Blog - People In Mind
Loops of time
The Bronte sisters didn’t mention railways when they wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, though a line had reached nearby Halifax in their lifetime. I was thinking of Thomas Hardy particularly when we were walking in the Yorkshire Wolds yesterday. After so much...
A Novel Memoir or a Memoir Novel?
I expected one of the three I was to drive to our book group member who lives in the countryside would call and tell me it was too dangerous. Gale force winds were wailing outside. They all came, intrepid and determined not to miss our meeting. At the first roundabout...
A Memoir or a Novel – or both?
The wind is howling down my chimney. Yesterday we drove back from visiting friends in York through light snow – the first this winter. Tonight I’m driving a carload of friends into the countryside to the only member of our book group who lives out of town. Let’s hope...
Computer Mayhem – whose fault is it?
Instead of spending time this week blogging, I’ve wasted hours trying to deal with combined – or ‘dual tariff’ as the phrase goes – gas and electricity bills. I pay by direct debit. So far, so good as far as Npower is concerned. I’m not sure about me. Every 6 months...
Paving the Streets of Hell
Yesterday evening I carefully counted the pages in the next chapters to revise: 4 in Chapter 26 and 7 in Chapter 27. Short, so easy and enjoyable. No feeling of having to rush. I retired to bed happily anticipating the next day. It is like reading a new novel, as I’ve...
It’s as good as the Original!
I felt there was something strange when I began teaching short courses for credit based in Venice for the University of California at Berkeley. Something was missing, but I wasn’t quite sure what. Of course, one couldn’t stroke the original bronze Horses of St....
The Groping Question
Will it never end? The UK Liberal Democrat Party is tearing itself apart in an old, old, question – what constitutes an unwelcome advance. Also in the news is the rather strange person, Stephen Ward, who was caught up on the periphery of a scandal that gave us the...
The Past is Another Country – so is the Future
This is one of the much-quoted openings that every writer would like to imagine. If I remember correctly they are J P Hartley’s opening words in The Go-Between. Remember the wonderful film with Alan Bates and Julie Christie? It was filmed in a early 18th-century...
What’s in a Name?
J K Rowling, P D JamesThis is a crucial question for anyone in the public eye. Is it an advantage to have the same name as a famous person? If ‘Shakespeare’, that could be helpful. There are no descendants of the playwright, so another writer using the same surname...
The First Cuckoo
I heard the first cuckoo on Sunday. Was I hallucinating? It was while sitting revising Chapter 14 and looking through double glazing at the Minster and the light playing over the stone carving on the West facade. Not possible. Then we went for a walk. It was sunny...
An Unforgettable Person
I don’t think I shall ever return to New York. The person who gave us our ‘home from home’ has just died. I still don’t, can’t think it is true. But it is. Once you stepped inside the five-storey brownstone and saw the interior loved by four generations and crammed...
Chapter One – its fate
By Christmas I had revised eight chapters and was enjoying the rediscovery of what I’d written a few years ago. Then came the mishaps. After the accident on my birthday I felt even more trepidation handing the manuscript of the first three chapters to my friend and...
A Chapter of Incidents
We were all set for London. Every present wrapped and labelled, clothes packed. In fact, we prided ourselves on being unusually well organised, much better than in previous years. We’d be in good time to queue for the Nine Lessons and Carols at St. Paul’s Cathedral in...
Walking past Pemberley
Clearing the Cobwebs I thought our favourite walk would be too far to go in midwinter with sunset at 4 p.m. It must be at least an hour and a half’s drive to Castle Howard. I was proved wrong. Admittedly, not many cars are on the road on Boxing Day, but it was sunny...
In 1741, over 24 days, Christmas was changed
I should have been with our son and his family in London today, Christmas Day, but with chicken pox raging there, we decided to stay home. I took a quiet walk through the main street. Hardly a soul. A few men, a dog or two and one couple with a child in a pram. Every...
Unavailable on Goodreads
I have been looking at what others are reading on Goodreads and adding my comments on the recent books I’ve been reading. Fine for Snow by Orhan Pamuk and for Legend of a Suicide – a tough read - , but then I wanted to write about Judith Harris’s The Monster in the...
Distractions
We have two markets in Beverley, and for weekends now we’ve had festivals – of food, of Christmas trees in the Minster and whatever else I missed. It’s difficult to settle down to writing as I’m so behind with cards, greetings not to mention emails, belaboured by...
Does one start at the End?
I’ve ‘lost my head’ in London and not written my blog! In fact, I’ve just returned from a Christmas drinks party where there was talk of Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn and the original way it ends. I suspect it might be like a play by Paul Claudel, L’Annonce faite à...
The First Page
Was it the French poet Claudel (whose sister was Rodin’s mistress for a time and herself a no mean sculptor) who wrote this unforgettable phrase for a writer? ‘La blancheur du papier qui se défend.’ This morning I didn’t face the forbidding whiteness of a page, too...
Returning to the Start
The gales started up while I was sorting out the first draft of a novel I had written some time ago. I was settling into my writing chair by the window that overlooks the Minster and watching the pale yellow leaves of the silver beech were dancing around the tree and...
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