I am whisked to the front of the queue like a celebrity at a nightclub. I embrace my new-found status and in a matter of minutes I am clutching my take-out cappuccino in one hand and a large manilla envelope with my name on it in the other. I am beside myself with excitement.

They send me to Room 038, which I take some pride in finding first go. The nice lady at the front of the class informs me that there has been a room switch and that I have, in fact, come to the Effective Writing class. Creative Writing is in another building altogether. I walk in circles for some time before stumbling, at two minutes to ten, upon Room 068, my correct destination. All morning there are small moments confusion as one, two, then another of our class realise that the same error has occurred to them, only in reverse. But I only wanted help with my paragraphs! I could hear them muttering as, one by one, they scoop up their papers and beat an embarrassed, hasty retreat.

The class is upbeat, interesting, stimulating and precisely pitched to what I need. We discuss monologue, point of view, the tricky line between stereotype and character in 3-D. I am in seventh heaven. It all goes swimmingly well, in fact, until the last informal moments. I have spent so long making notes that I find I'm the last to leave. The tutor is there, too, packing up his papers.

That was very good, what you wrote, he says encouragingly as I near the door. I am beginning to approach a feeling equivalent to the icing on the cake. And then -

Who do you read? he asks.

A hopeful, expectant look flickers across his pleasant face.

Er... I say.

He might as well have driven me into a brick wall. Who do I read? I ask myself, attempting bibliographies in my head. Who do I read? And I, who was raised on the classics, who could quote Shakespeare at seven, who once wrote critical essays citing Woolf, and Mansfield, and Plath - I who carried Henry James with me at sixteen, discovered John Irving in my thirties, moved on to Philip Roth, then back a century to Edith Wharton - in that moment could not utter one single author's name.

The question was asked of genuine interest. For my tutor, who I read places me on his world map. Later it occurs to me that had he asked What do you read? I could have answered. And what I have been reading of late defines me as sharply as my former intimacy with the Brontes.

The conversation goes like this:

What do you read? he asks.

Sell-by dates, I reply without thinking. I read alot of those. Oh, and ingredient lists come a close second in those stolen moments at the fridge door. Then there's cereal packets, shopping lists and instructions on battery-fitting - always a joy. Small-print, disclaimers, the fiddly bits on bills. When I have lots of time I read magazines - you know, Woman and Home, Ideal Home, that sort of thing. Anything with a home in it, really...

Late tonight I flick through my notes for the day. The very first note, in big, breezy capitals, says READ, READ, READ. ANYTHING. EVERYTHING. BROADEN YOUR WORLD.

I think I'll start doing that now.

Summer Report

2007-07-01T23:18:00.000+01:00

Fellow would-be writers will be familiar with the desperate, procrastinatory 'I-must-clean-the-house-at-all-costs' attacks which frequently precede the act of committing words to paper.

Small wonder, then, that the Creative Writing course I am about to undertake (largely, it has to be said, in astonished response to the many hugely encouraging Comments received after my last post detailing my struggles to write - for which eternal, heartfelt thanks) sent me into a house-clearing frenzy.

Imagine finding 18 hours of University-standard tuition spread over 6 mornings, for the majority of which your beloved supportive husband happens to be off work! Imagine, too, discovering that the course is - wait for it - free. Yep! Gratis. Niente - nothing! - to pay. How can this be? I asked at first. Now I'm just readying up to enjoy it.

I'm a bundle of nerves, joy and guilt, though: I don't like taking time away from Anna-mouse but this time it is as if I have no choice. I need shaking up/challenging. And my energy levels have shot through the roof! All of which, as tomorrow's start date nears, has meant that massive de-cluttering and box emptying has been achieved in an action-packed weekend at home.

Delving into a dusty crate, untouched since we moved here two years ago and probably not looked into for many more before that, I found a batch of old school reports. There were even some from my primary school days. Small, handwritten epics. It was hilarious and only a tiny bit heartbreaking to find the REPORT FOR SCHOOL YEAR ENDING JULY 1972, which read as follows:

'Livvy is producing first class imaginative written
work. She is currently at work on her first three volume novel!!'

