Writer-insighter – Page 17 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

False hopes and seemings

Seemings, certainly, although this odd little episode had its share of hopes, false or otherwise, as well.

Once upon a time in a land long ago, or Dorset when I was younger as I prefer to call it, my oldest friend bought an old schoolhouse. It wasn’t just any old schoolhouse, but Thomas Hardy’s sister’s one, in a tiny village near Sherbourne. I lived in London at the time, but I’d drive down fairly often for a taste of green fields and the things I’d never really left behind.

The Gleaners

She had a picture hanging up behind the kitchen door, under the stairs. I always wondered why it was there where nobody could see it, but my friend did things her way and it was after all her house and her picture. I thought so, anyway. I knew where it was any time I wanted to look at it.

I thought about it a lot over the years. It seemed to sum up something of the life I didn’t have, the one that thankfully most people don’t. The gleaners were looking for grains of corn or wheat, anything left over from the harvest. Because they were dirt poor. Life was not fun, nor easy. But hey, let’s talk about the pictures.

I discovered that there was another painting by Millett (presumably before he sold chepa camping gear) the year before, in 1857; The Angelus, one that always struck me as plaintive and sad, as if even while praying their crops would grow, this pair of peasant farmers lived with the knowledge that they might well not. This was real life for most people 150 years ago; it’s up to us if we chose this to be the way of things again.

The Angelus

I was thinking about both paintings a lot recently; namely how much I missed that house and how if I could find a copy of either of them I’d buy it, if the price was ok and if I could find either one, which didn’t look likely these days. Apart from anything, they’re pretty huge and in a style I haven’t seen anywhere for years.

And then I did at the local auction. I left a bid of £10 on them and much to my surprise it won. I collected themn and cleaned the frames and the glass and stripped off the binder twine used to hang them and the silver paper used to back them and hung them. I rang my friend, who was a bit bemused when I told her I had a copy of the picture she used to have under her stairs. I sent her a picture of both of them, just in case my memory had confused which one she’d actually had.

She rang me back. She liked them. They were the kind of things that if she’d seen them she’d have bought, if they were that kind of price. But she hadn’t. She’d never seen either one. She’d never owned either of them. She’d never had them in the house. They never hung under her stairs or anywhere else. Except in every visit to that house in my mind.

Memory isn’t always true. But then, truth isn’t always memory, either.

Comfort food

Once upon a time, when I hadn’t had a massive bill I wasn’t expecting, when I was going up to London to do university interviews instead of wondering how my life would have been if I’d done the degree I knew I should and could have done, when my jeans were tight because that’s how they were supposed to be worn, when I first discovered patchouli and wore it for the same reasons then as now, the mark of the dwindling tribe, I discovered this wondrous food.

We’d always been into vegetables at home, and a series of uncles’ and aunt’s weddings proved that the recipe for bacon and egg flan was not unknown in our circles. But it wasn’t until I went up to my step-sister’s in Notting Hill, those heavy years away when ordinary people lived there and not that thankfully, given that there was plenty of unspecified trouble just waiting to happen to you if you walked around not noticing what was going on, or noticing too much of what was going on. Then I got broccolli quiche for supper.

Almost every time. When years nearer now than then I mentioned it my step-sister wasn’t best pleased. But I was by it. She always made it from scratch, when she came in from law school. Her husband usually got back earlier and we’d drink massive gin and tonics steel blue and then red wine sitting around the table, eating bread cut with a razor-sharp old knife on ancient plates off a Portobello stall, talking of the future and psychology and all the things that were to happen. Some of them did.

So tonight, unable to visit that place in the past, I made broccoli quiche. It goes like this.

The Pastry

300g self-raising flour

About the same of butter.

Mash it all up together, crumble it between your fingers, then add just enough water to make it roll into a ball that stays together. Not too much. You can’t get the water out again if you mess it up.

Wrap it in clingfilm if you’ve got some or silver foil if you haven’t and put it in the fridge for at least half an hour. I gave it a day and half because I changed my mind about what to have for dinner yesterday.

