WanderingScribe

Tea for one...

2010-11-29T16:40:00.002Z

Alan Bennett

2010-08-27T14:48:00.009Z

Last week...almost the week before now, I met the writer Alan Bennett. Well, I stood next to him in a cafe, both of us queuing for coffee...

Alan Bennett! Of all the writers to meet, to have him, the writer who wrote The Lady in the Van. Has anyone read that? It's a book about a lady who lived in her van in Alan Bennett's driveway before she died! One day, (as you do at the beginning) I Googled myself - 'Wanderingscribe' — and in amongst 'woman living in her car' articles, and references to Wanderingscribe, and all the dross, I came across the book by Alan Bennett. I bought it the very next day. It is a slim volume, and of course I read it in one sitting... She wasn't like me at all; the Lady he writes about was a real bag lady, who had lived like that for years - though who knows that I might not have turned out like that under other circumstances. Anyway, I went on to read lots of Alan Bennett in the end, this way or that way. His name seemed to generally cross my path — as it does when you come across something new: I'd go into a bookshop and there it'd be, a book by Alan Bennett on the table or the counter, or a picture of him on the book jacket or some publicity flyer. He writes plays too, he wrote the 'History Boys', which was turned into the film, and so his picture was there in all the publicity for that, so you couldn't help knowing what he looks like. And I remember going to the Southbank one evening for a reading of 'Nocturnes' by Kazio Ishiguru, I think it was, and in one of the other theatres must have been something on by Bennett because there in the corner was a lifesize cardboard cut out of him. Yes, the long coat, the green scarf, the shirt and tie under a v-neck, the black specs, the newly cut hair, that boyish grin. It could have been him standing there in the corner, life-size, watching the comings and goings in the foyer. Anyway, it's a image everyone is probably familiar with, iconic almost.

A few months after that, I went out for the day to London, a place where there is a large park and, nearby, lots of smart cafes and the kind of little boutiques where dresses are chained to the rail, and I'd be terrified to even slow down to window shop past, and as I was choosing between cafes, walking towards me, looking very pleased with himself, grinning that grin, was Alan Bennett. Larger than life, pushing a bike, with a bunch of yellow flowers in the crook of one arm, and a couple of A4 writing pads under the other. Just walking towards me as if he had walked straight out of one of his own book jackets, Writing Home, or that cardboard cut-out I saw at the Southbank. Except surprisingly tall, taller than you'd imagine from the photos.

I haven't been to that place since. Until the week before last. Again I was out for the day, and walked from the train along to one of those cafes. This time I had some writing in my bag, and so hurried there, determined to finish a chapter of something. I chose my cafe, staked a claim at a table outside, ordered a coffee and then wandered down to the bookshop further along to get a book. The bookshop owner commented that he personally knew the author whose book I ended up buying. It wasn't Alan Bennett, but was apparently one of his neighbours. 'His children go to school with our children. He often pops in...' he said. And as he said it, it reminded me of the writer I had seen the last time I was there. I had it in mind to tell him my Alan Bennett story: that the very last time I was there I saw him, walking down the street towards me, pushing his bike with those yellow flowers in the crook of one arm, the writing pads under the other. I didn't tell him though. But as I walked out into drizzle and down to drink the coffee already waiting on the table, I had that image firmly in my head. It was as clear as if he was there again, slowly walking towards me along that same stretch of pavement, in that long coat and scarf, those yellow flowers tucked in the crook of one arm, and then past me, walking on, with that expression as if laughing at a continuous stream of jokes he is inventing as he goes along.

I forgot about the image. I drank my coffee. I lost myself in the writing. The words came so well in the end that I didn't dare break the spell and decided to stay and have a second coffee. I went inside to order at the counter at the far end, and as the waiter wiped cappuccino pipes and frothed milk in a metal jug, I turned around and who was walking down the long aisle towards the counter...but Alan Bennett! I did a double take, cleared my vision by staring blankly at the waiter, and then glanced around again and there he was, still there. No yellow flowers under one arm. I gave a cautious, probably very stunned, half-smile of aknowledgement, which he returned with that boyish grin. He then almost dropped himself into a chair at a small table by the counter, and waited to order. Seeing him sitting there, Alan Bennett dressed as Alan Bennett, was like looking at the cover of a book and again made me smile. It was table service, so sitting at that small table by the counter, he could only have been there for takeaway. I tried not to say hello. I tried hard...but in the end I couldn't help myself. I said in one breath, 'I know I shouldn't speak to you...' at which he waved a hand and said 'no, that's fine' which I spoke over anyway saying '...but it's almost like I just summoned you up, because I was literally just thinking of you as I walked along from the bookshop... ' He threw his head back and laughed when I said that, and I told him about nearly telling the man in the bookshop about seeing him last time I was in the area too, and how instead, just twenty minutes or so ago, I'd carried his image in my head all the way back down the street to my waiting coffee. I didn't tell him that I was there to write that day, that I'd taken my book bag with me and was writing for the first time in I don't know how long...and then I think of him coming from the bookshop and turn at the counter and there he is walking up and queuing beside me for a coffee! Amazing! On the day I blow the dust off my notepad as well...Hopefully a good omen.

I wished I'd said more...I wish I'd been able to say more: 'Can I walk with you, Mr Bennett, talk to you about writing?' The things he could have told me...the tips, the advice. I think mostly I wanted to tell him that I lived in my car too, like the woman he wrote about, and that I wrote about it too. That maybe I wrote for her, maybe I wrote her side of things, or a not too dissimilar version of it maybe...? Maybe I'm how it starts,the Mrs Shepherd thing, maybe she was how it could have ended. There but for the grace of God...But of course I couldn't have told him any of that...He did chat for a few minutes though as we waited for coffee, he was relaxed and approachable, with this great avuncular charm about him. He told me he used to live in Gloucester Place, and in the 60's lived in a flat around the corner from where we were, which he loved so much he wished he had back. When my coffee was ready, I could either hang around like some stalker or go back to my table outside. I wanted to hang around and talk to him, about anything, just be in his aura for a bit. But of course I said how nice it was to meet him and left, and minutes later saw him walk away in the other direction with his takeaway coffee, the long coat swinging as he walked off home. In a way I'm still kicking myself for not talking to him, for there not being a way to do that.

If you know Alan Bennett's agent, could you mention it: Anya Peters would love to get a message to him! I'm joking of course, why would he ever contact a complete stranger, I don't think he even uses email (although apparently his partner is editor of one of those glossy ideal home type magazines, surely he uses it. Borrow it Mr Bennett, drop me a line: wanderingscribe@btinternet.com and next time you have coffee at that cafe I could share one with you, show you some writing I've done, get some advice on it. Or just talk. Of course you won't... I'll probably have to just summon you up again one day, instead...

...a joy forever

2010-06-05T14:12:00.001Z

Someone sent me this. I have it as the screensaver on my computer. It's so beautiful I thought I would share it.

Did I really just do that?

2010-04-17T14:56:00.002Z

I'm reading The Bone People at the moment...it was recommended...that's all I can think to say...not sure if that is good or bad.

Hairdresser

2010-01-21T18:00:00.004Z

I've just got back from the hairdresser's, and talking to you. I left at 5.00, and have just got back. I don't know whether I should feel ridiculous or relieved. Maybe (and you know who you are) you'll email and let me know.

A flock of colours, a path of yellow moonlight — and may a slow wind work these words of love around you...to mind your life

2010-01-01T15:20:00.003Z

1 January 2010
From John O'Donohue (1956-2008), a blessing for your New Year:

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

...from the sieve of her hands...

2009-11-28T12:29:00.006Z

Sorry haven't been here for a while. Trying to go forwards...Hope you are all well and using up the last of the year well. During the week I got onto a tube in London feeling very tired and despondent, as you often do cramming onto a tube at rush hour, and without a book to read I stared up at the adverts and among them was this poem. It is called 'Prayer' and was almost in answer to one in that moment, and was so lovely I thought I'd put it here. I hope you think so too...

PRAYER - Carol anne Duffey

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

It would be enough wouldn't it... to write something like that. Even just once...

Sonnet

2009-08-07T16:54:00.004Z

Not sure why, but this poem seems appropriate today.

Sonnet to Orpheus

Oh you gentle ones, every once in a while step
into the breath that is indifferent to you,
let it be parted on your cheeks,
behind you it trembles, reunited.

Oh you blessed ones, oh you whole ones,
you who seem to be the beginning of the hearts.
Bow of arrows and target of arrows,
your smile beams eternally with tears.

Do not fear to suffer the heaviness,
give it back to earth's weight:
heavy are the mountains. Heavy are the oceans.
Even what you planted as children,
the trees, have long become too heavy;
you could not carry them.
But the breezes... but the spaces...

Be grateful for the freedom to see other dreams...

2009-07-14T17:59:00.004Z

Psalm 91 for my sins, this for pleasure. I wish I had written it...

To An English Friend In Africa
— Ben Okri

Be grateful for the freedom to see other dreams. Bless your loneliness as much as you drank of your former companionships. All that you are experiencing now, will become moods of future joys. So bless it all. Do not think your way superior to another's. Do not venture to judge, but see things with fresh and open eyes. Do not condemn, but praise when you can, and when you can't, be silent.

Time now is a gift for you. A gift of freedom to think and remember and understand the ever perplexing past and to recreate yourself anew in order to transform time.

Live while you are alive. Learn the ways of silence and wisdom. Learn to act, learn a new speech. Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit. Learn to free yourself from all the things that have moulded you and which limit your secret and undiscovered road.

Remember that all things which happen to you are raw materials. Endlessly fertile. Endlessly yielding of thoughts that could change your life and go on doing so forever.

Never forget to pray and be thankful for all things good or bad on the rich road; for everything is changeable so long as you live while you are alive.

Fear not, but be full of light and love. Fear not, but be alert and receptive. Fear not, but act decisively when you should. Fear not, but know when to stop. Fear not, for you are loved by me. Fear not, for death is not the real terror, but life magically is.

Be joyful in your silence, be strong in your patience. Do not try to wrestle with the universe, but be sometimes like water or air, sometimes like fire, and constant like the earth.

Live slowly, think slowly, for time is a mystery. Never forget that love requires always that you be the greatest person you are capable of being, self-regenerating and strong and gentle--your own hero and star.

Love demands the best in us. To always and in time oversome the worst and lowest in our souls. Love the world wisely.

It is love alone that is the greatest weapon and the deepest and hardest secret.

So fear not, my friend. The darkness is gentler than you think. Be grateful for the manifold, dreams of creation, and the many ways of the unnumbered peoples.

Be grateful for life as you live it. And may a wonderful light always guide you on the unfolding road.

...I turned a corner

2009-04-29T17:58:00.005Z

Today it was the smell of lilacs that got me. I turned a corner, on a road I'd never walked down before, quite close to home, and bang... There I was a child of seven or eight again, dragging her feet on the way to the big houses under the railway bridge, where on some Sunday mornings, a tiny lady who lived in one of them sold us rhubarb, and bunches of mint for potatoes. Delicious smells...but before we got to them, we walked with our huge bundles of rhubarb along a crescent-shaped road that was full of (what I now know to be) lilacs, and the smell cleared everything else from your mind. For a while, everything...One of the saving graces of childhood. To this day I love lilac - the colour, the smell, the look of them...and of course the way they make my mouth water for rhubarb crumble.

Robert McKee - STORY Weekend

2009-04-17T16:38:00.020Z

I am at a writing course this weekend, given by the legendary Robert McKee — the Los Angeles writer of the book STORY. He is an amazing teacher. I did the London course 2 years ago too, and read his book (a month or so before my own book came out), but it has taken all this time to absorb what he had to say on the level it needed to be known at; I feel like I am finally mastering story, and all that instinctive way of writing is being tamed by proper plotting and structure. I am really excited that bits of the craft are finally slipping over from right to left brain; very excited... But as he says in his book, no matter how much you think you've got it sussed, you can't do it properly until you have actually done it!

Here's something I re-read from his book last night, and which has stayed in my head all day. It's commonplace but something that really hit home...He says, once you've mastered the rules of story and the conventions of the genre you have chosen to write in, put away the rules and "Write only what you believe. Write your kind of story. The kind of story you’d stand in line in the rain to buy." What fantastic advice... '...the kind of book you'd stand in line in the rain to buy." (well, actually he says "...the kind of film you'd stand in line in the rain to watch." because his course is also for screenwriters, but it's relevant for all forms.

Just a word of warning if anyone is thinking of going to his next course (and he does them in countries around the world)...Two years ago I got lambasted by him because my phone went off during the first day of the 3 day course, when he had forbidden us to have phones on in the auditorium. He fined me £10, the total sum of money I had on me for lunch, but he made me hand it over. (To this day I swear I don't know how my phone switched on, as I'm convinced I turned it off...). I was emotionally raw because my book was about to come out, plus all that ugly stuff that was going around about me at the time, false and malicious though it all was, had finally got to me, and so the emotion his 'telling off' brought about almost knocked me for six. I wouldn't have believed it possible to feel that much over 'relatively' so little...I must have been holding all that emotion in for all that time waiting for my book to finally go public, and there in that lecture theatre I almost went into meltdown. I had shut myself down over the years, especially all those months that I was living in the car, and almost never cried anymore, about anything.... But during the 3 days of the course, I couldn't stop. I just couldn't hold back the tears, and in fact it got so bad, that on the afternoon of the last day, as we all settled down for the screening of Casablanca, I had to leave. The crying was silent of course, or as much as I could make it, but it felt like a hand had passed into my chest and was squeezing my heart over and over again, big fist-sized handfuls of it, kneading it over and over like dough, and I almost couldn't see for the tears, or breathe for the pain of it. And although no one else in the lecture theatre seemed to notice (who doesn't cry at Casablanca?) it felt like somehow he knew...I don't know how, but it felt like he did...and as he passed behind my seat as he briefly left the theatre for a few minutes while we continued to watch Casablanca, he slowed down and seemed to look directly at me and tears were just streaming down... He must have thought I was mad...having a slight overreaction anyhow...I think he recognises me this time too. Maybe I am just imagining that, but... Anyhow, this year I have been smart enough to leave my phone behind — for that read, so terrified of it happening again that I didn't dare bring it along...The man's a genius, but you don't want to see his dark side...So be warned, if any of you decide to go to his next course, and I would absolutely recommend it, switch your phones off! You have been warned...

Here and there

2009-04-15T13:22:00.009Z

I'm sitting here typing this under blue skies. The busy city street below my window is full of the smell of warm blossom and, now and then, when there is the occasional lull in traffic and all you hear is the slow swish of trees from neighbouring gardens and the call of birds in flight, you can close your eyes and think yourself almost anywhere. I love days like today.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well...

2009-04-09T15:32:00.008Z

All feels right with the world today.

Last night I made, and froze, a banoffee pie, a mound of gooey loveliness to be eaten at the weekend. The rain has stopped. The first purple bud of the desk-plant I bought last year has appeared overnight; I have just re-read psalm 23 and using my brand new keyboard have written the start of the first poem I have written in what feels like years. Also the magnolias are out and there are only 2 clear days left between now and the end of Lent. Coffee is fast approaching...And, just for today, it feels like nothing else matters.
Today I feel like someone has just given me a long, cold drink of water.

I hope the sun is shining where you are.

Lost in translation

2009-04-04T09:10:00.009Z

I just found a widget that allows readers to translate this blog into other languages. It is over on the links bar at the side. I don't know how accurate it is, so if anyone is fluent in other languages, it would be good to know.

The sun is out so I'm off on my bike to get a few miles in before the rain comes back, or my legs cease up completely.

P.S.
Apparently the Google Translate widget was very bad, so I have taken it off.

Out of sight jigsaws, and sushi...

2009-03-04T16:56:00.008Z

It seems only yesterday that I wrote in here that I had given up chocolate for Lent...Well, I've done it again...Chocolate AND coffee this year, so my nerves are on fire — constant red alert. Only another 35 days to go though (apparently Sundays don't count as Lenten days!).

Anyway, I really can't believe that it has rolled around again, and that Lent is here. Time has just slipped away.

I should be keeping an eye on time...making sure it doesn't just pass me by. It is not just me saying that, apparently it was a direct message from angels for me. So I was told anyway...

When I got back in touch with my dad (Brendan) again, the time just before I ended up living in my car, he heard about a woman in Ireland who was a mystic and received messages from angels. He got in touch with her. I don't know to this day what he said to her, but he had her telephone number and urged me to call her, saying she would be expecting my call. I didn't know what to say, and wasn't going to, but one day, feeling very foolish, I found myself dialing her number.

A softly spoken Irish lady answered, but it clearly wasn't a good time for her — I think she was in a hurry to pick one of her children up from somewhere (yes, she also has children and lives in a modern house in a modern part of Ireland). She said she had received a message for me though — that the angels had given her a message saying that I had many talents (haven't we all!) that I was in danger of wasting, and that time was running out. She said she was very busy and couldn't talk but that I should give her my address and that she would write to me with the message.

I thought she was fobbing me off, but I gave her my address in Newcastle anyway and a few weeks later a letter did arrive. It took up only one side of paper and repeated the message from the angels: saying that they stressed that I needed to be particularly careful about time, and not to let it slip past. Which at the time I thought was a very strange message, even though that is what I have always tended to do in my life. I was a bit disappointed in a way, of all the things that angels could tell you...especially me in the lost and fragile state I was in at the time. She also gave me the name of my two guardian angels. Names which weren't in English, but which, even though I was sceptical of the whole thing, I still found a bit disturbing seeing written down in the letter.She said all I needed to do was call the name and ask them to come down and they would. I remember rolling the sounds around my tongue and for a few days finding myself silently saying them. But then I got frightened of what I was doing and tried to forget them — which, unfortunately, I have now succeeded in doing. (Though I think I still have the letter somewhere.)

I'd never met this woman myself. All I knew was her name, and her voice...

Then yesterday, in a local bookshop, I squeezed past a couple pushing a toddler in a buggy, and as I did so knocked up against one of the bookcases. A display book, standing face-out on the edge of one of the shelves, threatened to topple. It was a new hardback book with a very nice light cover. As I reached up to straighten it, I instinctively read the title and then my eyes shot up to the author - because suddenly I knew who it was. It was her. The woman with the message for me from the angels. She has a book out, an autobiography called Angels In My Hair. Her name is Lorna Bryne, and she is apparently Kosher — for those who believe.

Brendan still has her telephone number and gave it to me again yesterday when I told him. Though I wouldn't dare call her again. But how odd...Time did run out for me in the end and I ended up in my car. So in a way the message was right. And then I wrote an autobiography. An autobiography which was there right at the right time in publishing in a way. And now the person who gave me that message has written her autobiography too - with many more books to come it seems. It gave me shivers standing there in the bookshop holding it in my hands. Kind of...sort of...in a way...mysterious...

You can get yourself in a state of mind where things start to feel like proof. As if someone is laying a trail... constantly saying: Now do you believe? Now do you ...? Now...? How about this time..?

Skye High

2008-12-30T11:49:00.010Z

I had an almost perfect Christmas — up on the Isle of Skye. My head is full of postcard-perfect images that I hope never fade.

I've never been to Skye before. I'd nearly been. I once went across to the island of Barra — many years ago, landing with only 3 other passengers in a tiny, 12-seater British Airways plane directly onto their long, white, cockle beach, which doubles as the runway — and island-hopping on the way home, down the freezing necklace of islands that make up the Outer Hebrides — uninterested in them mostly, ticking them off, reading Louis MacNeice and dreaming of getting to Skye and of home. But I never had time to stop off there in the end. And it's a place I've wondered about ever since...So I am so glad I got the chance to go. Skye is in a world of its own, definitely worth making time for.

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas.

In the words of the Mexican emailer I mentioned in the last post ...I splash all your New Years with blessings.

From Mexico with love

2008-12-20T23:49:00.004Z

Someone sent me an email this week. Someone from Mexico, writing mostly in broken English. They signed off saying - "I splash your life with blessings"
'I splash your life with blessings'... It's still making me smile.

Tis (almost) the year's midnight...

2008-08-31T20:55:00.022Z

and the day's...

Today is the last day of summer — apparently! My knees hurt already... The starlings are off to Africa, everything is hunkering down, and despite the shiver I get at this time of year now from memories of being in the car when the cold set in — I still love more than anything this whole season we are coming into — the long, slow striptease of autumn.

Thanks very much for your emails. Yes, I am well, just haven't written in here much because I am concentrating on looking ahead, putting all this behind me... Things these days are, mostly, good — definitely mostly good. Even though at times it still feels as though I am holding up the sky with one hand. Especially as we begin the long run-up to Christmas.

