THE POTHERER

It said on the pretty packaging for the teabag. 

‘sleepy mornings’ 

Sound lovely don’t they, like you have nothing pressing, no horrible job to go to, no chores to be done, you can simply wander around the house, cradling this drink telling everyone that you are having a 'sleepy morning’ and that once you get to the bottom of this mug of tepid lemony dishwater you will be feeling energised and ready to take on the day. But if you had days that had to be taken on you wouldn’t be having a sleepy morning, you’d wake up anxious, need a shit straight away because you were so tense, you‘d force down coffee and cereal and hope to get another pooh out before the day’s ordeal began. 

While I was hunting out some carrier bags in the back of the cupboard under the sink for a trip to Sainsbury’s a man was standing on the platform at Potters Bar train station preparing to jump. As I arrived at Sainsbury’s (situated next to the station) he had already gone under a train and the first of the police cars were arriving. Had I been stood on the platform next to him I would probably have been none the wiser that this poor man was in such a state of mind. The thought that we can be metres from someone with no idea of their inner turmoil, and perhaps have the potential to be able to aid them and yet be totally oblivious is disturbing.

In terms of a suitable life-leaving spot, a train station is a pretty bleak place. Is it psychologically easier to take your life somewhere grim than somewhere beautiful? To jump from an ugly multi-storey car park, in a concrete town, in the depths of an endless drizzly winter to escape the vileness of the world surrounding you (When I studied in Coventry it proffered these exact conditions every single day, even in June) sounds somehow befitting. Stood atop the magnificent cliffs at Beachy Head, one of the top (unfortunate choice of words) spots in the world to take your own life, taking in the Technicolor panoramic views, soaking up the warm sun, watching wild flowers tended by butterflies swaying in the breeze, seagulls gliding below you, absorbing the peacefulness you can’t believe that so many people come here to end it all. If anything, it is more of a life-affirming place - ‘Can things be that hopeless when simply sitting here looking out to sea is soothing me?’ But I guess if you get to Beachy Head and its beauty has no effect whatsoever on you then it probably confirms just how dreadfully unhappy you are. On the other hand I have not been to Beachy Head during an endless drizzly winter – I’m sure it is much altered in such conditions.

I was curious to see this notorious place because I have a fascination with mortality, but I did not expect it to be quite so beautiful and to have such a unique atmosphere. Driving through streets of Eastbourne I was hyper aware of the route. How many other people have driven up this very road thinking about the fact that they won’t be driving back down it? Have they noticed that pretty wisteria covered house, or the crumbling old telephone box and absorbed these last mental images? How many have driven back down this road having failed in their objective, hating the fact that they are seeing things that they hoped not to come back past, hating themselves even more than before for bottling it. Or maybe some drive back elated having realized it was not what they wanted, feeling euphoric at a life seized back at the last moment.

I’m clearly not the only morbid one; all along the jigs and jags of the cliff people shuffled tentatively to the edge, passed cameras to companions, wanting a photo stood by the little crosses in the grass. Some even did a pretend leap, pulling a terrified face, arms out. Strange. You wouldn’t go to the sight of a fatal road traffic accident and lie down in the road with your limbs at impossible angles and ask your friend to take a photo, but here it seems to be how people want to mark tragic events. Did those that jumped ever do this themselves? We would surely know, the press love to get hold of prophetic photos;

Photo Caption: Here is Emily on a family holiday five years ago, pulling a terrified face and pretending to fall from the very spot at the Sussex beauty spot that she would later jump from.

Photo Caption: Here is Geoff at the county steam fair five years ago, pulling a terrified face and pretending to be crushed by the giant steam roller that he would, just six months later, be tragically crushed under.

I was unable to walk along the cliff without veering towards the edge at every opportunity to gaze downwards; everyone was lured to the edge in the same way, playing with our own mortal thoughts, subverting our instincts.

Everyone walking at Beachy Head notices everyone else far more, we are all looking out for a jumper. How do the police and chaplains know who are the suicidal people in amongst everyone else?  Standing on their own? Wearing a hospital gown and no shoes? Lingering very near the edge, not looking at, or talking to anyone, appearing deep in thought, not eating a picnic? Bar the hospital gown and shoes, I was all of these things - I just happened to also be taking lots of photographs. Is it the time of day? Do most suicides go early morning or dusk? Just to throw the emergency services off the scent could you go there as a couple, or a group with the intention of jumping with nobody even slightly aware of your intention. Act all jolly and full of life with everyone, walk for a good hour or so and then just as everyone ambles up to a particularly vertiginous spot to picnic just take a run at it, past your loved ones and over the edge?!

“She showed no signs that she was suicidal, I thought we were having a really good day, she had just eaten a great big pork pie and we were making jokes about uncle Jim’s unruly bowels. As I stopped to take a photo of the lighthouse, I sensed something whoosh past me, I thought, ‘Inconsiderate bloody tourist, you’ve just got right in front of my shot. I looked at the back of the camera to see if the shot was ruined and to my horror I saw that it was my wife. She had leapt off as I took the photo. I was planning to use the image as my computer wallpaper, but you can’t see the pretty sailing boat because her arm is in the way. I guess I could crop it slightly, you can still see the lighthouse.”

As I stood on the outcrops, looking down, I tried to imagine what it feels like to jump. I have had so many dreams where I am falling, falling down escalators, from buildings, through the sky and I am willing myself to wake up as the sensation (though entirely created by my brain) is so horrific, at the limit of being able to bear, it feels as though my body is about to tear apart, I am waiting for impact, for the weight of ceasing to course through me, spreading me everywhere. I find it hard to contemplate my own brain simulating this sensation whilst I sleep. Have I fallen from that many things in my life that it can recreate what I felt? Had I not loved roller coasters and the high diving board at the local pool as a child what on earth would my brain have to draw upon for those falling dreams? When you go on one of those awful falling rides at theme parks you experience this all encompassing feeling of impending destruction, but all the while knowing that it will cease, any moment now, without pain. As you leap from Beachy Head, your ultimate relief – death can come only after the most hideous and intolerable pain, a sensation so horrific that you cannot imagine it and yet somehow you can absolutely imagine it. In places it didn’t look steep enough or high enough. Was there a chance to hit things on the way down and be bumped around, horribly wounded, but not killed? One spot had four crosses on it; do those intending to jump prefer to go from a spot where others have definitely succeeded? Like a guaranteed result? Does a cross endorse that spot? Or would you want to have your own spot, rather than be one cross amongst a cluster?

I know where I want my ashes scattered.

If you are on the M25 heading anticlockwise, Southbound, between junction 17 and 16 there is a sign stating that you have entered Buckinghamshire. Not long after that on the left is a field, and a tree in the middle of that field will stand out. All alone, on the brow of a hill, it draws the eye. Over the years I have passed this tree hundreds, maybe thousands of times, seen it with leaves, without leaves, backed by thick slatey skies, ‘Simpsons’ skies, obliterated by fog, backed by a sherberty sunrise. I have always wanted to have a photograph of it in all of its variations on my wall but have never had the impetus to pull off the motorway and actually find a route to it. That tree and I have eyed each other through good times and shitty times, when times are shitty I particularly think about wanting to be deposited there when I’m gone.

