Enjoy the longest night of the year...

After tomorrow the days grow brighter again!

More lavatorial humour

I have seen victorian urinals with a delicate image of a honey bee enameled on the sweet spot.

As any well bred properly educated 19th century english gentleman would know, the latin for bee is 'Apis'.

Not such a po-faced prudish bunch after all.

A crash in the kitchen suggests the mice got into the wine dregs in the washing up.

I'm too snug to go and fish drunken mice out of the washing up. They'll have to swim.

Just survived a dinner party in the cottage

5 adults, two babies, one stew.

That about as many as you can cram around the table and still breathe. The guests arrived cross country by landrover and brought coal - one of the most usual and thoughtful dinner gifts I have ever received.

Stew.

24 hours in advance - take a cast iron pot with a good heavy well fitting lid, hang over fire.

Add oil and diced bacon - sweat.
Add slices of beef shin - I left them whole, like steaks - they'll break apart easily enough.
Brown the beef on both sides.
Add 4 medium sized onions, whole but peeled, 1/2 a pound of mushrooms, a handful of tomatoes (optional), 4 peeled cloves of garlic, thyme, salt, pepper, a bay leaf and a strip of orange zest.
When all this is bubbling, pour on red wine - I think I added a pint and a half.

Clap on the lid and bring up to the boil - then stick the whole thing in a well insulated haybox, wrapped in old blankets, and forget all about it until tommorrow.

Heat for an hour, and serve the soft unctious result with spuds and cabbage, a glass of red wine and a screaming toddler.

Cheers!

Let's talk rude

I was digging through the cupboard in the back room when I found an extra chamberpot (a useful addition to any household where the privy may fall below zero on a sharp night.)

I turned it over to discover the manufacturer's mark.

It is delicately stamped 'PRICK'...

I have a one legged pheasant in the garden.

She's almost certainly a refuge from a shoot somewhere else in the valley, and has survived well over a week here in the garden, hop hop hop amoung the sheep. She gets a handful of extra feed from the bird table every day.

Funny how the solution to writing problems usually involves writing less...

... not more.

Cutting like crazy here.

from the bus - just crossing hadrians wall

Standing water is frozen to 2 - 3 inches and will bear my weight.

There's floating ice in the north tyne river.

The frost has turned even my 30 foot pine white.

I came here for a month's peace and quiet to write, expecting the cold to drive me out in november - i'm glad I decided to stay for december.

I'm not convinced that giggles are the sanest reaction to waking up in an ice cave

But it's so pretty (when I scrape the frost of the wihdows to look) and my duvet is so warm, I just can't help myself.

Perhaps I should be humming the theme from dr. Zhivago instead - you know, the frozen dacha?

Anyway, I woke up with one of the solutions to "the writing problem", so high spirits as permissable. "Sleep on it" is often the best advice. After all the story srarted as a dream, many years ago.

I'm about to hike cross-country to catch the bus to town. I day of shops and coffee and people and library is just what I need.

Hmmm... 8 inch icicles inside my kitchen.

At least it keeps the milk fresh!

Lunch from the ashes

Take an unpeeled onion and wrap it in a sheet of damp newspaper. Tuck the parcel into the ashes of a log fire.

When the paper has finally burnt away the onion is done. Split, scape out the soft core and eat with butter and pepper, or soft cheese.

Yum.

We have the most beautiful still hoar frost under a blue sky. Everything is white, every leaf, blade of grass, wisp of moss or cobweb.

This morning I paused for a few seconds on a large flat rock while walking in the wood over white grass. Within that tiny space of time my boots froze to the rock. It felt tacky, like glue...

Coldest morning yet - delicate flowers of frost etched on the inside of every window

Walking on the bone dry frozen fell behind the house sounds like the
crackle of gunfire. All the sheep have come up to the shelter of my
walls, and loom out of the mist under my trees. I took pictures - I
hope they come out.

Still no connection, so this will be posted sometime in the future -
near future I hope. I am walking towards broadband and central heating
for the afternoon, but right now I am just thawing out with a mug of tea
and Radio 4.

Still no solution to the writing problem. I've tried all the sort cuts
- working on another section, proof reading - I just need to solve the
order of about 10 key scenes, so that I believe that one character (who
I like) would participate in the torture of another character who he likes.

I worry that much of my story is bad science and bad history; one of the
characters is a member of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi's corrupt "Ancestral
Heritage" think tank, who started by faking pre-history and ended up
murdering men women and children in concentration camps in the interests
of "science". They aren't a joke - historians need as much ethical
rigour as physicists and biologists. Perrhaps more, when fantasies of
racial and cultural purity and past injustice are used to justify
mass-murder.

So I am terrified that by writing about Bad Historians in an
entertaining way I am just further muddying a very murky pool.

Actually that may help me - my Character's remorse at the crimes he
commits must be the drive the story needs to drive it to resolution.

I just don't believe it yet.

My domain host changed all my mail passwords without warning...

Me and all other users.

I wonder what security scare prompted that?

They didn't even put a note on the home page. 24 hours and several
attempts to get into the control panel to find out what had happened,
and another day to get a connection strong enough to log-on and reset
the password.

I'm just glad I found a solution.

Radio silence

My normal email account is out of order and my phone battery is about to die and I left the usb charger cable at the bottom of the hill (and even if it had a full charge I don't know how far I could go towards fixing this on a little pda) - this is a major comms disaster!

Luckily I have lots of work to do- I hit another script problem, and I am busy sorting that out - it's just as terrifying as the last one, but I am just a touch more confident that I can stick it out and fix it. (well enough)

Opps..

... I am getting through a pint of whisky a week.

Oh well, it's all central heating of a sort. The sky is full of stars and the
windows on the north side are icing up.

I'm within a few pages of completing this draft. Then revision, and I'm done,
(just two months late)...