Try as I might to shrug it off, and no matter how many people I surround myself with, Christmas will probably always be dimmed a bit by loneliness for me — it probably always has been — but now that I've written my book and so can no longer be in touch with any member of the family I used to have, ever again — even just to play 'happy families' once a year — even if I wanted to - I find myself looking on Christmas almost as a chore, wishing it was over already . It's only once a year though — and there are definitely worse things. Definitely, definitely worse things! And having lived in my car for all that time, I now feel very qualified to say that. I need to remember it...No matter how tough or hopeless things seem - there are definitely worse things.

Besides, this year I will be with someone who I know cares for me, and with other lovely people — and, before the Christmas tree is dusted off and the tinsel untangled from its boxes, we've got the year going down in flames, in another spectacular autumn to look forward to! The perfect time of year.

Food for thought

2008-08-23T13:36:00.020Z

When things get to me I cook. When they really get to me I bake. Yesterday I baked TWO egg custard tarts - which, warm, has got to be the ultimate comfort food — and a loaf of banana bread. Then I settled in, with several mugs of builders tea, to finish the book I am reading - The Road Home by Rose Tremain.

Almost every novel I have read recently has increased my desire and — more and more — my confidence, to write more books. If writing were that simple everybody would be doing it, but sometimes you read a book that makes it seem so clear. The Road Home is one of them - Tremain definitely manages to make it seem that way. Maybe my response is because it deals with homelessness and surviving on the edges of society - things which are still fresh in my mind; and so I feel I could have written something similar from experience rather than imagination. In places it almost feels like writing-by-numbers, which after the brilliance of Music and Silence I almost don't dare write. Of course it isn't...But because of my own experience of it all, the fact that for all those months I walked such a similar walk to Lev's (the main character), it seems so.

Maybe that is why the plot felt so visible at times, that I always had the feeling of knowing what was coming next. Maybe because that is what comes next...that it was so true to life! But it spoiled it for me a bit. Answering questions raised in a novel before the plot reveals them to you, and anticipating surprises, is part of the pleasure of reading, but I felt the answers came a bit too easily here (robbing me of the satisfaction of the penny-dropping moment coming only after the appropriate amount of head-scratching). Who am I to say though - it was definitely a moving read, and kept me engaged with the characters, and wanting to know what happened next right to the end, and Rose Tremain is Rose Tremain — every line of her should be read, and I couldn't even dream of writing that well — it has even won the Orange prize for fiction, so what do I know...Maybe you need a book like that to come along to give you that extra bit of confidence that you can do it yourself... Or maybe the craft always shows through the story when you look for it as closely as I have probably been doing since I put my own story into words - something, subconsciously, I had probably been 'writing' in my head my whole life, since it happened. Anyway, it has confirmed the fact that I want to write more than I want to do anything. Nothing comes closer to that feeling of sitting alone in a room and loosing yourself in writing and it all coming together... I want to do that more than anything. To write books that people want to curl up with. There can't be a pleasure greater than that.

Though egg-custard tart sometimes comes close...

In case I've wettted your appetite, here's my recipe:

250g (9oz) sweet, shortcrust pastry (you can make it or buy Just-Roll shortcrust pastry)
2 egg yolks, beaten — for sealing the pastry case
75g (3oz) caster sugar
8 egg yolks
570ml (1 pt) double cream
freshly grated nutmeg
20cm (8") fluted flan tin

Preheat oven to 180/350/mark 4. Line the flan tin with the pastry and cover with greaseproof paper. Fill with uncooked rice (or baking beans if you have them) to keep the pastry flat. Place the pastry case in the oven and bake 'blind' until it starts to brown around the edges. Remove from the oven. Carefully lift out the greaseproof paper and baking beans before replacing the pastry case in the oven. Once the base starts to colour, remove from the oven and brush the pastry all over with the 2 beaten egg yolks to seal any cracks. Return to the oven and as soon as the egg yolk mix is cooked repeat the process twice more to ensure that the pastry case is totally sealed. Finally, remove from the oven and set aside.

Turn the oven right down to 120/250/ mark 3/4 and proceed to make the filling. Whisk the sugar and 8 egg yolks together in a bowl. Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan, then take off the heat and pour over the egg yolks and sugar, whisking well. Pass through a fine sieve (if you have one) into a jug. Leave to cool slightly and skim off any bubbles from the surface.
To bake the tart, place the baked pastry case on a baking sheet and put into the oven (it is much easier to fill the case once it is in the oven - it avoids any spills!) Carefully pour the filling into the case. Grate fresh nutmeg over the top and bake for 45-50 minutes. Keep checking as the tart cooks. You are aiming for the filling to be just set, but slightly wobbly in the centre. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. Don't put in the fridge as this will change the texture. (But I any leftovers put in the fridge will taste even better the next day).
Now, dim the lights, draw the curtains, turn the lock and settle down to eat it undisturbed with a good read and a glass of something cold. Some things are not for sharing. Enjoy!

P.S.
If you have any favourite recipes of your own you would like to share, add them here as a comment, or email them to me: I'm collecting recipes at the moment...the luminous yellow notebook I used to keep recipes in, and which was bursting with torn-out recipes from magazines and newspapers over the years, and scribbled with ones people had given or cooked for me, disappeared with all the rest of my stuff in storage, so now I'm starting again — making a new one — and since there are readers of this blog from so many countries there must be some really interesting foods. I'm sure everyone has at least one meal they love to cook, one recipe they think is perfect and would be able to cook on a desert island.

There are eggs, potatoes and onions, a few slivers of ham, some slightly greenish cheese, and half a loaf of homemade olive-bread in my fridge. Anyone got a good recipe for tortilla? Or maybe Quesilladas (if you are in Mexico)?

Hasta la vista...

2008-07-30T15:04:00.007Z

Time has just flown by. My book was published in Portugal last week and there was also an interview in Reader's Digest in Mexico! How bizarre is that?
Can't believe it is the last day of July tomorrow...Every time I go to write in this blog I always find myself waiting for something 'better' to write about - though if anyone knows by now that the extraordinary is usually there in the ordinary, then it should be me. Time has got the better of me again for now though... I promise I'll update this blog with news soon ... but for now I am still working hard and trying to keep on track...and enjoying the sun when it makes an appearance.

Butterflies

2008-05-03T13:30:00.008Z

Saw lovely, blue butterflies in flight today. Don't think I've ever seen blue ones before, not like these anyway — small triangles of bright, summer-sky blue — like little chips of sky — fluttering above long, green grass at the back of a churchyard. And, for a change today, the sky was almost the exact same colour. Yesterday's hailstones almost don't make sense. So, for the first time in weeks, I'm just about to take my bike out and hope that if the clouds darken I can cycle faster than them.
Thanks for all your comments...It's great knowing people are still reading and really interesting seeing where you are all from.
A

...like bookends

2008-04-18T17:34:00.012Z

I was thinking of my old bookcase today — a wood-worm-riddled, junk-shop find that I got from outside a shop up near Leeds just after my last year at college. Somehow I'd managed to hang on to it through countless moves over the years. Until the year before last, when all my belongings in storage were sold-off without notifying me, when I could no longer pay the bill and didn't have an address for them to get in touch to let me know: everything from diaries to cutlery to washing machine to a triangular piece of the Berlin Wall I'd hammered off myself, to every photograph I'd ever had, to that lovely, dark-wood bookcase, went.

It was wider than most bookcases, mahoghany or a dirty oak I never knew how to tell, with four shelves — a larger one at the bottom for dictionaries and atlases and all my old Law textbooks, the three others bowed under the weight of an ever-changing hoard of paperbacks that I loved taking out at random, sometimes just for five-minute reads one after the other, tuning into the sound of all those distinct voices while pasta boiled or toast burned, unconciously getting the rhythm of the voices in my head until they were familiar, before snapping them closed, blowing the dust off another and spending time in other company and another world. A wooden pelmet, with three carved spirals along it, grey with clogged dust, came a few inches down over the top shelf and one of the front legs was shorter than the other requiring a wad of paper wedged in to stop the wobble, and it smelt of the dark oil I occassionally used to clean it and the damp Woods from where it once must have come.

In January every year, as close to the New Year as I remembered to do it, I used to clear all the books from the top shelf, wipe it down, and only fill it again with any book I'd read from that date on. It was very satisying from month to month watching the top shelf fill up again, as much as the ones beneath it, almost like watching a child grow; and seeing it so empty at the beginning of the year was always a good incentive to get to bed early to crack the spine of a new book, and form a good habit for the rest of the year.

I thought of that today, because I just did it here on the unwonky Ikea bookcase I bought as a replacement last year. So far there are only six books on it, not good for April. But hopefully passing it every day on my way out the door will shame me into reading more.
Hopefully, in the not too far distant future, there will be space on it for another one I have written myself.

Black swans and cravings

2008-03-16T16:31:00.011Z

I saw a pair of black swans yesterday. I had no idea swans could even be black - let alone seen one before. They were smaller than white swans, and completely black, with long red beaks. These two looked like they were preparing to build a nest as well, in underneath a curtain of long, green tassells of weeping willow down at the edge of a pond. One of them shovelling up bits of reed and dried leaves and grass with their bright red beaks, the other shaking it all out into loose piles.

Apparently it's a phrase too, a noun: 'a black swan'. Didn't know that either.

One week until Lent is over and I can eat chocolate biscuits again. It's all I can think about recently.

Endings

2008-03-08T12:49:00.003Z

I've finally crashed through a barrier. I finished reading the endings of several books I've had on the go for what seems like months, and it's a fantastic feeling to have finally done it. It was almost a psychological block. For some reason, I just wasn't able to finish them. But in the last few days without even thinking about it I found myself opening them at the bookmark, curling up somewhere and, one after the other, reading on until the last page. Pure joy.

One of them was the 'The Snow Geese' by William Fiennes, which is a book I had with me in one of my bags in the car all that time. Needless to say I wasn't in a state of mind to read much then, but I haven't been able to finish it since either, and I don't know why. I loved it from the start, for all sorts of reasons, one of them being the close-up-ness of the writing, he doesn't pan out much, he has the lens right up there, close to whatever he is describing. So if he writes about a woman in a long red coat wearing a black velvet cloche hat you see her standing there - very visual, you can 'see' everything he writes about as he travels halfway across the world following migrating geese to their nesting places and his own internal compass leading him back home. It wouldn't be for everyone, it's a very slow, quiet, but evocative, beautiful, beautiful book. Maybe it was because I had it in the car with me that finishing that one felt so momentous; it felt like I was finishing more than just the book, like I was finally drawing a line under things.

But the book I finished a couple of days ago: 'Eat Pray Love' (which curiously is also a travel book, of a sort) - and which definitely wasn't one of my favourites, her voice began to grate and it dragged on in places — is the one I keep thinking about. I woke up thinking about it this morning. Always just one thing she said at the end of the book about all the changes she has gone through by the book's end, how much she has grown as a person. And she said something which has stayed with me...About her growing as a person, she used the analogy of an acorn becoming an oak tree, and says the way she has come to see it there isn't just one force at work (the acorn pushing to become an oak tree) but two (also the oak tree being there already somewhere willing the acorn on to become the oaktree it already is - on some plane). She says, what if it's not just her younger, weaker self pushing on to become the stronger one she ended up as, but what if the woman she was always going to grow into was there already (somewhere) drawing her on to become her — The older you already there somewhere waiting for the younger you to push towards it. I may have got that idea a bit muddled - I've read a few other books in between — but it was something like that. And for some reason it felt like a powerful idea that I hadn't heard expressed like that before; and for some reason it stayed with me. So I thought I'd put it here. Because I woke up thinking of it again this morning: of the person you will finally become, being there already drawing you to become it. It's a strange idea to get your head around, but like words, what we imagine can be very powerful - and it's fun closing your eyes and imagining who that person you end up being might be — who you'd want them to be! And once you have an image of them in your mind to then push yourself to become that person that you end up being ('knowing' that they are there somewhere already drawing you to become them anyway) - walking towards them thought by thought, action by action, until you are the person you were always meant to be. Sorry...way too heavy for a blog. Rain is blowing across the windows here again.

One fire and a funeral

2008-02-17T10:49:00.014Z

I drove up to Camden market this morning to see what damage last weekend's fire had caused. I'd heard about it on the news at the time but at that stage they weren't sure how much damage had been done. Since then I've been out of London mostly, and the only news I saw was Sky news one time, with one very solemn report from India saying, 'The famous Camden Market in London has been reduced to ashes.' So I thought I'd better go up and have a look for myself.

I was expecting the whole place to be charcoal, all those places I used to go to when I was living in my car to be gone — but it's nothing like that. The Hawley Arms pub is destroyed, and there's half a row of boarded-up shops, and some top windows in the flats above blown in, and all of the stalls down the side, on the pub side of the canal, are gone. But it must have been very contained. The rest of the market, and the rest of Camden looks pretty much as it always has done, as buzzy and grubby and raunchy and edgy as it ever was when I was sleeping in the car and used to go down there to the Stables market across the way at the end of days I could afford to, for the cartons of hot chinese food being sold off cheaply for a pound. If anything, the soot and smoke stains and burnt-out shops, and the feint, lingering smell of woodsmoke mixed into more recent smoke from joss sticks and hashish layered with the stench of rancid canal water and new leather from the tiny squeeezed-together S&M shops and car fumes and sweat and cheap, fried street food, just add to the atmosphere.

If the wind had been in the other direction that night though, it would have been a very different story...really would have been hell down there. It would have taken something that random. As it is with lives.

I went to Andrew's dad's funeral on Wednesday, very sad.

2008-02-08T17:21:00.001Z

The buds are opening on the trees again. Today, for the first time this year I saw branches flecked with pale pink blossom.

DS

2008-02-04T23:43:00.000Z

An hour ago a friend of mine's father died; his name was Douglas, he was a good man. Maybe while you're passing this way you'll say a prayer for him.
x

Life seams...

2008-02-02T17:53:00.002Z

I am sitting here trying to catch up with emails. Lots of them in the last few days are from readers in Asia.. I had no idea my story would end up in an article over there and be read by a 16-year old student in Singapore or a man in Pakistan...how bizarre is that! But over the last few days emails have been coming in from people who have read the article or read my book all those thousands of miles away, telling me how, although they might have very different lives, they have been able to relate to my story in some way.

I have spent the last hour dipping in and out of some of their blogs, reading about their lives and cultures, being reminded that people are essentially the same wherever they come from, the same fears the same dreams...
Some of their blogs have pictures, or some are so vividly written that I almost feel I have swapped worlds. Then I look up from the virtual world of my computer screen and back out through my side window, here in my real world, out at the London skyline — from this distance all the scaled-down, matchbox-sized landmarks stretching across from the towers and cranes of Canary Wharf and the dome of St Paul's along to the long misshapen pole of the Post Office Tower, and there, slowly turning through the trees, the big, bright bangle of the London Eye poking up from somewhere down on the Thames. I look back to the computer, at Shing Yi and her friends at their reunion, in a restaurant somewhere in Singapore, smiling out at me from the screen and I can't help smiling back at how this world wide web we are all now in is making the world so tiny...at the great possibilities of that...at how it was a blog and the people from around the world that came to read and give me encouragement on it every day, that literally saved my life in the end.

As I wrote that I just remembered something about Asia, some connection to when I was in the car. While I was sleeping across the front seats of the car in the laneway all those months, at one point, I can't remember exactly when, but at almost the coldest bit of it I seem to remember, there was an earthquake in the Philippines, catastrophic destruction; every morning I'd turn the key in the ignition to listen for a few minutes on the car radio to news of the mud slide disaster — to how whole villages had been wiped out, and generations of families gone overnight. Morning after morning there would be reports of how many more homeless people there were now in these villages in the Philippines each day. The Phillipines had always seemed a milllion miles away for me before, tiny squiggles on a map, just a name; but during those weeks I felt such a connection to them somehow. And as the traumatised voices of survivors filled the car each morning, or accounts of them given, telling how they had not only lost their homes and all they had, but had lost their people too: mothers, husbands, children, friends, grandparents, lovers, all gone in an instant, it made me realise how lucky I was in a way. I know that sounds bizarre: I was homeless, on my own, had broken down, and was living in my car and I thought my own loss seemed unending, but it made me realise that I didn't have to deal with the enormity of their loss all at the same time, not only were they homeless and had their dreams wiped out, but some of them were having to deal with the grief of losing all their loved ones at the same time. It was near the end of my time living in the car and I had almost shut down completely, but somehow something far worse that was happening over in the Philippines got me thinking again, and got me feeling something other than my own pain.

I used to sit there in the car under the trees those mornings shivering, eating whatever I had left over from the night before for breakfast, before I drove off to the hospital to have a hot shower in their basement, and whenever I thought I couldn't manage for another day or another moment I would think of all those people who had had their lives blown apart and say to myself 'At least you have a car to sleep in, Anya, they don't even have that.' So what many of you have said in emails about my story making you see your own problems in more perspective, I can understand. I don't think anyone's problems are really bigger or smaller than others', but I know that feeling. I know it because waking up to news about the disaster in the Phillipines all those mornings is what got me through some days too. It taught me that there is always something better, but even when you think things can't get worse, there is always, always something worse happening somewhere. What was happening all those thousands of miles away in the Philippines was much worse than how I had ended up, living in my car...at least I had a car to sleep in, and access to a blog to tell whoever might stumble across it one day about my story. I never realised that a journalist from the New York Times would be the one to stumble across it — and from that hundreds of people would read my blog and that there would be a book and then this, or that one day I would be out of the car, and that again the Philippines would come into my story. It did yesterday, with a man leaving a message here on my blog saying simply 'I am from the Philipines, thank you for writing your story.' I'll probably never know, but maybe he was someone whose life was torn apart by that disaster that time, one of the ones I listened to in the sleeping bag laying in the car...the ones whose voices came into the car those mornings to show me that I was still a whole lot luckier than some. Maybe he was part of the invisible weft of my life, as others through connecting with this blog or my book have become, and I part of theirs. I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to say here, it's just that sometimes you think you start to see the seams of life — meanings and purposes behind things, and how everything is connected. It comes, it goes — and I don't think anyone ever does ever quite see them, but I hope I never give up believing that they are there: that somehow things are connected and for a purpose and that there is some design in all this, some method in what sometimes just seems like madness.

Book in Singapore

2008-02-02T17:47:00.001Z

I have been told that in Singapore you might find my book in MPH, Borders
or Kinokuniya stores?

If not, it can be ordered from this blog, by clicking on the link over at the side of the blog (the one under the pink book cover. Or just click on the pink book cover)
Hope that helps...

Goldfinches

2008-01-21T17:14:00.000Z

The birds I saw were goldfinches - just been sent pictures. If I figure a way I might put them up. Very cute.

Off to a painting class...yet again in rain.

Antidote to grey

2008-01-13T16:01:00.000Z

Woke up to bleak, grey, drizzly skies again today. Everything, even the grass and, in the mist that hung over everything, the trees, looked grey today. I stood at the kitchen window, in the new, pink bathrobe I got for Christmas, eating cereal, staring out at what could have been a scene straight from an old grainy, Sunday-afternoon black-and-white. Definitely a day for thinking about going straight back to bed... But for a while I stood there, chewing mindlessly, watching a pair of magpies hopping about next-door's lawn. Then just as my eyes adjusted to all the grey, two tiny, colourful little birds flew through the drizzle onto a birdtable in the garden at the other side. I don't know what they were, but seeing them there among all that grey made me smile. They were soft, minky-brown little things, with flashes of yellow on their breasts and bright red faces. Tiny like tits, but not tits...Beautiful splashes of colour brightening up the monochrome. There was something quite clownish about them. Their faces looked like they had just been dipped in bright red paint...And, on a morning like this morning, just before they flew off again skimming the hedges, it was easy to think they might have been designed just to bring a smile on the greyest of mornings.
It worked for me this morning...don't know what they were, but must look out for them more often.

...I really think so...

2008-01-11T11:11:00.000Z

It always seems to be raining when I write a blog.

In the post today I got the application form I'd requested months ago for a stay at a writers' retreat. I'd almost forgotten I'd sent off for it...While I was writing the book it was on my list of things I really wanted to do — hiding myself away in a retreat somewhere — which, by going down to Cornwall to write big chunks of 'Abandoned', I almost did. But now that I have the application form for a 'real' writers' retreat, it seems a bit self indulgent to want to go off somewhere just to write. I might feel differently if it ever did happen — because you have to apply quite far in advance, a year or more ahead sometimes - and, by then, who knows what I'll be thinking...maybe I'd be all fired up for it again by then. But I'm also beginning to wonder whether I was motivated by the right thing — maybe 'real' work should continue to take priority over everything for now. Maybe life from now on should be about plans rather than dreams — at least for me, to make sure I never end up in any place like the laneway ever again. Maybe writing books is something for other people...or at least for another time.
Just pipe dreams...