The first year of secondary school, I had a bad time. I was like a young meerkat who had been rejected by the mob, certain members were able to influence the rest with their smear campaign and out I was cast.

Like those nature programs where a member of the group is rejected for a superficial reason - they smelt funny, they got knocked up by the alpha male when they were not alpha female, they hurt their paw and couldn’t keep up - Suddenly I found myself alone, wandering the concrete plains, conspicuous by my solitude. The jackals – sullen 11 year old boys in my year – trailed the scent of weakness, yelled ‘loner’ at me every lunchtime and delighted in telling me what the girl who hated me had been saying. I imagined wildlife filmmakers were following my pathetic plight without intervening. ‘Rejected juvenile Naughton has survived another day alone in the grounds of the school. She skulked in areas where she knew there was cover and eventually found a bench at the top of a hill above the playing fields, that looked out onto the M25. It seemed that it was not within the territory of any predators, the plains below were filled with 5th year jackals, focused only on their footballs, so she cowered there unseen, able to keep a look out for the enemy whilst watching the vehicles charging clockwise North, longing to be inside any one of them.’

Having my ashes scattered under this tree is a most suitable spot. I live on the periphery. In most other people’s lives I am merely a fleeting presence, like the littlest hobo, except I don’t help anyone and no children cry when I disappear again. Every time someone who once knew me is driving along that section of the M25 they might pass the tree and think of me. This would certainly be more often than they’d ever think of me otherwise - If my ashes were in some garden of remembrance. This way no-one has to actually go out of their way to visit me, they can just pass by on their way and wave, or swear - apt representation of all of my relationships anyway – arms length/motorway’s width. You can’t actually go up to the tree, you can only view it from a distance, see it in passing, no chance to linger, no awkward pleasantries, no small-talk.

One idle Monday-dreading-Sunday I decided, today was the day to photograph my tree of death. Using Googlemaps I was able to find my tree and work out the possible routes to it.

Googlemaps streetview now shows, with little blue dots, the places people have taken photos, and you can see the exact spot they stood. My tree features in several of these shots. Maybe this could be the future of memorials - we can do away with engraved benches and instead have Google Memorials – a black dot on the map that, when you roll over it, shows who chose this to be their memorial spot - a brief life history, a couple of photos, links to every one of their multitude of blogs, websites, tweets, so much information that they are practically alive again according to their web presence. In order to secure the best memorial spots bidding would be done on Ebay, top spots being famous landmarks, football stadiums and strip clubs. Then we may as well have Google Graves and Google Gore – gold stars for all the spots where famous people are buried, and red splatters where noteworthy deaths occurred, you know how we like that. Instead of just getting it to show the traffic situation on your phone you can also ask for the gore spots to be shown. “Oh damn, accident on the M4, sorry kids, we’d better find another route to Legoland – in fact if we take that back road there are three gore-spots we will go past, you’d like that wouldn’t you kids?”

He arrived sighing and coughing and retching and hacking. He made it fairly clear that he did not feel well.

I got out the very expensive and effective cold medication that I hide at the back of the cupboard, which I don’t offer to my beloved when he is ill. 'Have you tried this? It’s really good for 'fending off' colds.’ I suggested strongly. He was not interested and yet continued to splutter and wheeze. I put the packet out on the side along with some tissues like a promotional display just for him. If he didn’t take any pills but then cried off sick then there would be no recompense.

In between his foul sounds and resentful flinging about of dust sheets I tried to give him some information about the cat. I am always apologetic when I speak of him (the cat). Men think all women are cat neurotics, even women who hate cats - they are neurotic about hating them.

“Urm, we have a cat; George." I left out the Herbert Leigh Mallory part. And his star sign. “Oh yeah? Can he go out?” he asked, intimating what he hoped the cat would mostly be doing. “Oh yes he comes and goes through the catflap, but please don’t let him get out the front.” And I should have stopped there, but I drifted on saying “. . . .because we are terrified of him running in the road….” Luckily for him I petered out before I said “Because just imagine if he got run over, his poor little pulverised body, I lost all of my cats on the road you know . . there was Cleo and Freddy and Alice and Alfie and Edward. . . ." He stood looking at the ceiling with loathing, unaware that I had kindly cut down my speech.

He had insisted he start work on a Saturday. This is a way to guilt trip you. You feel strangely indebted to workmen for being willing to work on the weekend even though you didn’t want them to come then and it is a complete inconvenience.

We planned to go out. As we too’d and fro’d preparing to leave, whilst really watching him set up, he cracked open a tin of paint and just started painting. I couldn’t fathom how he chose that particular place to start, a poky corner, next to the boiler cupboard in the middle of the room. No limbering up, no taping up, the sheets he had tossed about were nowhere near the area that he had chosen to start working. He became momentarily friendly in order to glean our WIFI password so that he could hook up his paint covered iPad (that should have been a red flag) to a radio station playing nonstop musicals. We left soon thereafter.

I worried about George (Herbert Leigh Mallory) and how strange it would be for him to come in through the cat flap and see a strange man, a load of sheets and ladders and no furniture. I felt guilty that I had just arranged this frightening situation with no explanation to him beforehand. As we pootled about all day, in the back of my mind I imagined George, horribly perturbed after bursting through the catflap and bursting straight back out again, never to return. When we got home that evening the decorator was clearing up and getting ready to leave. Turned out, contrary to expectations, George had come home, seen a theme park of sheets and spent all afternoon running around under them. Well at least he put SOME sheets down.

On Sunday morning when he started a second day’s work, my beloved asked him if we should move a table out of his way that was in the middle of the dining room. ‘Oh no, it’s fine there.’

‘But you’ve got paint on it.'

My beloved reported this back to me in the other room, whispering. We are all snitches when there are workmen in the house.  

We went out all day again. We had never done two days ‘out' in a row, it was as though we were retired, or had a decorator in.

He locked himself out, even after we left him keys. How you lock yourself out of a strange house when you go out to get lunch escapes me. As you are leaving you must surely be thinking, I don’t live here, this is not home, my wife isn’t upstairs, how will I get back in? Ah, the owner has left me a key. Do I have that key on my person? NO. Slam.

Wanker.

Sunday evening. We had stayed out till dark and were rewarded. He had left. I did the obligatory wandering through the house rubbishing his work so far and claiming that I hadn’t wanted the house painted anyway.

On Monday, sadly I was home by 1pm. I have never thought this to be sad before. I tried to fill the time with the weekly shop and coffees and smelling candles in gift shops but I started to feel homeless and cold wandering the streets and decided I'd brave the awkwardness of going home. Are workmen aware of the power they weald to drive a person out of their home for hours/days on end?  

When I got home he wasn’t there. When he came back I inwardly tensed but I greeted him delightedly. I don’t greet my boyfriend when he gets home.