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The Quiche Part

Half-boil some chopped broccoli.

Soften some finely-chopped onions, lots of garlic, at least three cloves. Do not burn any of this.

Mix up three eggs, creme fraiche or yoghurt and some grated cheese. Feta works. Anything in the fridge works. No, more than that.

Doing It

Roll out the pastry (use a floured wine bottle if you like) and put it in a heavy flan pan with a removable bottom. About £8. Trust me on this. You won’t regret it. They’re what TK Max is for.

Put little fork marks not all the way through into the pastry then bake it on really hot until it changes colour. You’ll see.

Take it out and put the onions, broccoli, garlic into the pastry shell then pour the eggy cheesy creamy mixture over it.

Bake until it sets without burning the pastry.

Then eat it, talking about Nietsche, the Channel Tunnel, Gurdjieff and if you really want to go for it, Kate Bush.

And don’t worry. You don’t have to know anything about any of them this far back into your comfort zone, just like the first time.

I’ve added another egg to this recipe because I skimped and only used two today. I didn’t use anywhere near enough cheese either. And I burned the onions and the oven was clearly too hot for the blind baking. All in all, it wasn’t quite as good as it used to be. But then, nostalgia never is.

The homecoming

Thomas Hardy’s dead. I know, ok? The people he described were charicatures, quaint yokels. A bucolic garden chorus behind the main characters who were all basically Thomas Hardy, including the women. And yes, I know the real locals didn’t think much of him because one of them spoke to a friend of mine. Actually, my very best friend of all.

In one of life’s circularities, one Hardy might like, I’m doing a job a friend did a long time ago, straight from university via working in a pub. In the way you could then, she bought a little stone house about fifteen miles from where she was working. It was and is magical, despite or perhaps especially as it’s somewhat problematically infested with owls.

Haunted too, the ghost seen walking by my friend’s straight-down-the-line brother, who thought for a second as the woman stood next to his bed, that my friend was bringing a cup of tea, then decided that the best thing he could do was to put the covers over his head. The house had been a school in a tiny village down ancient sunken lanes in Dorset, the school Thomas Hardy’s sister had been headmistress of.

The place, all of it, was part of our own dreamscape, “half-real, half dreamed” as Hardy himself wrote of what I came to call Wessex, a place that stretches from Lyme Regis past Weymouth, north to past Bath, possibly even to Oxford if Jude The Obscure can be trusted. Possibly it can’t; it’s a very long time since I read it. But it’s still ours.

Before we left school we’d started exploring the place where we live in a way I’m not certain most people do. We’d borrow a car and drive to Stratford on Avon, us crazy, wild, rebellious kids. We had a cup of tea in a cafe high on a hill on frosty day outside Shaftesbury, the walls lined with posters advertising the surreal selection of Stax soul bands this place on the edge of nowhere attracted. Unless they just collected posters, but that seemed somehow more unlikely.

I can’t even vaguely remember why we were anywhere near Shaftesbury, except that it was our land, our country. And still is. Not in the way we’re all supposed to say “our country” now, meaning “and you keep out of it.” The idea would have been laughable.

Our country meaning this is where we belong. Where we go in dreams. Where we’re from. Heartlands. This once and future thing.

I got back there just after Christmas. It was cold, damp and there were patches of freezing fog making driving unpredictable. My friend was there, with some of her children and another friend I met again after an unknown absence of decades. There weren’t enough beds and we had to keep going outside, putting on shoes, finding a torch, stumbling around in the dark to get wet logs for the fire without trashing our clothes before we gingerly, discretely, appraisingly assessed who we were going to be sleeping on the next sofa over from. It was absolutely perfect.

Before the flowers

January and the mornings get lighter. January and most days here near the coast the air is clear and now, just a month past the solstice, it’s just about light at half-past five. Just.

A girl stood in the door of the staff room, grinning and half-laughing, unable to really believe what had happened when she opened the letter from UCAS; an offer from Cambridge. I don’t know if she knows how much the rest of her life is going to change.