Rain has stopped, so I'm off on my bike to clear my head and get some air into my lungs. Hope it's stopped where you are...

Happy New Year!

2007-12-31T16:12:00.000Z

The tree lights are on behind me, the decorations still up, and I'm sitting here cracking nuts and eating the last of the Christmas chocolates from the tin, trying to work out what my New Year's resolutions should be this year. I intended posting them here so I'd have a constant reminder. But I've just remembered that my main resolution last year was not to do any 'shoulds' at all from now on. So, hopefully, at the stroke of midnight tonight, I'll be resolving just to keep positive and to keep going forward — which is what I want most from myself next year. I've got what feels like the start of flu, so if I can keep awake for it, I'll be seeing the New Year in tonight with a pint of Lemsip and some soluble Aspirin to bring my temperature down — but there's not a hint of complaint in that, because I was part of a new friend's great, family Christmas this year and I know the coming year will be a good one.
I hope it is for us all....
Happy New Year
x

Merry Christmas Everybody...

2007-12-24T20:30:00.000Z

Merry Christmas to all! Thankyou for reading the blog and the book and for all your support this year... Very best wishes for 2008
x

Dartmoor

2007-12-22T09:51:00.003Z

I could come some time over Christmas, or maybe we could meet part way? Sorry I didn't tell you about my book when I was there last time. I was going to, when we were out on the moors with that horse that was dying, and then at the pub when you were telling me about your spiritual experience with your dad when he was dying. It seemed wrong to tell you my story after that, it felt too important to you. Anyway you know know.

Footsteps in the frost — 0r — giving myself permission to have a nice Christmas

2007-12-21T09:59:00.000Z

I woke up this morning with the cold howling around inside my bones. But looking out of the window everything was all white and beautiful and brilliant, the sun like pearl behind white sky, and everything glittered with frost. It looked quite magical. I love mornings like this. Give me this over rain any day. I went to a pantomine the night before last, and the fairy godmother in it was fantastic, really throwing herself into the part, tip-toeing around the cast waving her wand and whispering good into everyones ears. That's what it felt like this morning, waking up to all this whiteness, as if someone had tiptoed through the night - over rooftops and hills, through the trees, up and down streets and alleyways and parks, waving a magic wand, turning the land this clean, silvery-white. I felt happy just laying there thinking it. I turned up the music on the CD alarm — tugged the duvet around me and lay there, staring out at the bare trees on the horizon behind all those misty layers of white, dreaming. One part of my mind though wanted to yank me back to thoughts of Christmas — Christmas that will always and ever be family, no matter how long you've been estranged. It's always hard not having family, but there's an added ache through Christmas, and the wondering if I should try to build bridges, at least with Mummy — pick up the phone just to make contact, and to see how she is...just to hear her voice even. I go through it every year, but I never do it. While my uncle is still there, and there are new husbands and wives and friends in teh family who know nothing about me or the past, it can never be anything more than a charade anyway, and me never more than a victim of that. I can't be that anymore. But maybe this might be the year to change things.
This year it feels even more difficult. Every part of me dreads finding out now if Mummy, or any of the others, have come across the book, dreads knowing any upset I've caused by bringing it all out into the open...She knows it all happened, she was there at the police station that day all those years ago, but the mind has to do funny things to survive and maybe she managed to somehow wipe out the details; maybe she had to to have him back in her life. Also she knows nothing about living in the car, about my breakdown and all those months out there, none of that. If they do know by now, my getting in touch would just make it worse - I think everday that one of them will find out — every time the phone rings my blood stops. But if they haven't read it...maybe I could just say hello to her, meet her on her own somewhere without my uncle or anyone else knowing? But I couldn't answer even the most basic questions now without lying, I'd have to say I've been getting on with life all this time, just doing the ordinary things...I couldn't mention anything about the book or how I ended up in the car, or any of this... But then what if she found out about the book sometime later? Surely that deception would feel worse? I've fallen asleep thinking about it all for weeks now in the run up to Christmas — almost tormenting myself — should I, shouldn't I — at least send her flowers even? Could I, couldn't I ?...Family never go away, never — especially at this time of year, no matter how long you've been apart. But this morning I managed to pull my mind back to the frost, the glittering, hard frost covering everything, and that fairy godmother in the pantomine the other night in her pink, satin high-heel shoes tip toeing through the night spreading magic, until all I sensed were her whispered, positive words, and all I could see were footsteps in the frost going forward.

Breaking the back of my inbox

2007-12-09T18:22:00.000Z

Time seems so speeded up — another Christmas already! Sometimes I can't believe how quick things are going. Don't feel I've done enough these past twelve months to mark off another year just yet. I'm here though, surviving, hopefully putting the peices of my life back together again. What I'm not doing so well with at the moment, is with emails — in replying to them.

I thought I was more or less ontop of things, but last week I found a folder I had moved lots of emails into. Lovely emails in response to the book. I separated them out, intending to reply to them later that week. Only I somehow forgot all about it, so I am now playing catch-up with myself — trying to reply to all those that were in that folder, as well as the ones that have come in since. That might take a while, so for now I just wanted to say thank you so much for reading the book and for taking the time to get in touch. I really, really have appreciated all the support and hearing your thoughts and sharing parts of your own stories, about you or others close to you — some of who never made it.
I'll never forget that this time the year before last, I was almost one of them...
For that I feel so very lucky.
...Thank you.

Rain stops play

2007-12-02T15:30:00.001Z

My plan for today was to go for a long walk somewhere. Preferably through woods, kicking up piles of dry leaves as I went. But I woke up today to rain — heavy, noisy rain gunning down for most of the morning. So instead I stayed inside reading the Fly Truffler, a beautiful, unusual love story that I'll be a long time getting out of my head. I'm typing here to delay reading the last pages.

Friday already

2007-11-30T19:45:00.000Z

December probably isn't the time for it, but I'm looking around for another job at the moment. This job was only ever meant to be a stepping stone - a way back into things — temporary cover that I knew would come to an end, but I feel quite anxious now that it is - anxious about what the next step will be. Not sure which way to turn again. Not sure I'm tough-headed or tough-hearted enough to go back to a career in law full-time, even if that was possible, but not sure what else I can do. It's hard knowing what you're cut out for.

Sometimes I give in to dreams — dream that one day I'll go on to write other books. Books that I'll be proud of. Not autobiographical writing, not always anyway. I'm not exactly ashamed of 'Abandoned', I know from the emails I get that it has helped a lot of people. But because the details of my background are in it, the sometimes graphic details of things that went on that I wouldn't ever tell people face to face, or have them know about me outside of this book - things that I spat out of me like a bad taste in the mouth, and needed to to move on — it is not a book I can look people in the eye and admit to being proud of having written. Not yet anyway... But in writing this book, in the actual process, I have discovered how much I love writing, and how much I'd love to go on to do more of it one day. I realise that is just a dream, but there have to be dreams... If I could do something useful that way though, somehow connect with others through something I write one day then I think I would finally be happy in my own skin. Some people would say that is another form of retreat from the world, but I don't think so...maybe I have just found something I love.

In the meantime though, it's hard graft and scouring job ad's.

.

Thank you

2007-11-20T22:33:00.000Z

I stopped off at a shop yesterday morning, on the drive back, and had a very surreal moment. My book was there on one of the shelves and just as I walked past, a woman came along, took it down from the shelf and after reading the back cover and skimming several pages, went off to buy it. I couldn't believe it. What are the chances of that happening? Not only the having a book up there at all, but actually standing there as someone takes it down and starts to read it. For a moment I was stunned. I immediately picked up another book and pretended to be reading, but when she turned out of sight I actually walked off after her. It was Monday morning and there was hardly anyone about and I found myself wanting to walk past her and whisper 'thank you for buying my book,' or just to tell her that it was my book she had in her hands, wanting to say something,

anything...

Because what are the chances of seeing that again. Of course I didn't. But it was a very strange moment. I hurried out into the rain, cold and shaky, shocked at what I had almost blurted out, and at seeing someone there actually reading my book. And very confused by my own reaction to both.

Who knows, one of the emails I get one day might actually be from her. Though now I'll never know...

If you felt someone watching you from a distance, for those few minutes in a shop yesterday, after you had just picked up my book, someone acting strangely behind you, half-turned away, trying to be invisible but clearly wanting to say something, it was probably me — me feeling a million things at once; but trying to pluck up the courage to say 'thank you for reading my book.'

Mondays

2007-11-12T18:22:00.001Z

I'd almost forgotten about Monday mornings! Not a good day today, feel less than solid. Thoughts of Christmas and the paperback being out and the possibilty of one of my family one day seeing it, battered around inside my head all day.

God I need you.

When does the pretense become reality?

2007-11-11T09:46:00.001Z

Thank you God, for seeing me through all this, and for the strength to get through it.

Remembrace Sunday (Will it always be like this?)

2007-11-11T09:36:00.001Z

Woke up this morning to loud rain.

The paperback being out has unsettled me. I feel like layers have been peeled away from me again. I feel all at sea. Today I felt that most of my strength during the writing of the book and after had been pretense, really. It's just that I hadn't tested it so much. When does the pretense become real? When do you walk out of the house in the morning with your head held high and your shoulders back, and feel like things are more solid around you?

Fox

2007-11-09T20:21:00.000Z

It was difficult to concentrate at work today. I found distraction in everything. I kept staring out of the window trying to watch the clouds changing shape, or found myself standing in the kitchen down on the first floor, staring out at the long lawns at the backs of the houses across the way. Towards the back of one of them there's a moss-covered bench beneath a beautiful maple tree with big, beautifully-shaped red and gold leaves the colour of flames. The rest of the lawn in front has been raked and is clear and green, but the area behind is still thickly carpeted with gold and russet leaves fallen from the taller trees at the back of the garden. I looked at the leaves and looked away a few times today before I saw what was in them. Curled up, just to the left of the bench, right there in the open, was a big fox, asleep in the leaves. Just curled there, happy as you like, in the middle of the day, at the back of a garden in a busy area of London. I kept going down to check throughout the afternoon, and he would be turned in different directions, but still curled up in a ball, his head tucked into his tail. It made me think of waking at night in the car, raising myself from the sleeping bag to get a sip of water or pull the layers tighter around myself and staring up out of the windscreen at the tall thin trees towering up like sticks of charcoal into the black sky, and several times seeing foxes coming back at night, trotting silently up the dark laneway, in twos or threes, their red eyes staring directly at me for long seconds before they disappeared off into the trees. Never seen one during the day like that though, just laying there. Almost the exact same colour as the autumn leaves.

Ghost-leaves on the pavements

2007-11-04T11:12:00.000Z

I haven't written here for a while. I've been trying to let things settle and to think forwards, rather than backwards all the time. Obviously I had to do that while I was writing the book, think backwards — wade through all that past, all that heavy sludge of childhood emotion. I felt like a spring recoiling on itself. But once the book was finished it was time to try to go forward again. It's what we all have to do, but that's exactly what I hadn't been doing for so long. I'd gotten stuck. So these past few weeks I've tried to think forwards, and put all the past behind me. But the paperback is out tomorrow, so for a while I can see that will be difficult to do.

I've still been writing, lots of writing, but all of it in notebooks, scribbled on the bus on the way to work or in cafes over lukewarm teas at lunchtime. Some of it okay, but more of it just words, grounding words, anchoring me to the day. I don't think I could get through a day without writing something now...But being back at work changes everything.

There's no time for anything anymore. Even on days off I still find myself thinking about work, or washing or ironing or tidying, or making soup to freeze or replying to emails. Sometimes, something that happens during the day strikes me and I say ' that'll be a nice thing to tell people on the blog, I must remember to write in it tonight.' Even if it's just about fighting the urge to kick up the piles of leaves noisily on the way to work, imagining myself laughing loudly as I mow through them. Or seeing the beautiful imprints of big, golden sycamore leaves on the pavements as I walk up from the bus each morning, the early autumn streets overnight paved with gold. One morning, weeks ago, the pavement was full of those leaves, crunchy yellow and gold, then the rain came and for days soaked through them, and when it stopped and the leaves were blown or swept away, gold-brown 'leaf-stain' was left underneath, on the pavement. Beautiful, clear patterns, like ghost-leaves, were left, as far up as the eye could see. They're still there, beneath the city grime. Every day they get a bit fainter, but the pavement on the hill up to where I work is full of beautiful, feint, leaf pattern. The streets already holding their memory of autumn.

Seeing things like that makes the walk to work far less dull, and one day last week it lifted my spirits so much that I decided to write a blog about it when I got back. But when it comes to the end of the day, I switch on the computer and stare glassy-eyed at the blog and I've either forgotten about what I was going to write, or it suddenly doesn't seem interesting at all. I start telling myself that nobody wants to read about somebody else's day at work when they get home from their own, or about ghost-leaves on pavements... And I end up convincing myself to wait until I have something more interesting to write.

But apart from work, nothing much else has happened. Well... I shouldn't say that: I'm not living in the car anymore, so that has happened! And I've told the most intimate details of my life in a book, that's an enormous thing to have happened. But you all know that already... It's still hard to accept the emails I get from people everyday still, telling me how inspiring my story has been, or how it has helped them — even if it is just to appreciate what they have, or simply to stay positive, or to see that there is always a way out, or just to open their eyes to the lives of someone around them. It's difficult to take on board that somehow my life, when I was at my lowest ebb living in my car, and especially the bits of my childhood that I have been so ashamed of, have somehow gone on to help others. Very odd. Somedays, I still have very mixed feelings about telling my own story, wrestling with the rightness or wrongness of it. But when I get those emails, when people tell me how much the book has helped them, even people who ordinarily wouldn't read this kind of book, I can't help feeling a little bit...?? maybe even a little bit proud...?? A little bit like this was what I was meant to do — tell the story that so many other people do not have the words or wherewithall or opportunity to tell. It hasn't been a nice story to tell, but hearing other people's stories has made me appreciate how lucky I was too, in many ways. I have lived two lives in one, and not many people do that — I don't mean one after the other, but both of them in tandem. Yes, I had that childhood, and ended up homeless living in my car on the streets of London not far from where I grew up, but in between I lived a very different life, one which some people would see as being full of priviledge. Maybe that's why I survived intact. So that I could tell the story so many others couldn't tell — stories need to be told, they are what connect us, and what sometimes heal us. So even though it did take falling to the bottom rung of the ladder, with a breakdown and a period of homelessness living in my car to finally get the words out, maybe, in finally getting my story out, I did do the right thing afterall.

The new Paperback cover

2007-10-07T09:07:00.000Z

In case you were wondering... the paperback of my book has a completly new cover to the hardback, and is out on 5th November 2007. And the cover looks like this:

Not sure whether I prefer it or not: it's very pink and white...

Chile...

2007-07-11T15:53:00.000Z

Thanks to Soldad I just came across this again. The journalist got in touch when I signed the book deal and was getting out of the car. It is from a newspaper in Chile. The picture still makes me smile — it's defintely not me though!

I don't speak Spanish so have no idea what it says, though get the general jist from obvious bits. Anyway, while I still haven't gotten around to putting up a blog here, getting on with work things and boring sorting-out things... I thought the picture might amuse, some. Again, it is not me, not even warm...

http://www.lun.cl/modulos/busqueda/searchleft_canales_new.asp?idnoticia=
CH8DKHPC20060608&pagina=1&variable=vagabunda

Back — soon

2007-06-18T12:40:00.000Z

I've been away — cycling, mostly, in Norfolk — and mostly in the rain. Now that I'm back, I'm getting down to tackling my inbox, which is full of emails from readers of the book. The response I've had so far has been amazing, and I really appreciate you taking the time to e-mail, so just to let you know I am not ignoring them... will reply! It just might take a bit longer than usual is all...

Mass

2007-05-27T11:02:00.000Z

Book in hardback charts today.

One last time...

2007-05-17T10:11:00.000Z

Someone e-mailed yesterday saying they'd just randomly come across my blog, and asked me whether it was true, whether I did actually live in my car for all that time. I can't believe someone is still asking that — I don't know whether to scream or cry.
Most of me wants to just shrug it off, not even bother answering. But a tiny part of me, some soft part in under the ribs, wishes they could feel some of the pain still here in my back and neck that I'm still seeing a physiotherapist for — the way the muscles in them contract at the slightest onset of cold, as if they still remember how it was out there the winter before last; or about the thyroxine tablets I'm now having to take because of the hypothyroid problem I developed during those nine months in the car — because my hormones and metabolism got so messed up with all the stress and fear and hunger, and all that brutal cold. Or the way I wake at night, occassionally still sometimes, in a panic, disorientated, facing that big, black emptiness again that I woke to night after night in the woods, my body scrunched up between the sheets the way it had to be sleeping across the front seats, feeling tiny, not knowing which way around I am sleeping, ready to flip myself over to ease the pain I used to have every night in every part of me, with my neck and legs shoved up against the car doors — all that fear as I look around me, that for a long, dark moment I'm gripped with again. Believe it or don't believe it, all I will say, one last time, is that yes, it is completely true, every last moment of it, I did end up having some kind of breakdown and lived, hiding out in my car, not knowing what to do or where to turn, waiting for it to pass, for the healing calm of the trees and nature to strengthen me. And it was terrifying how easy it was to fall off the radar and into that spiral downwards, how it all happened so quickly, as you'll see if you read the book.
Some respect for the courage and pain it took to write my heart and soul in a book which hopefully will go on to help others too, would be the decenter thing — or, at least no emails questioning my reality. It might also be good to realise that some people don't fit into any of the boxes you try to put them into, no matter how big you try to make them. And yes, even people who end up homelesss can read and write — and all had lives before getting there.

Running on empty

2007-05-17T09:56:00.000Z

No matter how many people I surround myself with I can't get rid of this feeling of loneliness, or the quake inside when I think of the future. Must do something about it before its too late. I admit it here publically so that I don't go on pretending that everything is okay.
Does the prentense that everything is okay inside, ever become the reality that everything actually is okay? Maybe not, maybe that's how it is for everyone.

Radio

2007-05-08T17:30:00.000Z

I came into London today to talk on a local radio show about my book. It was a very strange thing to do. Not only sitting in a dark booth at BBC studios infront of a console with such a bewildering array of buttons and dials that it looked like we were about to take off, but just the talking about the book at all. Writing it was bad enough. It is definitely not a comfortable thing to publicise. I have been psyching myself up for it for weeks, though I was very glad to get it over and done with today, particulary given the cold I have. But the presenter's reaction was so lovely, and in a way unexpected. I assumed like most people his interest would be in the homelessness bit and how I wrote the blog. He did talk about the shame and secrecy of homelessness, and how it had been for me living in the car for those nine months, but he focussed mostly on the earlier part of the book — on some of the childhood stuff. He said he had young daughters himself and couldn't imagine a man wanting to do anything but protect them - that bit I did expect from him - and that he thought these stories should be told - I probably also expected that, though it was good to hear. But the thing he said that made me not know what to say back was that he almost wanted to apologise for what happened to me. I didn't know what to say. In ways I still feel almost apologetic myself for having written about my life, in sometimes such graphic terms. But I also think part of moving beyond such experiences is having them heard and people not being appalled and rejecting you for them, I think that is what finally ends that shame. It is also what chips away at that taboo about talking about it. Abuse is a dark, grotty subject, nobody would choose to talk about it, but silence makes it perfect for abusers. What they need to know, those people who do it, is that the children they abuse don't stay children. That one day they will grow up, and some of them will go on to write books, books about their abuse and the people involved. One day, this child will not be a child. And they will not forget — children do not grow out of their memories, they will not forget.

I wasn't sure what reaction I'd get to having told my story — the last time I told it I was eleven years old, and the reaction to telling and lifelong effects of it I wrote about in length in the book — so it was a huge relief to get the interviewer's reaction today on the radio. Thank you. And apologies to any listeners for my streaming cold and hacking cough as I spoke.

Mayday...

2007-05-01T15:07:00.001Z

My book is out today. Hugely stressfull...
.

Seeing my book for the first time

2007-04-30T22:36:00.000Z

Today was surreal. I found myself in Waterstones looking for a book. Not mine…what I wanted was some comfort-reading to get me through the next few days so that I didn't have to think of mine for a while, — something like the one I've just finished, The Summer Book by Tove Jannson, something timeless and ageless, some other world I could just sink into for a while.

