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I'm Still Here
Back when I was finishing writing Gods Behaving Badly, I decided that I needed a stretch of isolation so that I could really focus and immerse myself, so I took myself to Dorset for a month. At the time, my parents' place in Dorset wasn't the house in the town where I am now, but was a cottage at the end of a small village. There was no village after this village, just the path a mile down to the sea. I was there on my own, my only company my sister's cat which she had loaned me and which had a huge abscess on its head that stank of shit. There was no mobile phone reception, no internet, and no TV. The cottage was in a good spot for walks, but it was January, so the daylight hours were short, the weather was terrible, and I was at home most of the time. It was extremely cold and the house didn't have proper central heating. At night I chose one spot on the icy sheets, rolled myself up in the covers, and didn't move. If I strayed off my patch in the middle of the night, the touch of the cold sheets was enough to wake me up. During the day, I kept a coal fire burning and sat at my desk wearing all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket and with fingerless gloves on, which was the only way that my hands would be warm enough to type. The desk was opposite a window, and three small children would sometimes creep up and try to look at me without getting caught. If I looked up, they would shriek and run away. I realised that I had become the Boo Radley of the village. Anyway, I knew that I wouldn't be working on my novel all of my waking hours, so before I went to the cottage I daydreamed about all the improving things that I would do with my spare time. I was inspired and intimidated by someone I had recently sat opposite at a dinner party who didn't have a TV. 'Really? Then what do you do in the evenings?' I'd asked him, a hint of derision in my voice. 'I'm learning Japanese,' he said. While I knew I wouldn't be learning Japanese any time soon, I had high hopes for the reading I was going to get done. This would be the perfect time to get stuck into some serious literature: maybe Proust, at last, and some James Joyce. I would teach myself to do the Times cryptic crossword, and for light relief, I would draw. Radio 4 would be my constant, educational companion. What I ended up doing was listening to the Big Hat Country Music show on Radio 2 every night while doing a jigsaw puzzle. My memory is failing me here, because surely it cannot have been Big Hat Country Music every night on Radio 2, but that is what I remember. That and the realisation that if I wasn't going to rot by brain with television I was damn well going to rot it with something. There was only a certain amount of improving I was willing or able to do on any given day, and writing a novel took it all up. Lately, I've caught myself doing something similar when I read what an incredible opportunity for self exploration and personal growth this pandemic is: I start to believe that if I do enough yoga and enough meditation and take enough long country walks and think about this moment in time for long enough I'm going to have some amazing insight and figure it all out, what this pandemic MEANS, that I will have learned something from all this and definitely not just sort of sat here getting bored and feeling like every damn day is the exact same day as yester damned day, scrolling through Twitter, reading books, watching TV, looking for distraction and wishing this was over, killing time and hoping the weather is nice enough for a walk later, and, OK, I admit it, trying to write a novel, but not because wow this lacuna of stillness is my moment to write a novel but because writing novels is my job so I should probably keep doing it. The insight, the incredible Coronavirus insight, isn't coming. It is not coming. It does not exist. It's just me, at home, being me. Or maybe that IS the insight. I can't embed video in this newsletter, but here's a link to Elaine Stritch singing I'm Still Here when she was 86 years old, for Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday concert ten years ago (he is also still here, as this week's 90th birthday celebrations shows, though alas Elaine is not) which you can watch and listen to as the triumphant conclusion to this whole train of thought. Or, if you'd rather, I'm sure there is still the Big Hat Country Music Show available on Radio 2.
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