He immediately launched into an excuse-type speech. "I’m not 'avin a very good week." He lifted up his t-shirt and showed me a rounded belly with a slightly pink patch. I gasped in the horrified fashion that I assumed he was hoping for. "Did that last night filling up the wife’s hot water bottle. Went all down me." His hand gestured the route down his tummy, past his groin which I pictured with pubes all congealed with paint, and along the length of his thigh, as though taking a theatrical bow. He straightened up, put his hand on his side and walked stiffly about as if he had been shot. "So I 'ad to get that sorted out didn’t I" I think he was hinting at having just been to the doctors but a doctor wouldn’t be able to offer much treatment for a severely mild scald and when I asked him what the doctor had given him he changed the subject by looking up at the walls and saying “It’s not been quite that easy this." "Oh really?" I said thinking 'What’s not so easy? You saw the house and quoted on the job, the walls haven’t moved, it’s all just white paint and you paint for a living.'

After five minutes politely listening to him complain I offered him a drink, he declined, and I said 'well if you want one at any point just help yourself' as I backed out of the room, ‘help yourself’ was said as my door swung quietly very closed.

I put on a loud film with lots of gunshots and swearing to try and keep him at bay. At one point he was working really near to the door to the hallway that led to the door to the room I was hiding in. I could hear great huffs and puffs and sighs and groans as though something unreasonable was being done to him in my dining room. I turned up the gunshot sound effects, but at some point the two doors between us came ajar and he spoke to me and I leaned over on my chair and I peered around the door to answer him, but I didn’t open the door any further. I hoped a draught would blow both doors closed, even though they were hung in opposite orientations rendering that impossible. I was thankful to Vodafone when, at that precise moment, he reached the front of the phone queue he was waiting in and he walked off down the other end of my house to negotiate a new phone for his daughter who, he told me proudly, is going to be both a professional photographer and a prosecution lawyer after her GCSEs.

When he came back after his phone call he firmly shut the door. I was relieved and affronted. I am allowed to shut the door on him, not him on me.

At some point near the end of my gunfight and screaming film I could hear him still painting near the now firmly closed door and I started to fret that he was actually painting said beautifully stripped old pine door with white gloss. We just said walls didn’t we?! Didn’t we?! When you say ‘paint this room’ do they interpret that as everything IN the room? I grabbed the empty mug on my desk as an excuse to need to go into the kitchen, waited till he called his wife about whether to order his laywerphotographerdaughter’s phone yet, and tiptoe-ran in (I’m really good at a silent sprint), turned to look at the door; not painted, quick about-face and I was out again before he saw me.

It felt like the last two hours of the day were him packing up. The tap ran for ten minutes on full, he got the hoover out and just left it sucking. There were worrying crashes followed by urgent wiping sounds.

Eventually he did the verbal ‘knock knock’ at my door and told me that he was all done for the day. He said that he had painted the radiator as though it was a great act of kindness, and I thanked him as though he had saved my life. I had to do the obligatory standing with him looking around at the walls, he playing up the ordeal that it has been and me spouting crap, “Oh wow, it looks so much better, you’ve done a great job!" When really I was thinking how can I even tell if he has painted everything - the room was white before, It’s white now, would I really know if he hadn’t done two coats everywhere? Even if i did suspect would I have the balls to say anything? Of course not. So after he left I looked for confirmation that he had painted everywhere - And boy did I find it.

I don’t know why he brought the dust sheets because he didn’t use them, not where he was actually working. They mostly lay on a table next to his dirty buckets. Meanwhile over all the surfaces and all of our belongings were constellations of teeny tiny white dots.

Pretty much the main reason to pay for a decorator to come in is that he will do a better job than you at not spattering paint everywhere and that he probably owns a vast supply of sheets to protect your stuff. That surely is the difference between the amateur and the professional. If I employed the services of a ‘cleaner’ to get rid of a body and remove all traces of the crime I would not be best pleased if he left a few drops of blood here and there and a smattering of fingerprints.

Poor man. No one ever tells a decorator what a beautiful job they have done (well except me, the gusher) it’s just paint, it’s just painting, we could do it ourselves if we had time and we all think that we would do it much better, with more love, or at least more care as it is our own stuff we would be ruining. If my boyfriend left spatters everywhere I would swear at him, call him incompetent and then clean it up myself because his cleaning up would not be good enough. But when we are paying a professional we don’t even mention the polka dots all over the kitchen, the antique towel rail, the designer side table that he was using to mix paint on, the satellite box, the cat’s dinner, the cat. It is embarrassment on his behalf that stops me, how will he feel and react at having attention drawn to his incompetence? Can I bear to witness his discomfort? NO. It’s as difficult as breaking up with someone or telling them they have some goo in the corner of their eye.

On Tuesday I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing his paint freckled face for a fourth day, couldn’t bear the thought of hiding in the front room listening to his indiscernible, ominous sounds, couldn’t bear to be there for the grand unveiling at the end of the job and having to be even more enthusiastic about what he had done. So once again I walked the streets, had three coffees, tried on perfumes and covered the back of my hand in lipstick, which I don’t wear. My pay and display ticket ran out so I decided to do a drive by; if he was still there I would drive on. I crawled past the house. Still there, I floored it.

Having read the planting instructions on every packet of spring bulbs in the garden centre I decided to try again to go home. I drove by again; GONE, hurrah! relief washed over me, but then, unexpectedly, I felt guilt rising. I hadn’t been there to utter far too many grateful thanks and to wave him off. He may have hung on at the house, hoping to see me before leaving to receive praise, to feel job satisfaction. I Imagined him as the last boy at boarding school whose parents forgot to go and collect him, setting off for the train station, dragging his tuck box and cricket kit behind him whilst frequently looking up the road for the family car. 'Lucy, you heartless bitch' I thought as I went inside.

He’d left a note; "Sarah and Justin……"

Cunt.

And decorators leave a lasting legacy; every single thing that I have noticed being broken or damaged since the decorator has been here is now, and will forever after, be blamed on him.  

Woman gets out of bed

Three cars draw up to the mini roundabout at exactly the same moment. There is a pregnant pause where you can actually see each person computing the highway code, ‘Give way to the right, give way to the right, oh, but look, he is also giving way to the right, and so am I, and so is she so who goes first?’ And then someone eventually breaks it and I love the awful tension before that moment - My bloke considers this to be the perfect time to firmly establish his alpha-ness in the world. He claims that without fail it is always he who breaks the stalemate, that he is unaffected by doubts or manners or fears of a three way crash, no, he thinks only, ‘I’m the best so I’m going first.’ 

I always think that there must be a reason that these three people got here at exactly the same moment, that they really ought to get out of their cars and shake hands, celebrating chance, or fate, or irritating events that make them late for work. When stalemate happens the centre of the roundabout should start flashing and a bell ring as though they have hit the jackpot and then a giant arrow on the roundabout spins and selects at random the person who is to proceed first.

