Society of Authors Christmas party

The Society of Authors in Scotland Christmas party in Edinburgh was faintly reminiscent of a gathering of archers after the invention of the flintlock, or of farriers once Henry Ford's Model T in any shade of black was bowling along the road. The atmosphere was convivial and civilised and the words 'ebook' were on many lips. Before I left Moffat, by McEwan's bus, someone asked if I would know many people. Writing, on the whole, is a solitary calling, but I guessed correctly that I would know one: Aline Templeton, who was one of our guests in April at our MBE D E Stevenson event. The group on my table included an academic author from a Scottish university and a travel writer. It was agreed that, alongside the euro crisis, the sudden loss of authority by Putin in Russia following blatant vote-rigging and consequent demos was a game-changing development. Appropriately, last night I watched a DVD of Moonlighting, Jerzy Skolimovski's 1982 film about a group of four Polish builders working - in those pre-Berlin Wall, pre-EU days, illegally, - on a house renovation in London. Three are kept unaware by their foreman ( played by Jeremy Irons) that the Russians have invaded their country. Every period detail of the film is telling, from their arrival at immigration to the supermarket where Irons daily risks arrest for shoplifting. At the bus station in Edinburgh, and on the bus, I was struck by the friendly, chatty village atmosphere that prevails, in stark contrast to present-day London. As the credits rolled, I saw that the late great poet Christopher Logue had played a cameo role as 'workman'.

Full circle

I woke up wondering if my life was going to describe an arc, parabola or trajectory in the material sense that I was born into a world where one was cold and hungry a lot of the time - not because I was underprivileged but because we were all cold and hungry more or less from 1944 when I was born until 1958 when my father, on a whim, sent me to school in Switzerland. At home we were cold - no heating upstairs; coal fires in the downstairs rooms; coal fired Aga. Food was filling and bland: shepherd's pie, rice pudding, 'custard' made with powder etc. I was sent away to school aged 7 where it was equally cold and there was still rationing so we had 2 ounces of butter a week distributed in little pots with our school number on. You could blow the whole lot one teatime or there were school champions who could keep their supply going nearly the whole week, by which time it was rancid because the pot were kept in the dining room at room temperature. We had a sweet ration which was doled out on a Saturday too. At my big school on the Weald of Kent, it was so cold in winter that water froze inside the dormitories and many fellow students suffered from chilblains. We used to stand next to the big old radiators for some heat and stamp our feet to keep the circulation going. The diet was so appallingly short of any fresh vegetables or fruit that I developed chronic constipation - a typical meal would consist of baked bean pie followed by 'Dead Man's Leg' - a pastry roll with jam and custard. Life as a student in Oxford in the early 1960's was equally spartan; we subsisted on a dreadful diet of faggots (the cheapest nourishment known to man) and cheap fags - meaning cigarettes not gay men. Some of our best friends were gay men, of course, but we were unaware, until one by one they succumbed, not long after, to AIDS. The first to go was Luis, a charming Puerto Rican who was a guest at our first spectacularly inept 'dinner party' my flatmates and I gave. To us, making and serving a meal for five or six was like splitting the atom. The meat - was it duck? - was indequate and inedible; we managed to cook some frozen peas and maybe we made a trifle for dessert? I cannot remember. We knew nothing about wine, so bought the cheapest gut rot, probably rough Spanish red because we remembered ( thought vaguely) that red went with meat. Our other guests included a delightful history don from Balliol, Maurice Keen and perhaps David who is now a very senior city lawyer, specialising in mediating in international corporate legal disputes. Two of my four flatmates have 'gone before': one was murdered in France by persons unknown in the first long vac after we all went down, and another died early from a combination of self neglect and alcoholism, leaving her magnificent family house to the National Trust. Privilege is not a passport to happiness or even, in those days, comfort. Perhaps the opposite.