I'll take a break for Christmas (plenty of background reading still to do) and
then start thinking about the next - full - draft.

Another hour of work tonight, then off to bed with two hot water bottles and a
wind-up radio.

Now - this really is cool...

Just came home by starlight. The grass is already crisp with ice, and it's not even 6pm.

The met is forecasting 4 degrees of frost. You can add a degree to that on the fell. You can bet i've already checked all the windows.

Wayhay! An excuse to open the whisky (again).

No wonder it was a little chilly last night.

I pulled back the bedroom curtain to find that the window was wide open all night. I'd propped it open when I headed out with the laundry, intending to air the house. It certainly did.

Just goes to show how well sheltered the house must be. I snuggled down last night listening to the roar of wind in the oaks, with not an inkling that my nose was only 6 feet from an open window. The curtain didn't even twitch.

It seems to have blown my cold away

Freaking cold...

I am working in fingerless mitts. My face is tingling with cold - it's almost refreshing...

It snowed yesterday - everything washed away over night.

Tip for the day - peppermint oil really works against mice. They avoid any surface wiped with it. And it smells fabulous.

The Night of the Living Deadline - part deux.

Like 28 Days Later this one has a happyish ending. (Sorry if that spoils the
movie for you, but any one with a taste for zombie movies really should have
seen it by now, and any one who hasn't may be reassured enough to watch it).

The realization that I was so many weeks behind my own schedule, and no where
close to a solution precipitated a magnificent "Lost Weekend" - hangover, sofa,
movies, the penultimate episode of Heroes, long into the night, followed by a
few hours of staring into the darkness, desperate to sleep. I mean by that
every sane cell in my body screaming at my stupid skull to switch off and let us
rest, while the skull entertained lurid yet banal fantasies of failure and
starvation and a wasted life. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Even my misery was proving
uncreative and dull.

I ended up re-reading Edward Rutherfurd's London: the Novel, which is one of
those books which is shockingly bad and thoroughly entertaining. It has to be -
it's XXXX pages long. The research is impeccable (and reproduced in bleeding
chunks every 80 pages or so - how to build a coracle, what a kiddle is and why
the king banned them from the Thames, the origins of the whores of Southwark,
etc, etc), and one has to root for a historical novelist who names his 13th
Century heroine "Tiffany" (it is an authentic name, but what cohones!) Tiffany
is 15, oval faced, slender and small breasted. As are the majority of
Rutherfurd's heroines from 55AD to the present day.

So that's the bad place. I realise that the story I have been trying to tell is
probably untellable after all, and because I am 3 miles cross country from the
nearest pub, drown my sorrows in pulp fiction rather than booze.

This is just a long way of saying that crucial breakthroughs always seem to need
a few day of despair.

It didn't come in a flash of inspiration. It came from 8 hours with a note pad
and pen, scribbling, working out, tearing up, pacing, more tearing up (good
firelighters), more scribbling...

By 10pm I thought I might have a solution, but off course, I was delirious from
sleep deprivation, and wasn't sure if any of it made sense, or, if it did, I
would remember it in the morning. I made one last page of notes - in capitals -
that I hoped I would be able to interpret the next day, and fell in to bed.

That was a week ago. The solution I had been seeking for 5 years is in sight,
and the story is falling into a meaningful pattern at last.

So what was the key?

Well, turns out it was the scene that I have never been able to write – for all
those years I have scribbled a placeholder ("X questions Y, Y doesn't break, X
holds Y for further questioning"). What would Y say to X that would convince Y
to X her live it relative freedom for another 5 days? I always put that off,
for the time when I had the rest of the script working. Dumb, huh?

When I finally wrote it – having nowhere else to go – I realised that whatever Y
told X was a lie, and the audience would know it was a lie (because they already
knew what had happened to bring Y to that point.) and at that point the whole
story became a yawn. Everything else I had written to cover that was melodrama
and co-incidence, and could now been seen through. It was trash.

Hence the melt down.

The solution started in exactly the same place – with that troublesome
interrogation, and what each participant thinks they know before and afterwards,
and the story unwinds from there….

It took me another 24 hours to get the spine of scenes down, and now I have to
write or edit them into the step. All the melodrama has melted away. All the
improbable skills and co-incidences are ashes in the fireplace.

It may not be a brilliant piece of writing, but at last it has a beginning, and
middle and an end, and an interesting way for my poor characters to get from one
to other without becoming ciphers or puppets.

Just brought the christmas tree indoors. Far to early, but at least in these tempretures it won't drop before the 25th. Besides, if i'd left it outside it would have blown over the hills and far away by now.

Wonder what the mice will make of it? Apart from dinner, that is.

Tropical skies and deadlines

The advantage of being so cold is that mild mornings like this feel tropical.
At sunrise the sky turned blue, the birds started to sing, the breeze was sweet,
and for a few moments it felt like Mexico.

There is no getting around the fact that I am almost two months behind schedule.
I hoped to have the step outline of the script finished by the end of October.

The whole point of taking time out to write this project was to solve some
fairly fundamental problems with the structure. The story has three time frames,
three protagonists and three major locations. Making that work in a way that is
still interesting, entertaining and meaningful is a bitch.

It proved impossible to do while I was still working full-time as a copywriter.
Even when I was working 50 hours a week I could manage 1500 words a day. I
got up at 6, hopped on a train, bought a coffee and wrote like crazy in the
Caffe Nero around the corner from the office. I left work at 6, or 7, or
sometimes 8, and, headed back to the same bar to hack out another page or so.

Some of those 1500 words were almost good enough...

But there were two overriding problems. First, I couldn't find enough brain
cells and time to revise the structure of the storytelling. It just made my
brain ache. And secondly, every holiday I took was spent in bed with antibiotics
and an interesting opportunistic infection. I would just be at the stage when I
could dress myself and crawl into sunlight when the holiday would end and I
would be back at my desk.