Lana Del Ray had it just right. A recent study has discovered that those born in the summer months are more likely to suffer from mood swings. If you were born in the spring you will be excessively positive; autumn birthdays are less likely to be depressive, while those born in winter were less likely to be irritable.

This for me is rather important news. I was a summer baby and I have been horribly plagued with moody mardiness all my life. I think summer births should be phased out, outlawed even to eradicate moody people. 

Instead of that rhyme about the day's of the week your child is born on, 'Monday's child is fair of face' blah blah blah, it is more important to make everyone learn one about the best time to conceive a child so that we can craft a world of tolerant, jolly, un-sulky people.

It doesn't flow quite as well as the days of the week one:

After springtime copulation expect little irritation,

Summer splicing of genes means baby will be full of beans,

Choose an autumnal screw, you will get moody blues

Enjoy winter boning your child won't lack serotonin 

Everybody's Autobiography, Gertrude Stein.

A little scribble to celebrate 61 years today since the First ascent of Mount Everest.

I would absolutely love to get hold of a used gas canister from Everest, you could make a beautiful anglepoise style lamp with one, or a doorstop, or a rolling pin, or quite a heavy bathroom light dangly thing.

No one ever celebrates the summits of each of those oxygen canisters, they count too. . .

I concentrate on looking like I’m concentrating.

I tell myself, ‘Focus Lucy – take this in.’ - which prompts my mind to spontaneously wander off to aimless thoughts of ex-boyfriends, work, why You’ve Been Framed still has video tapes in the title sequence animation when no one uses video tapes any more and whether I prefer daddy or chips.

The tennis coach must quickly suss out each client, not only their tennis ability or lack thereof, but a way to connect with them, he must pander to teenage boys and their flouncy tantrums, and middle-aged men and their flouncy tantrums. For the women he has a social responsibility to flirt with each and every one. His flirting is imperative to the wellbeing of the local community. If he can make all of the women he coaches feel attractive for an hour a week then they go away and don’t have to be prescribed anti-depressants.

Day after day, hour after hour he must repeat himself, not just to different clients but to the same person. Someone who, in the rest of their life, is perfectly educate-able, in this situation becomes utterly incapable of retaining information, or imitating what they are shown, or even coordinating one hand with the other.

I forget that he sees eight or more people a day and has to do the small talk with them all. When it’s my hour and he asks me something that he has already asked me, or tells me a story I have already heard, I am secretly affronted.

‘He doesn’t remember that we spoke about this during my last lesson, while I bashed a bucket full of backhands at him?! Pah.’

‘He told me that story three weeks ago when I was having a really good serving day, doesn’t he remember? Pah.’

I am convinced that people only drink so that they can recycle the same old stories and conversations with the same people over and over again. When drunk you can tell the same story to someone else who is drunk, who has heard it before, and neither of you will care. I have a brain wipe at the end of a night if I have had more than two large glasses of wine, which means that I can repeat that same night indefinitely. If I ever go out and I’m not drinking when the other person is, within about three minutes of them speaking I will say, “You’ve already told me that, yes, yes I know and then he got the sack, and then he killed himself, and you wrote a poem on Facebook dedicated to him, come on, drink up I want to go home.”

In the original version of one of my favourite songs ‘Eat sleep rave repeat’ by Fat Boy Slim – it is perfectly summarised:

“So. . . like. . . John called me the next morning.  ‘Like. . .Dude. . .Like. . .where were you last night?’ I was like . . . ‘I was there. He was like  ‘. . . .Oh . . . yeah’”

When my boyfriend regales me about an event that I was stood next to him during, watching said event, commenting on said event, TO him, I am always very violently affronted. “I was fucking there man!!!”

“Oh . . . .yeah”

When my mother tells me some snippet of news related trivia; “Oh yes and I’ve heard that they do in fact have mirrors on the front of dumper trucks so that they can see cyclists they are about to squash in front of them at traffic lights.”

“Yes Mum, I told YOU that.”

I have developed a technique myself where I make sure not to mention any events/things said without my description being so ambiguous that I am almost suggesting that they were there or said the ‘thing’. If you talk in such an inclusive way as if they have full knowledge of what you are talking about then they won’t be offended and say “I wasn’t bloody well there, don’t you remember?!”

If they foolishly respond with outrage then you could just say, “Oh, sorry, it just always feels like you are with me, even when you aren’t.” or “Oh it was such an intelligent, witty comment that I just assumed that it would have been you who said it.”

While you have tennis coaching you can pretend for an hour that you are an elite tennis pro, and that this is the coach you employ to get you to the Open finals. For perhaps ten seconds you manage to get in the zone and hit two shots in a row; which don’t bounce off the frame or wang over the perimeter fence - you are living the dream. The hour ends, you mix in with the other club players and everything goes to shit. Entire games of double faults follow entire games where every return goes into the net. There is a general consensus at my club that you cannot ‘mix in’ after a lesson because without fail you will be horrendous. Just the same as when you pass your driving test your teacher won’t then let you drive the learner car back home because he knows that you will have lost all ability to drive for the rest of the day.

If someone asked you to throw a ball straight up into the air, you’d think nothing of it, wouldn’t you? Not if you have just had tennis coaching. Serving to the veteran club members, all of a sudden I am aware of the infinite possibilities of my throw direction, height and speed. Each joint can contribute to a throw going wayward – fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder, head, any of these could randomly tilt just slightly the wrong way and off goes my ball. After no more than three bad throw ups I am so embarrassed that I just hit the next ball regardless of the toss up being the worst of the lot.

Coach has a script of how to break down shots and convey them to an eager idiot. As he talks me through it I listen. HARD. So hard that I go off into one of those wonderful hazy meditations where I am staring ahead, looking as though I am alert, when really I have been plunged into a consciousness limbo, he is mouthing instructions and all I hear is blood rushing through my own head and birdsong. I only break out of it when coach says, “Ok, now go down the other end.”

“Urm, so take it early, hit the rising ball, power from the shoulder, whip the wrist?”

It doesn’t really matter what shot he has told me to make, whatever I am meant to be doing I end up capable only of doing the exact opposite, he may as well say, “Approach on totally the wrong foot, prepare too late, swipe at the ball in a panic, whack it with the frame and send it over the fence onto the roof of that car.” I guess if we all took on board what he said and were able to immediately do it he would be doing himself out of a regular income, and a new Harley.

The serve is the worst for too much information:

“Arms down and straight, lean back, throw the ball, lean forward, knees bent, arms up, arms back, leaping up, legs straight, arms down, leaping forward, arms leaping, legs leaping, leaping! Leaping! LEAPING!”

He watches my horrendous attempts to serve, makes idle conversation while I mess it up continually. When I actually get one over, he interjects, “That’s good. Now, didn’t that feel different? Did you hear the sound it made? Remember how that felt, that’s how to do it.” I give a kind of embarrassed nod, it’s almost more uncomfortable when I do well, I don’t quite know what to say, ‘thank you’ seems as though I know that I did a good shot and I am thanking him for acknowledging it. If I screw up my face and say “Was that really ok?! It was a total fluke” then it’s as though I have no confidence in his tuition and am effectively dissing him. Maybe subconsciously I mess up more than I do good shots because I feel awkward about being praised.

