A Writer's Journal

16 March to 15 April

Sunday 16 March

The cold is getting a good grip. I got a nosebleed from constantly blowing my nose. A Covid test was negative, which considering how rotten I feel was a surprise. Still, I did some work – a synopsis for the novel, notes for the book review.

Monday 17 March

I started reading Dickens’s The Uncommercial Traveller. The first essay, ‘The Shipwreck’, is about the wreck of the Royal Charter at Anglesey in October 1859, while travelling to Liverpool from Melbourne. All the women and children on board died, and out of 490 passengers only forty survived. It’s a moving piece, and a tribute to the efforts of Stephen Roose Hughes, rector of the church of Llanallgo, to identify the bodies that washed up on the shore, contact relatives, conduct burials. One hundred and forty victims are buried in the churchyard. Others washed up further along the shore and are buried in churches at Penrhos Lligwy, Llaneugrad, Pentraeth and Llanddona.

I love the narrative persona of the Uncommercial Traveller. He’s enigmatic, an outsider and observer who yet insinuates himself into the centre of the places he describes, among the people he writes about, even while he somehow keeps himself hidden too. He’s anonymous but unmistakable, recognisable.

I have finished Tchaikovsky’s Architects trilogy – superb. And I’m reading the Eleanor Fitzsimons biography of Edith Nesbit, which is very good. And I’m about to start Christie’s Towards Zero.

Wednesday 20 March

A quiet day working on the Biography, assessing the mess that is the next chapter, continuing with the book review.

Thursday 21 March

I finished Towards Zero. I really enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ll bother watching any modern TV adaptations (or unnecessary ‘updatings’) any more, the books are so much better.

Sunday 23 March

I’m feeling a bit rudderless and lost without a fiction project on the go. I’m toying with a couple of ideas, waiting for The One to make herself known. In the meantime I made a rhubarb compote and meringues, plain and chocolate. If in doubt, cook.

Tuesday 25 March

My cold is finally disappearing, and I had a lovely day in Bath. It was dry and sunny, nice and bright. We parked at the park and ride and just as we got to the bus stop an elderly man, walking with the aid of a stick, tripped and fell, a nasty fall leaving him with cuts on his hands and face. We picked him up and dabbed off the blood as well as we could, got him onto the bus and sitting down. But he was a tough soul – ninety years old, he told us, and on his way to his bank in town. His wife died last September and the bank being the bank are making life difficult for him by insisting he telephone to sort things out, but when he’s tried that he can’t get any help, so now he’s going into the branch. He said the pavements in Bath are difficult to negotiate, uneven and cobbled, and told us he had been in the RAF.

We got him off the bus and he went off to his bank, where I hope they gave him the service and respect he deserves. Though I wonder.

We had coffee, then I went to lovely Mr B’s and bought Femina by Janina Ramirez and Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I had a lovely chat with the man at the counter who is also a Tchaikovsky fan – and he actually thanked me and said it was lovely to talk to another fan – when really I should have thanked him!

Then on to lunch with friends, and afterwards to the Victoria Art Gallery for the exhibition Mirror of Mirth: Satire in Georgian Bath. It was an excellent exhibition, with works by Rowlandson, Gilray, John Nixon – marvellous caricatures by him. He’s described as an “amateur” and his work is a lesson for anyone who thinks that “amateur” means not really as good as a “professional”. There was an illustrated copy of Christopher Anstey’s New Bath Guide (1766), a verse satire.

I liked the way the exhibition was laid out – it started with pictures of a genteel, stately, gleaming Bath with elegant, well-dressed people greeting one another politely in the streets, horses strolling along and leaving no sign (or smell) of their passing. Then you got on to the pictures of an earthier city – raucous, noisy, smelly; greedy people eating and drinking themselves to gouty ill health; dogs fighting; doctors bleeding patients literally and financially; unsavoury-looking bath attendants who I’d think twice about submitting myself to for a dip in the crowded and none-too-clean looking waters – which people then drank!

Friday 28 March

I went for coffee with a friend, we met in the café at the Cathedral. We hadn’t met for a while and had a lovely catch up, sharing our love of fairy stories, books, puppets, challenges of writing. Then I came home and tackled some more of the suffragette recordings. Such slow slow going.

I started Doomsday Morning by C L Moore.

Saturday 29 March

I watched the partial eclipse on the live stream from Greenwich Observatory. It was very well presented, enthusiastic presenters giving you lots of Interesting Facts. A fascinating and awe-inspiring event even at a remove and on screen.

Sunday 30 March

I enjoyed Doomsday Morning, and started The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side. And I finished listening to Richard II (Arkangel Shakespeare), Rupert Graves a superb Richard. I love this play, and was even inclined to join in at times, like singing along to a favourite album.

Tuesday 1 April

We had a lovely picnic at Tyntesfield, sitting by a wonderful clutch of trees, or is it one tree that has grown into a grove? It was a beautiful sunny day, bright crisp blue sky, warm in the sun but chilly in the shade.

I finished Sparkling Cyanide, my Agatha Christie re-read is going well.

Tonight there is a beautiful crescent moon and a few stars showing.

Wednesday 2 April

Last night I started a biography of Valentine Ackland by Frances Bingham. I find the style a bit odd at times and the chronology a bit baffling, a bit back and forth. Worse, though, I don’t like Valentine Ackland. And yet I think the book is interesting.

Alien Clay brilliant as expected!

Wednesday 9 April

Where are the blue tits? For days we’ve watched them busy-bodying in and out of the nest box with beak-fulls of moss and feather. For the last couple of days, no sign of them.

Thursday 10 April

The blue tits returned! What a relief.

Sunday 13 April

I’ve been reading The Country Gentleman by Mrs Oliphant, a big, fat book originally published as a three decker. It’s an amazing study of quiet, gentry lives where nothing seems to happen yet there’s passion underneath the surface, humans finding a way to live chaotically even in what look like the most ordered and measured existences. I’m struck by people’s awareness of one another, how they gossip and fear gossip, how they watch one another and know they are watched, how in conversation the slightest change of expression is observed, how they seize on the most trivial occurrence and make such judgments from it, see so much meaning in it, how this sense of being watched influences every word and action.

Monday 14 April

I went to a very nice book launch with Stephen Oram for his novel We Are Not Anonymous. It was in Bookhaus book shop, which I’d not been to before. It’s a really nice bookshop, well laid out, much bigger than I expected, friendly staff. I learned about a new, to me, genre – throughtopia – neither utopia or dystopia, but something on its way to one of those. An interesting discussion about technology and the future.