So What Are You Up To This Week...?




I predict an uneventful week ahead. Working, pottering, revising for my SATS helping my son to revise for his SATS, tiling the bathroom, blah.

And on Thursday I shall be at Waterstones in Manchester (91, Deansgate) listening to a promising new author read from her brand spanking new work of fiction. She is called Caroline Smailes. Have you heard of her?

Fancy a review of this yet-to-be-launched novel? Just scroll down a bit then: there's one I prepared earlier.

I have booked on a charabanc. Stray is our driver, Badger is in charge of maps and Bobo The Hysteric is providing the in-car entertainment. It is always worth taking an hysteric with you on a long trip. I shall be bringing the picnic. Ms M just loves to feed people. (Whaddya make of that, Dr Freud?) I have heard that lots of bloggers will be there, as well as people who just love books, and even some people who like to write about people who write books. I have heard that there might be room for just a couple more, so long as you are little.

So, like I said, an uneventful week ahead for me.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

In Search Of Adam...

Caroline Smailes has written a novel. I would be surprised if anyone who reads this blog has not come across Caroline's amazing story, of how her unassuming blog launched her beautiful first novel, but in case you haven't you can catch up with her story here.

I read her novel this week. I was blown away. With the story of Jude - a motherless, abused child on a quest to discover her roots - Caroline has produced the most moving piece of fiction I have read in a long time. The subject matter is not for the faint-hearted. Childhood sexual abuse, post-natal depression, self-harm and suicide are not topics that raise one's spirits. The prose, however, will fill your heart with sheer pleasure. Soak up the words. Each one is carefully chosen.

Caroline has beautifully crafted form and style to shape the content. The ‘what’ is presented simply. The ‘how’ is the stunning beauty of the book. The way we meet the book is precisely the way we meet a broken child. With patience, with work, with tolerance. By hearing the voice that lay underneath the words, chilling as those words are.

Jude doesn’t let you get close to her easily. Of course she doesn’t. That is how it is when you are a child abused. She tells you her story in stark, brutal sentences and you have to read between her words to find out who she is. But once you are alongside her, she slowly begins to reveal herself. You have to work hard. That is how it is for children like Jude.

Books can often make me cry. I have read Love In The Time Of Cholera umpteen times and I cry every single time. In Search Of Adam made me cry. I began to weep not at Jude’s story, but the beautiful way in which Caroline allows me to know it. I began to weep at the beauty of the voices within; at the emotion that is held within the words. I had to work to attune to Jude, but once you are attuned Caroline draws you in until you are deeply involved in Jude's reality. This is precisely how I would ‘do therapy’ with Jude. Caroline has the consummate skill of an experienced writer to recreate this process in fiction form.

Caroline is a linguist. She captures Jude's voice beautifully, and through Jude we come to know the world of the grown-ups. As Jude grows, the voices begin to layer and layer until the book is dense with texture and meaning. Her use of language and poetry is exquisite. I was reminded of some of the Anglo-Indian writers: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy. Quite some going for a first time novelist.


Caroline will be reading from her novel at Waterstone's in Deansgate, Manchester, on Thursday 14 June at 7pm. Don't miss it. I suspect it's the start of something big.

Why Does Play-Doh Smell Of Marzipan...?

We have just spent a wonderful evening at the Bridgewater Hall, listening to Colin Carr playing Bridge's Oration, Natalie Guttman playing Britten's Cello Symphony, Ralph Kirshbaum playing Elgar's Cello Concerto and Yo-Yo Ma playing Walton's Cello Concerto. The concert was part of the Royal Northern College of Music's International Cello Festival. We heard four truly stunning performances. Although Elgar's Cello Concerto really belongs to Du Pre, Kirshbaum still made me weep.

As the music flowed through me I became quite fixated on the percussion section. The bloke playing the timpani had both hands occupied for most of the night. There was another chap with a snare drum and another kind of drum; he had a couple of snare rolls and a few bangs on the other drum. Next to him was a chap with a couple of cymbals. He got to have a go at the end of both the Elgar and the Walton, but I don't think he was needed much for the Bridge or the Britten. (My memory may be letting me down here.) However, he had to slip over to a xylophone type thingy (which may well have been an actual xylophone) during the Walton which I guess kept him on his toes.

And finally, there was a young woman with a big J. Arthur Rank looking gong. She wasn't wearing a toga though. She gonged a couple of times during the Britten and I think once again during the Walton. I got to thinking about being a percussionist. She was turning the pages, and I realised that she would have to be able to read music so she could see when it was time for her to gong. I know that reading music at that level takes a lot of skill. I once turned pages for a pianist friend who was playing Prokofiev's Sonata for Violin and Piano and I could barely follow the music to turn in the right place. Heaven only knows how he actually played it. So I am guessing that the gong woman could read music at a very high level.

But with all that skill, all she gets to do is gong the once in a 30 minute piece of music. And the problem is, if she gongs in the wrong place it is a complete disaster. Ergo, she has to be both competent and confident. So, I wondered, if she is both competent and confident, and can read very difficult music, why doesn't she play an instrument where she gets to play a bit more of the time? Even the bassoon had more play time than she did. What prompted her to think 'I want to be a percussionist. In fact, I want to be the gong person'?

I'm not saying that being a percussionist is easy. Not at all. It just seems that it is both a responsible and yet a potentially dull role to play in an orchestra. I eagerly await correction from my erudite blog readers.