I always knew my own book was out tomorrow, but I somehow managed not to be thinking about that at all by lunchtime. It was hot and the high street was crowded and after I’d been to the supermarket I wandered in off the street without planning to, and almost without thinking. I browsed from table to table, picking up books randomly, turning them over, reading the publisher’s blurbs on the back, flicking through pages. Then as I passed the ‘new release’ hardbacks on the wall by the door I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye and stopped in my tracks. There staring back at me amongst all the others was a copy of my book.

It was the weirdest thing. I think my heart stopped at least two beats.

I’ve had a copy of that cover pinned to the noticeboard in my room for months now, and it's here on the blog as well (I also had my own author copies by then) so the image on the front of the book is very familiar to me by now. But in the shop today, seeing it there for the first time — and a day too soon! — for a moment I was completely disorientated and just stared up at it frowning, thinking 'what's that doing there?' I recognised it as my book, but, for a split second that’s all I did, just recognised it as mine — a possession, something belonging to me. It was almost as if I had left my own copy — which just happened to be in my bag at the time — there on the shelf by mistake. ‘How did that get there?’ my head was trying to say, as my hand almost got ready to grab it off the shelf and put it back into my bag. As soon as my head caught up and I realised why it was there I turned and left the shop without even taking it down to look at it. Very, very odd reaction.

But it's there - my life in a book on a bookshelf somewhere - and it's bizarre seeing it, but I was right: it doesn't belong to me anymore, it's somebody else's book now. My life is just a story now, out there with all the other stories. And hopefully now, at long, long last, I can finally be free of it and move on.

A life more ordinary

2007-04-21T22:03:00.000Z

Weeks and weeks since I've written in here. I haven't known what to write. I kept waiting for something more interesting to happen, but since I've written the book nothing has really, not really, nothing particularly bloggable anyway. I've spent the time since slowly putting my life back into order, sorting things out, settling back into things, relishing the ordinariness of it all again. I feel stronger now than I have ever done, can't imagine what could phase me after how I lived this time last year, but the feelings I have about the book are still very complicated, conflicted feelings and I suppose that was another reason to avoid writing in here too soon — to avoid even thinking about any of it for a while once it was written. It is done now, will have to speak for itself.

Part of sorting things out was gathering my belongings around me again. All my stuff in proper commercial storage went a long time ago, when I couldn't afford to pay the bills anymore. But I had stuff stored in other places too, and have been slowly reclaiming them. Last week I went up to get the last of it, bags and boxes stored up in an old organ loft in a church near Hexham. I spent a few days on the way back walking in Yorkshire. On the last day I ended up at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. One of the main attractions there is the sky space, in an old deer shelter. There is seating around the walls and everyone sits in silence looking up at the sky through an open roof. It really is very beautiful, and loving the sky the way I do, ever since I first heard about it months ago I was really looking forward to going. Falling into a mediative state along with everyone else as I leaned back and stared up at big, white cumulus clouds drifting through all that clear, bright blue, I realised how familiar that state of mind was — sitting there staring up at it in silence was just like laying in the car all those months looking up out of the windowscreen. All I could see was sky then too, hours and hours and hours of it — my very own deer shelter.

The thing I've been trying to avoid thinking about is the book coming out so soon. It all happened so quickly. It's very strange not having any of the feelings of excitement or pride I'd expect to have if this were any other book I'd written— but I guess that was inevitable.

Just words

2007-02-11T14:12:00.000Z

The book is entirely out of my hands now, but the pressure still hasn't lifted. Several times a night these last few nights I've woken in heavy sweats, desperatley wanting to change words I am no longer able to change. It is a terrifying thing to accept that the way I said things on particular days sometime at the end of last year are now set forever.

I woke up and lay in the dark at 3am last night trying to force myself to remember the words of the serenity prayer. I eventually remembered 'accept...', 'change...' and 'know the difference...' But I couldn't string the rest of it together or get any comfort from even the jist of it.

They are just words I keep telling myself, just, just words... But it hasn't been easy letting go of them.

Just to say...

2007-01-21T16:56:00.000Z

I can't believe I've actually written a book...I didn't think things like this happened to people like me. Maybe now I can finally lay all this to rest and move on.

Recovering from a cold, no energy to say anything today, off to bed with some Lemsip and some Bessie Smith.

More to report when there is more to report.

.

Seven, my lucky number (though any year with 007 in it is fine by me...)

2007-01-15T10:54:00.000Z

Just for the record, let me say that I was wrong...writing books is not as easy as I thought. Obvioulsy I didn't think it would be a walk in the park, but after all that time in the car, living how I was living — on the outside of everything, depressed, isolated, without focus or purpose, no job or project to throw myself into — I thought everything would be easy after that, that nothing could phase me and nothing could beat me — which hopefully is true, now I have fought my way back - and I thought that since I love writing, that that would be a joy to do for the next six months.

And occassionally it was. The times when I forgot that I was writing about me and just sank into it, but writing your own story is hard. And writing books generally takes everything you've got. Not nice...Feel wrecked. But at least it's over now. Now I can start rebuilding...

And now that it is over, I am looking for a job — (any offers gratefully considered;-)). Surely now I have completed this whole project I have demonstrated qualities and skills that I can put to use — hopefully it won't be as hard getting a job now that at least I have somewhere to live this year. No job hunt can be as bad as one done while living in a car.

I hope none of you ever find that out the hard way. But I'm beginning to see that anyone can end up living how I did really, especially in this country and this age of easy credit and staggeringly high debt that too easily swings out of control. Most people, apparently, are only a couple of paychecks away from being homeless — which is scarey. I think if people were being honest, and the statistics known, it would be a huge number who had found themselves down to the wire and heading for that big slide down. Of course most would go to family or friends if it ever happened, or think they would. But if like me that first night sleeping in the car wasn't planned, just happened, and they survived it, maybe they'd do it for another night, never thinking it would last more than a very short time: days, a week, a couple of weeks...? Then maybe, like me, they'd decide to wait until they got back on their feet again instead of going through the shame of telling anyone, maybe afterwards nobody need know. I'm sure I can't be the only one that has happened to, once the slide begins it is soon overwhelming. Though, from all the emails I got from people at the beginning, people telling me how they had either been in my situation, or come close to living in their cars themselves, emails saying: 'there but for the grace of God go I.' I know that many of you know that already.

Very disorientating weather. Feels like the first days of spring today. The laneway looked fabulous on days like this, all that green, jewelled light falling through the branches of trees tightly wrapped in ivy — magpies and squirrels and jays hopping along the banks or flying across branches. I shouldn't say this, I've tempted fate too many times, but sometimes I miss it. Not living in my car there, of course not that, but things about it, that extraordinary silence, just being a part of it sometimes.

Happy 2007 to all

What a difference a year makes...

2006-12-24T17:27:00.000Z

I'm having a proper Christmas this year. Well, a bit different to last year's anyway, which I spent alone in the car, without sending or receiving a single present or card...trying to blank it all out. During the summer, when I could finally face it, I got back in touch with a few people, so at least this year I had a few presents to buy and people to send cards to. And that is what has made all the difference! Yes, I was in a bit better position to buy presents this year, and I am not forgetting how different it was without that - without being able to buy a second cup of tea in the day to warm myself up, let alone presents! But it is the having the people there to share it with that has made my Christmas this year...presents or no presents. And I hope it always will - that I never forget.

Thanks to everyone for seeing me through the last half year or so, and for sharing part of the ride with me through this blog. I wasn't the island I thought I was...noone can do it on their own, so I'm so glad I reached out, and that such positive and encouraging voices were at the other end of this blog when I did! Thanks everyone!

Merry Christmas and the very best wishes for all you do and all you want in 2007.

Sandcastles in the air

2006-11-27T00:38:00.000Z

Sounds of weather like this will probably always remind me of certain nights in the car — driving rain and stormy, wintry winds battering around outside that sound like wet laundry flapping about on washing lines across the sky. One time in the car in particular has come to mind in the last few days. I’m not sure why but it’s always the same one: one evening walking back to the car in the dark to drive to the laneway for the night, cold and wet and absolutely dreading another night of being out in it. I can still feel everything about that walk, from the weight of my damp clothes to the wet-wool smell of my scarf pulled up to cover my mouth and nose, to the rain in my pockets and the way it squelched about inside my boots to the pain in my eyes and across my forehead from the cold, to the uneven wearing down of my heels that made my right foot roll inwards and my toenail cut into the skin, to the tapping sound of the worn down bit of my heel as I walked down the ramp into the carpark, and the smell of petrol as I walked underground into it and the feel of my rucksack thumping against my sore back, to the taste of the fruit shortcake biscuits I ate when I got back to the car, and all that constant, constant tiredness and the longing to be out of sight of people back in the laneway.

I am by the sea at the moment, so lots of long walks and hanging about waiting for the rain to stop. It hasn’t stopped all day today, and the winds even now are battering around ferociously outside still. Yesterday I went down to the beach to search for shells and stones, there was nothing remarkable, nothing worth taking away, but I wanted one to mark getting to this stage of the book so kept picking them up and turning them over in my hands rubbing the sand off, searching for a heart-shaped one like the one I found in Galway when I visited my dad. I searched for ages and it looked like there wouldn’t be one, and then, right at the water’s edge, I saw one, a small smooth white stone, with black marbling effect, almost a perfect heart. Afterwards, I took the steep zig-zag path at the edge of the cove up to the top of the wooded cliffs and out onto the coastal path, and went on a spectacular walk for what felt like far more miles than it probably was. I felt almost dizzy looking down at the cove from the top, it was very dramatic and beautiful, the wide crescent of sand very white and the sea very green against shiny black cliffs, and very calm at the start, and I stood at the top staring down at it for a long while before I walked on, letting the waves carry my mind off. Because, yesterday, it was very good to walk on without it for a bit, I can tell you.

After a while I was pitting myself against the wind, walking precariously close to sheer drops at times and it felt fantastic. There were mushrooms everywhere, of all shapes and colours and sizes, I must have counted eight or nine different types: scarlet ones and vivid yellow ones and tiny flimsy white ones that looked like fingerprints across the grass, and shiny chestnut ones that looked like conkers. I don't know the first thing about mushrooms but would like to, and was hoping to go back today to pick some to identify, using the internet, but they are probably all ruined in this rain anyway. Again, almost this exact time last year, I came across these amazing flat white mushrooms big as tea plates undera copse of trees in a corner of the park. They looked like the kind of mushrooms you eat: soft white flat tops with dark brown, fluted undersides — but some of these were giants, literally big as tea plates. I was almost fainting with hunger when I discovered them and imagined them cooked up in hot peppery butter. Of course while I was in the car I had nowhere I could do that, and I was so frustrated that I couldn’t cook them. I was so hungry though that in the end I carried them to the café at the other end of the park and told them I had come out for a long walk and wouldn’t be back for hours and asked them if they could cook them up for me. Of course they wouldn’t – although to be fair they said it was something about health and safety. I was tempted to eat them raw, but worried that they might not be as innocuos as they looked, so threw them away almost crying in frustration — at the hunger, but also at the constant choice I was making to stay alive despite the circumstances I was in. I walked back tormented by the taste of them in my mouth, my saliva dripping in lemony butter, and had imagined it so hard that by the time I got back to the gates at the other end it felt like I almost had eaten them, which was very strange, and something I wish I could remember when I start on the chocolate biscuits.

Hopefully it'll have rained itself out by tomorrow and I can go see if there are any up there that haven't turned to mulch.

It is done

2006-11-21T23:02:00.000Z

I did it...it's finished...out there...being chewed, and heavily scribbled, over by my editor, in green ink. But I did it, it's over, a thing now with a life of its own, out there in the world... I don't know if this sad-happy feeling has a name.

Actually this is a little premature, there's a way to go yet...There is lots and lots of editing and weeks, and probably weeks, yet of fine-combing through it all — adding and subtracting and whatever else goes into the next stage. But this stage is over, deadlines have been met and everyone has read it, and I am left heart hammering in my chest, not knowing what to do with myself; waiting.

My book on Amazon

2006-10-21T08:21:00.001Z

I got an email today asking me where someone could buy my book, and that they couldn't find it on Amazon. Well, that is because it is only available on Amazon UK, so you have to order from there, I think - I've put a clickable link over at side of the blog.

It's not in the bookshops yet, but this is the cover, and what it will look like when it is.

Still here...

2006-10-21T08:21:00.000Z

Just checking in to say hello and to let everyone know I am still here and well and scribbling away furiously. Every time I put my pen down I keep thinking of the laneway - of how contorted my body was sleeping scrunched up there in the car night after night, of how much fear and pain was in it, how much lonlieness — and of how I don't ever want to end up anywhere like that again. If there's anything to drive you on it's that, not wanting to go back to where you once were.

This won't last long I have to keep reminding myself, then time will be my own again.

Wandering Aengus, the Arran Islands, and cheese and onion Tayto crisps

2006-08-26T21:23:00.000Z

Time is playing its tricks with my mind again. I have been away for a few weeks, to Ireland — and now that I am back everything seems either slowed right down, or speeded up: it seems impossible that summer is almost over, or that it is a whole year since I first rolled up my fleece as a pillow, loosened my boots, laid my head down on the passenger seat, just to rest for a while, and ended up sleeping in my car for the very first time. Time seemed all scrunched up then too. I couldn’t hold it back, and so didn’t want to know about it, blanked out as much as I could — couldn’t even say what day it was sometimes; and sometimes, now, too, it is difficult to decide whether it seems ages ago since I was in the car, or more like yesterday. Seems a bit of both. Despite two massages and a hard bed, my back still holds most of the pain of it, so healing is no indication of time lapsed.

Mostly I went to Ireland to escape the hideous heat we had here at the beginning of August — all that oven-hot heat that was melting the sanity from my brain. That, and to try to give myself the slip for a few weeks, when the writing got too much. But I also went to see my dad. And though both of us had to bite our tongues a few times, and to hide our surprise at how the other now looked, as we caught glimpses of each other in the driver’s mirror, or took what we thought were quick, furtive, glances when we thought the other wasn’t looking, it was lovely to drive for hours with him through all that familiar, calming green countryside from one end of the country to the other. And to do all the other things: to brave a visit to an old friend, and stay a few nights in Trinity College where I queued in the rain next morning eating toffees, to see the Book of Kells again, and pick shells from the wet sand near where my mother lived before she went off to live in America last year, and where I always got the ferry back, and to drive through all those slow, sepia-toned villages and small towns that we stopped to eat in in the evenings (and that except for their euro's and satellite dishes and everyone huddled outside the pubs smoking — giving the impresssion that the whole country now smokes — seemed not to have changed since the holidays I spent there as a girl), and to eat corner shops out of bags of cheese and onion Tayto crisps.

Of all the places that could, Ireland feels most like home in many ways, especially in all the out of the way places and in the rain, and I was very glad I went back. It was great to make my peace with my dad — not that there was much peace to be made — but deeply satisfying, and to talk about this book and try to explain what a blog was;-) and sit with him in Yeat’s tower, in what felt like almost the exact middle of Ireland, eating apples from the apple tree in the small tidy garden beside it — apple trees which may or may not have been planted by Yeats himself. 'Definitely, they were!’ my dad said, reciting, what seemed almost word perfectly, The Song of Wandering Angus: “…the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’ Which quite uncannily is the one poem I think I have ever written out in this blog somewhere ( ‘I went down to the Hazel wood/ because a fire was in my head./ And cut and peeled a hazel wand/ and tied a berry to a thread…’) Which is one of my favourite poems and seemed appropriate at the time I mentioned it here, not because of the apples, but because of the wood, and the laneway I was in.

He recites poetry constantly, always has, in place of conversation often, and as a girl, cooped up in cars with him when he came over to England to drive me to or from school at either end of the school term, whenever we weren't sitting for much of the time locked in our complicated silences, I always pretended to be annoyed with his reciting of poetry — of his own and other people’s — in the middle, or in place of talk, much more than I actually was. But this time, driving all those hours through the rain with him I loved listening to it. And know that it will be one of the things, one day, not so many many years away, that I will long for most, to fill the big, gaping silences that will be left.

I know it was the apples in that poem, and the fact that we were sitting there biting into the sour ones from the tree beside Yeat's tower, but still, it seems weird that he should have chosen the one poem that I have ever mentioned here on this blog, to recite as we sat there. Before he got up and strode off to have a word with Yeats, whose spirit he said was definitely still around the place, he threw me one of the apples and told me to bring it back with me. So I have, but I haven't eaten it yet, it is sitting in front of me, and I am hoping that it will last until this book is written.

We also drove over to Galway under huge dramatic grey and blue skies. And one morning, in bright, flashing sunshine, took the ferry across to the Arran Islands, which is a place my dad had always wanted to visit, but never had. Me too, and I felt close to him sharing the day out there, eating ice-cream and clattering around the narrow bumpy roads in a horse and trap as if time had reeled back on itself.

There’s not a lot to do in the Arran Islands if you aren't able to cycle the few miles around it, which my dad wasn't, so after we came back from our ride, and a walk up to the fort as far as he felt able, we wandered between sweater shops and then went back and sat in the sun outside the café by the bike rental place down at the harbour — him eating baked ham, and me the shallowest, but nicest crème brulee I have ever tasted — and chatted to the Polish waitresses about how they had ended up all the way over there on the islands, and for some reason about what twelve courses went into their traditional Christmas Eve meals back in Poland.

The Arran islands are tiny and treeless and seem out of step with everything, and the ocean splashing up against their cliffs seems vast and threatening and at war with the land and leaves you with a strange, adrift feeling, almost like we weren't in a place at all, and it was hard to relax there. And although I'd like to go back one day, I was glad to leave at the end of the day and to be back with a bit more land under my feet and to be in sight of trees again.

I also drove out to see a friend that I used to work with in what seems like almost another lifetime ago now. Out of the blue she phoned me once, while I was in the car in Brighton, telling me she had moved out there with her new husband who was working in one of the colleges there. Luckily the message went straight to answerphone, and I never replied. I was living in the car by then, fallen a million miles away from their world. And I wouldn't have known what to say — or what not to say. But on the spur of the moment while I was over there this time, strengthened by a long rest and meeting my dad, I got in touch and we met. Only a brief visit, in a hotel restaurant overlooking purple mountains, and I didn’t tell her about living in the car — or the book or much else new about myself either — and felt annoyed afterwards that I hadn’t, but it was very nice and easy to be with her, and making contact felt like a start. And although for some strange reason it has always been easier to tell strangers about myself rather than go back to tell it to anyone I have known, I can see myself telling her one day maybe —or someone else from my past — and know that the sky will not fall in when I do.

Actually I almost slept in the car the night I saw her. I was planning to stay in a hotel —though, typically, hadn’t booked —and to drive on up to see my dad the following morning. Instead of driving across the country though I decided to drive backwards to the Dingle peninsular and to stay there for the night. It was further than I thought! And when I finally got there it was almost eleven o’clock and every hotel I tried was fully booked. All of them! Every little last one of them that I went in to. I had no choice in the end but to drive like a maniac all the way back to where I had just come from, and at gone one thirty check into one of the larger hotels that had a vacant room and a night porter to check me in.

For weeks after I got out of the car I played with the thought that now that I had done it — had slept in my car for all that time, and knew that I could do it — that I would be able to drive anywhere now, just take off spontaneously and go for the long drives I love, all over, whenever I chose — drive to all those out of the way places, without worrying about it getting late and having to get back. Because if I was stuck, or simply too tired to drive back, I could always park up somewhere and sleep in the car now! I’m not saying I thought I would do it on a regular basis! (I don’t ever want to have to do anything like that again!). But this time it would be my choice, and as with anything, once there is choice attached to it, it becomes a whole different thing. There was an exhilarating sense of freedom about the idea whenever it occurred to me during those first few weeks out of the car, and one day I even put an emergency sleeping bag in the boot, just in case. The idea quickly faded though and within a couple of weeks I recoiled at the idea of it. But that night in Ireland, not being able to get a hotel room, I wondered if I would be brave enough to do it again: to sleep out in the car somewhere, for just one last night.

The sleeping bag had been stored away in the boot for weeks, so that was there, and my wash things were in my suitcase, and I was an expert at sleeping with the handbrake poking into either my stomach or spine by that stage, so it was possible …? But suddenly, in that moment of being close to being forced into it again, all my bravery started to collapse, and I felt my heart thumping and palpitations starting, and drove back, in a cold, panicky sweat. There was no moon and it was a dark, empty road most of the way and at one point a few miles further on I saw a grey-white motor home parked up in the middle of nowhere, a little way in off the road. It looked so vulnerable there all on its own, against a backdrop of big black hills pleated into the darkness and a foreground of wasteland — so exposed and isolated, and I panicked at the thought of doing something like that myself, and put my foot down and drove off, praying I would find a hotel somewhere still open.