The problem with coaching; every shot sent to me is a pleasure to return, perfectly placed to help me hit it right – this is absolutely no help. Every shot I receive when playing social tennis will be awkward, too long, too short, ploppy or bouncing way above head height. If he sent me only bad shots I might actually improve my match play. If I play against someone really good who hits textbook shots I suddenly think, ‘Wow, I’m not half bad you know, I’m getting all his shots back.’ whereas if I play against a never-had-coaching type who has played for fifty years and has two ceramic hips they will humiliate me by hitting bizarre uncooperative balls.

I hate playing doubles, but I also hate singles. I think that I might only like having coaching or knocking up. In doubles no calories are burnt because at least half of the time is spent standing at the net listening uncomfortably to my partner at the baseline grunting and lurching to cover the 97% of the court that I am not. Eventually a drop shot is played. It is just far enough to the other side of the court that I hope perhaps technically it is part of the 97% that my partner is responsible for. I see them loom into my peripheral vision, staggering forward to reach it and failing. I say sorry. ‘I won’t do that again.’ I think, so next time, mid-rally I start skipping backwards to the baseline so that I can contribute to the rally, and they hit a drop shot. I say sorry. If I burnt calories from cringing and apologising then doubles would be a great workout. So too would my job.

I am a choker.

I am the worst of combinations, a very competitive choker. I always prefer playing with men or boys because I feel like because there is less expectation for me to be as good as them and therefore I relax and play better. If I am playing women I realise that I smother my aggressive instincts for some reason. I feel uncomfortable trying to bash hell out of them, even though they have no qualms about doing that to me.

I never win my own serve, it is tradition. The minute I get even a point ahead I start thinking, gosh, I might win this game, and then I do a Jana Novotna. I think if I ever embraced my true competitiveness I would let out that child in me who used to have hideous rages. I have held in so many tantrums and screaming, unreasonable hissy fits over the last twenty five years that if I let one out now it may never end.

It reminds me of my dad driving us, in convoy, to Clacton for my 12th birthday outing. Half my friends were in the car with me and my dad and half were in the car of my friend’s mum. My father let the woman lead the convoy. She drove at 45mph all the way up the motorway, it was agony, and yet when we begged him to overtake her he refused saying that it would be impolite. Why are we so uncomfortable beating women?

Cold weather tennis presents its own special problem; Camel toe.

Any of the figure hugging, leg-flattering-bottom-perting-legging-type things out there have, as the yang to the ying, untapped potential for camel toe.

I wore my winter bottoms during the three times I played this winter and was so conscious of the threat of camel toe that I could think of nothing else. I had to check every five minutes to make sure that the crotch of my trousers hadn’t risen up and created the Mariana Trench. When I stood to receive serve I stood with legs stupidly far apart, just to make sure that the cotton couldn’t gather up and form an offensive outline.

I don’t want much. Just once I would like to retain the score in my head for the whole of my own service game. In maths lessons I used to hear the teacher reciting a longwinded, many facetted question involving bus timetables, average speeds, sharing sweets with multiple people and counting out change. After the first stage to the question I always lost everything else, I just about managed the first calculation but lost the end goal and no longer knew why I was holding in my head a figure of 25, what it meant, whether that was time or sweets and what I was meant to do with it next. I would repeat over and over 25, 25 and look deep in concentration whilst swivelling my eyes to their maximum trajectory to try to see what my partner was doing with her 25. They talk about children needing to learn to fail, I knew plenty about it, I learnt to conceal failure, I learnt to somehow scrape through an hour’s lesson without being asked a question by thinking invisible, acting quietly confident and like I knew what was happening so that the teacher wouldn’t see through my poker face.

I get this same panicked feeling playing tennis when I realise that everyone else has also lost track of the score. One of them will come out with; “Well if you are serving from that side then it must be either 15 all, 30 love, 15/40 or deuce.” Huh?!! Everyone but me seems to see the possible score combinations of each side of the court laid out, like Google glass in front of their eyes. I see nothing. On the one occasion I asked my mother to list me every single score combination for each side of the court so that I could learn them like multiplication tables, or at least write them on each arm, she herself got so muddled up she couldn’t explain. She knew them if she was playing but could not break them down for an egit. I think it might have been an act so that she can always manipulate the score when we play, exploiting my dyscalculia.

One of my favourite eccentric players at the club; Roger, when asked the score says, “I’m afraid I don’t keep score.” It’s the perfect answer, its as though he doesn’t believe in scoring. If the rest of us want to be frivolous and make this activity about scores then that’s up to us but he is not here for such superficial reasons, he is just here to hit the ball.

We all hit a wall at some point where the worries we were putting aside by going to play tennis creep back in. It hits me suddenly. While waiting for the serve near the end of the first set my thoughts switch from hitting the perfect backhand and return to worrying about the tax return, the boyfriend, why iCloud has stopped backing up my phone and the concentration is gone, it’s over, I won’t get it back today, time to go home. But the others haven’t yet hit their worry wall so I must play on. When there is social tennis going on, we all play longer than we want to. We are at the mercy of the six games rule, counting down to the time when everyone swaps partners. Either side of me the other courts all finish and are saying, “We need a man over here!” “Ladies four?” “Who’s leaving?” I am still playing, trying to get through the last crucial game while the woman serving is yelling back at the others’ “I simply have to go, I’ve got potatoes to roast!” as she sends an ace past me. When I finally pluck up the courage to whimper, “I think I’d better be going now.” I hear an angry mob shout “But then we will be NINE/FIVE/SEVEN” as though odd numbers are the work of the devil. So I carry on playing and someone else two minutes later announces they are leaving, mid-point, because a ham has to be boiled and everyone yells’ “BYEEEE Jillian!”

I believe that I like tennis, and yet the very moment I start playing a set I am thinking about the end of it and being able to stop and go home. When I think about it there aren’t many activities that I can do without wanting it to end quite soon. Sleeping is one, and reading, but the reading takes place in bed, just before the sleeping so I never get to the point of wanting the reading to end because the sleep sweeps in and takes me away.

When I have a big gap between playing I become frightened to go back, worried that my serve will have deteriorated. So I don’t play and my serve deteriorates. I finally pluck up the courage to go back to the club. I drag someone related to me up there and pull them aside before I go on court, grabbing their arm, looking deep into their eyes pleadingly, “Promise me that you will refuse to play doubles, if anyone asks, remember, YOU and I are just doing singles because my serve is not for public consumption yet, I couldn’t cope if we mix in, promise me, PROMISE ME!!” And then some bossy woman insists almost immediately that we both ‘mix in’ with everyone and my mother skips off to play on a distant court and I have to play doubles with three people who don’t know that I always lose my serve, how I can’t stay put at the net and how I am incapable of keeping score.

