It rhymes with reach (+ out)

The fact that I feel so damned lonely must be proof that I married well. During sixty-six years there've been plenty of arguments but also plenty of agreements. Notably when VR - already a mother - agreed to share the adventure of uprooting ourselves from the suburb of Stoke Newington, from London, from England and from Europe and settle - for an unspecified length of time - in the USA. Where I knew nobody, would live unprotected by the NHS (National Health Service) in a sub-continent where more than two-thirds of the population had never owned a passport. A huge but parochial land mass.

Why? The immediate assumption, on both sides of the Atlantic, was that I intended to make my fortune. Not so, and I fear you'll just have to take my word for that. I was influenced, of course, but not so much by movies or by TV. Rather by Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, James Thurber, E. B. White, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Henry James, Anne Tyler, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, P. J. O'Rourke, Ross McDonald, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Lorenz Hart, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, James Jones... Many more. Many re-read. Yup, folks, it was the writers who wove the web.

Two things kept me there. One I fear will sound like boasting but don't complain; aged ninety, I won't be boasting for much longer. Fact is I'm good at what I do and this was recognised. For which, many thanks.

Second: life as it is lived in the suburbs.This came as a surprise especially when VR gave birth. Suburbanites are, I suppose, in the majority and it's my opinion that this is where the USA's true heart lies. Take it or leave it.

And now we - the USA and I - are suffering; VR is in a nursing home and US suburbanites are being maltreated by a starkly mad salesman. I felt  it was time to show that I cared.

Hence the tee-shirt bearing a single word. It's not a word that's as well-known in the UK as it is in the USA. And I haven't done it any favours by mirror-reversing it. But it's the eventuality we should all be hoping for. And, if that's your habit, praying for. 

Loss... from another angle

Not many people would have read the post - A Different Type of Loss - which I wrote, published and then quixotically destroyed a day or two later. Not because it was defective or the subject ill-chosen; I think the transformation marriages can bring about is under-explored. Ceasing to think purely as an individual and absorbing - in parallel - aspects of another person's life can be beneficial. The trouble is I had created an elephant in the room. In some respects I had - as the cliché goes - swallowed the camel while straining at the gnat.

I had taken a vow not to write about the medical condition that had overtaken VR even though there had been powerful discoveries I'd made along the way. And misunderstandings that needed clearing up. But I knew in my heart of hearts VR would not have approved of such a project. Silence, however inadequate, would be my paltry gift.

But quite by chance I came upon a reference by Stephen Fry in his arguments against the possible existence of an all-powerful God. One who had thought everything through and then brought about all aspects of life as we know it. Why, Fry asked, had God thought it necessary to create a form of bone cancer that is more or less fatal and only attacks children? How could that fit into the principles of overwhelming  love said to form the basis of Christianity?

As it happens, in one of my short walks to pick up the newspaper, I had fallen into conversation with a woman who'd recently been widowed - in mere middle age - and was struggling to re-establish herself. The chat lasted quite a long time and I was drawn in by her articulacy and the way she was able to control her emotions. Inevitably I compared her situation with my own. Was a partner's death preferable to the awfully inflicted cruelties I found myself sharing with my wife of 65 years?

There is of course no agreed answer to this question. Unless, of course, the all-powerful God exists and he'd seen my situation as worthy of the most exquisitely devised punishment for coming to the wrong conclusion about his all-abiding love? And believe me the torture is very finely wrought since it relies on those benefits that marriage has conferred on me.

I may find it necessary to destroy this substitute post too. Who knows? Like the weather I find myself changeable. Very English, that.

A different type of loss

Sorry Lucy, I've had second thoughts about this one. Hence I'm exercising editor's privilege.

But the email would be greatly welcome.

Cheers,

Robbie

Navel inspection

 

These days I get out more, meet new people and – as with the unchanging spots on a leopard – I ask them questions. Initially to help me get work done; latterly, when I’m impressed by the quality of the answers.

I’ll call S a charity worker even though that’s inexact. What’s true is her work demands a sense of vocation, certain aspects would put off someone less sympathetic, she immediately gets on with people and she’s well-informed. Her husband is also “not exactly” a charity worker but is much closer to being one.

The obfuscation is intentional.

