Listening to War and Peace on New Year’s Day
I woke up this New Year’s Day morning and didn’t really feel like getting up. The night before had been a late one, natch, and the outside world was both cold and wet. My phone was out of power, so Facebook and Twitter were out. I had a book handy, but that was too much effort. So I put on the radio and reached for the headphones. I didn’t want to disturb the sleeping dogs on the bed, after all. Or the sleeping Graeme, come to that. But the radio was strange. None of the normal programmes were on. The radio world had become War and Peace. Funny how these things work out. A bare three weeks ago, I read War and Peace for the first time since I was a teenager. (*Disclaimer: I didn’t actually read all of it in the run up to Christmas. I caught...
Finding Bridie
Being a girl from Swindon means that going to London is a big deal. I mean, you never know when you’ll make it back there. Even now, with Manchester on my doorstep and semi-regular London flits becoming part and parcel of having a book deal, I still feel the need to justify my presence with meaningful activity. This time, though, it wasn’t museums or exhibitions or galleries I was after. This time, I was going to find my grandmother. Not literally, because she died in the mid-nineties. Part of her story, though, was played out in Kensington. My plan was to walk across Hyde Park and find where it had happened. It was something I’d wanted to do for a long time. As a teenager, my social life was completely bound up in the Swindon Young Musicians, where I played...
Anna Wharton: How to pitch an article the short and snappy way
Today, I’m delighted to welcome Anna Wharton aboard. I first met Anna when she emailed to ask if I could answer a few questions about living on a boat, for an article about dream homes. Of course I said yes – I’ll talk for hours to anyone about boat life – but warned, in exchange, that I might send a few questions her way as well. As a journalist, features editor and now freelance writer, she seemed like the perfect person to give us freelance-article-writing-wannabes the inside track. And I was right. Anna, could you give us a brief outline of your career path, and tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now? I started out, like many journalists, on my local newspaper. Back then it was a pretty big operation, with 14...
Cuckoo in the Nest
I met Emma Yates-Badley in the first year of my MA, and got to know her better during a run of writing retreats, first at Lumb Bank and then Moniack Mhor. A week of sharing workshops, writing time and readings-aloud at an Arvon centre is a bonding process, and I’m massively excited to see Emma taking the bold step which she talks about here in Not the Guardian Family Section: “If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book When I was a little girl, my image of life was pretty simplistic: school was something to be endured and Adulthood would be the prize for surviving adolescence (I have just reread my teenage diaries and, yes, I really was that dramatic). One day I’d be all grown...
The Good Life (or How to Make a Home)
Today, in Not the Guardian Family Section, writer Kate Lord Brown muses on loss, the skeletons in family closets, and how to create a home in an uncertain world. ‘If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance’ George Bernard Shaw We live in uncertain times. Protests in the West, uprisings in the East, even Brand is baiting Paxo with calls for revolution. A recent article in The Telegraph claimed that we’ll never have it so good again. It was a thought that struck me over the summer, packing up one, two, three, houses – dismantling three remarkable family lives. They are the kind of homes I would love my children to grow up in – with apple orchards, and attics crammed with nonsense, junk and forgotten treasures. My grandmother, in...
Blackberries in the Freezer
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love free stuff. LOVE it. So blackberries are one of my favourite things. But they’re more than that. They are one of the more essential markers for my year, and a continuing link to everyone I’ve ever been. And I can promise that, when I’m an old lady, wherever I end up, I’ll still be out there filling my plastic boxes and getting my fingertips stained purple. I grew up in a little village in Wiltshire. It was the village where my mother and my grandfather had been born. When I was a child, back in the Seventies, it was still the sort of village where everyone knew everybody, all very Laurie Lee. The same things happened every year: the carnival; the sponsored walk to raise money for the village hall; the candlelit...
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I’m Reading
To The River, by Olivia Laing