So, there I was, in September, with the miraculous support of Screen WM, able to
take a break from the salary trap and final sort the damn script out.

Looking back, a month was an absurdly short time to give myself. I suppose I had
spent so long wading through separate scenes, sections, sequences that I could
no longer see the who structure at all.

Every day I turned up at the keyboard and tried a new approach. Scratch pads,
flow diagrams, re-reading old drafts, research, long walks, reading other
scripts - even just making sure I wrote 6 pages every day...

I kept coming to the same spot in the script, and coming to a full stop - it
didn't work, I didn't believe any of it, and the patient was dead on the table.

Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, no matter what I did I woke up in the same
place the next morning....

I am surrounded by sex; it's tupping time in the hills, and every field and fell around me is full of randy sheep.

The local crop is hillbred crossbred lambs, which are sold each autumn to lowland farmers for fattening. The ewes are hardy blackfaced mountain sheep - swaledales I think, and they have the look of goodtime girls slightly past their best - narrow sweet sootyblack faces, framed by curly horns like hoop earrings, shaggy white coats, and black stockings. They are up for a good time after a summer as single mums, herding together to eat and natter, buck and fight.

The tups are nowhere near as pretty or as bright. Dumb bone-headed roman-nosed Leicester lummoxes, in short sheepskin jackets. All they need are little porkpie hats at an angle to complete the look.

Two rams to a field, and they never stop doing what rams do. I've been out at midnight, in 3 degrees of frost, the air cracking with moonlit ice, and have found them stretching their huge snouts into the air to sniff out the ladies.

I've been travelling, checking up on home, catching up with family, friends, flatmates and the foremost points of interest in current British Culture (i.e., the Tate Crack and recent episodes of Heroes), and pretty much lost my regular connection to the WWW.

I did however work, and I am very close to completing a step-outline of the script. I'm 30 days behind schedule, and trying not to let that worry me - the structure of the last act took much more sorting out than I had anticipated. I hope the northern breezes blowing through my skull have sharpened the brain rather than addled it, (they do make my fingers a little stiff in the morning, so spelling can be a little eccentric) and that I have a suitable structure to start hanging a film on.

I've come back to the cottage to find that winter has descended from the fell. It was blowing in when I left, stripping the last leaves from the sessile oaks, and tossing the crows about the sky.

Now we have had the whole range of winter weather - including snow, which I missed by 90 mins. My train pulled into Hexham station just as the last traces melted away, leaving only salt.

The colours have all changed - all the yellow is leached out of the grass, leaving that wonderful blue-grey they call "wintergreen", and has fled upwards to the fell where the bracken is the colour of ginger biscuits or a new welcome mat.

It's still wriggling with life - two days ago I saw a weasel, bright red, leaping from the water trough to the old tank and back into the rushes. Adders have been seen (not alas by me) sunning themselves on the walls. My missing frogs turned up in the scrub around the burn, big and fat and old and wary.

Last night was full moon and frost - I could see from one side of the valley to the other, and all of it sparkling.

But inside I am warm enough, and dry enough. I have cracked to the extent that I am lighting two portable LPG heaters - one in the bedroom for 15 minutes before I slip under the quilt, one downstairs first thing in the morning, and on very cold nights after 9pm.

And I have water, blessed running water, thanks to a swift decision by my landlord. The contractor brought a mini digger up to the fell, and for two days this week two men worked in the pouring rain to capture the original spring (using a box, pea- shingle and masses of the sticky impervious bright yellow native clay), dig in a new settling tank 100 yards above me, and run a new pipe down.

seconds after the connected the new pipe to the original, water gushed at at least one bar pressure from the old brass kitchen tap, bringing with it all the peat that had clogged the older one solid. After two minutes of high velocity black mud I had clear water. No more wading through the mud to collect from a stream.

I'm looking out now for a replacement for the 19th C sink, which disappeared some time ago - a shallow stoneware slopstone, wide and shallow enough to stand pans and jugs, wash and prep veg, gut fish etc.

Now that I know that there are weasels in the wild wood, and that I am constant enough to stick out the cold weather, I finally feel more like tough wise old Badger, and less like eccentric fly-by-night enthusiast Mr Toad.

Ahem... Nervously clears throat.

I'm back online.

Border Reivers

I have always felt at home - in the sharp, biting challenge of 'rightness' rather than comfort - in border lands. I grew up in the space between England and Wales, never quite sure if we belonged to the bleak beauty of the black mountains or the enfolded green and red and gold of Hereford and Worcester.

One year I spent Christmas in a house which literally straddled that border, in the village of Clyro. It seemed appropriate, given that I entertained both my parents that year, one on Christmas day, one on Boxing day, as at the time it seemed easier to bring down a wall in Berlin as to imagine them sharing the same space and time.

My ancestors' graves are scattered on either side of that border, both sides partaking equally of Welsh and English DNA. Coal merchants, magistrates, china dealers, farm labourers, army officers, parlour maids, professors, factory hands.

In the years since I have discovered other landscapes that invoke the tooth of recognition - of rightness, home, and only now do I realise that they are all border lands, liminal places; seashores and coastlines and the meeting places of language and cultures.

Some borders are more extreme - the limits of human life themselves; I have slept best in a hammock below the waterline of a ship, the dark Atlantic ocean running inches from the tip of my nose. I have perched in the mast, swinging between the great dome of air and the vast disc of sea.

It's there in the stories I try to write - the meeting of Ethiopia and Europe through the medium of approximate translation, the exchange of culture on a pacific island in 1789, between the islanders who swim, and the men of the sea who drown.

And even now I am writing this in the new border my family have settled in - among the Border Reivers of Northumberland, where boundary disputes still rumble between families with 800 years of cross-border raiding history.

This one is funny....