As a little aside, the evening was slightly marred for me by my current acute sense of smell. I have been finding many ordinary smells quite offensive this week. I walked past someone eating a hot dog in the street on Friday, and felt nauseous. I had to leave our staff room ten minutes later because someone was eating soup for lunch. (Perfectly nice carrot soup, but I couldn't bear the smell.) Tonight I was sitting next to a woman who smelled of marzipan. I tried to get my son to swap places in the interval but he couldn't be bribed. I thought it might be her perfume, but son suggested helpfully that perhaps she was made of Play-Doh. I was tempted to squeeze her leg just to see.

If I didn't absolutely know better, I might think that I was pregnant. (I'm not.) When I was pregnant I couldn't bear any strong smells, apart from the smell of rubber which I craved and would frequently pop into my local bicycle shop for a deep sniff. Is there another explanation, dear readers?

The Word On The Street...

The size zero model issue rages again. It is undeniable that the fashion industry and certain sections of the media are setting norms that for most young women are largely unattainable, resulting in an increasing number of young women with anorexia and body dysmorphia issues. That much is true. But is that the extent of the story? I have never heard anybody argue publicly that they prefer a size zero, apart from a minority of adolescent girls, top designers (apparently clothes just don’t hang right on women with a woman’s body) and a minority of men who prefer pre-pubescent girls but, in a bid to stay the right side of the law, choose women who just happen to look like pre-pubescent girls instead. I have a hunch, though, that alongside this truism the fat girls are voting with their feet. I followed a young woman down the High Street this summer. She was in the uniform of most young women: crop top, hipster jeans, far too much flesh on show. It wasn’t a particularly warm day, and I worried for the cold on her kidneys in a rush of maternal concern. She was also revealing a considerable roll of corned beef-mottled flesh over the top of her jeans, and I couldn’t help but admire her for it, cold kidneys aside. I liked the fact that she was more than happy to show off her quite considerable belly, complete with belly-button piercing. It seemed a sign of her liberation, within the parameters of today’s cultural norms.

I loathe the fact that young women today seem to have abandoned any notions of old-fashioned feminism, and dress in a way that advertises first and foremost their sexual attractiveness. Their pat answer to this charge is that ‘I dress to please myself, not to please men’, which is the biggest pile of hypocritical pants since Hillary Clinton took part in that nauseating bake-off with Barbara Bush. But if we old Kate Millett types accept that that is how it is for young women today, then it is pretty cool that fat girls feel that they can pull it off too. In my teenage years – which was actually only ’79 to ’86 – there is no way a fat girl would’ve dreamt of wearing the same sexy clothes that her skinny friends were wearing, for fear of public humiliation. Walk down any High Street at 11.30pm on a Friday night, however, and you will see any number of curvy young women showing off their curves, their bulges and their magnificent cleavages without a hint of shame. And although I do wish they would all cover themselves up and leave a bit more to the imagination, I admire the curvier girls their self-confidence and their blatant two-fingers to the size zero culture.

PS. I have a rather curvy friend who wears very low cut tops with no bra, and her breasts can often be seeing escaping from the briefest of material that feigns to cover them. She once complained to me that ‘men only talk to my tits’. I pointed out that I only talk to her tits, as it is quite impossible to take your eyes off them as they swing out of her plunging tops. When I invite her over to dinner my poor husband has to take a very deep breath and chant “eyes forward” quietly to himself until she has left. I love her very much but come on, what is that all about? I will show you my tits, but you mustn’t look? Come back Andrea Dworkin, all is forgiven.

Come on, keep up.....

I have my ear to the ground, my finger on the pulse and a close eye on popular culture so let me be the first to tell you that Dave Hill has a new book out. What do you mean you already know? Oh well, buy it anyway, it looks fab.

In Praise of Radio 4...

For someone with a penchant for melancholy, Start the Week yesterday was a lovely, erm, well, start to the week, featuring as it did both Patti Smith on poetry and Nicholas Cleobury on Mozart’s Requiem. Mozart’s Requiem happens to be one of my favourite pieces of music, ranking right up there with Devo’s Whip It and Dead Kennedys’ California Über Alles. (For anyone who is yet to discover the deliciousness of melancholia, listen to the Lacrimosa whilst sitting alone at the top of a very big hill. Bliss.)

Following yesterday’s programme I feel I can finally make a confession, however. I never listen to it all the way through. I cry at the Lacrimosa but by the time we get to the Sanctus I am flicking through my playlists already. I have ascribed this variously to: a) the fact that I have ADHD when it comes to things of high culture; b) I have an aversion to seeing things through to the end; c) I have yet to resolve my class issues. All of which, you will note, focus on my own inadequacies.

So imagine how bloody smug I felt yesterday on discovering that Mozart wrote the Lacrimosa and then promptly pegged it. The Requiem was finished by one of Mozart’s pupils, and Constanza’s third choice composer at that, the first two having caffled at the enormity of the task. Cleobury agrees with me that the ending is rubbish. (Well, his actual words were ‘not very good’, and he then promptly withdrew the remark, so I suppose I had best not libel him or he may do a Gina Ford and start threatening to sue anonymous bloggers for making defamatory comments. Missed that story? See it here – it’s truly hilarious. Über nanny gets sensitive.)

So anyway, a collective of modern composers have written a new ending to be debuted at Canterbury Cathedral some time in December. I live a very long way from Canterbury Cathedral so I shan’t be there, but if anyone happens to go could you let me know if you get bored?

PS. This was followed by Woman’s Hour, and I usually do love it’s rather Home Counties brand of feminism. Today Martha Kearney was interviewing a psychotherapist who has written a book - ‘The Anxious Gardener’ - about the anxiety, loss and disappointment provoked by, yes, you guessed right – gardening. I have only one thing to say: stop it lady, its people like you give the rest of us a bad name. (And if you happen to be suffering from any gardening-related neurosis, can I suggest that you just get out more?)

The BBC – public service broadcasting at it’s best.