But I remember this time. Interview time. I went all over. Warwick. Brighton. Goldsmith’s in Virginia Waters. Sheffield. Southampton. It was always cold, it was always somewhere I’d never been. It was always somewhere I went on my own to, by train. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Goldsmiths was a farce. Because my school was a bit useless and because the internet wasn’t even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, I hadn’t any clue that Goldsmith’s English course back then was heavily, loony-tunes religious. I couldn’t then and don’t now understand why the question “Are you a practising Christian?” has any place in an interview for an English degree, any more than I later understood the question “Who do you know in advertising?” when I was trying to be an account exec. at BMP. The phrase “WTUF?” hadn’t been invented then. Pity.

I walked back to the station in the fading light, past the pub with a Ferrari parked in the car-park, too young, too dim to realise that it almost certainly wasn’t the landlord’s but a rich drunk’s, left there the night before. I was amazed. The past is a different country. Coming from Trowbridge, then home of Bowyers pork pies and Ushers brewery, Virginia Waters was, too.

Falmer was no better. Brighton didn’t want me there under any circumstances whatsoever, either to do Psychology the first time I tried nor to do English and American Studies the second. I’d read no Melville, way too much Kerouac and not enough Hemingway and I hadn’t yet met the friend who blagged her way through an entire degree with the fictional Hemingway all-purpose quote: “That is the way it is in the mountains.” Far from any mountains, I posed on the train, looking out the window at the Kaakinen-designed halls of residence so derided in The History Man with my big boots and copy of AE Coppard’s Dusky Ruth. In my combat jacket. Over my black velvet jacket. Since you ask. It was freezing.

I don’t know if the mountains thing would have helped. What didn’t was me almost laughing out loud that the alleged American Studies expert had never heard of Horace Greeley. I mean, seriously? The father of American journalism? The man who gave up his desk job and wrote about the ’49 goldfields? The man who coined the phrase “Go West young man?” But you’re fine to teach English and American Studies. Oh, ok. “FFS” hadn’t been invented either.

They should have let me in just for attitude, but as Bruce Springsteen put it:

Maybe you got a nice car, Maybe you got a pretty wife. Well mister, all I got is attitude. And I had it all of my life.

Except attitude wasn’t all I had. I had a friend in Sheffield, my best friend of all, the one I met when I was seventeen on a school trip to Dorchester, who I spent hours on the phone with last night. So I went to see her when I was up in Sheffield that snowy January, doing an interview to do Experimental Psychology which would have meant playing with monkeys instead of working with them. I don’t know how my life would have been different if I’d done that. There was snow head-height in Sheffield that winter. My friend transferred her Law degree to Cardiff, after almost deciding to quit altogether. We bought Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance LP off a record shop stall in the street. Record shops. That’s how long ago it was. They do things differently there.

But that January feeling, with the world still cold but opening up, getting bigger every single day, that’s still there. This time before the flowers are out. Everything’s still growing. There’s everything still to play for.

David Cameron and Me

A year ago David Cameron was Prime Minister. Daddy was a money man, Eton and Oxford his schools, the Queen some kind of cousin, and certainly close enough for someone to make a phone call to tell Carlton TV, which he joined as his first, very first job out of uni, that a) they’d better hire him and b) £90,000 seemed about right for a new graduate. So far, it’s true, we don’t share a lot.

But yesterday David Cameron gave a speech at De Pauw. Which you’ve almost certainly never heard of before. But I have. Just like David Cameron. I’ve been there.

Once upon a time in a land long ago I was teaching kids to shoot on a summer camp up in Wisconsin. Like you do. After camp ended I bought an old Chevrolet I found in a barn and drove it down to Greencastle, Indiana, chasing a red-haired cheerleader called Nancy-Jean. Not wanting to spoil a good Springsteen theme I put my work boots on and drove my Chevy across the railroad tracks every morning to go work in the sawmill, alongside a guy who claimed lineal descent from Dan’l Boone. Because that’s how we said it in the mill, with the smell of cedar and Camels all around.