Monday morning is swimming. I share a car into Hexham, 30mins away at. 7.30 am. But as i live at the top of a wood, this means waking at 6.30, dressing in the dark and cold [no fire] and walking 25 min through the trees by starlight. I have to be 'very brave', [more about the getting up than the walking.

This morning I had a landrover. This does not make things faster as I have to stop to open and close 5 gates.

But when my alarm went off, I Did It.

I put my head down, ignored the pain and the desire to crawl back into my lovely warm bed, and dressed and drove and opened and closed and admired the stars swinging overhead and...
...hang on a mo...
...the clocks went back last night, it should be light by now...
And I checked the dashboard clock with bleared eyes. It was 1.38 am.

Bloody alarm clock.

I had two choices - drive back through those 5 gates to a cold dark house, crawl back between the cooling sheets and do the whole thing all ovee again in 5 hours time.

Or sneak into my sister's house, curl up on the sofa and hope not to be blasted away by a spooked neighbour with a shot gun.

I just been woken by a txt. Swimming is cancelled.

Shocked to discover what a reactionary I am...

... I have caught myself musing that perhaps we got it abiut right by 1750 [industry, agriculture, shipbuilding, music, sanitation, food etc] and it's been downhill ever since.

I'll just go and die of childbed fever to cure myself of this ludicrous opinion.

Today

7.30: woke up to a pale window. Listening to radio 4 in bed while watching the painted cows appear from the mist. It's warm in here, cold out there.

7.55: deep breath, slippers and wrapper on, downstairs. It's still dark enough to need a light. Light the fire, make tea, draft writing plan for the day and tidy up last night's notes.

9.00: wash, dress, make breakfast; bacon and eggs. It takes almost an hour to get the fire hot enough to cook.
I'm still looking for a way of warming plates without cracking them or knocking them flying. There isn't a good place by the fire.
I suspect a hot water container may be the key... will have to look up the reference books to see what devices were being used in the 18th/19th C and improvise around that.

10.00: Write

11.00: Fetch water, top up the filter, wash up and clean kitchen. The mice are slacking. Perhaps they are having lie-ins too. Or maybe they have moved on to pastures new for the winter.

11.30: Writing again - a whole new scene, a whole new character, distilling pages of backstory and exposition into one short conversation that also sets up the next scene and drives my character on. If I've got it right - result!

12.30: Stack firewood. I have a log pile in the yard, and another in the porch, where it dries out before I bring it in. Looks like I will have to order more within the next week - and start sawing my own to make it go further.

1.00: lunch: Chilli beans. The chilli powder is red hot - my nose is on fire! Very satisfying.

1.30: writing again. The next scene is a very old one, a set piece love scene, but it now sits better in the whole structure and drives the plot. (I hope).

2.30: clean pheasants for tomorrow's soup. They are a gift from the ruggedly handsome landlord who happens to be my brother-in-law, and leant the cottage a rural film set look for a short while, hanging beside the porch. I've no use for a whole bird, and no way to roast them anyway, so I skin them and take off breasts and legs to cook with raisins and a little wine.

Then I sat and finished a curtain to hang in the bedroom. I bought the fabric in Kelso 10 months ago; curtain making has been a very stop-start project, slowed down still further by problems with a borrowed sewing machine. The onset of winter is more than enough encouragement to finish them by hand.

5.00: write - almost completed a whole section today.

7.00: The Archers, supper, book of the week (The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. Read an interview with the author, who is famously agoraphobic, and so researched the entire novel, which is set in Canada, without being able to visit the country. If she hadn't been open about her illness would anyone have commented on this? The novel is set in the 1860s - she hasn't visited there either. That's what writers do. I like her.
"Why is one of the characters gay?" "Some people are you know."

8.00: write - finishing up for the day.

9.00: Connect up the disc drive and watch the second half of The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

Tomorrow I have a lift to the swimming pool at 7.30. This means getting up and down the hill in the dark. Could be interesting!

Yay! Sleet!

And it's only just past Trafalgar Day...

And island in a still sea of mist. Every blade of grass, every leaf, every berry edged with ice.

I understand now, in my bones, exactly why our ancestors wore caps to bed..

Potty talk

The new earth closet, based on the Seperett system, is a huge success. After a month's use there is only a small amount of entirely inoffensive dry matter, already very like soil, to move to the main compost area, where, mixed with fresh earth (to boost the number of microbes) it will continue to break down into loam. No smell, no fluids, no need to handle anything unpleasant, all wrapped up in bio-degradable packaging. I am very impressed. Bear in mind that this is the most basic of the Seperett systems; no ventilation fan, no turning chamber, just a portable seat which separates solids from the rest. The entire kit cost less than £80, and I am now strongly inclined to invest in one of the more deluxe versions next year, which will make the cottage much more attractive to the less hardy visitor.

Had a visit this morning from a contractor with a solution to the running water problem. At present water is collected at a spring 200 yards above the cottage and runs downwards in a 4 inch salt glazed pipe, cracked at several points, to a settling tank just above the kitchen. This then feeds a tap in the kitchen, which is frequently blocked, on account of a) the peat and leaves collected on the 200 yard journey, and b.) the lack of pressure in the syphon between tank and tap, which are almost level. As a result I rely on water collected in jerry cans from the settling tank itself, and the tap is unused.

The proposed solution is a new lightweight tank at the spring itself, and a 1 inch pipe leading directly to the kitchen. Any overflow at the tank would be diverted back into the old pipe to feed the trough. The resulting pressure - 50 feet of head - would be strong enough to keep the tap running – and even, in the longer term, to feed a shower and/or drive a small turbine to provide electricity.

But let's not get too excited – it's three days work with the small digger, and a large capital investment. I may be walking to and from the outflow with a jerry can for some time to come.