I couldn’t get the little white motor van, alone on that dark wasteland at the side of the road, out of my head though. It shook me. Just seeing it there so still and vulnerable all on its own in the dark, its owners asleep inside, unaware of me driving past staring at it. It gave me a real sense — even though my car was under tree cover in a narrow lane and I had a main road right at the top at one end and behind the trees beyond the curve in the lane at the other end, had knowledge, and sometimes sight, of a clump of houses — of what my car must have looked like parked there on its own all those nights — how vulnerable it was there, and what risks I was taking.

Although it wasn’t a cold night, I arrived at the hotel shivering and cold and jumpy, my heart racing. And when I laid down under the tight covers, all that fear about sleeping in the car that I had to hold off all the time that I was actually doing it, started to flow jerkily out of me. And I fell asleep trembling, unable to get warm, even though I had wrapped myself in towels under the bed sheets, and slid one of the big, plump pillows down under the covers, close in, right up against me lengthways, to hug. Sometimes I can’t believe that it happened — that I slept out in the car for all those months. My mind doesn’t want to process it all. I just want to put it all behind me as quickly as possible and move on. The same as I want to do with all the other stuff.

That is why I am determined to throw myself back into the writing of this book. Mostly so that I get it out of me and finished and can be over and done with it one last time. It's not easy writing about things you don't even usually want to remember, not easy at all. But I am going to blast through it this time, only think about all that old, very young stuff, one last time, and then leave it all there between the covers of the book and move on. I know it wont be as simple as that, but I am looking forward to getting closer to the end.

Coming up for air

2006-08-17T11:21:00.000Z

It is a month to the day since I last updated this blog — and since I have had several emails asking me why, and if I am okay — I just thought I'd sign in, to let everyone know that things are fine. Well...ish. Because the writing is tough going — as I should have known it would be — but hopefully I am tougher; and this won't last forever.

I am looking forward to getting fit afterwards, and to doing some serious hill walking. Though right now I feel like bundling myself up and rolling down a few, the way I did once as a little girl, and a few times since, pushing myself from the top, and just rolling rolling rolling all the way down, until I was like a wristwatch, shaken back into life.

And talking of wristwatches...must go — will report back soon.

My car has a mind of its own...

2006-07-17T12:53:00.000Z

...and it looks like it shares my reluctance to go back to the laneway. Today — now that I've had time and distance from it — for the first time since I left, I had decided to drive back there. Not to sleep! Just to park up under the trees and to sit in the car and think for a while. It's a bit of a trek back there these days, particularly in this heat, but this morning I was determined to go, was even looking forward to it in a way, and drove off at about nine. But driving down the highstreet (still only a mile or so from home) I stalled, and when I turned the key in the ignition and desperately tried to start it nothing happened. I panicked because I didn't even have my mobile on me, but even if I had I wasn't sure what I could have done. Luckily, some workmen who were repairing the road further up had seen and came to push it over to the kerb for me. One told me to open the bonnet, that he'd take a quick look. When I did it was clear, even to me, that the car had run out of water and had completely overheated. After it had cooled down a bit, and following a lot of serious frowning, he prodded a large, molten gash on the rubber water pipe at the front, and it split. Watching the steam gush out of it I expected the worst.

Apart from clean it I haven't done anything about getting the car checked over or serviced yet (not even keep the water topped up, evidently). Everything is out at the end of the month: the MOT/tax/insurance etc., and so I was hoping it might hold out until then, but standing there watching gusts of sizzling, white steam coming up it seemed as though my luck might not hold out that long. Fortunately though the gash in the rubber tubing was quite close to the end and so after topping me up with warm water they told me where the nearest garage was, and when I got there a mechanic simply cut that portion off with a Stanley knife, stretched the rest of the rubber pipe around and then secured it back in place again. No more steam, no expensive water pipes to buy, doesn't look like it is a gasket problem either. Phew!

I decided in the end though not to chance driving all the way back up to the laneway in this heat so turned around and drove very slowly home, almost relieved. So, yet again my trip back to the laneway has been postponed. I will go soon though. I just hope this isn't the beginning of the end for the car though, and that I can drive back there in it. We've been through too much together for it to give up the ghost just yet. Maybe it just needs a longer rest...maybe in this weather we both do.

Because, this heat is taking everything out of me but words right now. And the only worrying thing about that is that I am not that worried about it at all. I lie in bed at night staring defiantly up at the rows of small squares on the wall calendar up on the opposite wall, counting the squares and doing rough calculations of dates in my head until I am almost cross-eyed, convincing myself that I have plenty of time to write this book, despite the long line of smudged red crosses that have already been marked off. When my stomach flips in panic, I simply switch off the light and fall into deep, dreamless sleeps, certain of plenty of tomorrows full of fresh resolve. There is no way I am not going to get this book finished! There is no way I am going to waste this opportunity and end up homeless again! So it will be done! It just might mean a whole lot more sweat than blood or tears while this heatwave lasts.

I might also need to choose my background music more carefully. All last week, to counter the radio of the builders out in their shorts on scaffolding on the house across the road, I played Chopin's Nocturnes on autorewind in the background. Hours and hours and hours of it, but all it led to, apart from a dedication and an acknowledgement, which I may or may not eventually use in the book, was scribbled verses and random lines of poetry, which is not what I should be doing! So today I plan to work with earplugs and to will myself not to be distracted by builders or letterwriting, or pencils that suddenly need sharpening...or anything else. Today I will break the back of at least one scene, whatever it takes! I won't let it wrestle away from me, will strap myself to this chair if necessary. Writing about yourself is tough though...not at all an easy thing...But slowly, bit by bit onto the page, in hushed, stuttered sentences, day by day, my story is emerging.

Boiling hot days like these...

2006-07-03T15:42:00.000Z

There were boiling hot days like these when I first slept out in the car. Not quite as hot, and I was down on the coast then, in and around Brighton, so warm, salty breezes coming in off the sea cooled things down a bit. But sometimes, when it had been there collecting heat all day, the car's metal could burn bare skin and the interior was full of exhausting, nauseating, oven-hot heat, unbearable, the kind you have to physically force yourself to get in to: my hair would frizz, my body stick to the seats, grimy sweat from walking about all day would slide in greasy streams and collect in hot pools underneath me, and the inside of my head throbbed with constant headaches from breathing the hot, dry air full of car fumes. My car doesn't have heating or air conditioning, the part, whatever it is, is broken, and the knob just swings around when you turn it, so I gulped down bottles and bottles of the tap water I kept under the seat, always more than luke-warm by then, and with nowhere to shower and nowhere to cool off, dreaded another day of it, and another night of willing myself, exhausted, to sleep across the heated car seats after it. Hot days as extreme as the cold ones, and in ways just as bad.

I'm not doing that anymore, I'm here in a room with the window wide open and the curtains knotted to let in a breeze, but some people still are. In this sizzling heat, there are plenty of people out there sleeping in their cars, people trying to make themselves invisible, finding a way to get through. But even I, sleeping out there in August and the beginnings of that false promise of an Indian summer we had last year, before the cold came, and more recently during those first shockingly hot days of May, don't know how they do it on a day like today.

Seeing my book listed on Amazon

2006-07-03T15:40:00.000Z

Earlier I saw my book listed on Amazon! It isn't even nearly written yet, and yet there it was! A very, very strange experience seeing it there. I felt sad, rather than surprised or exhillerated though, seeing it there (was almost going to type just then it felt like coming across your own obituary in a newspaper — that same, I imagine, kind of shocking strangeness — but maybe that is the wrong analogy. Extremely weird though that first glance...left me winded. Seeing the title there for the first time: 'Abandoned', alongside Anya Peters, was a bit unsettling too. It even said how many pages it is: 320! and the date it will be published. Three hundred and twenty pages and none of them written yet! Except mostly in my head — where they have been written over and over most of my life in a way. But that is nowhere near the same as having them written down properly on paper, and then typed up — not in the form they will be in in a book that is sold on Amazon anyway.

After the initial shock, I sat there eating Creamcrakers just staring at the listing on the screen, snapping one after the other of the dry crackers and chewing mindlessly. There it was: 320 pages, and even a precise date: 'published May 8, 2007', as if it was there someplace already! There exactly as though it already exists somewhere! Already bound and ready to box. By the time I came to, and got up and walked towards the door to go off for a walk I almost thought 'Oh good, that sounds like a good book, I'm looking forward to reading that...' — that's the kind of feeling I had anyway — and then I stopped in my tracks and my heart slumped in my chest and I said to myself, 'that's me who has to write that!' and in a state of panic, thinking of all those blank pages I have yet to scribble, picked up my notebook and pen and went straight back towards the room. Was so panicked though that I haven't been able to write a word since. My mouth is dry and my heart is hammering and I keep thinking, 'what if I can't do it at all?' What if this feeling of: 'Oh my God, what have I signed to do...?' never leaves me...? Hopefully once the panic subsides the dread of that will keep me glued to this chair furiously filling 320 blank pages. But first things first...now is the time to give in to these waves and waves of panic...

Nomad

2006-06-26T20:49:00.000Z

I seem to have a nomadic ability to put down roots very quickly — to just stay in whatever situation I find myself in and not budge. To get used to, and quickly make a home of it, wherever it is. I did it there in the laneway, almost putting down roots, bizarrelly got used to things, and week after week did not budge. It's as if something switches off in my brain and I don't want to leave more than I want to do anything else. It's not that I want to stay there, I just don't want to leave... It's not really on a conscious level, the not wanting to leave, I'm replaying old scenes, acting out old pain, but I don't always see it.

I feel myself putting down roots now here too. But in a good way. Here right now is where I want to be. I am beginning to feel comfortable and 'at home', and even though I feel stir-crazy at times and sometimes feel that all the air has been breathed up in the place and that I have to just get out fast, mostly it is a good feeling and one that I hope lasts. Just propping a pillow against the headboard and laying back to read a book is an amazing feeling, to just be able to do that...in privacy and safety adn comfort! Or pottering about doing nothing, feeling carpet under my toes, or standing barefoot on the cold tiles in the jutting-out kitchen at the top of the house in the mornings, eating toast dripping with butter and staring out at the early sky and down on the big horse chestnut tree, which stands like a guardian of the house at the end of the neighbours garden, swishing loudly in the slightest breeze. I haven't listened to any Beethoven yet, dont' seem to have any CD's with me at all, but I shall, when this house is quiet and empty one day, one evening when a dramatic sunset is spreading pink and mauve across the sky, and the last of the birds are hurrying through it...

But there is plenty of music about. This morning I ate the last piece of soggy melon, which I bought myself as a treat on Friday, and listened to the rain splashing against the pipe and patio outside, standing there trying to remember the smell of the woods after rain, a smell I love and miss. It came rushing back, that complicated, ancient, deep down smell. And I missed it hugely, physically. I haven't been back yet, and this morning listening to that rain tap down, I thought I might, just pack a lunch and drive back over there, but in the end it didn't seem right. Not yet.

I need to be here a bit more firmly first. Here, miles away from the woods and my life the past nine months. I think I need a layer in me to heal over first. My room here is a good size and bright and airy, and until this weekend was still full of bags and boxes slumped against the cream walls and furniture. It took me a while to bring myself to open them, to have the courage to put things on shelves and away in drawers; to find a place for even the smallest possession felt like such a monumental thing, such a statement, and was quite emotional, in ways I hadn't expected. I did it slowly, bag by bag, evening by evening, but now it is done, more or less: everything with a home, somewhere I know where to lay my hands on. I even have a desk with a drawer I keep opening and closing, smiling down at all the pens, and the big black stapler and the two burgundy hole punches I found in seperate bags in the car. Not using them yet, just opening and closing the drawer idiotically and smiling down at them all settled neatly in there, getting used to them there...

I had no idea I had so much in the car, I had forgotten... I even had a new pair of boots still in their box in the boot, which I had completely forgotten about! there half-buried under piles of other bags. A good pair of waterproof walking boots that I could have really done with during the winter walking those endless wet pavements, or could have sold or pawned for things I was even more in need of. So much surprised me coming from the car, so many things I had forgotten I had squeezed down into bags and boxes and cases. While I was there I didn't want to draw attention to myself by rooting around in bags and boxes looking for things, or tugging things out of bags that I might never fit back into them. So I rarely touched them. I lived in the same two or three outfits of clothes and used items from the same three or four carrier bags. I suppose if I had of taken things out of the other bags they would only have been any good to me if I could have wrapped them around myself for warmth, or eaten them. Anything else would have been superfluous: beauty and ornament have their place but when you are freezing cold and your stomach is shrivelled in hunger they are quickly relegated. Bag after bag came out of the car in the end, endlessly dragging yet another one up the stone steps, and still the back seat seemed packed up to the roof — it was like that old advert for the mini, with person after person coming out of it, and still almost full. I can't think for the life of me what I needed all that stuff for, but I'll no doubt remember all too soon...Though hopefully my time in the car has shown me, if nothing else, that none of these things, no matter how pretty or seemingly necessary, are going to make me happy, that happiness lies elsewhere.

My instinct as soon as I moved in was to want to hide all the evidence of my homelessness, to want to start afresh, burn my boots and put down new roots, have nothing more to do with the way I had been living. But I have bravely kept onto things, and have to remind myself that I am writing a book about it now and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in how I ended up. Lives unravel, people don't (or wont) keep up for all sorts of reasons and have to find other ways of living all the time, I am not the first and I won't be the last, so these days I am trying to hold my head up as I crane it around the corner to see what's coming next — (as long as it includes mugs of steaming tea and lots of hot buttered toast I'm sure it'll be fine whatever it is, hopefully I've learnt to shrug off the rest, and to smile.

reconnecting

2006-06-25T18:03:00.000Z

It's difficult to get back into my stride with blogging. I have started to write here so often during these last two weeks, to type away about this and that, and almost-started just as many times: sat in front of a screen, deep breaths taken, my sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair tucked in behind my ear, fingers curved, poised and determined, at the keyboard... but for some reason I have always hesitated — just that little bit too long in the end, and never actually got around to sending anything - found distactions from one day to the next, as is my wont...Obviously it's different now, both here in the blog and in my situation: the urgency has gone from it, for one: in the car this blog was such a reaching out, such a cry for help in a way, that it feels over now, and in some ways I'm even half-embarrassed at the loudness of the yell I screamed from the laneway. And secondly, since I turned off comments in the end, the connection I had with readers — all those wonderfully distinct and largely postive voices from so many near and faraway places that shouted back each day at my shouting out — and which gave this blog its life — were suddenly silenced, the connection fizzled out.

I miss that connection, and hated turning comments off, but in the end I felt I had little choice, as someone started 'masquerading' as me, opening another blog called Wanderingscribe and sending abusive comments and emails out, in my name, to those who had posted in my blog. Obviously those messages weren't from me, and most people would have known that (well they did because many of them emailed telling me) but some people didn't understand, and unfortunately assumed it was me, emailing me upset and angry. The only thing I could do in the end to stop it all was to eventually switch comments off. It was probably just one person, and I have no idea if they are still doing it, because except for that one time to find out what was happening, I refuse to go there to look, and reopening comments on my blog is just feeding them, aswell as taking too much time by me to vet them all, so I won't do that for a while, and am just sorry that someone has spoiled it for the rest, and that all those conversations going on so loudly sometimes at the side of my blog have had to end. Email is not the same, but it is always there if you need to contact me, though most people realise that most of my time and focus has had to switch to writing the book now.

Time has got the better of me again, I'm timed out, so rather than leave this yet again, I will post this bit now...definitely back tomorrow to say the rest. My neck is slowly beginning to come up out of my shoulders, you'll be pleased to know, and I am starting to uncurl. Life is good... More tomorrow....

nesting

2006-06-09T11:29:00.000Z

Sorry, you are right, I should have at least put up one blog in all this time! I have a pile of excuses, but none of them justify it. I know if you have been following the blog, and been routing for me, then you will definitely want to know how this last couple of weeks has been, I'm sorry, I would have been disappointed had it been me reading. Everyday it feels like I've got a million things to say, which I want to come and 'unburden' myself of here as much as anything, but when I come to put them down, all I end up doing is creating a blog on the template page and then suddenly not knowing what to say. You'd think, wanting to be a writer, that I'd be able to grab at least a couple of the days thoughts and impressions to share and expand on here, but nothing comes, and before I know it I've run out of time. So each day I've resolved to leave it until the following day.

And now it has been nine days since I posted. Time is all messed up at the moment, all my senses say that it can't have been that long, but calendar says it is. Curious too that it is nine days since I posted and nine months that I was in the car for. Or maybe not! But sometimes, in all the other thinking I am doing for the writing of the book, it is hard not to think of the significance of that many months. I try not though.

All is well, you'll be pleased to know. I will write about settling in things and teh up-down experience of all that, but not now. Because what is causing me concern at the moment is my neck. I can't think much beyond it right now. Hopefully it is just transtional pain, straightening up from being scrunched up in the car night after night, but it is searing pain at the back of my neck right now, frightening pain. I have to hold it very very still, it feels like it needs a collar, and every tap of the keyboard I feel as a red-hot twinge in my neck. Not nice. So this is all I am going to write for now. Hopefully this pain will go soon, and I can tell you how it is going, relearning to live indoors: how I have forgotten how to hang my clothes up after me, and eat from plates and bowls with knives and forks, instead of with my fingers, and on my knees; about all the simple pleasures I am quickly learning to take for granted again already. Last night I had the place to myself for the whole evening and forced myself to watch Big Brother, to kind of re-socialise myself into living indoors, and with others again. Not sure it is a good idea to sit night after night staring at a collection of people cooped up in a house going mad.

They could at least plant a big tree in the garden for them.

Quill

2006-05-31T21:06:00.000Z

Today has been an insanely busy day! It is quite a leap after all the silence of the trees, to dealing with all the emails and comments and traffic here on the blog again after another BBC article. Hugely exciting too though.
It has taken me a while to get used to the link that I have put up over at the side to my book, looks a bit scarily corporate, but hope it's still friendly enough. That link doesn't mean, by the way, that I am stopping blogging, or that it is being replaced by a newsletter — that is just an additional thing, it will be ad hoc updates, and strictly about the book — or just to use if you only visit the blog once, but might still like to be notified when the book comes out in the spring. I'll still be blogging here, about settling in and summer things and whatnot. But progress reports on the book itself, or just whatever might come up from the whole writing process etc, will be by email update through that link. Though it might be that very soon writing the book will have precedence over everything, blogging and breathing included! I'm timed out, will write more about settling in etc, tomorrow. I'm off to bed!
I have one again! Yay!!!
*Blows one of those tiny party horn things*

Of fixed abode

2006-05-30T19:53:00.000Z

Finally...
Finally, finally, the search is over. I found a place to live last week. And on Sunday I moved in.
It is only a room — a small, cream-walled room, that still smells of new paint, in a shared place, not a place of my own — but it is a room with a door I can lock and curtains I can draw, and after all this time, I have the privacy that I have craved all these months. It is the strangest feeling though...So far I have mostly just wanted to run out of the place. It is too warm and I can't breathe or recognise all the unfamiliar smells or sounds, and nothing feels like mine yet. But for the next six months it will be, and after what I've been through these past months I'm sure I'll get used to anything.

Strange though, I thought my first night somewhere after all this time would be remembered forever. I'd been dreaming about it for so long, planning it so hard it almost felt done. But in the end I was so tired by the time I settled in that I hardly did any of the things I thought I would: not the long candlelit bubble bath, or the glass of wine, or hours of staring at a TV or cooking homemade food that I had ghost-tasted for months, or sleeping for a week in a soft bed piled high with pillows... On Monday night I felt so odd there I didn't even stay; and my car is still only half-unloaded even now, the bags and boxes I did bring up mostly unpacked, slumped against the front of the wardrobe — which I have yet to find a need for. So tonight will only be my second night there. I'm looking forward to it this time though. Am still using the sleeping bag as don't have a duvet yet, but it is on a flat mattress, which I am sure tonight my back will try to resist less, and which my legs can stretch right out on.