S’s answers to my questions were not only factual but reassuring. I didn’t want to waste her time but the atmosphere suggested a couple of minutes’ chat wouldn’t go amiss. “Just suppose,” I said, “you and your husband were faced with an unexpected day off; how would you ideally spend it?”

“Reading,” she said.

Break for stage directions. Journalistic questions are not plucked from the ether; many are intended to provoke a foreseen (possibly revelatory) answer. But not in this case. I had no real idea beforehand. If I say I was surprised by the answer it might imply I’d seen S as a non-reader. Perish the thought! I was, in fact, delighted. End of break.

I do a lot of reading, myself  (less so in old age, I fear). Mainly when the mood takes me. But am I such a devoted print-lover as to allocate a whole day to a book? The answer must be no. Am I missing out, then? Might there be bigger rewards if I were?

A situation that had me – agreeably – questioning myself.

Pure gold.

Gather ye comfort where ye may

This post does not break the vow I made under "Which?" It concerns me, not VR.

I visit her regularly and find myself comparing my current way of life (Lonely but free to do whatever I wish) with hers (Seated and surrounded by inarticulacy and/or other forms of suffering associated with this terrible illness). 

Leaving me feeling guilty. The manageress of the nursing home says: "You are not alone".

Both my daughters are distant and I am regularly in touch by phone. Both are immensely supportive. I mention this feeling of guilt but point out the word is inexact: guilt implies self-blame and I am not responsible for VR's illness. Wouldn't "grief" be a better word, one suggests.

It would. And, strangely, this greater precision helps me. The joy of getting language right.

**** And, with almost unbelievable timing, an email arrives from a local computer repair service which used TeamViewer Host software (ie, temporarily taking over the running of my PC from an office three miiles away) to cure a connection problem. At the time I was impressed by this very civilised way of doing business, and said so. Would I therefore write them a review? I would, but, I told them, it would not take the form of most reviews - apparently composed by the company owner's sycophant. 

Quite, quite different. I was surprised they posted it. But they did and they say it attracted over fifty viewings. Lessons learned: Stay clear of clichés, think before pressing the first key, revel in language's ultimate potential.

The authorial maze

I started writing my current novel - Rictangular Lenses - in early September 2016. There have been year-long gaps to the point where you might have thought I'd lost interest altogether. Brother Sir Hugh pointed out I started learning to sing the same year (early January) and there is no doubt I was absorbed by this new turning-point in my life. On the other hand I've been writing fiction since I was 11, the year 1946. Do the forties have any resonance for anyone who reads Tone Deaf?

I may not have written RL continuously but its existence nagged at me. In Lindsay I'd created the toughest of all the women who dominate my other four novels. She gives men hell and I've loved devising these torments; perhaps, deep down, I'm an unrevealed masochist. There was no way I'd let her drop into oblivion.

During the last six months I've resumed writing RL and I'm up to 75,181 words. For those who can't envisage what that means, an average medium-length novel probably tops out at about 100,000 words.

But here's a thing: creating  RL has stretched over a decade and there's no doubt - even discounting learning to sing -  during that period I've changed as a person and, thereby, as an author. I'm not sure I ever knew how RL would end but I've just completed a totally unexpected conversation between Lindsay and a concert pianist which must surely change the plot in a big way. How? I'm not sure. But then I'm kind of sure.

Am I being irritating? Cast your mind over the biographies of all the novel writers you've read: many have been downright peculiar, some close to criminal. It's not a job for healthy minds

WHICH?

Veronica now lives in a nursing home. Yesterday I visited her there for the first time. I do not intend to write directly about this matter again.

Not because the subject is too raw, too difficult or too personal. I’ve written for a living and I’ve tackled those adjectives before. Rather, because it would be pointless.

At the present core of our 65-year-old marriage is a dilemma, a word that’s often misused. Too casually. It is much more than a sticky how’s-your-father. Google puts it rather pungently:

A challenging situation requiring a choice between two or more equally undesirable, unfavourable, or mutually exclusive  alternatives… often… a  ‘no-win’.”

Occasionally, at three o’clock of a morning, I reckon I’ve cracked it. But it’s fool’s gold. One cannot do anything about the passage of time, whatever H. G. Wells postulated. To explain the dilemma would be easy enough, if wordy. But, as I say, pointless. And that’s what Brits call a full stop and North Americans a period.