Cooking: Sloe gin. Found about 20 lbs of sloes (wild plums) in the hedgerows; I started picking on my own but the landlord got intrigued, then enthusiastic, and my two pounds turned into a vast haul in several sacks. They are all in the freezer at the bottom of hill, waiting for bottling. (Freezing breaks down the tough skins, which otherwise need pricking. 1 Lb of sloes, 4 oz of sugar, 1 pt of gin (or vodka – gin was traditionally the only clear spirit available in this country until the 2nd half of the 20th C) Bottle and shake every other day.

After 3 months the liquor is a rich purple, and the dry bitter sloes have worked an extraordinary alchemy to produce the richest, most flavoursome drink imaginable. It can be drunk at once, although it improves still further with keeping.

Reading: Ball of Fire by Antony Brett-James: rats, my copy is damaged, with pages missing just as the partisan leader, Ras Seyoum – a key figure in the film – is launching a wild attack on the Italian fortifications. I shall have to hike to the library and order another copy and hope that it arrives in good time. If not it will have to wait until I can get to the British Library in November.

Watching: The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Lovely storytelling.

Smoke gets in your eyes - and hair, and clothes and lungs...

First time back at the cottage for almost 2 weeks – the leaves have fallen and light is falling on the West side for the first time in months. The mice have been slacking – almost no damage.
Found a hedge of sloes which I will convert into gin for Christmas tomorrow

Falling leaves

Back in Northumberland, nursing the last of the cold, as a guest of my lovely sister and bro-in-law, who have an aga (bliss).

It is the coldest morning to date – verging on frost and with a dense white fog. The Beech tree beyond the door is shedding leaves so fast it looks like golden snowfall, with a similar crispy whisper.

Today is the first day I feel inclined to work again – I am making use of the Aga to stay in pajamas and try to make up for lost time on the step-outline.

I have been working on the same story now for 6 years (not exclusively, of course, but pretty consistently. The thought process is different – a series of small "aha!" as I rehearse the possibilities while walking.

This story has its origins in a sickbed. In 2001 I had been writing short stories for under a year, all arriving as a result of internal conversations, "what ifs" and being resolved into finished pieces within a few days I actually used to rush home from work to complete them in a hot flush of invention. There was no room for any other words in my head.

Then I got bronchitis after a bad winter cold – exacerbated by the fact that my desk at the time was in a basement, which was also used as a smoking room by other employees. The window next to which I perched was thickly coated with tar, so that the light filtering down from street level had a sepia glow to match the 1950s conditions. I had a bar heater on one side and the PC to the other to provide heat. A year later the

It took me almost 4 weeks to recover. When I tried to return to work the smoke drove me straight back to bed within two days.

I was soooooo bored of the hours spent swaddled in bed – upright to relieve the strain on the lungs, listening to the radio, sleepless through the night, listless through the day and living on soup. I doodled as a listened, a woman in a black coat running down a the stairs from a court room, a man following who had believed she was dead, who needed to know why she had disappeared. It was a scene I had created and run through my head for amusement for almost 15 years. I tried to remember where it had come from. A dream about a desert, a crashed jeep, a woman with a rifle and two lovers. For the first time I tried to write it down.

4 hours later I had 15 pages of single line typescript, starting:

*****

INT. WATERLOO STATION. DAY

Ellen alights from the train in the smoky grey dawn light, carrying a small vanity case and a handbag. She passes porters, early morning workers, mail bags being unloaded, two West Indian Airmen with kit bags, international travellers from the boat train, a cleaner sweeping the concourse.

She searches in her purse for change. She is wearing close fitting black leather gloves.

She opens her purse. No change, only notes.

She buys a newspaper with a 10-shilling note. The seller grumbles.

She enters the ladies rest room, and uses a penny to open a cubicle door.

INT. LAVATORY CUBICLE – DAY

Ellen locks the door and lowers the seat. She kneels on the cubicle floor, places the vanity case on the seat in front of her and opens it. Rummaging inside she retrieves the parts of a handgun and assembles it - with remarkable efficiency. She is still wearing the gloves. She puts the gun in her handbag.

********

It's very different now. But so is the rhythm of writing, and that is why I am procrastinating by blogging instead of working!

Bugs and dustbusters

The week in Suffolk ended on a snuffly note - I caught a chill walking from
Orford to Butley through the woods in the rain.

Haven't written a word since - too busy hiding under the covers with a stash of
tissues and laudanum reading up on natural (and other) disasters, which always
cheers me up.

My flatmate's awesome mother stayed in the London flat while I was away -
awesome because she scrubbed every room from top to bottom and transformed it.
The bath sparkled, the walls shone. And then she cooked goulash and left in the
fridge for me. I've never met the woman (I have spoken to her on the phone, but
as she speaks no English and I speak less Magyar they were short conversations)
but I want to hug her.

I should explain that the flat was a cheerless wreck when I moved in – It had
been trashed by previous tenants and needed to be steam cleaned over two days
before I could move in. This left many corners of grime and dinginess to tackle
and smashed fittings to repair, but as I was in a plaster cast at the time, and
trying to catch up at work, mush of this wasn't tackled at the time.
Redecorating was postponed while we chased an insurance claim against the owner
of the flat above us, which seems to spring a leak every second month. And we
got used to the lime-dulled taps and streaky walls.

It took a skilled and determined woman to put us straight.

Mrs. Ambrus, I salute you. And your goulash rocks.

Score to date...

4 miles of orford shingle
6 avocets
2 heron
2 egrets
2 curlew
1 shelduck
10 cows
5 smoked sausages
3 scenes

Eastward Ho

Having been in the North for two weeks I am now in the east - Suffolk (Orford to be precise.)