Hmmm. Right then. Could be time to quit the cleaning, don't you think?

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

Sometimes

2007-06-21T22:56:00.000+01:00

As Dee's Jewish grandmother would say, Nobody ever said it was easy: they were right when they didn't say it!

What is this thing I'm suffering from? Writer's block? How can it be? How can I have writer's block when I barely consider myself a writer? A writer, self-evidently, is someone who writes. Me? I write sometimes.

Sometimes I manage to do the day (the endless, mindless tasks which must be done simply to make one day look like another; interspersed with the odd, unmissable moment of brilliance with Anna-mouse); sometimes I manage to get the child down; share some sort of coherent minutes with the Bim before he stumbles up to bed for another 4.30am wake-up; call my mother-who-is-in-chemotherapy; call a friend (very unlikely if I have got through to Esme); watch something mind-numbing on TV for long enough to induce a semblance of relaxation and then sometimes, just sometimes, make it up the stairs quietly enough not to wake husband or child, turn on the computer and write.

It's an exhausting business, not being a writer.

They say it's a process. I'm pissed off with the process. I want results. I want to know I can string more words together than the length of a post. I want to write a short story in two days, not two years. Above all, I want to snatch the gremlins from my person (they've recently been breeding and now a collection of ugly voices keeps a noisy, near-constant vigil on both shoulders), throw them at the wall and watch them die a slow and nasty death.

I resent that these creatures, these voices with impressive credentials, inhabit my world. I am angry with myself that they have such astonishing sway. Where do the negatives get in? At what point? What age? Do they come from just one source, one parent, or many such figures? Have I spent the day passing subtle, debilitating messages to my beautiful clean slate of a daughter? If I knew, I'd sell quite alot of my soul to protect her self-confidence from the slime of self-doubt sliding its suffocating message down the ages.

Tonight I want to silence my ancestors new and old. I want to act David to the Goliath, Family, which gives with one hand while the other sneaks round from behind until it has placed its gentle, fatal seal across the mouth. Let me speak! Let me speak! Let me say the unspeakable, project my voice into the darkness and be heard.

Of course I know, I do know, that the voices which hinder me are not real, though lately they may as well have been. I also know that, for some reason, in my - dare I say it - extremely talented clan it is fear of success which has frequently stumped us, not fear of failure. Laughable when it's told out loud, just like that, without a by-your-leave, don't you think? Lethal, too, when you combine it with the voices.

I remember a favourite maxim of mine: Leap, and the net will appear. Or, as in my case, the inter-net. Writing here for almost a year has indeed helped me to silence the voices. I can only imagine that the reason I feel like I'm wading through treacle in over-sized wellingtons every time I even so much as think of writing, lately, is perhaps because it has become that much nearer. The dream, I mean. The one where I get to write all the time, where my commitment becomes tangible and the results are paid for - for real.

I'm scared. But I'm driving myself crazy with this. I need to leap.

Planting Up

2007-06-12T23:53:00.000+01:00

A fine, damp mist falls into our urban valley as I work, quickly, against the fading light. Starting work with the old plastic trowel, I soon discard this in favour of my hands, plunging them into the bag of compost and coming up with fistfuls of warm, clean earth. In no time at all grit niggles satisfyingly behind my fingernails.

Eight budding petunias and a handful of busy lizzies make up four pots of varying sizes. Small and ungainly in their polystyrene trays, they appear to spread into their summer selves before my very eyes as I transfer them into patted-out holes and press more compost around them.

I’m aware, nowadays, of Esme’s hands working with me when I work in the garden - her know-how, her demonstrations, her advice firming the plants into their proper place. In my mind’s eye I see her in our childhood garden after my father left, heartbroken, kneeling before the borders, healing her soul with her solitary communion with the earth. I don’t remember Esme teaching much then, it’s more recent, adult times of instruction I cherish when I take up a fork or a spade.