Other days I got a job working construction, but not for the Johnstown Company. I worked demolition on a post-bellum mansion that had been an orphanage. Some people said it was haunted; if it is then I know where the happy ghost walks. I found the names of the people who had worked there when the place was an orphanage, twenty years before, carved into the underside of the stairs to the basement. I discovered those big porch columns outside the front door were never marble or even stone, but made in Birmingham, England, cast out of iron. It said so on the base.

Lunch we either brown-bagged, made by Nancy-Jean’s mom in the big house with a wooden eagle over the fireplace, up by the golf course, or not often, took a trip to McDonald’s and ate a burger looking out over 150 year-old wooden houses I never got back to then or now. It wasn’t the burgers we went there for but the air-con. Summer was hot in Indiana.

But it’s snowy there now. It’s a place nothing much ever happened. Indiana never knew whether it was the northernmost state in the Confederacy or the southernmost state in the Union, which must have felt familiar to Dave.

There was a bank robbery there once in the 1930s, which might have been the Dillinger Gang’s work, but everywhere a bank got robbed people liked to claim it was one of the big name gangsters who did it. When I was there a policeman was facing jail time for shooting two men who were shooting at another police officer locked in a car boot. The problem was he’d done it with a back-up gun he shouldn’t have been carrying after the bad guys took his issue weapon.

Greencastle still has the only other V1 rocket bomb in the USA stuck on a plinth. The other one is in the Smithsonian. And it’s got a really nice old courthouse square, just like something out of a John Grisham novel. And that’s pretty much it. It’s the middle of nowhere. That’s why IBM chose it for a distribution centre. Because it was in the middle. So why De Pauw hosted a speech for David Cameron there and paid him £120,000 for it beats me. There’s a lot I don’t understand about now. Things change.

I hung up my bandana and traded the Chevy for a Saab. Nancy-Jean became a professor of story-telling, published books about swamp beasts and posted pictures of her C-section online for reasons that as Hunter Thomson used to say, were never made clear. It rather spoiled what had been fond memories of her lower stomach area. Much the same way David Cameron’s gamble spoiled a lot of things for people not called him.

But the past is a different country. They do things differently there. And that, as they say at De Pauw and the sawmill, that ain’t no lie.

Gloria mundi

Hemingstone Hall. By the mid-1850s no Brands lived there. There were none left.

I’ve always been surprised that there was never an American sitcom with a zany heroine called Gloria Monday, but as Americans used to not do irony maybe not. One thing The Donald definitely has done is blow that stereotype away completely.

You know the quote or you’ve heard it or just saw it most of your life: sic transit gloria mundi. Thus pass worldly glories. Dust to dust. You can’t take it with you, the biggest, most profound and inescapable joke ever played on the unscrupulous, the richest and the worst. Our tomorrow is the night, as Victor Hugo put it.

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I don’t know what the Brand family were like. Nobody does, now, because I think they became extinct in the early 1800s. But I know where they lived and from their memorials in a tiny Suffolk church that started-off Saxon I drove past for 15 years, perched high on its hill all alone apart from what I hope is called Church Farm next to it, The Hut, the 1920 wooden village hall a hundred yards away along the ridge.

One sunny afternoon in September I stopped and went in, just to see. Up near the altar were two memorials to the same family in the tiny village of Hemingstone. The dates seemed to tell a sad little story.

Squire John Brand’s wife was first to die, aged XXIIII, just 24, in 1792. He followed her to their marble plaque on the wall of their church – and being the squire and his wife I’m sure they felt it was actually their church – 9 years later, in 1833, aged 63. Well, if we must then…..That means he was born in 1770. She was two years older than him.

Just two years later, in 1805, Miss Elizabeth Brand died on January XVIII, the 18th, just as the days seemed to be getting longer again. She was 16, meaning she was born in 1789. If she was Elizabeth’s daughter her mother died when she was two.

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Then Miss Elizabeth, surely the other daughter with that name, on a tour of the Hebrides, died at Stirling in Scotland, in 1812, aged just 23. She had to have been born in 1789 as well. Twins? It’s hard to see how they can’t have been. All have the same marble slabs on the wall of the church, handsomely carved.