It was in a converted pigsty a few miles from here, in 2002, that I wrote the first draft of Translations. I'd been stuck at home with bronchitis and wanted to escape. Foot and mouth had left holiday cottages empty, and so I was able to rent the pigsty (which was very sweet). I took a pound of coffee, my very first suitcase and an elderly 'laptop' running windows 3.1 and textpad. Without a car I was forced to walk everywhere.

The story came out in huge chunks - 4 hours at a time.

This time there are more distractions (i.e., company) but I am gratified to discover that the story is coming in big blocks. Must be all that sky.

Doesn't get much better

Solved some major act 2 problems on the script, the rain is falling past the open door, I have a glass of red wine and a fat cuban cigar. All I need is a sailor on leave to make life perfect.

I just hosted a dinner party in the cottage - with half of the guests under the age of two. It was noisy but entertaining and has left a mound of washing up.

Back to the keyboard in 30 mins.

All the curses of hell fall on the heads of spammers

At regular intervals [say every 2 weeks] some mf spoofs my address to send bulk mail, and my mail box crashes under the weight of returned mail. This is irritating enough when I have broadband, a laptop and a mail filter. When I am on a mountain relying on the webbrowser on a mobile phone it is heartbreaking. I haven't been able to read mail for 48 hours... I can clear it out in the library tomorrow, but right now I am feeling really un-buddhist in my desire to inflict pain on the bastards who have hijacked my mail.

Lunch for the [deputy] landlord...

Baked beans, cottage style.

Two pork ribs, trimmed off a bit to make supper tomorrow, and a piece of smoked bacon, chopped - browned over the fire for 5 minutes or so.

Added a chopped onion, garlic, then a few minutes later, a tablespoon of brown sugar.

Opened tin of tomatoes - and sod it, the new 99p tin opener doesn't work. Curse Robert Dyas then open tin with brute force.

Add 'tin opener' to the shopping list chalked onto the mantel piece.

Added tomatoes to pan. Wiped the fine spray of tomato juice from my face. I probably look like Paul Bettany in Gangster No. 1. The tin died hard...

Added black pepper, bay leaf, majoram - no salt, salt hardens beans.

Added bowl of white beans soaked overnight and water from kettle.

Brought to boil for 10 minutes.

Now, if I had a hay-box, i'd have slid it in there and left it for 4 hours. I don't, so the pot went into the lpg stove in the back-kitchen.

Mmm - lovely smells. Time for breakfast, and a 2 hour stint at the keyboard

Only two hours work today - i'll have to do better tomorrow. Most of the day was taken up with learning to drive a landrover, then carrying stuff up to the cottage in it - an old windsor chair, a zinc chest to store food in, etc.

Home made baked beans taste remarkably like heinz, oddly enough.

Picked a pocket full of blackberries on the way home - i'm eating them with greek yogurt.

Called home to hereford - it's still summer down there as far as the fruit is concerned.

Reading: Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers. Silly book. Nothing like as strange and funny as Nine Tailors. Just a lot of unlikable suspects and some train timetables. And almost NO Bunter...

I wonder if I should learn learn to fly-fish. There's salmon in that river..

Bah - turns out I can post to this blog from the cottage, but not moderate or comment - so that will just have to hang on until I have babysitting duties at the bottom of the hill and can use a real computer.

Meanwhile, either:
A - it's a mild night.
B - i'm toughening up.
C - the place is finally warming through.
D - any combination of the above.

I know this to be the case as I just found myself with no clothes on while getting ready for bed. Didn't manage that when I was here in july!

The pop-pop-snap-hiss of a log fire is one of the loveliest sounds in the world. Seriously.

Just clocking off - 4 hours work on step-outline, trying to make sense of the different stories that make up the whole.

Nice egg and a pot of tea, then a few chapters of Bleak House, which i've had on the go since I got stuck overnight at JFK overnight in June.

Landlord climbing up for lunch tomorrow, so I am soaking beans.

Have to remember to borrow the sewing machine on Saturday and finish putting curtains up before I freeze.

I've cracked under the strain of living wild.

I just caught myself collecting sheeps' wool from the gate to leave out for my mice, so they won't be tempted to carry off my socks. Commit me, now.

I and da mice are v v cosy

It's 8.30, and almost dark (still some reflected light in the sky).

As of 5pm yesterday I am now living full-time in the Stone Caravan. October. Bloody awful timing - although, to be honest, August was almost as cold!

The composting loo is working, the water filter is doing its work and the fire seems to be just warm enough for comfort – although I am looking at a pot belly stove that I can install in a month or two...

Just went to make tea and found a disgruntled mouse in the recycling bin. I had to help him out, which probably induced a mouse-sized heart attack of terror...

Running a live test…

I am updating this by email from the North Cloister of Westminster Abbey (a delightful spot with a healthy draft and a fairtrade coffee offering to mitigate the chill of the stone seating.

It's good to know that the Abbey still resembles nothing so much as a national auction house, the bays are crammed hugger-mugger with beds, chairs, stacked portraits, chipped busts and broken vases, all in magically odd conjuction with each other. There is the same tender shock at recognising long dead affection in the portrait of a child, or a faded postcard from the front, lost in the back of a drawer. Poet's corner is, of course, the book section…

Happy New Year everyone!

Wednesday was the first day of the 3rd Millenium in the Ethiopian Calendar (which is based on the Coptic Church calendar).

I spent Tuesday evening in Trafalgar Square, with what looked like at least 3000 Ethiopians and their friends, partying "like it's 1999" for the very last time.

September is a great time to start the year. It's still warm enough to sit out and barbecue and drink wine at midnight.

Roman Wall Blues
 
 
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

WH Auden

Hmmm... I have been trying to find a way to update this on-site, from the hilltop, but Blogger is not really PDA friendly.

I have to solve this, as I will now be on the hill for much longer.

'Cos - I got the bursary!!!!!!!!!! For the next 4 month I am a full-time paid up commissioned writer in a stone caravan.

