diary – SANDERLINGS

27 December, 2021

Write your diary as a writer, he said. I read the extract from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. Much of it contains her analysis of Ulysses. She doesn’t think much of it, although she promises to read it again. I wish I had her fortitude.

Sept 6^th ‘I finished Ulysses and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water.’

I have never finished Ulysses. Every five years or so I pick it up and try again. It’s a book that I imagine other people imagine I have read. I have it my hands now. It’s a paperback edition, a Penguin Modern Classic. It smells of fade and stain and heavy use. The smell is a lie. I’m sure I bought it new. According to the publishing details, it must have been around 1985 in Edinburgh. I was a student, but I was not studying literature. I was a heavy reader. With no television and no sporting skills and no Internet, that’s what I did. We read and we drank and we played records and we went to gigs and we shouted Can’t Pay Won’t Pay on anti-poll tax marches.

I have packed up and carried that book to three flats in Edinburgh in the 1980s. To four houses in New Zealand in the 1990s. To five flats this century in the UK. In each of those moves I decided to keep that book. My fingers would have danced around the cover. I would have opened a random page while I stood in front of several half-filled cardboard boxes. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float.

The words said nothing to me then and they don’t now. I didn’t care about Buck Mulligan or Stephen Dedalus. Sometimes I prefer my literature spare, at other times resplendent. But whatever the style, I scorn the lavish use of adverbs and similes. You may smart at my use of lavish. Give him a break you may say. At least James Joyce finished and published the damned book. A masterpiece, one of the most famous and celebrated works in modern literature. Look in your draft folder. Ah, but I respond. Check it out yourself. The following adverbs appear on the first page: solemnly, coldly, smartly, sternly, briskly, gravely, and quietly.

I can’t believe I have just gone through Joyce’s most famous work looking for adverbs. I am beyond petty. I am also cold and I need to go outside and oil my wretched knee with an hour’s cycle.

Why haven’t I taken Ulysses to a charity shop? The same reason I still have shoes and boots I could wear before I was run over by a truck eleven years ago. I am waiting for the new improved me. The person that reads the classics and enjoys them. The person that finishes writing the dozen or so half-arsed short stories sitting in her draft file. The person who has a life plan and delivers it. There is nothing to suggest this new me will ever materialise. My writing flits between fragments and oddments and remnants and lost buttons and broken zips. It conjures wisps but never consummates.

I’ll put Ulysses back on the glass shelf in my bedroom. Later I’ll pick up Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. It’s a perfect day for the fact that.

26 December, 2021

Derek Jarman writes about the weather. And famous people. Being gay. And suicides. And the colour of the sky. Everyone he knows is smiling in slow motion. I put my panniers down in the hall and flick on Radio 6 Music. I am home from Christmas. Joan Armatrading lights up the dial. One line, I hear, one line and I’m crying. Not weeping, more a thickening, a welling, the blunting of a sharpening stone. An unexpected unwelcome internal lament.

I am twenty-one and he is alive, and we are dancing on a square of blue carpet on a groundfloor flat in Stockbridge. The same blue as the postage stamp square he later paints in the lower right-hand corner of White on White. To remember, he says. By October that year he is dead. I’ll be your fire side, Joan sings now. Your willow, oh willow. I wait for the name of the song. Willow. I don’t recall ever knowing the name, or even the words. It’s her voice, damn it. The impregnable tone, the elegiacal modulation.

The presenter announces Janice Long is dead. A short illness. She announces Janice before Desmond Tutu. She was one of them, the BBC. Desmond was bigger than all of them. Janice made it to sixty-six. Desmond to ninety. The dancing man had less than half the life of Janice. Of length, not of value. I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion. Love and Affection, fourth on her set list at the Hammersmith Odeon in March that year. Me, Myself I, the opening track. I imagine the crowd surging, fists in the air. I sit here by myself and I know you love it.

We’d had that talk. I’m going on my own, I told him. I’ll be back, I said. I didn’t care what he thought. I went interrailing. He sent me a postcard to one of the hotels I planned to stay in. The receptionist handed it to me with a smile. He must love you, she said in a language I wasn’t familiar with. She didn’t know that he’d left me a chocolate Rollo taped to my bike handlebars outside the old Royal Infirmary just weeks before.

Thunder, don’t go under the sheets. Boxing day. The Promenade is crawling ant black with coats and winter knits and pure wool pompoms and dogs in sweaty quilted jackets. Women with neoprene gloves and gilt-stained skins stand around waist deep in the sea. I push through the crowds on my bike. My knee throbs. Arthritis is a stiff tin badge I wear with neither honour nor pride. I have not yet heard Joan’s guitar or that shush brush over the skin of the drum.

The cat is a soft mound under the Colombian blanket at the end of the bed. I remember the man, the maker of the blanket. Reaching to the top shelf of the shop that sweated lanolin with his loose knees and his finger tremors. His own sheep, he said, he had six that lived in a scrap of field outside his house. His own work, he said as he sat down hard on the low wooden stool, the blanket warm grey ivory over his lap. It’s not women’s work, he continued. His Spanish was slow and certain. It was his second language. Maybe his third. His fingers were doing better than his teeth.

I still find burrs in the blanket. I pull them out and roll the rough sharp of them in my fingers. It is disrespectful to throw them away. There’s a pile of them somewhere. I can’t remember where. Is it tomorrow yet? I’ve got to look my best.