1812 was the time when Mendelsohn was just born, later writing Fingal’s Cave and spurring a whole new strain of mock-Scottish legend. In 1795 Southey and Coleridge had a joint wedding in St Mary Redcliffe, although not to each other. Wordsworth was maundering around the Lake District and fashionable young ladies of a romantic inclination did their own Grand Tour. To be able to afford it in this pre-industrial age the family must have been pretty well-off. Certainly their Jacobean-style house with its Dutch gables that may cover a much older building says so.

But there were a thousand things to die from in 1812, however rich you were. Simple infection from a cut finger could do it, 140 years before antibiotics were around. The squire lingered on, his wife dead, his son and heir dying in the womb even as his inception killed his mother, I’m guessing from the dates, the two twin girls, one named in her likeness, cold and dead as the marble that commemorates them now.

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It’s a beautiful little church, high on its hill. The house was shrouded in fog when I went again, yesterday, to find the church busy and being decorated for the Christmas carol service. A welcoming little place, full of grace. And not the worst place to be peacefully remembered on a wall, not quite unknown.

The kingdom by the sea

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It looks like something from years ago around here, where I live. Because it is. The first few people I met when I moved to this forgotten part of England alarmed me. It wasn’t just the nonsense they talked about being over-run by black people. To be fair, I did actually see a single black person in the village once. The shop was run by people from Sri Lanka; I’m not sure if they were included or not.

It wasn’t just that the local district nurse told me that in her professional opinion two families in the village at least hadn’t got out of a Saturday night as often as they ought to have done, with long-term consequences.

It wasn’t just the solid Conservative vote, delivered like clockwork, by people who then spent the next four years complaining about their buses being cut,m the railway being a joke, the road being a deathtrap in summer and useless the rest of the year for getting to That Lunnon, not even 100 miles away, in anything less than two and half hours if you were lucky and knew where the cameras were. They didn’t complain about the village being one of the last places in England to get broadband, nor the fact that when we did get broadband it didn’t work very well when it rained.

Why would they want to know about the outside world anyway? This was a place where some people didn’t go to London from one decade to the next, where people said they didn’t see any need to go outside the village now their National Service was done. National Service ended in 1962. A Southwold barber proudly told me how his daughter had gone to uni and at the end of her first term showed him how to use the Tube. He was surprised how she’d got used to it; she hadn’t been across the bridge till she was 19, he told me. I thought for a second he meant the bridge into Reydon, a couple of hundred yards away. The truth, that it was the Orwell bridge, was hardly any better.

But the most alarming was the man who like many others here, regretted that he wasn’t older. Not five or ten years. Seventy or eighty years older. So he could have been what everyone here still calls The War. It must have been great, he said.

Not much happened in the village from 1939 to 1945, much the same as not much ever happened there. William Joyce called the local American squadron the Yoxford Boys, but they only rarely visited because leave was better spent in London. There was supposed to be a Home Guard Auxiliary weapons dump somewhere that people half-remembered being stocked but nobody really remembered it being de-commissioned, or really, exactly where it was. Cuckfield Hall was bombed, but the single bomb only demolished the ugly Victorian wing someone had added to it. A German Heinkel was shot to pieces over nearby Saxmundham and most of the wreckage ended-up smashing into a farm up the hill.

What he wanted to be involved in wasn’t the killing but the excitement. The thousands of Americans pouring into the area, the 3,500 living in a field at Leiston, the many more at the bomber station at Parham. The strangers at High Street, the 360-foot high Chain Home radar towers so secret there was only ever one photograph of it, taken by accident in the 1950s before it was pulled down.