Wild Excitement

Wild excitement yesterday! I noticed a 10cm shoot growing from my 'orchid' - a tiny plant which came into my possession sometime late in 2009 or early 2010. I think it was a present from one member of the family to another, and it was left behind in my flat where I was then living above Manse Furnishings. The tiny, exquisite bright purple florets fell off one by one and I would have chucked it but there were signs of new green leaves so I spared it. It moved with me to Milburn House in Sept 2010 and has sat on the windowsill of my little first floor kitchen ever since, neither quite dead nor in full vigorous plant life. This summer, concerned for its welfare, I even went into the garden centre and tried to buy some appropriate compost to repot it. To her eternal credit, the lady behind the till refused to sell me any, insisting that these fragile plants like to be cramped and starved. How right she was! Four months later, a flower shoot has emerged and I have pinned it carefully to the narrow stake which once held the (now dead and brown) previous shoot and flower head, using the tiny plastic clip that does not damage the shoot. This gardening exploit set me thinking about the garden I am going to make at 21 Well Road, behind our new offices and a workshop. I made a four square grid with 'low' and 'high' maintenance at either end of the vertical line and 'practical' and 'pleasure' on the horizontal. What would please me best is a garden that somehow complements the pretty mid 18th century building we have restored, both in appearance and for use, whether as a meditation walk, a 'hortus conclusus' or a patch to grow fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers, with perhaps a few chickens. Speaking of vegetables, yesterday I rescued all the blackening carrots from my wire basket in the hallway (kept there because it is cool) and one withered parsnip. I roasted some in the oven, adding an onion, and the rest I browned first in oil and butter, then added water and boiled them with a chicken stock cube. I also roasted a squash. Inspired, I then browned two beef olives in a frying pan with some sliced garlic, added some carrots and their liquor and a bay leaf. When the beef olives were done, I removed everything with a slotted spoon and added some couscous grains to the gravy and feasted on the result. In the evening, I had egg mayo with beetroot salad - a magical combination that I commend to you, with possibly a freshly baked potato, butter and plenty of freshly ground pepper. I have hung my Christmas wreath on the front door and last night it snowed. Moffat looks beautiful

Tad

I became involved in a mini controversy on Facebook yesterday about whether the word 'tad' is (or was) an Americanism. I held that it is, and found a reference via Google that supported my belief that the word came into English from America during my lifetime. The debate veered off into whether it is an age thing (if you are old, 'tad' is an Americanism; if young, then it is English) at which point I gave up.

My daughter went to Glasgow yesterday and reported that the shops were heaving. Will history divide our lives into BC (Before the Crunch) and AC (After the Crunch)? I have visions that, whereas we are being encouraged to feel relatively protected - cushioned as we are by sterling from the euro crash - , there is a darker scenario: democracy disappears from Europe in favour of the coercive rule of technocrats, the worst possible combination of French and German bossiness. How near the surface are lingering resentments and regrets following the outcome of WWII? Is Nicholas Ridley's Spectator prophecy to come true?

(From Wikipedia: On 14 July 1990 Ridley was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after an interview published in The Spectator. He had described the proposed Economic and Monetary Union as "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe" and said that giving up sovereignty to Europe was as bad as giving it up to Adolf Hitler. The interview was illustrated with a cartoon depicting Ridley adding a Hitler moustache to a poster of the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. While Ridley was not one of the most powerful government members, he was regarded as a Thatcherite loyalist and his departure was a significant break in their ranks. Margaret Thatcher herself had to resign four months later. Some commentators point to Ridley's resignation, its manner, and the European issue at its core, as leading indicators for the next decade of Conservative Party politics.)

Lunch yesterday at Brodies to discuss progress on the Moffat Book Events Sept 2012 conference. I had done a Jeremy Clarkson (ill-advised use of irony) by prefacing an email to my lunch companion: 'No! No! No! No!' - a quote from Margaret Thatcher whose biopic starring Meryl Streep is being promoted on TV. Clarkson's scripted sally on The One Show was delivered quite clearly and deliberately in two parts: first, he said how blissfully quiet London was because of the strike, restaurants empty therefore easy to get a table etc, then 'in the name of BBC balance' he went into the rant about taking the strikers out to shoot them. End of.

My Dinner with Andre

I watched a DVD of My Dinner with Andre last night. The film,directed by Louis Malle, consists of a conversation over dinner between Wallace Shawn, an actor and writer and his friend Andre Gregory. The first long section concerns an account of a bizarre acting class which took place in a forest in Poland. I think the director Jerzy Skolimovski is mentioned as having organised this for Andre. Jerzy directed Moonlighting, of which more another time. Spookily, in the course of a riff about whether theatre is still capable of delivering a level of experience capable of changing hearts and minds, Wallace Shawn cites Gordon Craig, who I had been writing about earlier in the day.