Robert De Niro,  A Bronx Tale.

There is no point going skiing with anyone else, they always sod off ahead, a blurry speck in the distance. You find yourself following the wrong speck with the same colour outfit on, like a penguin chick, unable to distinguish it’s mother from the crowd. Because you are behind your companion when you have a catastrophic fall it is strangers who witness it, record it on their GoPros and who hand you back the skis and poles that were strewn across the piste. Meanwhile your companion has stopped half a mile ahead and wonders why you are so slow. You then hurry to find him again and call out to him triumphantly ‘I fell over!’ hoping for some acknowledgement, concern, checking your pupils for signs of a head injury. But because he saw nothing, he can’t relate, unless he sees it with his own eyes it didn’t happen. It is as though you have told him that today is Wednesday.

A sore point between men and women ski companions – women will not come to a halt anywhere near their man. He stops at the brow of a hill, she pootles down towards him. . . and does a big slow, cautious, swooping stop . . .  about ten metres above him. They are too far apart to talk, he has to shout and point his pole. People ski through the gap between them.  All over the piste this is happening, men ski off in front, stop, wait, women ski not-quite-up-to their partners. The man, irritated, skis off even further ahead, the woman, peeved, skis slower, and, when she eventually spots him pause on the horizon she makes sure to stop this time at least twenty metres uphill from him, out of communicating distance - pointing of poles only. When men pull up they aim to get as close as possible to their companion, to look as though they are not going to stop, then swoosh round in a hockey stop creating a torrent of spray into the face of the halted party. It’s all to do with spatial awareness; women are crap, take parking for example – women pull up next to a huge space that they can easily get into frontwards but will always reverse in. Men will pull up alongside a tiny space, too small to fit them, and still somehow manage to pull in frontwards, up the kerb, bump back down again, and in, without scraping the alloys, Bosch. I heard somewhere that in supermarket car parks men will always pull in frontwards to the spaces whereas women prefer to reverse in because they are thinking about it being nice and easy when they want to leave to just pull out frontwards. The men haven’t even thought as far ahead as to why they are even in the car park let alone whether it would be easier for them to pull out front wards when leaving.  So on the piste the man imagines only the magnificent sight of his hockey stop, the icy spray that will coat his friends, how they will admire him and respect his ability to very, very nearly but not quite take them all out. The woman imagines only the awful embarrassment should she fail to stop and instead snow plough clumsily into her partner, or someone else’s.

  The cable car faff and chair lift dare. . .  

Generally on the trip back up the mountain inside a cable car the time is utilised by blowing of noses, application of chapstick, removal of helmets and gloves immediately followed by worrying about what point you should start putting them back on again. Jackets are unzipped to let the heat out, pockets are patted to check that phones and lift passes and money are all still in situ. Boot straps are tweaked, piste maps perused. On the chair lifts however everything is still. Open to the elements, legs dangling down you are terribly aware of the draw of gravity. It seems to be hanging off your legs. The first few times you sit ever so still, holding your poles, sniffing the snot back up deep inside your head, trying to redistribute what is left of the lip balm around your lips for fear of attempting to get it out of your pocket.

As you become more and more accustomed to the chair and the long periods spent on it, you get braver, the tissues come out, the manky croissant stolen from breakfast, is pried out from under the bottle of water in the rucksack and gobbled. You let your legs dangle, enjoying the tug, you take your gloves off, sit them in your lap, hold your poles using only your knees, it feels dangerous, risky. Then, at some point, perhaps the last day you are totally wild, you get your phone out and take a picture. Gravity pulls at it, it feels so heavy, so naughty, it is being sucked downwards, you hold it with two hands, you even hold it out over the side of the chair – knowing that any slip and down it will go into the snow, not even onto your lap, such gay abandon. As we climbed one mountain we saw below us a path of deep footprints heading up the slope, following the line of the cable car. Eventually we saw a guy trudging underneath the chairlift. Everyone in the chair was transfixed – the thing we all worry about happening has happened – to that guy – what did he drop?!  As we overtook him we all leant forwards peering into the white, imagining Rolexes sparkling, a treasured glove, wads of cash, a ski pole. I spotted it – a snow white ski pass - why don’t they make them day glow orange? Why don’t they put them on elastic? Why don’t they insert them under our skin?  I wanted to yell down at him – “Only 100 yards more, I can see it!” But what if he was looking for the body of his dropped baby and not a ski pass at all and I would have cruelly raised his hopes.

There is something wonderfully liberating about wearing a helmet, goggles and a face mask to ski – you are totally anonymous, perhaps even sexless, apart from the meek old lady ski technique that gives away the female in you. Strange though is when one of the breathtakingly handsome ESF (École du Ski Français) instructors looks at you and you think, ‘Wow, he noticed me, he must find me attractive.’ and then you realise that you are just a black plastic and wool covered head, he has noticed nothing about you any different to noticing a tree. Then you think about all of the times when you weren’t wearing a balaclava and helmet when you thought someone noticed you – the same look – they noticed you like they notice a bollard that they must not walk into and there you were all those years thinking that they liked your face.

I had originally signed up for group lessons with the French Ski School ESF, I was, unbeknown to me, put in the ‘English-women-who-don’t-really-care-how-well-they-ski-who-won’t-know-whether-they-are-improving-or-not-who-just like-the-idea-of-lessons-whilst-their-children-are-having-slalom-practice’ Group. It was Russian Christmas in Courchevel. All of the stunningly good-looking, physically perfect instructors had been assigned to pouty, skin-tight white Fendi one-piece-wearing-Russians, or their supermodel girlfriends. To service the stupide English women they had got a couple of instructors out of the ESF retirement home. Alain looked about seventy-five, (imagine Roald Dahl’s BFG) and had a teaching vocabulary of three sentences.

“If you want to ski p a r a l l e l,  go down, and zen UP and zen down wiz ze knees”

“Ok, we go on”

Sorry, two sentences.

His one trick was jumping up and around 180 degrees on the spot. All the women went, ‘ooooohhhh!’ We then followed him down the slopes for two and a half hours each morning. I’m not sure that he didn’t forget on a few occasions that he was actually taking a lesson and wondered why he was on the mountain at all, turning round to see a line of women, stiff as boards snow ploughing behind him like ducklings. He said nothing, apart from pointing out the odd restaurant or mountain. I did not come for a guided tour Alain. There were so many in my group that we snaked down the slopes like a long hair being slowly sucked towards the plug hole. Because I couldn’t see the ‘instructor’ 300 yards ahead all I could see was the person in front of me, invariably a knock-kneed woman with the most ridiculous technique, bending the knees when she should be straightening them, planting her poles at random and usually the opposite side to that which is generally considered useful. In the eons of time it took to get down a green run, instead of my technique improving, it was deteriorating, I was taking on the peculiar mannerisms of whoever was in front of me, a hideous amalgamation of eleven other people’s uncorrected bad habits.  The ministry of silly skiers.