Earlier this same day, Esme has gone to the hospital for her weekly cancer clinic. The previous night, as it happens, the episode of a popular TV drama in which Esme has a guest part was aired. Everyone at the hospital knows about this episode, because it was for this job that Esme postponed her operation. She actually phoned the consultant and asked him whether she’d be putting her life at risk if she put the op off for a couple of weeks. His secretary, a lover of TV soaps and serials, was terribly impressed with this real-life quandary of a real-live actress, and helped Esme chase the consultant round the hospital until he picked up her call.

And so it was, a few hours before my twilight planting, that when Esme walked into the chemotherapy unit for her blood test, everyone – staff and patients – cheered.

I hope my plants prosper. And I hope that my other growing project, the sleeping child in the room across the landing, has mixed into her being some of her grandmother’s grit.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

I'm It

2007-06-06T22:49:00.000+01:00

Required: eight facts. Only eight. About me.

When Elsie let me know I'd been 'tagged' I was pretty chuffed. Since then I've been struggling to write this post. I'd even go so far as to call it a mild case of Poster's Block - really, I've found it unbelievably hard to come up with 8 facts about myself which won't bore me to death to write about, or bore the reader to read. Funny, since so many of my posts are, let's face it, about, ehem, me...

Anyway, I'm fed up to the back teeth with this procrastinating (and, as my old Italian teacher used to say, my back teeth go a long way back), so I'm just going to plunge in and see what surfaces...

Fact One: Once I danced naked on a roof in Herne Hill in the rain. My friend and I threw off our clothes and climbed out of a window onto the flat roof when the downpour came. It was joyous. A marker. A memory of youth. That same friend and I hit an impasse years after that which caused us to pause our friendship. Just recently we made tentative moves towards one another to resume. I understand now that love doesn't go away just because you can't handle it, and that where some people are concerned, family is family, whether they're blood family or not.

Fact Two is this: I understand the above because of something I started doing on Sunday, 5th March 2006. On that day I started to attend Quaker Meeting for Worship. This is a quiet fact, not one I shout about. How to speak of something as private and mysterious as uncovering one's faith? Perhaps another day. I can mention the astonishing power of the silence. The hopefulness of the light which streams through the three celestory windows of our simple meeting room. The subtle working of the other light, the one Quakers speak of, in parts of my life which I did not think could be illuminated. And I can mention the silence again.

Fact Three: In another silence, one July eight years ago, during a guided 'creative visualisation' I had what I've only ever been able to describe as a vision. I saw some part of a possible future for myself. It involved dance, and working with the dispossessed, and running a place of which I was the boss. I was on holiday at the time, and my life was a million miles from what I had seen. But within weeks this vision led me to be offered movement teaching work, then to the decision to re-train in Community Dance, and from there it led me to a placement in Ireland, where I met the Bim. Which led to... well, let's just say the vision's on hold for the time being!

Fact Four: Anna-mouse had a sister called Joy. We were both sure she was a girl, though she only made it to seven weeks. I have never forgotten the intensity of the happiness I felt when I carried her. Hence her name. I found out she had died in a tiny cubicle in a Catholic hospital in southern Ireland. It was just past midnight. You never forget.

Fact Five: I had been trying to live in Ireland with the Bim. The country, while a pleasure to visit, sat uncomfortably with me as a permanent option. When Joy died, I had to come home.

Fact Six: I came home, in a fantastical journey with nine bags, over land and sea: Cork city to Rosslare to Fishguard to Swansea to London. What I remember most as I stepped off the train at Paddington Station was being hit by this vast wall of sound, a city soundscape which has no equal. I began to realise I'm a Londoner, through and through.

Fact Seven: Within months of my return, the Bim had followed me over the water to live with me here in England. Before we met, he had never been on a plane and didn't have a passport. I never forget this. I hold this act of love very dear.

Fact Eight: It's not actually very hard to write eight facts about yourself if you do it quickly, and from the heart.

Now I believe I am supposed to name 5 others out of whom I would like to tease eight facts. Elsie, forgive me - I'm useless at chains of any kind, I'm too much of a laissez fairekind of a gal. I can only humbly offer my 8 facts and hope the ether might inspire others without the asking.