The house in south Lanarkshire where I lived until I moved to Moffat two years ago overlooks Watermeetings, where Sir Henry Irving and his partner Ellen Terry, giants of the Victorian stage, used to stay with their entourage: Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl, Ellen Terry's secretary who ran her fan club, thought to be the world's first), Bram Dracula Stoker, Henry Irving's secretary and Ellen’s children, her daughter and illegitimate son Edward Gordon Craig (surname plucked whimsically after his mother saw Ailsa Craig the volcanic core rock nicknamed Paddy's Milestone, one of the world's two sources of curling stone granite, sitting off the coast of Ayrshire) whose portrait can be seen hanging in the foyer of the Moscow Arts theatre. Craig was the most celebrated theatre designer of his time. Their presence as a touring theatre company in Scotland was directly due to religion. Severe post-reformation Scotland abjured theatre, (indeed Christmas itself was first celebrated only in 1947 as a public holiday in Scotland, when shops such as Jenners began tentatively to put Christmas scenes in their windows) so the only theatre was provided by touring companies such as Henry Irving’s.There is also quite a lot of talk in the film about Findhorn, the eco community in northern Scotland. There is a comical aside by Gregory about a university production of The Bacchae that brought to mind a tragi-comic episode in my own life. Towards the end of my second marriage, on the occasion of our wedding anniversary we booked tickets to see a play at the National Theatre. When I arrived, my about to be ex-husband broke the news to me that for some reason that play had been cancelled and we had been offered (and he had accepted) tickets for The Bacchae instead. Connoisseurs of classical drama will know that the plotline of The Bacchae is the savage pursuit and dismemberment by enraged female spirits (the Bacchae of the title) of the protagonist. Ahem.

Synchronicity

I noticed yesterday that at one of the December 2011 weekly meetings of Ph D students at St Mary's College Institute for Theology, the Imagination and the Arts (ITIA), St Andrews university, someone is going to speak about the American farmer-philosopher and author Wendell Berry. In 2000, I flew to Baranov Island in Alaska from my home in Chelsea, where I lived two or three doors down from the poet Kathleen (On a Deserted Shore) Raine. The purpose of my visit was to explore the native territory of a tree – Picea sitchensis - I grow as a commercial timber crop in south Lanarkshire. Kathleen had founded an organisation called Temenos, of which Wendell, a close friend of Kathleen's, was a member (as was I). As I left my house to go to the airport, I saw Kathleen and waved to her. On my arrival at Sitka, I discovered that the Island Institute was holding a literary festival, and walked into a room where Wendell Berry was telling the audience about a visit to Kathleen in London, and in particular about the fact that our shared back gardens had once formed part of St Thomas More's country estate, therefore how the little weeds and wild flowers we found coming up in them were in all probability descended from that time. When he finished his talk I put my hand up and explained that my garden was virtually next door to Kathleen's, and how I had seen her the day before. I had had no idea before I arrived that Wendell Berry was to be in Sitka. I classed this experience under 'synchronicity' and regarded it as a sign that my life was somehow 'on track'. On a less elevated plane: I was moved yesterday to write to the BBC TV quiz programme Only Connect pointing out that they had mis-spelled the word borshch - Russian beetroot soup - with an unnecessary, non-existent 't' at the end in an item about words of increasing length that only have one vowel. The combination of the four letters shch in English are represented by one consonant in the Russian alphabet. It occurs in the name Khrushchev - the first two letters kh are also only a one- letter consonant in Russian. A classic example of concision in Russian is the two word message sent by one Russian to another when the Soviet Union collapsed 'Neuzheli dozhili' - rendered in eleven in English: Is it possible that we have lived to see this day.

Machiavelli's Lawn

Yesterday at our Moffat Book Events meeting to progress plans for our May 26/27 2012 event themed on 'gardens', Carolyn Yates, our Dumfries & Galloway literary development officer, loaned me her copy of Machiavelli's Lawn. This clever little book, written and illustrated by the staggeringly good-looking and talented Mark Crick turns out to be the third in a series whose predecessors are Sartre's Sink and Kafka's Soup. The first item in the Machiavelli collection is such a brilliant parody of Raymond Carver's style, that, as yet unaware of the author's - the series - shtick, I assumed it was by Carver himself. Mark Crick not only writes brilliant parodies, he illustrates each short exercise with a drawing or painting in the style of Durer, Hockney, Klimt and so on. A very clever pastiche of artists and authors - I am amazed that I had never heard of the series or the author before. The committee has added his name to our invitation list. By way of a liber pro quo I gave Carolyn one of several copies on my bookshelf of A Scottish Feast - a collection of excerpts from real novels and stories with accompanying recipes that was compiled and published twenty years ago in aid of some good cause - perhaps the Society of Authors in Scotland? The rain has stopped at last, and I have been able to remove the metal waste paper basket from my stair where it stands to collect drips from the skylight above during heavy rain. It is a token of how much I love living in this house that I now regard this as a quaint, enduring characteristic not something to be repaired.