Someone once told me that in order to have a 'successful' blog you need to update it at least three times a week. I don't know what 'successful' implies, especially as I have no idea whether anyone beyond various pals actually reads this, but at the current rate I am failing miserably. Hence life trundles on uncommented. Although considering the fact that yesterday I managed the three alarmingly middle-aged pursuits of drinking tea, doing the washing up while listening to Radio 4 and falling asleep under the Sunday newspapers, perhaps that's not too much of a loss.
On Friday I went to Dungeness in Kent to see the late film-director, artist and writer Derek Jarman's garden. It is a strange, strange moonscape of stones and windblown grasses, speckled with a community of tough wooden houses, painted black and yellow or black and red, the nuclear power station brooding like a science-fiction city in the background. Derek Jarman's garden itself is composed of wild flowers and plants wringing life from beneath the combed gravel, decorated with rust-red chains and oddments of glass and stone and driftwood. A new incumbent lives there now, and although a sign warned tourists not to gawp in the windows, I couldn't help but look in to see jam jars full of pencils and white-painted walls. It is light, light, light there, a bone-coloured scouring light, and despite the weirdness I felt briefly at ease for the first time in weeks.
It would probably be the perfect environment for writing, but after a brief enchantment with the idea, the endless howling winds and isolation got to me a bit. Talking of writing, I have been reading Michele Roberts' memoir Paper Houses, which is not only by one of my favourite authors but about the '70s and second-wave feminism, and living in London, and all the things I find fascinating, so am trying to take it slowly. It occurred to me this morning that I spend more time reading about writing, not only in the Guardian Review, but so far this year a biography of Rebecca West, the story of the bohemian writers and (half of) a biography of Edith Wharton, than actually doing any writing myself. I think I am too scared of trying and failing, or discovering those vague ideas of myself as being a 'writer' are just that- ideas.
Just to add to the unrelenting gloom, one of my best pals at work left on Thursday (the beneficiary of my acrylic knitting in the shape of a probably very flammable Liverpool scarf). I am really going to miss him!