Went back this afternoon and in the quiet kitchen at the top, that juts out of the side of the building like a crow's nest, cooked my first meal: beans on toast, and made cup after cup of tea, that didn't cost a pound — and sat there listening to the hum of the fridge, unable to stop smiling to myself. It is clean and safe and there are lots of plants and a bath and even a milkman who delivers, and I am sharing with nice people who are out at work all day, so it should be fine — it will be fine. It is...really it is...but something feels missing: maybe it is that there are no trees or foxes or rain blowing in through the unsealed windows soaking the ends of my bag, no birds at five in the morning or owl tooting for me at night. I don't ever want to be back in the laneway again, not ever, or anywhere like it, but already I miss it — hugely. Miss the smells of it, the sound of rain falling through the trees, drumming soft or hard on the car roof; the bright moon wandering the sky all through the night, keeping me company. In ways, the aloneness of it all, the unboundedness of it all. Sure I'll get used to the drum and bass through the thin, cream walls, but for now its a very unsettled, very odd, very caged feeling.

Have run out of credit (btw I know a great internet cafe that does a 10 hour access for ten pounds, which you can use over 3 months, if anyone needs to use one — I rarely do, use library, even on bank holiday — it does a nice cuppa too. (Yes, I've heard what he has been saying...all of it groundless, but I don't want to be drawn into it all by replying to any of it.)
Will post more about all tomorrow. Good night!

Call and response...

2006-05-26T16:39:00.000Z

I feel like I have been found and hoisted up and out of this laneway by angels.
Silently, continuously, one after the other after the other of them coming into the darkness this past few weeks and lifting me further out of the laneway. Ian Urbina, the New York Times journalist, who just happened to be writing an article on people living in their cars in the US, was the first. Just when I was at my lowest point, almost giving in to thoughts that things were over for me; when every step and every breath became almost a prayer, there, thousands of miles away, he wakes up one morning and decides to write an article on people living in their cars.

It's an article restricted to American people living in their cars — he didn't figure on finding some woman living in her car in a laneway somewhere in England...but there I was. And what does he do? What he does is do a search on the internet for 'homelessness' blogs — and he finds me...Finds me through the blog that I had, for some reason, only recently then, started. And out of the blue he e-mails me. Soon after, he includes a mention of my blog in the online version of his article; the sky over the laneway lightens, and very soon it feels as though the wind across it is full of the sound of flapping wings, as one after the other after the other approach, and I am left stunned — and full of the certainty of miracles.

Meanwhile, back in the laneway...

2006-05-22T17:55:00.000Z

Still trying to catch up with myself and to process all that's been happening in the last few weeks. My mind is in semi-shutdown and it's still not really taking it all in. It's also kind of surreal because I still haven't found a place to live, even though with all this running around that has been my priority for the last couple of weeks. Have been to view lots, and used up several credit vouchers on the phone chasing places, but no luck as yet. Although that might be about to change tonight — so maybe more news about that tomorrow. So for the most part life continues to be sardine sandwiches and sleeping bags...and, for the last few days, an awful lot of rain. But it hardly matters anymore, because it all feels so different now. I know it's temporary rather than permanent, and this book deal gives me choices, which is what makes the real difference in a life.

Have also done another interview, more about that in a few days too, and lots of thinking about the writing that is ahead, and working out a plan of attack for it.

Sorry to be so vague and incomplete, there's nothing I can't tell here really, and you deserve to know as it feels like many of you have been on part of this journey with me, but I am mostly just registering this as a huge amount of tiredness at the moment, and just want to sleep lots. Haven't got energy for much else.

From all that, to all this...I'm still black and blue from pinching myself, and it'll take a while for me to process my thoughts and unpick this emotional reaction. I'm also busy storing up memories, turning it all over in my mind, because it looks like my days of living in the woods are finally coming to an end.
Promise I'll try to be more coherent by next post.

Book deal

2006-05-17T15:10:00.000Z

Sorry, didn't mean to drag it out — just wasn't sure what I could and couldn't say, and had to wait to ask somebody. Although it was good for me to hold it close for a while, just let it settle in me for a bit. I did already say it though: my news was a book deal — I AM HAVING A BOOK PUBLISHED - hooray! I'm celebrating a bit prematurely though, because haven't got the thing written yet, but after what I've been through with all this, feels like that might be the easy bit. Sitting at a table after a warm, scented bath, Beethoven on in the background, a glass of something in one hand, my pen in the other hovering over all those pristine, blank sheets of paper. Writing a book can't be that difficult;-)

And anyway, all those sheets of paper won't really be blank. Because for months, being here among all these trees, staring up and through them night after night, watching their leaves fall and new ones grow back, their branches snap off in high winds, and stripped clean of bark in rainstorms, laying like bones on the ground around them — night after night I told bits of my story to them. Sometimes talking aloud, sometimes staring it into them - all the things I couldn't tell anyone else, all the things my hunched-up spirit was tired of. Trees absorb pain, and some of these will one day be felled and made into paper, and I have this feeling that if I stare really hard into those empty sheets of white paper once I begin to write, I'll probably see my story already there, like a watermark on their blank surfaces.

You know I would if I could...

2006-05-15T11:44:00.000Z

Life felt almost close to being over a few times, and now, suddenly, it feels like it might only just be beginning.

Although sometimes, I wish someone would tell me how I am supposed to feel.

Promise I will say more about all that's been happening in the last week or so, when I can...

A stroke of luck

2006-05-13T10:10:00.000Z

Not sure if I'm dreaming this or not...but I think Lady Luck just came strolling down my laneway, rolling her big, shiny dice. Words have come clattering to a stop, and all I can do for now is smile.
Not sure if I'm dreaming this or not...

Standing back

2006-05-10T13:16:00.000Z

It is not always easy to see a thing close up. You know what I mean... — I am heading straight for the cliche about it being hard to see the wood for the trees — and trying hard to resist it — but that's exactly what I mean. Because it is — hard to see the wood for the trees at the moment, about a lot of things, but especially about this blog. It seems to have touched a nerve, brought all sorts of people together, and brought out both the best and the worst in them too. Hard to understand what has happened here sometimes. Maybe it is not just one thing, but several, and maybe I won't know until all this is over, but was wondering if anyone could put it into words themselves — help me to see the wood a bit more. I imagine it is a very personal thing, different for everyone.

Not out of the woods yet

2006-05-07T15:21:00.000Z

But getting closer...

There have been meetings and it looks like there might be a publishing deal. Nothing is settled...and don't know what else to say for now, feel everything, and sometimes nothing, just walking around in a daze...my fingernails bitten down to the quick.

The good, the bad, but not the ugly

2006-05-06T19:49:00.000Z

Phew! Peace and silence in the blog for a change... Even though I did have to turn off comments completely to get it...

The last week has been insane. From the deep silence of the trees, to suddenly everything kicking off around me, including here in this blog —but not confined to it at all this week. My main priority has been rushing about trying to find somewhere to live, and that's what I've been doing — has been all up-down, disheartening and disorientating at times, racing around psyching myself up, then being turned down, 'already gone', or lack of a job ending it before it gets started. I have enough for the deposit and month in advance and couple of weeks maybe, but even with that and the new determination I have to stand up and be counted in the world again, an end to homelessness is not sudden or easy. Not for anyone. Anyway there are possibilities, and I am working on them. But, in the midst of everything this week, and reeling from some people's reaction to the Paypal button, it suddenly occurred to me that most of this bitterness is probably because nobody actually knows how much I got from it. I read one comment (which made me smile) saying I had probably made my fortune and that you wouldn't see me for dust now. Well, no, obviously, I didn't. But since none of you know that, and because the Paypal donations were only meant to be for month in advance and months deposit to get a place, it seems only right that now that I have that I should take it down. So I did. Not because I was feeling guilty, as one comment suggested, and not because I knew the 'game' was up and I was running scared, as another one did — believe me, living in a car through a long, cold winter, as I did, is no 'game' I can tell you! And also Paypal 'donations' are simply that 'donations' so it does not interfere with benefits situation. But if there is any more publicity and therefore traffic on my blog people will be assuming that I am inviting it in the hope that people will donate. So incase that happens, and at some stage it probably will, I have taken it off.

Anyway, the button being there, was playing more and more on my mind. Not only because of the comments I got in the last few days (to be honest despite all your emails asking if I was okay and bearing up after reading them, my mind has been on so many other things this week that I haven't had time to read them, not most of them anyway). Was reading them all before, but this week when they turned ugly I just decided it was best not to read them, not that I would have been that affected by them it is what you expect from the internet — I was always surprised from the beginning that I had not had more of that stuff. So no, it didn't really bother me, I was more concerned for all you reading them, as I said this week was too busy trying to get a life back together to worry too much about all that on top of it all — so I rarely read them (sorry to all the supportive posters, I have been reading emails though, and know the support that is out there for me, so thanks for that.)

Anyway, as I said things have been kicking off, and in the midst of it I took down the Paypal button. I might also make another announcement about that soon, because I may be getting a paid position, and if I do I have decided that the best thing to do is to refund the Paypal money. Not because I feel guilty about it —in the end I looked at lots of American blogs, which people had sent the url to me to convince me it was okay to do. They all had Paypal donate buttons on them too, and so I accepted in the end that people were just donating here if they liked the blog (almost a modern form of tipping or something) just like they do on other blogs. But I never felt entirely comfortable with it, only because of the nature of mine — the fact that I am living in my car and writing about my homelessness here. That made mine different — maybe more difficult to just click out of without feeling guilty in some way. That was never my intention. But I can see the dilemma. I would have felt it too. I always said I wanted to drive out of this laneway with my dignity still intact, and I still can, but I need my integrity to be intact too, and with all this bitterness about the Paypal, and the issue of whether it was a guilt trip, and people's speculation about how much I made from it, has left such a bad taste in my mouth about it all, that I would just prefer not to have the donations at all. Hopefully, I have got a lot of life ahead of me to live, and I don't want to have to continually defend my decision in putting that Paypal button up. It takes up too much energy. So I think that is the only way to end all this nonsense and endless talk about paypal. And that is what I will do. I promised, in thank you emails that the first chance I had I would pass on that kindness to someone else who needs it. Instead, now, I will just refund it and let you pass it on (until I am also able in my own way). What's more important here, to me, is that I was in dire straits, and when I absolutely had no way out of here people, total strangers, donated to help me get out, and I will always be awed by that. But maybe I was wrong, maybe there are other ways out now, and if there are I would rather take them than Payal donations. I am pre-empting things hugely, but even when the money goes back, I will still be left with the kindness that was shown here. I will never forget that kindness, it has changed me.

As you can see, I switched the comments off as well. Finally. Because it got too ridiculous in the end. I tried to leave it up as long as possible so that anyone could have their say here, but had no choice in the end. Good or bad it didn't matter, but ugly did. And in the end some of the comments got really ugly. I didn't have time to read all of them in the last few days but occassionally, when I checked-in I'd scan almost without looking, until I saw swearing and deleted those where I found them, just without looking, clicking the delete button (apologies for the few I deleted by mistake — that was the reason) — not for me really, as I said I expected those from the beginning, so wasn't surprised by them, or the abuse or threats in them. But I thought it wrong that everyone else should have to read them. Even though all the positives still outweighed the negatives — as always...

Actually I have, just this minute, decided to put moderated comments back on, because I think the reaction of the majority here shouldn't be silenced by the few. So there...Abracadabra!...it's back.

Hold on to your hats...

2006-05-06T19:44:00.000Z

The other piece of news in all that insanity that was the blog this week, was that while it was all kicking off here on the sidelines, I had hardly a chance to look at it, because as well as looking for a place to live and trying to get out of here, I was being approached by people and getting all sorts of response to my situation and the blog. And, in the midst of it all, it looks like I got myself an agent, and put something together and because of the timimg of things and my situation, things and meetings and talks, and what have you, are being rushed through and it looks like there might be possibilites. I thought things like that took forever, but apparently not always. It's all been hectice, crazy. But frustratingly, I wasn't able to mention it here — probably still not meant to. Can't take it all in yet, more as and when it unfolds, but for now, who knows, there may be an eleventh-hour way out of this laneway afterall.

It feels like I have been down at the bottom of this deep, dark hole, for a long, long time, and that now someone is shining a light down and has found me. I'm not out yet, but there is a flicker of light from above, and I sense movement.

Rhubarb

2006-05-03T15:19:00.000Z

Blossom

2006-04-29T14:26:00.000Z

Sat on a bench at the top of the hill this morning, staring out at the silvery London skyline stretched out below. The trees on the grass around me against a clear blue sky were staggeringly beautiful, with their heavy, pink and white blossom, and my eyes, almost famished of beauty and colour all winter, kept swinging up towards them. I didn't realise how much I had missed colour the last few months. It was a beautiful, spring day, and everything else in the foreground was saturated with light and colour too: the backs of all the houses backing onto the railway, the poles and pots and green netting on the allotments, the weeping willows lining the edge of the park, with their long hair lifting now and again in the breeze, and in the childrens's playground the row of empty, red swings, sadder than you can imagine. But there was still a mist hung in the distance, and all the far buildings there were greyed out: some of the skyscrapers and office blocks and steeples poking up among the rooftops. And sitting there, staring out at all those greyed-out buildings in the distance, London suddenly felt like a computer game I only had part access to — as if what I was staring out at was not the full version, but just a demo version, some of the icons and functions greyed out on the screen. That's what life has felt like, for a very long time. Maybe all those greyed out parts will never come back into play, but maybe they can, maybe one day I will have full access again.

Bit worrying though, thinking of life in terms of interactive computer games - think I have been staring at computer screens for far too long! Off for a cup of tea.

In all that blue sky as I sat there, all the miles and miles and miles of it, there wasn't a single bird flying. If I was a bird I would have dived right out into it, spent the day swooping and soaring. At times, sitting at the top of that steep hill, half asleep still, surrounded by all that blue, I almost felt I had.

Un poco desorbitado

2006-04-28T20:51:00.000Z

Everything I sit down to write in here at the moment feels wrong. I almost posted a dozen times today but kept finding myself anticipating responses and hit the delete key each time. I'll get back into my stride with it, and glad to have you all here, but for now I almost feel like an outsider in my own blog, doesn't always feel good, doesn't feel like mine anymore. I'll be back though. Huge relief that most people have stopped questioning my reality at least...that helps. So for now, just to say: still here, and still okay...and the trees are looking beautiful, most of them with at least some of their leaves back on — everyday watching them change a little more, it feels like I am watching a slow healing taking place.

...the best of times, and the worst of times

2006-04-27T18:13:00.000Z

Still here... This is still a little bit overwhelming at times...Since the BBC article (direct link to it on linksbar now) have had so many emails...Amazing response...Someone emailed me today from Venice! — Venice! Saying there was a mention about me in an Italian newspaper yesterday...! Amazing...! Why though...? How did that happen...? Thoughts haven't caught up with me yet. Not sure I get it...I'm just me, just a homeless person going back to my car every night, trying to keep everything together, and keeping myself sane and connected by blogging about it here...talking to myself mostly — well, was to begin with anyway — ashamed of my situation, and going to greater and greater lengths to conceal it from everyone — except here on the blog where I can anonymously be Wanderingscribe...

But suddenly there are all these emails, and hundreds of voices talking to each other at the side of my blog, many of them saying how my situation is similar in ways to theirs, emotionally anyway...how it has touched them, and how many people, even those in homes and jobs can actually relate because they feel only a few steps away from a similar situation themselves. It's amazing, feel suddenly not so alone, quite overwhelmed at times. Have wanted to just blog through it, but end up just peering at the screen blankly...waiting for words that never come. Most of you are saying it for me in the comments though...so thank you;-) — So I've just been sitting here listening in for a while — even though clapping my hands over my ears some of the time and running for cover... ;-) There's a Spanish saying...not sure of exact phrasing, but something like: 'Un poco desorbitado...' Don't think there is an exact translation, but think it means: 'a little bit out of one's orbit' — something like that. That's how I've been feeling the last few days — definitely un poco desorbitado. All this support is really strengthening though...feel good.

Catching up with emails... will definitely reply, but is taking a while, and keep losing track of which ones have and haven't read/replied to. My head was spinning from looking at the screen this morning. On way back to the car dropped keys. Stooped to pick them up and noticed these tiny purple flowers growing between the paving slabs, minute little things. Pulled one up and just stared and stared at it to still my mind. Things like that usually do it, something small to focus on. Don't know what they were, but were exquisite: these tiny, fragile, purple petals, the heart of them splased with yellow and then inside that a circle of white and sprouting out of that these perfect yellow stamens. People must have thought I was mad walking along staring at this one tiny flower not much bigger than a freckle. But by the time I got to the car my mind was stilled, calm again — mostly empty...but calm. Trying to hold on to that.

For the record...

2006-04-25T09:29:00.000Z

I feel like I should say something, but I still don't know what. I feel wrecked to be honest, a horrible sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know I invited all your comments by agreeing to the interview but I never expected so much ill-feeling with it. Maybe it is just tiredness, I am typing this on hardly any sleep, and my head feels like it has been bludgeoned all night long, and I can't still my thoughts enough to get the right words. And this is my blog, (and yes — unfortunately — it is 100% genuine!) so partly I feel that I don't really have to justify myself to anyone here. But just for now I'll say two things.

Just for the record: One: I haven't got publishers etc knocking on my car door, or a fortune from Paypal, or (apart from one seasonal job helping out at festivals, which I am looking into) any offers of jobs. And Two: I really am homeless, and everything else that I have said here...I have been going through real difficulties...this blog is real, and one hundred per cent honest...it just so happens that I express myself better in writing, and enjoy that, so I started this blog...And then got a bit carried away with it, because I found an online community I could start to break my isolation and communicate with. I also wrote it to keep me sane and a foot in the real world again. What it didn't do was write it for the media ( a NYT journalist just happened to be doing an article on homelessness, did a blog search and found mine. It was coincidence or serendipity or a bit of luck, whatever you might call it, it was that...I didn't in a million years expect it. I just came here to type myself sane everyday. This is how I write to myself in private. I didn't write it for you and I didn't write it for the media, I wrote it mostly for myself, and to myself. I was sorting out my own head, here online, and because isolation and not telling others about myself (and therefore not letting them in) are such issues with me, I forced myself to do it here in this blog where others would maybe read it, because that opening up was such a huge barrier I needed (and still need) to go through in my life. It was helping.

Also for now thank you to everyone for your support and for giving me the benefit of the doubt about the genuineness of this blog — yes, it really is genuine...what more can I say. Your stories and emails were so powerful, there is a lot of goodness. And for everyone else, for now, or at least until you have read the rest of the blog, perhaps you could reserve judgement for a bit, perhaps see it in your hearts to say, 'What if she really is homeless, and did go back to that laneway on her own to sleep in her car last night, after reading all these comments here, how must she have felt?' Because last night when I DID go back to the laneway that IS how I felt. And that is how I still feel...Flat and very very tired... so how about easying up on me a bit. I don't blame your doubting, and I am not saying this is the worse situation in the world, you may be going through tougher, unfortunately a lot of people are, but this is my situation, and this is my blog where I come to write about it, and this situation is really tough for me, I come here and talk about the trees and the impact of the light, but that it to usually to take my mind off things, to keep a balance...I really am trying

The naming of trees

2006-04-22T18:15:00.000Z

Woke late again this morning, and reluctantly. Drowsy and disorientated. Don’t know why but my head feels both heavy and light-headed the last few days, like a balloon, full of water. Very odd. Takes me a while to realise that the sun is beating down on the car and that the laneway is full of voices. Feel drenched in sweat, uncomfortably hot and itchy all over, my hair plastered to my head and nylon sleeping bag tangled around me. Lay there separating out all the children’s voices tumbling down the laneway towards me, from all the birdsong, before half-raising myself slowly and squinting out into the bright yellow light trying to locate the voices. A group of women, all of them in white t-shirts, with walking sticks and rucksacks and fleeces tied around their waists, are walking towards me from the top of the laneway. Children are everywhere, stamping and squealing. I wriggle back down into the sleeping bag pull the drawstring over my head, lay still and wait for them to pass. People always do, eventually, and I’m used to doing it now, especially these brighter mornings, and when I sleep late – which seems to be more and more these days. I wait for the voices to fade completely and then wash my teeth and face with the last of the bottle water, get dressed quickly and walk up into the trees to have breakfast: milk and oranges and triangles of cheese and a big stack of Fig Rolls, that leave me feeling bloated.

The ground is beautifully cool and for a while I ignore the fact that I might be drawing attention to myself and lay down as flat as I can, almost crying out in pain trying to straighten. Hope the damage to my back and legs, cramped against the cardoor night after night is not permanent, but doesn't bear thinking about really. Over the usual ancient smell of the woods, that I have come to love waking up to, there is the strong smell of mint, smells like mint anyway, fresh mint — mint and woodsmoke. Can’t see either, but both are very strong. The light filters down prettily, yellow-green, through the leaves, and for a while I just sit there listening to the birds and trying to identify the trees now that most of them have at least some of their leaves back.