The kingdom by the sea was the title of Paul Theraux’s book, published back in the early 1980s, one of the first books I bought. Later I read Jonathan Raban’s Coasting; the same year they’d both travelled around Britain in different directions, one on foot, one by boat, but where Coasting is mainly about an inner journey, Theroux’s book is about the awful, deluded insularity this place that used to be the heart of an empire still has notwithstanding that Raban’s comment on the unedifying ever-lasting spectacle of MPs clamouring for a war in a place they couldn’t point to on a map half-way around the world and the nonsense of a fleet supposedly sailing for an officially ‘unknown’ destination was like listening to a country talking in its sleep.

It doesn’t change much, except as the picture shows, every year it’s based on less and less. The dragon’s teeth anti-tank defences’s foundations are undermined; they’re slowly, year by year, tumbling down the little cliff into the sea. And across the water where once truly brave Dutch boys paddled canoes to freedom, where once, maybe, at about this very spot a U-boat might have landed a raiding party, or who else burgled the Hall the very evening Churchill’s double was visiting, the enemy has long gone.

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Few memorials here now unless you know where to look for them and know what they are. A place abandoned mainly to dog walkers. The way it should be, if it was ever for anything at all.

Mushrooms unseen

I was taught this recipe I don’t know when. We ate it a fair bit because we didn’t have much money I think, but there are lots of other reasons to do it. It tastes good. It’s quick. It’s actually pretty good for you. I don’t understand why hardly anyone I know has ever heard of it.

It’s winter. It’s cold, your shoe feels like it’s leaking, it’s dark, you don’t know what you want, but you want something easy, hot, tasty and above all, quick. But that’s probably not going to happen tonight, so you’d better get some dinner instead.

OK, it’s not really called Mushrooms Unseen. But they are. Until now. I just call them Mushrooms On Toast. If you want to be fancy, or don’t like toast, or like me, your toaster has just half-broken, so it only does one slice at a time, like every darned toaster I’ve had for the past few years that give-up the day after the warranty expires, call them Poached Mushrooms.

And do them like this.

Get some mushrooms. Preferably brown chestnut ones from the market at £1 a paper bag. Although of course you might not go to a market, in which case more fool you. A pound/half kilo is too many for one, but choose how many you think you can eat.

Put some toast on.

Wash the mushrooms and cut them. I used to just chunk them, but slices look nicer.

Put them in a saucepan with a little milk and a knob of butter. Soya milk works fine. A knob of butter is the size of a walnut, and that’s way too much butter, so make it a small knob of butter.

Boil. Until they soften. The milk will go mushroom colour, astonishingly enough. It will also thicken, so don’t let it catch and burn on the pan. I like loads of black pepper with them. I can’t really imagine adding salt. This is a sweet, earthy taste. Add enough mushroom juice poured over the buttered (or better, Marmited) toast to make it soft.

That’s it. Less than ten minutes for a really nice, simple, tasty, quick, cheap, healthy lunch, good winter breakfast or supper. Every student should know about it. Every adult too. And I still don’t understand why hardly anybody I know has ever even heard of it.

Thank me later.

They don’t tell you

I started drinking beetroot juice a while ago.

At first I hated the taste, but it’s grown on me. Beetroot juice with a bit of ginger in it is even better. It’s meant to be fabulously good for you. It fights free radicals, which sounds like it’s a bad thing, except free radicals aren’t people like Will Self or of course, me, but stuff that acts like rust on your skin, oxidising it so I’d have to spend much more on moisturiser and being generally vain than I already do. And I don’t at this point, actually want to talk about what happened in June with the sales girl in Bond Street on a really hot day. It was expensive though. Like,

Like, RARELY...

So, beetroot juice, which oddly you never find in Poundland or anywhere at much under £2.50 a litre. Except oddly this week in Saxmundham Tesco. Now to be fair, I hardly ever go there. But I was feeling thrifty and economical (it has to happen once a year, after all. Law of averages) and I was price comparing between there and the Waitrose literally across the road.

Tesco won on price, with organic beetroot juice from the same local maker nearly 70p a litre cheaper than Waitrose. I suspect because nobody in Tesco buys organic beetroot juice and they were trying to get rid of it in favour of stuff people actually do give their cash for.

But they don’t tell you the thing about beetroot juice. Nobody does.