I noticed a remarkable difference in myself over three days of lessons. No, not in my skiing, but my attitude. On the first day I was all “Bonjour Alain!! Je m’appelle Lucy!!” Making dreary small talk with the gaggle of women, laughing and agreeing at all the right moments when they told me proudly how they couldn’t keep up with their children. By the third morning, resentful of the expense of paying to follow an old man around the Alps I was transformed into a silent, unresponsive member of the group. I kept my goggles down and my facemask on so that I didn’t have to contribute. I had a sick feeling in my stomach as I witnessed two members of the group do what I should have done – they ditched Alain in search of an actual tutor. Their boyfriends, after two days of sending their women off for lessons had clearly seen no improvement, they still had the embarrassing technique – the very reason said boyfriends had put them in for lessons in the first place – complaints were made and a new instructor materialised for them.

“Zees stupide eeenglish vomen will veel sorry for ze old man, zey love old men”

And it’s true, had a seventy year old woman come out to teach us I would have had little hesitation in protesting, but old men, for some reason, we both respect them and find them endearing. I imagined him sitting in his chair all day in the home for retired instructors, wearing his ESF uniform, ski’s leant up against his chair, just in case he should be reinstated as head instructor. In the ESF head office the management discussed the issues of understaffing during Russian Christmas.  “We haven’t got anyone to take the stupide English women group lessons.”

“Well we can’t sacrifice any of our hot young instructors – the Russians need them. Jean Claude, get yourself over to the ESF pensioners home, pick out one of the more continent ones, one with nice sunglasses, a kindly face and big ears, the English women won’t even notice the dementia.”

With the furore about head injuries when skiing we are all slightly confused about what to do. In the media they tell you that after a serious head injury you can seem perfectly ok, be talking, get up and ski on, go out and get drunk after, get up the next day, eat breakfast, go skiing, get drunk, eat dinner, get drunker, go to bed, wake up and then suddenly, bam, brain damage. On the two occasions during my trip that I took a tumble at speed I did indeed bash my head on the snow. I immediately thought, ‘That’s it, I just hit my head, they say you can’t tell how bad it is, that it can feel like nothing and yet be life threatening. Well this does indeed feel like nothing – it must, therefore, be life threatening. I had better get helicoptered down and sent straight to intensive care, surely?!’ But I was in the middle of a lesson, a private lesson - get me. (I was forced to go private after the Alain debacle) Naturally my French instructor had skied ahead so fast that he had disappeared over the other side of a precipice and, of course, saw nothing. I got up and skied hurriedly down to him, making ridiculous apologies. “I’m sorry that I fell over during the expensive lesson I am paying you for and held you up on your way effortlessly and obliviously down the mountain.” He shrugged. As I submissively followed him down the piste I was thinking, ‘This could be my last few minutes of being compos mentis, any second now I might start babbling and becoming aggressive.’ – the instructor wouldn’t even know if that was normal behaviour for me and so wouldn’t be alerted to my massive injury. How often does this occur? If all of the instructors conveniently fail to witness any of their hapless students falling over, they finish the day’s lessons none the wiser as to whether any of their pupils were subsequently rushed to hospital.  Maybe this is why everyone wants to shag their instructor – nothing to do with fancying them, it is to ensure that if their head injury emerges later that day then there is someone with them, or at least within them, who can call an ambulance when their brain starts to swell.

This is getting ridiculous now. I read and I read and I read, reading is my second favourite thing to do after sleep and yet I cannot hold onto what I have read longer than a week, maybe two, max.  I still remember incredibly dull dreams that I had over twenty years ago, but a book that I thought brilliant – nothing. If I am in the middle of a book that I am enjoying I will bore people to death talking about it, but if I get into conversation with someone more than two weeks after reading a great book, I may well still rave about it, but when questioned, “What’s it about?” “What did you like so much about it?” “Any good quotes?” I have lost all the fundamental facts. It doesn’t help I suppose that a lot of the books I read are these loose memoir themed things where the author seems to simply have purged several years of thoughts and observations and collated them in an order known only to themselves – I like these because it’s what any book that I wrote would come out like – anyway – to sum up one of these books to a disinterested drinking partner is not easy. They want to hear a quick three-sentence summary, something they can imagine with no effort. “It’s about a vampire who realises he is gay, and vegetarian, so he goes travelling and he buys a tumble down Chateau in the South of France that he painstakingly renovates with his lover Jean-Paul who owns the neighbouring farm where he grows sustainable chou-fleurs.”

Strangely, it would be far easier to explain a book like that than one of the ones I have read lately; “There’s this woman, she notices things more than most and she writes about everyday, ordinary, dreary daily life stuff. Her observations of her world and of human nature is written so beautifully that she changes your outlook on the world, makes you more observant in your own life and find amusement and beauty in the mundane.”

“Is she dying?”

“No”

“A vampire?”

“No”

“Into BDSM?”

“No”

“Doesn’t sound very interesting to me, I like books about murders that are about 150 pages long.”

“Try ‘150 murders’ - One murder to a page, large text.”

“That’s more like it, I’ll get it on my kindle – it makes page turning sounds, it’s so clever.”

So because I can’t seem to retain my own memories in my internal hard-drive, because at the end of a year, I know that I have read quite a lot of books and yet cannot name more than the last two, I am going to purge all recollection, while it lingers, onto my computer and by proxy the internet.

    Diana Athill – Instead of a letter – Read in October 2013

The Sunday Times Culture magazine had a list of the top 100 books that you should read. I went through the list and felt very smug that I had read several of them – though of course, I could recall no more than that.

Instead of a letter by Diana Athill leapt out at me, also Portnoy’s Complaint by Phillip Roth. Both were immediately ordered (I wonder how inundated Amazon was that afternoon with orders as a result of the Sunday Times feature) and I waited for my joyful brown packages full of memoirs to arrive. (Only receiving a kitten in the post could possibly outdo the happiness I feel at receiving a book.)

In order to write this piece it has been necessary to re-read the entire novel and it has taken me three months to then pen it. (Strike that, it’s now almost six). Re-reading much-loved books is a wonderful thing in itself. It is like reading a different book. Now that you are able to trip easily through the story without too much concentration required your mind is free to notice the details in the text, the phrases, the language, the imagery.

On the cover is an image of a woman leaning into one of those wooden huts selling papers and sweets, at night, in London. A tree looms over the hut. In the tree there is a ghostly apparition – I hadn’t realised there was a supernatural element to her memoirs, I wondered if it was the ghost of her first love, the man who blighted her early life. ‘I’m sure I shall soon find out.’ I thought and began to read. A few days in and whilst lying in bed hungrily consuming her words my finger found a rough texture to the cover, as I looked at it, highlighted in the lamplight I realised that the ghostly apparition was a dried creamy substance and not a ghost at all. I went back to reading with renewed vigour; ‘this must be a real bonk-buster then.’ I thought, index finger piggling at the substance excitedly. That’s what you get when you choose the slightly cheaper ‘used’ option on Play.com - other people’s excretions.