When I remember that I have a whole day to fill I feel nauseous trying to decide how to fill it. I struggle for a minute to breathe and though there is no breeze, when I look up at the trees they look as if they are swaying and the blue sky feels like it is swirling down like water down a sink. What I really want to do is crawl back to the car and under the sleeping bag and go back to sleep — it’s gone nine but it feels way too early to do anything at all. And I feel shakey, completely exhausted just thinking about all the hours stretched ahead of me in the day.

Was determined to give the hospital a miss for a while, during the day anyway, go in there too much, but have to have a shower, my hair, at least, desperately needs washing. And if I don’t go in there everyday to have one, the only other place are the showers at the swimming pool, which of course aren’t free — so I have no choice really. Hair desperately needs washing after sweat of the night and so I have to go in there to use the showers. In the end I bring both carrier bags with assorted wash and pampering things in with me from the car, trying to ignore the cleaners who stop sweeping and watch me scuttle past. I get a tea from the canteen and bring it in with me, spending the whole morning in the toilets trying to wash my homelessness away. Afterwards I go back into the canteen for another tea, but the guy who I’ve been trying to avoid is sitting at the table right by the till, with a big, grinning sunburnt face, his hands folded across his big stomach as he looks me up and down. I just walk back out again and go to the chapel, where I lay, out of sight, across the table behind the stained glass screen for as long as I can bear it, trying to straighten my back and pray one of the prayerboard prayers for a man whose sister has just had a heart attack after a hip replacement operation, and the usual ones for myself.

Put everything away in the car, change my jacket and then walk out into the bright, blue and white day. I feel like whistling but don’t dare. Don't know why, just feel like it, hard to know what I feel these days really though, probably still shut down too much to feel much at all. Don't know whether to turn left or right at the top of the road. Try to decide walking up to the corner, finger-drying my hair as I walk. But still haven't made a decision by the time I get there. Today feels like the first true spring weekend: clear blue skies and flowers everywhere and plenty of sunshine, and the day has a bank holiday feel to it, people just milling about in thick groups. At the top I turn right just out of habit, before everyone walking by arm-in-arm with family and friends sees that I am just on my own and loitering. Right is the way to the park so I walk towards it, not minding either way, busy working out my options for a cup of tea. If I went the other way and up the hill I could have gone into the Quakers Meeting House if there was a group going on and got one for free, this way the nearer one is the takeaway kebab restuarant, but I don't want to go there either, don't like the way they look at me, as if they know where all this will end. They are wrong, but am running out of places to go. Just want people to leave me alone, or treat me with a bit of respect, to understand that I am doing my best to get back on my feet. And not to try to pull the ground from under them everytime I try to get myself up. Some people see you struggling and want your complete downfall, living in my car is not bad enough, they want me on the streets completely, in every sense. I feel that. The man who feels like he has just been sitting in wait in the canteen since Christmas makes me feel like that. Feeling like rushing back to the shower whenever I see him, scrubbing myself clean again.

Rarely feel clean much at all these days, not for long anyway. Even after all that showering today still feel grubby, and people’s looks leech all the positive feelings out of me; anyway the sunlight outside hurts my eyes. But for the rest of the day I am determined to try to let up on myself and give myself a treat by trying to just forget that I am homeless. For one day just try to be ordinary and feel that I have a right to exist and take up space in the world just like everyone else walking by — try to blend in and do the things that everyone can do for free — to read, walk, sit on a bench or in a café I’ve never been in, try to mingle in with the crowds in the park, enjoy the sunshine — just easy up on myself a bit. Doesn’t last long though, feel too shabby and too exposed in the park and head off the path for the cover of the trees.

Already both dreading and wanting to go back to the laneway and to the car. Feel lost without trees these days though. Next time I’m in the library am determined to learn the names of them and how to identify them. Think I used to know, once — used to know a lot of things...but my head is like mesh these days, nothing seems to stay in it for very long. But walking with a purpose, even if it is only naming the trees in my head, is what will make a difference...make me less conscious of other people's stares...make me feel less visible...less homeless. Must remember that.

All this magical light

2006-04-20T21:31:00.000Z

The days are getting so long. It's Spring and it's spectacular but there are hours and hours and hours to fill in the day too, and a lot of the time I just don’t know what to do with myself. I find myself longing for dark — something I never thought I’d hear myself say. Other years I have longed for Spring, the same as everyone does, and can’t wait for the longer days, all this magical light, lasting into the evenings. But homeless, longer days, so far, just mean that other people are out and about for longer and that I can’t even think of settling down for the night until it gets reasonably dark and people out walking their dogs in the woods and milling about head for home. So although I am even more staggered this year, being so close to it, at the beauty of everything, the surges of life all around, sometimes through me, the days seem, as much as anything else at the moment, tediously long, and exhaustion is catching up with me. I found myself having a long nap in the hospital carpark two afternoons this week, a fleece bundled up as a pillow and curled across the seats with sleeping bag over me, hardly caring for once that I was so visible, something I would never have done even a few weeks ago.

There are new trials to sleeping too, now that the worst of the cold has mostly gone, a new routine to get used to (though hopefully not for much longer). The night before last it was almost too warm, and at one point it was so uncomfortable I had to open the door to let my legs stretch out, flapping them about in the sleeping bag to get the circulation going and ease the pains in them. But then a few hours later I coughed myself awake with a sore throat and aching and woke shivering having to rummage around in the bags for the shirt to put back, which I had taken off earlier. Couldn't get back to sleep. The sky was filled with purply light and I sat eating tomatoes and handfuls of raisins watching a squashed moon fall down towards the trees, and trying to stay positive about everything. Hopefully I'll be out of here soon, somewhere with my own room I can shut the door on the world with...somewhere that is warm and smells nice...with curtains I can draw...a door to lock...a kettle to make my own cups of tea...waking in the mornings stretched out somewhere warm, to the smell of toast and milky coffee...

My voice has found me again

2006-04-15T11:08:00.000Z

A few things happened. Started to get nervous about leaving this laneway, but that is natural. Have been to church almost everyday this week: twice yesterday and again today, praying for the usual things and reminding myself of others. Something I've never done so much of other Easters. Yesterday is a null day in churches, nothing happens. Christ has died and there is no Mass or nothing to celebrate, it was all very solemn. I went back in the evening for veneration and the Stations of the Cross, and at the end of it had such an awful sense of utter emptiness, of there being no God in the world at all — of the utter emptiness and terror and utter pointlessness of a world without him. The complete absence of anything at all, and it was terrifying! I've never considered myself to be that religious, though I've always had quite a firm, though quite private, faith — more spiritual than religious though I'd always have said — though not overtly either way. But it brought home to me how we take it for granted. Even now, here in this laneway. All the time here, I have somehow never quite come to despair. Because, despite what else is happening, there has always been an almost tangible prescence here sometimes, a sense that I am not alone, ever. And it keeps me from despair, won't allow me to get to it. Yesterday though, in the church at the end of the Stations it was there — just an utter, utter incomprehensible emptiness — something that must be close to despair, and it was a revelation. I left stunned — feeling completely forsaken. And it made me realise that all this time I've been homeless and living in my car, despite all the low points, all the depths that I'd gone to, I had never actually felt forsaken. I hadn't thought that at the time, I only realised it by the abscence of the feeling I had yesterday.

But something else happened close on teh heels of it so I haven't given it as much thought as I want to yet. The other thing that happened was that I bumped into someone who I used to know when I lived in this area, almost eight years ago. It was a strange, awkward meeting. One) because I was walking out of church and almost literally bumped into him — and two) because he was the person I came across before Christmas, too. Maybe he is the only person —however loose and vague the knowing once was — who is left here in London, who might once have even recognised me, for me to bump into.

Then — back before Christmas — it wasn't so long since I had been living in my car here in London, and I wasn't at such rockbottom - or possibly didor washed my hair for more than a fortnight. Standing there on the street that first time I almost died. But then I managed to quickly make excuses for how I looked, and for how untogether I was, even though I could tell by his reaction that that probably only made things seem more suspicious than they must anyway have looked. I hardly knew him those eight years ago — he was more an aquaintance of one of the flatmates I shared a house with at the time, just someone I mostly just recognised from some of the local places I once went to. He had hardly changed at all. But given all the changes in me over the years, all the corners turned without even knowing, and how I have ended up, here in my car, I would have known him less now — or, rather, been able to relate to him less — and we passed on abruptly, both of us obviously embarrassed by the meeting. Him probably just as much by the state of my clothes and appearance and my smell just as much as I was by them.

I've tried to put that meeting out of my mind since. Something I am good at. But today I saw him again. I had literally just come out of the church and was still blinking in teh bright light outside when I almost ran into him as he was struggling up the hill with about five carrier bags of grocery shopping, obviously in a hurry. Luckily, I hadn't yet reached teh car, otherwise he would have seen it loaded up with the sleeping bags still on teh passenger seat from the nap I'd had in the carpark in the afternoon. It was another awkward recognition though, that stopped both of us in our tracks and made us turn around, too embarrassed to just walk on now that we had both obviously been caught staring at the other (though both obviously wanting to) but again not knowing what to say. Both of us, after the embarrassed hello's and the uncalled for excuses I again made for my appearance: about how I was 'in between' moves and getting over a bad bout of flue — already walking away from each other, passing on again — until I stopped and blurted out 'do you want to go for a coffee, or something.' I wish I hadn't of said it. Well, especially not said 'or something' but I did. He looked very apologetic and flushed and then softened his voice and jsut said, 'Sorry, I really have to get back'. I stood there rooted to the spot, allowing what I had said to catch up with me. I couldn't believe that I, almost a bag lady, spending most of the day trying to be invisible, had asked an almost total stranger to go for a drink, and nearly told them then or there on teh street that I was living in my car. Because that is what I wanted to do, and almost did there on the street. Then I almost collapsed just at the thought of what I had nearly done. I felt my knees buckle and a muscle spasm in my chin, and when I looked back up at him I saw a dozen expressions pass across his face, all of them more sad and worried than the last. I willed my legs to work but they wouldn't, neither would my voice. Then I heard him say 'Yes, why not, I could do with a cup of coffee. '

For a minute I didn't know what he was saying 'alright' to. Then my head cleared. If I could have run off I would have, but I couldn't, I jsut stood there looking at him almost horrified. He took over and said we could probably get a coffee over there, and I found myself walking beside him to the pub across the road on the corner. Fortunately it wasn't one whose toilets I had used as a bathroom some mornings, or where I had sat trying to be invisible at a corner table in for hours without buying anything just to be out of the cold. It was hugely awkward, but he was a nice man and filled in the embarrassing silences with a few memories from that time, mostly about the flatmate I hardly knew at the time anyway, and the way the area had changed since then, all the new things and buildings, and, kindly, how awful he felt when he had even the slightest cold, let alone flu (like I made an excuse that i had, to help explain my dishelleved appearance - yet again). I said very little, still shocked that I was there and taking all my concentration just to breathe, and stop myself jumping up and running out of the place. But with every sip of my drink I nearly told him too. I don't think I realised how much I long to do that, still. Luckily I never did. He didn't ask too many questions either, I think my situation, or one very similar must have been obvious, and embarrassing to both of us. I felt so out of place being there. My whole body was dripping sweat just sitting there, and I felt like a security guard was goiing to come over any minute and tell me to leave. I daren't look around me in case it happened and I felt sweat dribble down my arms and hands and run down the glass onto the table, and he was obviously feeling awkward and drank his drink quicklly and when I (desperate to proove I could afford soemthing I clearly couldn't) asked if he wanted another drink he turned it down — almost too quickly — which was a mixture of hurt and releif, and collected his bags while I went bright red. He left quickly and luckily I didn't tell him anything about myself, or how I'm living. And although I am hugely embarrassed at how untogether I was and hwo he probably thought by the way I looked and acted that I was on drugs or something worse, I'm also pleased that I just managed to sit down with another human being and not completely go to pieces. It is one thing 'talking' about things here, leaving this screen often after reading all your comments etc thinking I have had a 'conversation' with you, but it is another world actually being with someone trying to talk and just be 'ordinary' in places you have spent so many months trying to be invisible in. Not sure if I'll ever be able to do that again. Worry about that. When he left I still half-wished I had told him, at least some things, but mostly I was glad that I didn't. I don't belong in that kind of world anymore and it left me sad, but realising that I have to find another way, whatever it is.

The other thing that happened was realising a thing or two about my reasons for being in the laneway. So I can now say, you're right, Lucy — about me needing to tell as much as you need to hear — right about the first bit anyway. Because I do have a story I want to tell. I have from the beginning of starting this blog — aswell as it being a safe place I could come to to admit my homelessness (the ultimate failure in my life) it was part of the reason for me starting the blog in the first place, I suppose. An unreal-real place where I could shout it out of me, hopefully forever. But I realised more things about that recently, and how much I do actually need to tell it — here or elsewhere.

It's a story I've told a million times to the trees — trees that stand there night after night absorbing it, vowing to protect me — and to myself too of course — in the dark uncertain hours of the night to the blank inside of my head — but it never goes away, the story just unreals and unreals and never ever ends. But saying it here — starting to say it, as I have...several times — with the real people,you've all become to me, listening, is so very different to saying it to the trees or to myself, and it has been so very, very scarey, too. Each time I've tried I feel like another layer of myself unfolds and almost suffocates me with the pain of it, until I literally can't breathe typing it, and have to write other things. I feel things I don't even know the names for.

Young, young feelings, trying to lead me back to the time when the feelings were there first, the time before words and the names of things, the time when there were just lumps of pain inside that noone told me the name of or what to do with - perhaps because nobody knew themselves — sometimes there isn't anyone to blame,there's just a chain of damaged, weak and frightened people, that it is left to you to be the one to step out of — to finally break the chain, before it breaks you.

Maybe that is why it is so scary telling it here, maybe I sense that it might finally end — and I want that more than anything, but I am only human and so inside there is a part of me — no matter how warped or wrong it might sound — that must get some comfort from holding on to something that you have held on to your whole life. It can be terrifying to let that go — who will you be then? Who knows what might happen if you don't have that pain to walk around with...who knows if there will ever be anything to replace it...to fill the hollow it leaves. There are huge risks, and I have lived a life steered clear of risks. a lonely, half-dead life.

The story I need to tell is of me, of how I ended up in this laneway. But the one older than that, too. The one further back, the story that got me on the — emotional — road — at least — to getting into the position in the first place of even ending up anywhere near the position that got me to this laneway. And the story that kept me here so long too — because what I've come to slowly realise is that, in a deep-down, not even known to myself most of the time way, is that I'm mostly here (or at least still here) because in a way I feel that I deserve to be here — that this is where I belong — on the outside of everything, kept away from it all, and apart from other people — away where I can't tell anyone secrets — not mine, or any of the people's who have wanted my whole life for me to be in a place like this — a place where I would be isolated and muzzled — and their secrets safe. And so here I have been, a whole winter, stabbing myself with the knife they gave me. Nothing's ever that clear-cut, no motivation always that visible, but I've come to think that that is part of the reason I have been here, waiting for the truth to surface, and for that penny to drop into it. That's the story I really need to tell — the one of that little girl sitting up on her pink bed shaking, hardly able to breathe, waiting for hours and hours for the police to come — and in a way, waiting her whole life since — still there trembling — for someone to come and put their arms around her, tell her that she is safe, and that it will all be alright.

That's where I've been, mostly, during this time in my car in the woods, and who I have been — that terrified little girl sitting up on that pink bed, waiting. Though of course I wasn't aware of that most of the time — things that I just had flashes of before only becoming obvious to me in the last few days.

In the last few days, in all this silence, that is what I have come to realise. I might not be right, or not totally right, but it feels something like that — a sudden realisation, as if the trees have breathed it into me.

So that is what I have been doing the last couple of days — I wasn't going to say it here, it felt too 'raw' and too 'new', so I intended to leave it sink in for a day or two — but I started typing here today and this is what came out so it must be ready to be said. So, in the last few days, I have been thinking and making at least one decision.

The decision is about therapy. Once, for several months one long, hot summer and into autumn several years ago when I'd just left college and all sorts of things were coming to an end, again, I went to see a therapist. I used to live near here, not a million miles from this laneway, and the therapist lived nearby too. I have almost passed her house, without even thinking of it, a thousand times or more while I have been in this laneway. But in the last few days I have passed her house and thought of her too, thought of one day going back and seeing her, of continuing the excavation that she started with me several years ago, when I left suddenly, and gaping open. I wasn't in desperate need of therapy then, I was relatively happy, in a good job and on the face of it doing well. I was mostly facing the sun, but I always knew I had 'things' lurking there, things that I would one day need to deal with, and so before the need came, once, when I heard someone else recommend a very good therapist, I found her number, made an appointment and went to see her. And she was good...very good, she made me see so many things. For months I sat there in her pale-orange garden room, in almost silence, saying not much more than that I didn't know why I was there because I had nothing to say really, and that's what I did: said mostly nothing. Until the last month or so when things started to bubble up quite urgently, coming out in dreams and half-thoughts and sharp unputbackinable memories. Then just as it was all coming out, I lost my job when the company went into sudden liquidation. Everything suddenly threatened to cave in and I couldn't afford the fees anymore. She reduced them for a while, and then I ran up a bill and in the end I just stopped going. Not sure if I even went back to explain to her why — though like all endings in my life it is all a bit of a blank, so maybe I did. Anyway, I have come to see that all the time I have been in this laneway — literally down a few roads from where she lives — my mind seems to be continuing the stuff I started with her then. Then out of the blue a few days ago I searched out an old address book, looked up her number and phoned it. I did it all on automatic pilot, literally didn't even think about it, just did it, following myself going through the motions — don't know if I intended speaking to her, but I never did. I think I would have expected an answerphone, I seem to remember the few times I ever had occasion to phone in the past there always was one. But this time there wasn't. She spoke. And I either couldn't or wouldn't speak. I just listended to her saying 'hello...hello...hello...is anyone there' over a few times, before the phone went dead.

I never phoned again. But it felt like that voice, that simple hello, the fact that someone from the past — someone who knew the 'old' me, as well as all the demons from my childhood that were trailing me into adulthood, someone who knew the me I was when I was still flourishing, the one before the failed loves and all the determined, running attempts at a life I didn't quite fit into, and the eventual caving in of everything in the end, the 'me' I was before I ended up a hair's breadth away from being a bag lady, living in my car here in this laneway — it felt like that —just hearing the voice of someone like that — brought on all the insights of the last few days. That comment from 'Anonymous' helped as well in then end (so thank you;-)) by telling me to get over myself, and telling me how depressing I was to listen to etc etc (even though the others were right too - it's my blog can say what I want ) I got really upset by it but then after I think, along with her voice on the phone, it did help me shunt myself into a different place.

So although I am not in a position to start up therapy with her again — she was almost too expensive to go to even then — I will — one day when I am working again and can make that commitment — go back and continue working through some of this stuff. She would be the perfect person to go to, because she is a link to my past, so I'd be conquering that fear, and she knows all the old stuff about me, who I was, and so I wouldn't have to explain it all again, and she can best help me understand this emotional and physical rut I am in and how to move on from it. I think that knowing me 'before' is the vital bit. I need that link with someone from my past, and since I can't have it with someone on a personal level, someone like her who knew me then and knew all those 'seeds' that were probably in me even then, and that maybe got me to this laneway, or at least staying in such a rut in it, would be ideal to go to. Don't know why I didn't think of that before, or maybe I did, maybe I just knew I couldn't afford to go now so that there was no point even tomenting myself with teh possibility of it. But I need aims, somthing to reach for and she would be an ideal one.

I think without that kind of help in understanding this I would be in and out of laneways all my life, either mentally, or physically. Because what I have realised so clearly is that pain and trauma this deep, all that long ago stuff, is probably the blueprint for how I ended up in this laneway — for why, on some level, I even seem to think that I deserve to be here. In a way I am punishing myself — punishing that little girl, sitting up there on her bed, waiting. Using the knife that others gave me years ago. One day I am determined to understand it fully, so that I can finally put an end to all this and stop it turning up every so often and biting me on the bum. Because all my life that is what it has been doing — sabotaging things, that little girl popping up saying, 'hey, what about me I am still here hurting,'. Some pain doesn't end it seems, you have to cut it out like a fungus and to do that permanently you have to get to the roots. I just wish I knew how to do that once and for all and be done with all this. I think that old therapist is part of that answer. That was part of the revealtion in the last few days anyway.