You drink it. Half a pint of it. It’s good for you. If you don’t breathe at the same time it’s actually an ok taste. (No, I don’t know how that works). You feel you’ve drunk something that’s going to make life better, make your teeth whiter, make you feel like someone in a cornflakes ad on TV 20 years ago. Almost refreshed. You sort-of spring out of bed, just avoiding stepping on the belt buckle on your jeans you dropped on the floor because you didn’t have company. You go to the bathroom and do the things everyone always does. And then you think:

OMG I’M GOING TO BE DEAD IN THREE DAYS!!!!

Because what they don’t tell you, the thing they don’t put a BIG warning about on the bottle is this: drinking half a pint of beetroot jiuce turns your urine scarlet.

It’s totally harmless. Except it doesn’t look that way. And you can’t mention it to anybody. What do you say?

“You know that thing with your best friend I didn’t tell you about, look, I’m going to be dead soon.”

“You know that time I was mean to you about – look, I’m going to be dead soon.”

“You know that £5 I owe you, look, I’m going to be dead soon.”

“You know how I’ve always fancied your wife, look, I’m going to be dead soon.”

And luckily, by the time you’ve not said any of these things, you’ve Googled it. But it’s still worrying. A real, serious, sick in your stomach, maths test in the morning bloody red bleeding worry.

And I wish they’d just TELL you…….

Into the light

Now I’m older I can admit it.

Now I’m older I can realise there actually is a problem.

It’s not me. And it’s not my fault.

No amount of ‘snapping out of it,’ ‘stopping feeling so sorry for myself,’ no ‘up at the corners’ is ever going to change it. Only one thing does. The thing I don’t want to do. That’s part of it, somehow.

It’s the light at this time of year. It wrecks me. Light seeking light might light of light beguile, but when there isn’t any, you’re stuffed, Mr Shakespeare. And some, not a lot at all, but some of your stuff was frankly bollocks. Like this quote, for example.

It makes me keep the lights off in doors, which makes it ten times worse. I have no idea why I do that. I have to stop myself doing it, consciously, and turn on lights. But I know I don’t want to. I have lights all over the house. A massive silver Anglepoise that would sear the retinas of a German gynaecologist. But I don’t want to put it on. Or any of them. I want to cave. It’s the light.

It makes me clumsy and disorganised. I’ve hurt my left hand five separate times today, doing simple things that got out of hand. My knuckles are cut where a spanner slipped; sorer because of the bedstead and cupboard and something else I hit the same hand on. I wanted to go out tonight, but because of this I think it’s safer to stay at home. I went out this morning. I need to go out tomorrow. I need to do this and I know I need to do this. It’s just that I don’t want to. Because of the light.

It makes me tired all the time. By four in the afternoon I’m ready to just sit on the sofa, because it’s too early to go to bed. So I watch films or read or play my guitar or all of these and then it’s half-past one in the morning and the next day is going to be more difficult. And the next.

It’s the light. And there’s nothing I can do to change it.

I’ve got one of those Seriously Affected Dysfunction lamps, or whatever they call them. That actually helps. Except it also floods the entire room (well, dur!!!) with ghastly rays brighter than a thousand suns, which doesn’t make for a relaxing evening. And because my sleep is shot what I feel I need is a relaxing evening. And morning. And lunchtime.

It makes me stay indoors when I need to be out in what light there is. It’s not helped by the fact that I haven’t any more students to teach this year. If I had to go out, get in the car, drive to the school and stand-up on my hind legs telling people they can do things they don’t think they can it would be different. I could do that. Not doing it doesn’t help.

In two weeks it will start to get better. All I have to do is get through to the 21st and suddenly and faster and faster the evenings will get lighter, the days longer until by the end of freezing January it will be back to tolerable light. I’ll start going to walks again without feeling it’s a penance.

I can get through. I have my lamp. I have wonderful, caring friends who recognise what’s happening and text me to say ‘turn your lamp on.’ I am so lucky with that.

I still have to deal with it. But at least these days I know it’s not me.