Just as well - the application process (3 - 4 hours a day writing, on top of a 10 hour working day, with long-haul travel thrown in, for 35 days) - almost finished me. I spent 10 days in a darkened room if conjunctivitis straight afterwards.

I was contemplating giving up one of the following:

• The long-houred Job (but even eccentric hermits need an income)
• The Writing (but I would probably go insane)
• The Cottage...

But, for the next few month I don't have to make that choice...

I was heading up the hill again in a week, to live and write in the cottage over October/November.

I am a little worried about Foot and Mouth. This is a very very hard time for hill farmer, as September is the month when the harvest the lambs, just before the grass on the hill dies back. They are at a standstill, with no cash coming in after a year's work, and no way to feed the excess stock through the winter. Walking through the pastures daily carries minuscule risk, but I don't want to do anything to cause more distress or concern to my neighbours at the moment.

The long silence is the result...

... of work on a major funding application. Approximately 40 pages of documentation, plus 20 pages of original prose and 8 pages of other writing samples.

It's eaten almost all my spare time, like a shoal of pirhana stripping a cow before it can breath. Most days I stop only to eat, breathe, fetch water and use the (non-composting) loo.

Oh, and to earn the yankee dollar at corporate towers inc.

D Day is May 30th - I've got most of the documentation done, and 15 pages of the original piece - that gives me approximately 20 hours to finish the trickiest part, revise and proofread. I won't be able to redraft the samples - they'll just have to be good to go...

eeek!

June 2 - If I make the deadline, I'll be lying in a meadow full of flowers and flies, talkin' to sheep and drinkin' beer.
June 2 - If I don't make the deadline, I'll be in bed at midday, eating cheese and contemplating a messy suicide attempt

Wierdest feedback from a creative writing class ever

"are you sure they had dogs in Shakespeare's time?"

What I did on Saturday

This is a Harris Hawk, and an unexpectedly up close and personal encounter at the magnificent Kielder Water Bird of Prey Centre at Leaplish Water.

Definately worth a visit - Owls of all sizes from Scops to Eagle(or "itty-bitty to ****** HUGE!"), sweet natured vultures, a chatty kookabura, eagles bald and golden, kestrals, falcons....

(The hawk is the one with the tail, I'm the one with the goofy grin.)

Northern Trains Haiku

Imagine this on continuous scroll in LEDS at the end of the carriage transporting me from Hexham to Newcastle.

"The Next Stop is Metro Centre.
This Train is for Newcastle.
This Train will call at Metro Centre and Newcastle
where This Train will terminate.


Poetry in motion....

Counting up - what has been done to the Stone Sloop to date

I have to say I took on the Stone Sloop in great condition - it has clearly been loved and cared for through the generations, and all those who have known it in the last 50 years speak of it with great affection.

The structure is and was as sound as a 200 year old rubble built structure on a the side of a steep hill can be, and the contents were amazing - all the furniture etc to start, much of it 19th Century originals.

In no particular order:(And remember - there is no mains electricity, no road to bring materials to the house, an interupted water supply, and drainage straight into pasture.... so working methods have to be unconventional at times!)

1.) Water. The cold water tap in the back kitchen is fed by a spring, via a settling tank. The tap frequently blocks because of sediment. The settling tank has been completely flushed, but I think we need to get a "pig's tail" (flexible corkscrew thingie) into the pig to clear it, and then see where we go from there. I bought a freestanding waterfilter - ceramic candles and silver filters, £80. I have now been advised by the Council that the filter plus boiling does render the water fit to drink, although I won't be offering it to pregant women and the vulnerable. I don't mind the taste, as it happens - but I prefer gin.

2.) Fire.
the old range is non functional, and would take too long, too much cash and some seriously heavy gear to restore - all for the pleasure of baking in the old oven. And I own a dutch oven, which works just as well over the coals. So the range stays decorative for the foreseeable future.But the fire itself is essential - so the old firebasket and grate were removed, and a new firebasket welded together by the blacksmith - cost £60. It sits in the void where the original grate was, burns hot and has two stands for pots, so I can cook over it in the evening.In addition the chimney has been swept - which has certainly made the fire draw better, and a old terracotta chimney pot has been added to the chimney stack, to prevent rain getting in and to increase the draught - again, working fine (although the first pot slipped, rolled down the roof and crashed to the ground on the original attempt!)

3.) Floor.
The ground floor was poured concrete - hard on the feet and very very cold. After removing the layers of old carpet to inspect it we had a short conference with the landlord(s) to debate the alternatives, and headed off together to Ikea to buy a wood floor. It cost £450, including insulation, and has made a huge difference to the light levels and warmth in the living room. But it was a BUGGER to lay, and couldn't have been done without the heroic efforts of Arthur, who worked for days in the half light of winter getting it down. The cost of floor and installation was carried by the estate, and is probably the biggest single change to the Stone Sloop in this generation. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

4.) Walls.
Repainted throughout with casein limewash - £80 for materials. It lets the damp through, but that it what it is designed to do.I suspect I'll be repainting every spring, but that's how it goes...

5.) Guttering.
The Guttering on the porch has been moved and rehung - it was channeling water direct on to the kitchen wall, which was soaked through as a result.

6.) Floorboards.
Backbreaking - cleaned with lemon and oil (cost approx £2.50), inch by inch, to pull up as much dust as possible.

New Photos - all ship shape

Spent a large part of last week on my hands and knees cleaning the wood work with oil and lemon mixed (startling good at picking up engrained dust in the older boards.)

This is what the Stone Sloop looked like on Monday...

Nettle Risotto Recipe

Collect young nettle tops (wear gloves!)
Put kettle on to boil.

Dice a little bacon and an onion - I used a newspaper as a cutting board, and disposed of it in the fire - no washing up.

Heat pan on fire, toss in onion and bacon, a splash of olive oil and garlic. Stir until it sizzles.

Add rice, stir until coated with oil.
Add boiling water to cover to a depth of one finger width (approx). Add salt and nettles.

Clap on lid, and move to trivet in front on fire for 10 minutes.

Stir, add butter and pepper.

Eat.

dinner last night

Nettle risotto.
Very tasty. The ruins around the sloop are covered with young nettles, about 3 inches high, which tasted great with rice and butter. Needed a glove to pick though.
Also spotted, but not eaten;
Primrose
Speedwell
Hairy bitter cress
Violets
Cowslips
Grape hyacinths

And baby lambs are ridiculously and unnecessarily cute.

Day 3
I will have to rechristen the cottage. Life her has a remarkably naval feel, very like the routine on the tall ships I was sailing 3 years ago.
7am - hammocks up, fire lit, all decks swept and swabbed, heads cleaned, wooding and watering, captain swabbed in a bucket, breakfast (tea and hard tack).
I will have to install a ship's bell, and a bosun's call to pipe visitors aboard hms Stone Sloop.

still here, all cosied up under the quilt trying to work up the energy to get to the loo and start building the fire. have guest coming for breakfast ...

Tonight is the first full night I will spend in the sc. The new firebasket is installed, and after some bodging draws beautiful. I have cut enough wood for the week, and carried in enough for the evening. The water filter is dripping in the kitchen, and supper is cooking over the coals.
It is still light outside, but the room is dark.
Oh, and I am writing this live, on my mobile...

Photographs from the Day of the Bonfire

Back before Christmas we had a House Cleaning party, to air and de-cobweb, which turned into a sort of House Warming when we lit a fire with some of the older carpets...

More at flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/51751031@N00/

Yay! The Firebasket is ready to collect from the Blacksmith!

Next challenge - getting it up the hill (I feel the need for a lift in a
landrover...)

I am sitting opposite the noisiest father and son team in the South East.

They have taken the seats opposite me in Cafe Nero, and are dedicated slurpers,
cooling their tea and chocolate by mixing it with air in every mouthful, then
smacking their lips.

I suspect they are enjoying their drinks a lot more than I am.

Here is some advice.
If you are going to take a lump hammer, on impulse, to the broken iron bars of the old grate in your remote cottage, in preparation for a brand new firebasket - PUT YOUR BOOTS ON FIRST.

I was in socks because the floor was only half laid, and I did want to tread good Northumbrian muck all over it. And the old grate was so tempting. The hammer and cold chisel were off to one side. The bars had to come out before the new went in....

Ouch.

Cue idiot woman hopping on afore mentioned half-laid floor, cursing the universe and her own stupidity.

Actually I had the luck of the truly idiotic- no permanent damage, no one to see the spectacle, and no pain by the time I needed to pull the wellies back down, and slide down the hillside for tea and toast with the Young-Parents.

The upside is that I was able to measure the void and draw up plans for a new firebasket - the old one was burnt down to about half it's original size, and didn't hold much more than a single log at the time - the new one will be deeper, hold several logs at a time, and have a stable surface for kettles, dutch oven, bake stone etc.

Monday morning saw me and Mr Young-Parent at the blacksmiths on the Industrial
Estate at Hexham, handing over the plans. (We had to shoo some rather dense ducks out of the road first).

There was much sucking of teeth, and holding of my sketches to the light, and scrabbling around for bits of square section steel - but the upshot is that next week I pick up a new firebasket for the grand sum of £40.

Fingers crossed that my measuring-fu is stronger than my lump hammer-fu.

The Wall...

In the first few centuries of the Common Era, valley the Stone Caravan was part of a Demilitarised Zone - the Northernmost border of the Roman Empire.

Hadrian's famous Wall is several miles to the South, Antonine's less well known embankment to the North, and this must have been a comfortable and prosperous place to live. The garrisons of the Wall needed cattle and sheep and corn - and wood for those heated bathhouses, all of which could be sourced from the communities north and south of the wall. A little town that grew up around the fort of Vindolanda, (home of the birthday invitation ) could boast glass for its windows and wine and oil and garlic for its dinner parties. The legions might have called the locals "Brittunculi" ("nasty little brits"), but they also housed British allies and their familes within the camp walls in times of unrest.)

It's from this time that the earliest remains at the Stone Caravan seem to date - a tumble of rocks among the oaks mark the site of a Romano-British settlement, as far as I am aware, unexcavated. (Don't tell Tony Robinson - it's nice and quiet up here, and I suspect the merest pulse from "Geo-Phys" would bring the woodshed down right now!)

The legions on the wall were not Italian (although most of their senior officers were). They were Gauls and Dacians(?) and Belgians*, and when their service was up they were given strips of land in the area, and settled down, mixing their genes happily with those of the horrid little brits.
When the legions were withdrawn from the Border to defend Rome from Vandals and Goths and other ASBO youth cults of the 4th Century, the descendents of those retired squaddies stayed behind. So at least some of neighbours are the result of early EU labour migration - (and the BNP can stuff its repulsive rhetoric anti-immigration rhetoric up its own lardy arse!)

*Sorry - I was asked for stories of Roman Belgian Waffles, and I couldn't find any - but here is a recipe for Roman pancakes in honey:

I haven't been updating this for a few weeks - there are many reasons, and they all seem to have taken up residence in my upper respiratory tract. In short, what started as a nasty head cold turned into Sinusitus, which feels like an unholy cross between migraine, neuraligia, headsche and flu. With the added bonus of pints of lurid green bleurgh to dispose off.
Lets just say that a stone caravan, even a cosy firelit one, is not the ideal crawl space for a woman with a colony of bugs, so I have been tucked up under duvets at my sisters place, gobbling up brufen and antibiotics.
One good thing about fever - great technicolour dreams and you can turn down the heating 3 notches.