Trying to silence the moon

2006-04-11T18:00:00.000Z

That big, bright, not-quite-full moon was in full flow last night, saying things I really did not want to hear! There all night, refusing to let me go - the perforated inside of my head lit up with uncomfortable truths, all splattered across it like stars. Tough night — cruel, heartless moon.

Fun of the fair

2006-04-10T14:15:00.000Z

The hospital, in the greyed-out distance, looked like an oil rig out in a rough sea, looking back at it as I drove away from car park in all that rain last night. Weather is dragging me down, up and down, all over the place, don't know where you are with it. Felt enormous sadness going back to laneway, more than usual, not sure what it was about, just completely weighed down by it. The night before last that same volvo was parked there, and I suppose just dreaded seeing it there again last night, that was part of it anyway. Felt almost angry more than afraid, and intimidated. Its been there a few other times last week. I just ignore it, drive off before he can even see me, put my head down against steering wheel or twist it around so he doesn't register me, and drive past fast, so he doesn't realise I am sleeping there.

Went to churchyard carpark and slept there for a bit, but woke up sore and thirsty at about 1: 20am, and instead of going back to sleep decided to drive back to laneway to see if he had gone. Drove back with sleeping bag just pulled down so could get feet on pedals, without loosign too much heat. Almost out of water, so wanted to stop off at 24 hour garage for milk (12p more) but didn't want to get myslef dressed enough or wake up enough to get out of car for it. Probably done that before over the years, driven to garage or somewhere after midnight when ran out of milk or driving back from someplace, and never given it a second thought, but now hate doing it, convinced that everyone would automatically assume I am homeless. Wasn't there when I went back and must be gettting very blase about it because slept right through. Woke up next morning groggy and disorientated feeling like I'd slept really deeply. What I've noticed since been in car is that the stronger the emotion I feel, even if its fear, the heavier I usually sleep. Which is strange, would imagine it to be other way around — always on the alert. Took me a while as I listened to all the birds and then slowly sat upright and the laneway tilted into focus to realise why it wasn't the churchyard.

Anyway, last night part of the dread was thinking that he would be there again. Felt wrecked, really tired, but he wasn't there. Ate half of french stick with thick butter and two portions of cheese. Almost too tired to chew. Felt myself crying out of the blue. Really strained. Tears are mostly good though, release of pent up energy, so didn't mind. Proves I'm alive...so that's good sign.

Saw lots of tents being put up in fairground today. Walked all the way back over there late morning, really wanted to go and ask if there was any casual jobs going. Just couldn't bring myself to do it, almost couldn't breathe. Don't know what I'm scared of... 'you're in a laneway for God's sake' I kept telling myself, how bad can anything else be, but I couldn't walk in, just felt sick. Circled it for about an hour, going and coming back, watching from different places, all the warm caravans, the lads threading in and out between, carrying long poles and crates of things, all looking content, everyone with a purpose, knowing what was expected of them, and just getting on with it. I long for that.

2006-04-08T10:50:00.001Z

There are parts of this hospital you could live in. I don't, but you could. When I get out of this laneway, and don't need to use the hospital so much for everything, think I'll write a letter to the head of security services at the NHS, letting them know how bad the security actually is in this place. Giving them lists of all the hide-out places, the times I've been in them, dates, durations...But for now lax security suits me..If I were a patient in there, though, all these who-knows-who's wandering about the place, would find it a bit unsettling...

Actually I think the wards are pretty secure...and the operating theatres. But there are a huge amount of places you could find to rest undisturbed, sleep even. All those people stuck in a foreign city overnight not being able to find a hotel for the night...if only they knew...All those enormous city hospitals, which at night are more like uninhabited villages — vast and empty, full of little tucked-away places you can go and sit in undisturbed — get some rest.

I stayed upstairs last night in the long corridor leading to the medical school part. I sat here the night before too, reading, scribbling down stuff in a notebook, staring down those long, shiny corridors like rivers of pale mud, looking for answers. It's colder up in that part and there's not really an excuse for being up there if anyone came, but three hours and not a soul passed. My whole body screamed to lay out flat on the hard bench-seat that stretches along the entire back wall, but I fought it for hours, just in case anyone did come by. I need to be discreet, stay under the radar in the hospital, can't afford to ever be asked to leave. Don't know what other people do, how they manage, but if I couldn't keep going in there everyday for a shower and hairwash don't know what I'd do. Sitting there reading though — quiet, keeping myself to myself — what could they do? I could be distressed hospital visitor, waiting for news of a loved one, needing time to myself. I keep forgetting that they know I'm not, that I'm 'known' in the hospital now, that the security men and lot of the other staff recognise me now. Some things it's best to forget, and so I just look right through them, blank them out — if I don't see them they won't see me — old skills, from childhood. Took my boots off though, walked up and down a few times barefoot. Was agony, blissful, painful agony. Never get a chance to stand barefoot — anywhere; take boots off in car at night, and ground in laneway is too wet, or else stony, to stand on in the morning, so put them on again before I get out to shake out bags and tidy things. The floor of the shower is concrete, and slimy — and freezing — and probably crawling with verucca's so don't hang about there barefoot either.

Bending down to put boots back on noticed that there were whole row of sockets along the wall under the bench. Didn't think, just noticed. But suddenly in the laundrette yesterday evening, folding hot clothes from the dryer and planning what to do with the rest of the evening, suddenly occurred to me that those long benches up in the hospital corridor would make a great ironing board. Didn't think it, just swam into my mind. But later last night, found my iron which was in one of the bags I never use in the boot and took it in with me from the car. Plugged it into one of the sockets up there and pushed it in underneath, out of sight. Sat there for ages sweating, sipping water from the water cooler, waiting for the big, lanky security guard who was on duty, to come up and catch me. But when nobody did, got down on knees and ironed my trousers and then two tops. Had my back to the security camera and did it quickly, hardly breathing, my head full of thoughts of all those sick people probably dying right that minute downstairs on the wards, life support machines being turned off one by one, souls departing. Felt sure security guard would swing open the double doors at the far end and shout down to me. But they were probably sitting down in their office reading paperbacks or doing Sudoko as they usually are when I pass, too busy to watch the screens. And anyway what could they do. 'ask me to leave?' So... I'd leave, what of it...I'd just come back next day though... during someone else's shift. Getting very brazen, would never have done this back in October, none of it. Survival...

Joy to have ironed top and jeans again though. Laid them out on top of all the bags on back seat last night, and today wearing them feel almost human again. First time I've worn ironed clothes since August, amazing...Used to be so anal about that kind of thing, clothes-brushing, ironing, getting all the little creases right, using the sleeve board...but got by all this time without doing it all once, except special occasions don't think I'll bother doing it even when I'm back living inside somewhere. That's the thing about all this time living in my, have changed so much. don't think I'd ever fit back into my old kind of life again, then again wouldn't really want to?... But when you're homeless fitting in becomes everything, all the little details...all I want to do is blend in, keep under the radar...I even found an old 'spare' key in glove box in car few months ago and put it on keyring, go round flashing it, put it on tables when sitting in cafes etc. keep lifting it up and playing with it, letting people see it — imaging it's proof that I'm not homeless, that everyone who sees it will think I must have a home to go back to, a front door somewhere to unlock, slam close behind me. Think they'd think that anyway...Maybe they do...maybe they don't?...makes me feel more normal though...less 'homeless'.

What it's all all about...

2006-04-06T17:05:00.000Z

All I ever wanted my whole life was to be loved. Right from being a child. Not to be pretty or popular or successful or smart, not to make a go of life — not really, not deep, deep down where everything springs from — or even to get out of this laneway really — yes-and-no, but not really-really — just for someone to take me in their arms and to finally find out what it feels like to be loved. It always felt wrong to even want that, even as a child — wrong as both an ambition and a dream: greedy and wrong — something that you only watch through windows, happening to other people.

But now I think I'm starting to feel it, slowly, a warm trickle of it from myself back to myself... and it's good, I like it. And they say that love follows love, don't they? So who knows, maybe one day I will feel it from somewhere outside myself. But I'm not waiting anymore, it feels like something is over — a whole phase. Love is not going to stride down this laneway and take me in its arms and get me out of here — course it's not. So, I'm ready to do it myself now. Everything feels different today, can't say quite how, it just does. Feels like something has snapped loose inside me — something tight that was pinning me down.

Have you ever seen how butterflies sit in the sun, motionless, wings spread, waiting to absorb enough energy to fly off? Don't know why, but that was the first thing I thought of this morning when I woke up late and raised myself in sleeping bag, rustling, sleepily, to a sitting postion, coming to slowly, hardly believing I was still there, but looking out blankly at all that bright sunlight in the laneway, blinking myself reluctantly back into the world — and suddenly thinking that — of butterflies in the sun, waiting to fly off...

Boo! And Tuk-tuking across the sky...and May Sarton

2006-04-05T14:11:00.000Z

The cold came back last night, not with a vengeance, but it was there, doing its best to take the edge off my optimism. I didn't let it, but was enough to put an extra layer back on and sleep in my hat again, which hadn't had to the night before. There were a few, loud, flash-showers too, which drowned out thoughts, and, as usual, the ends of the sleeping bag. But it didn't seem to matter...nothing did much, last night, at all. Not because I was in one of my numbed-off states, detached from my body — which is often the way with me — because I wasn't — not last night —I was completely in the moment and 'up' last night, even glad to be there, and alive,...But for some reason I hardly felt the cold or the pain or discomfort of cramped-up sleeping either.

Wish I knew why that was, so I could call it up again? I felt optimistic for a change, felt different, sure that something would happen to end all this soon. That I'd climb out of it. Maybe it was just the tail-end of all that excitement over the NYT piece. Because nothing has happened from that — I haven't had publishers knocking on my car door, or job offers piling in or anything — I'm not being asked to represent Shelter or be a spokesperson for Centerpoint, nor has the Paypal button (whose garish prescence I hate even looking at there out of the corner of my eye) made much of a difference, everyone probably assuming that everyone else is doing it, despite a lot of people encouraging me to put it there has only been used by four people, so it's not that I expect that to be the way out — I don't, not really, or not in the immediate future anyway. But I do feel real optimism somehow. Maybe it is just the number of people who came to visit the site from the NYT article, and all the supportive emails and comments I got from that, though that has died down too now — people saying nice things about my writing and my spirit, and it's not just spring either, though seeing the new year stretch its wings like this is always one of the nicest times of year — and this time I've got the best seat in the house to see it from! Don't know...sometimes these emotional changes just come and go without outside influence, just internal seasons with laws of their own. Three or four times since August I have gone through distinct mood changes without ryhme or reason. Just feeling completely different to the way I had felt just the day earlier. Growth spurts maybe. Although I felt last night younger in a way than I have in a long, long, time — so felt more like regression at times.

Sleep was impossible though, despite all the walking yesterday, restless and agitated, so maybe am still stepping over all those nameless fears. At one point, some time after two, I gave up and just sat up in the car eating Cheese Balls and a bar of Toblerone. Just sat there eyeballing the rain, and, when it went, the two bright, silver stars that were the only ones visible in the whole sky, and suddenly thought to myself, 'After this, after what I've been through here these past months, I will never be frightened of anything, ever again!' Heard myself say it in my head. And for a time believed it. Felt like I had chased away all the bogeymen from my life. That I had, despite all the people who had wanted me to fail in my life — people who should have been there caring and guiding me, wanting my failure instead of my success — as their way of silencing me — that I had triumphed over adversity in a way, come through it all. I'm not out of this laneway yet, and it was still only me and that big, black sky with its two silver stars, like the glitter of love in eyes I'll never see again, but last night it felt like I was almost out of that other isolated laneway that I have been living in in my head for years. And maybe that is what it takes: to get out of that mental one first, before I can finally leave here. Maybe that's why I am here, in this laneway, learning that lesson. My world has been pulled out of shape for far too long, but last night it felt like maybe it was possible to get it back into some kind of shape, some kind of semblance of 'normality' , whatever that is, again. Maybe you just say 'Boo!' to your fears and they go, off hightailing it out of there. I whispered 'Boo' last night, and tonight am going to say it louder, shout it right out of me into the trees.

Was still cold when I woke around 7:00 this morning, but again just noticed rather than feared it and what was jsut as noticeable was that I hardly ached at all. Felt quite loose and rested...The windowscreen was covered in glittering frost and dressed quickly, pulling the thick, navy fleece and my trousers on over sleep-clothes, and before even digging the sleep from my eyes or anythign else walked off into the trees with my loo roll, crunching over cold, hard frost, which was already being burnt off by strong sun by the time I circled back through the frosted trees, the long way round, to the car. All I could see was the beauty of it all...such a beautiful world — and it's all I'm determined to see all day too...

Came across a journal of May Sarton's in the library the other day so decided to come back and try and find it again and read it today. In library now, but through the long, slit-windows over by the curved, far wall can see bright-blue sky, full of big white flat-bottomed clouds that look like parked snow-tuk-tuk's that you could just hop on and whizz off across the sky on...Sometimes, seems the more doors close, the better you become at jumping over walls, just noticing that?

So, help me God...

2006-04-03T20:18:00.000Z

I don't know how to do this with dignity. But the suggestions here about it, in the comments to posts, have been wriggling about in my head all day, and now I don't know how not to do it either... so I have set up a Paypal account and am thinking about putting a donate button on this blog — as apparently a lot of others do on their's.

I don't know if it is the right thing to do, or the wrong thing. I am overtired and still wondering if I am thinking straight about it all. All I know for certain is that, at the end of the day, I need to be able to hold my head up. I might be homeless and have nowhere in particular to walk to these days, but I want to walk there tall. As I said here before, I still have my dignity and a clear conscience — came into this laneway with it and intend to drive out of here with it...I hope that this still enables me to somehow do that.

In many ways this feels like the ultimate admission of defeat, and that's tough. Tough because I've been living in my car in this laneway for so long, been through so much, convinced that I'd get out of it my own way, without asking for help, determined I would...But here I am almost worn to a stump with it all. So I put my hands up and swallow my pride.

The way several of you have put it to me in the comments here is that some people have enjoyed my writing and would like to see me get out of this situation to do more of it, and that I shouldn't see it as charity but as a donation to show their appreciation of that, my writing. My mind has to go through a lot of contortions to accept that explanation, but I've just about arrived at the point where I can. I don't know what else to say at this stage — which is usually the best time to say nothing more. So, if you have appreciated the writing of this blog and would like to make a donation I will put a button on the links bar — and thank you.

Eating cake

2006-04-03T20:01:00.000Z

Suddenly I feel part of this huge, bustling family. Is fantastic...don't feel so alone...a bit overwhelming too, though, and right now it feels like everyone is over all at once, a huge festive gathering going on around me, and all I want to do is sneak off and go sit under the table and eat cake — alone with the dog. That's what I'm doing right now, sitting, eavesdropping on you all, from under there, not wishing you away, just needing a moment of quiet time to take this in, but glad to be part of it all too, would never want not to be.

Ran out of water last night. Was going to drive off to late garage but luckily eventually fell off, woke several times sitting out showers not wanting to get out there, unable to get back to sleep. Had to finger-brush teeth with no water and drive to carpark this morning with thick, stale, mouth. Felt really dirty all day. Don't think I've cleaned myself so much ever, but still can't get rid of this unclean feeling, trails me everywhere. Most of the day in library, back and forward, eavesdropping here...wondering...eating cake...

Promise will answer all messages soon.

Talking the talk...

2006-04-02T16:16:00.000Z

I think this is the link to the NYT audio file:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/
20060402_HOMELESS_AUDIOSS/blocker.html

There is also a clickable link to it over at the side bar, under 'Links'.

London calling...

2006-04-02T14:11:00.001Z

I'd like to explain something — to all who have been reading this blog regularly, and being so supportive the last couple of months. Support which I really do appreciate — despite that badly worded comment I made about feeling a bit inhibited by the support too (missed all your regular comments after! But own fault...) Anyway, this NYT thing today, coming out of the blue the way it has, makes me feel almost deceitful...so I want to explain.

A few weeks ago – well, almost four now — a NYT journalist doing an article on homelessness stumbled across my blog (which on Technorati.com is listed as 'homeless' blog) and got in touch as part of his research. Being in different country they couldn't really focus on me, as I am in London and the article was about homeless in the US. But I did do a phone interview etc. and someone from the NYT London office had to come to my car to meet me etc. and journalist said if it fit into the story I would be mentioned, but no promises — for reason just explained — and that it was actually probably unlikely. Also, when the story is finished that's all in the hands of editors and senior editors etc. etc. so other people decide what to cut out and leave in. I thought there was not much chance at all of me being mentioned. When I heard nothing in the last week or so, had given up hope that anything would be there at all — mentioning me or not.

So many times I had wanted to refer to something about it here, but I was under strict orders not to mention it before it was confirmed whether going in or not — which is I suppose normal practice — but has been hugely frustrating, especially since I wasn't likely to be in it! But I'd agreed not to mention it here, either way. By coincidence, yesterday, I headed blog entry 'Exposure' — which was referring to how it felt to be so visible now that spring is here, the discomfort of that — but then this morning when I got to check blog and email the article had been published overnight. And on the New York Times website there is a link to this blog! and an email from the journalist letting me know that article was out today. Wasn't really expecting it, so feels strange to suddenly have so many visitors and comments.

Anyway, as I said, I wasn't expecting it to be there at all after all this time, had almost blanked it out, though because I had promised not to mention it in my blog, I couldn't.

Article on homlessness is on front page of NYT today. I'm not really in it, but apparently at bottom of article it refers to me having a blog and a link to the NYT website, where there is then a link to my blog (in 'related' over at the side) and an audio link to the interview I had with the journalist, talking about my experience of homelessness.

I am trying to figure out a way to get a link to that audio onto my blog, so that you can listen to it from here, but don't know how to do it. (If anyone knows could they please email/comment me). Wasn't so easy to find the article, but is there on New York Times website though, front page, but you have to go to the 'National' news (click on 'National' news, on left hand side of the NYT main site, to bring up that page. Article has photo of man in car, and follow link to 'interactive', where there are two of us speaking: one male, one female —female is me;-) or on 'related', which brings you back to this blog.

Hello America...
Thank you for reading my blog! Have been so many comments/emails it might take me a while to get back to them, but definitely will answer all soon.

Just one thing though, I just read last comment that said something like, 'if' you are genuine, and 'if' you are homeless, and 'if' you want a job etc etc. That hurts! I'm too tired and stressed and burnt down to a stump for too much of that kind of thing, so can I just please ask that people don't insult me here. I am certainly not proud of this (which is why I talk about it in this blog but spend all the rest of my time and energy trying to hide it from the outside world!) but unfortunately I am homeless and am living in my car. The New York Times does very thorough checks to ensure that their articles are correct, and that everyone in them are kosha (well, maybe especially in the last couple of years they have had to be more stringent, but they certainly were with me). They have a London office, and a journalist from that office did have to come to meet me — in my car — and check that I was kosher, and who I said I was here in my blog! So they did check me out, so maybe we could drop the 'if's', it is upsetting.

This blog is where I come to be honest about my homelessness, not dishonest about it. I spend the rest of the day 'outside' in the 'real' world being dishonest about it, trying my hardest to cover it all up etc. I can understand the comment with all the 'if's', and am running out of time to answer it right now, and far too tired, (and anyway I don't have to justify myself to anyone on my own blog!) but because I really am homeless and am writing all this here to keep me sane then I do get a bit touchy about it, it's still upsetting. I am trying the best way I can to get by and dig myself out of this — and the energy for that comes in spurts, after each knockback it takes longer to build it back up again (but yes I tried a Care Agency and a nursing agency for nursing support staff etc etc plus a nanny agency, and one for classroom assistants etc. But without a job for almost two years and up to date references and home address, interview clothes etc etc. I was turned down by all of them (which I don't blame — I wouldn't leave children or elderly relative in care of just anybody, either). But it is hugely frustrating, especially when struggling living like this. Haven't given up though, will keep trying — am! I am not only writing in this blog, I am writing in it inbetweentimes — in between surviving and trying to get out of it. Getting knockbacks all the time is ineveitable but hard, and yes I might have to go to a hostel or something in the end, but for now I am still trying to avoid that — rightly or wrongly. Don't know what you would all do in this situation — or think you might do — all I know is that for who I am and where I am and as far as I am able, for now, I am doing the best I can. And like most of you I am praying hard that that is enough.

Thank you all for reading and comments etc I will reply soon as I can.

Exposure

2006-04-01T16:42:00.000Z

Spring! this year it feels so lonely...the way it blows right through you: the way it blows you right open for everyone to see.