Condition: ‘Used, abused, all pages present, but some stuck together.’

It is very satisfying and somehow comforting to read thoughts from another person that reflect your own, they validate your own strange way of being – She talked of the feeling of watching herself during sexual encounters, ‘One half going obediently and easily through the routine. The other watching with ironic amusement.’ At that moment, had I been an American teenager I would have said, “OMG that is, like, SOOOO me’.

In a random moment in her life; a man in a car stopped to speak to her, thinking at first she was someone else and then, upon realising his mistake invited her for a coffee anyway - she declined but described feeling ‘Extraordinarily alive and cheerful afterwards’ I know this feeling. It isn’t until something stimulating like that happens to me that I realise just how half dead I am as I go about my daily existence. All it takes is a nice interaction with a stranger and I can feel temporarily revived.  Just last week as I approached a mini-roundabout a man driving an Ocado delivery van was doing a full 360 turn. He almost didn’t make it as the van mounted the kerb and lurched ominously close to a builder’s hoarding. As he was mid-turn he pulled a frightened gurn and pretended to cover his eyes. I laughed, surprised by a little glimpse of humanity. Normally as I drive around I see the little figures behind steering wheels and assume the worst, that they are all selfish robotic, territorial drones that I must try to avoid any kind of interaction with because it will only ever be unpleasant. To see some humility in this drone was nice, I was the only one who witnessed his little mishap and so we both shared a little moment of amusement. The rest of the day, ok the rest of that minute I felt quite elated and optimistic about the world. Then a housewife in a Range Rover cut me up – ‘CUNT’ I spat.

When Athill and her brother were children they discussed feeling torn between loyalties and nostalgia towards their first home Beckton versus their second, nearby home, The Manor – they felt disloyal to Beckton for enjoying living at The Manor. This sentimentality and feelings of guilt towards inanimate objects I recall vividly during my childhood.  I couldn’t just leave cuddly toys laying face down on the floor, I had to sit them up, tuck them into bed and give them a companion toy to sit with.

Another astute observation of Athill’s:

“An adult watching children scurrying about a farm must see their movements as mysterious, like those of animals. What makes them decide to sit on a certain wall, stare solemnly for perhaps ten minutes at a certain pig, then jump down and run into a barn, clamber to the top of a pile of sugar beet? But I can remember that each building, each activity, each time of day had its own value and meaning – we went from one to another as an adult would decide to drop in at a picture gallery, or go into a shop to buy bread. ‘Going to look at the bull,’ for example was not a random whim but an accepted pastime.”

I used to be able to amuse myself for entire summers in our poky, scruffy little garden with my routine. I would wander around in the mornings looking at what new flowers had come out, particularly hoping that the ones that flung their seeds everywhere when you squeezed the seed pod were ready to burst. I would call for the cat, looking for a rustling through the bushes. There was the crumbly old wall to climb followed by the swing under the tree (made from a painfully narrow piece of wood, wrapped in plastic bags and tied at the middle point to a branch above, I don’t know how I tolerated the sharp edges digging into my thighs.) I would look at all the dark, aggressive looking spiders sprinting about on the celandines in the cold shady rockery under the swing, shudder, run to the front garden, pick the tiny forget-me-nots and make bouquets for my dolls house, sit on the hot stone gate post looking at the tiny red spiders milling about underneath me, squashing them if they got too close. I might trim the edges of the lawn with the old gardening shears imagining that it was a horse’s mane, dig up and replant a weed, spray the bug spray on all the roses and watch the aphids drown in the acid rain. Collect pebbles and wash them all in a bucket, dry them with a tea towel and then rub them with Vaseline, pretending I was polishing them.  Oh happy days!

  Some of my favourite excerpts from Instead of a letter:

(I hope that I am allowed to quote Diana Athill without getting into trouble – Just imagine if I was sued by Diana Athill herself for quoting her without permission, that might slightly taint my lasting memories of her work. Though it would be rather exciting to know that I, however momentarily, might exist to her, that I would have been swilled around in that genius brain amongst other, greater thoughts.)

‘During that time my soul shrank to the size of a pea. It had never been very large or succulent, or capable of sending out sprouts beyond the limits of self, but now it had almost shrivelled away. I became artful in avoiding pain and in living from one small sensation to another, because what else could one do when one had understood that, as far as one’s personal life was concerned, one was a failure, doomed to be alone because one did not merit anything else. (p150)

‘Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure.’ P151

On her work with writers and in publishing;

‘ “We are a neurotic lot, every last one of us,” one of them said to me, and certainly the good ones I have known have included the violently moody, the super-sensitive, the spiteful-about-other-people’s-work, the hard drinker, the bad husband, the unable-to-communicate-in-speech, the cheerfully perverse, the conventionally amoral. Underneath whatever it may be, however, they have all had a private sanity, which does not seem to me to be neurotic: they are the people to whom truth is important, and who can see things.’ P184

‘My own feeling, if I have been truly excited by a book, is nearer to a curiously detached kind of love than to a liking: I have looked at the head of the man or woman sitting opposite me and thought, It all came out of that head, and I could have taken it between my hands and kissed it.’ P184

‘Of social life I had, and still have almost none. I have never had a talent for acquaintance, only an enjoyment of intimacy. People who have more than three or four friends whom they wish to see often, who come and go to dinner parties and so on with a wide circle of acquaintances whose company they enjoy although they do not know them very well, fill me with envious admiration.’ P186

‘I once spent four hours alone on that terrace with an unread book and untouched writing-pad, turned by the spectacle into nothing but eyes, with no idea of the time that was passing until the sun went down. Such pleasures can only be enjoyed alone and on foot. Earth, stone, water, trees must be touched and smelt in order to be fully realized. I have seen landscapes more magnificent from cars, buses, trains and boats, and have been pleased to see them; but the ones I have learnt, the ones which have become part of the fabric of my memory, are those which have made the muscles of my legs ache, have scratched my ankles and caused sweat to drip from my forehead. Why I should still consider the conscientious hiker slightly absurd I cannot conceive. He is undoubtedly gaining a more intense and enduring experience than any other traveller.’

‘It is embarrassing to revert to my writing when it still amounts to so little – to hardly more than a private satisfaction – but I believe that it is the impulse to write which underlies my peace of mind. If I ask myself, So what will become of me if THAT happens? The answer is, I will be all right after a time. I will go on writing. And because I can say that, I can live in the present with nothing but gratitude for and joy in what it offers.

For me Athill’s work is a perfect example of how a good writer can make everything interesting. Though the story of her life took some dramatic turns and ought to be interesting to read simply because of that, it is her way of writing that kept me reading rather than the events. She could have written about nothing more than making a cup of tea and she would have found a way to make it compelling and absorbing.

I stumbled upon this piece about the very process of writing by William Stafford. If you read Athill’s book, then William’s piece, I defy you not to have a slight urge to sit down and see what words pour out of you.

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. . . . .

To read on: