Making Things

It has long been a family joke that I have only one skill – verbal reasoning – and that’s it. I am distinctly not an all-rounder. But my friend, Ms Thrifty, started it, being a very capable and artistic sort of person.  She found a link to these incredible artworks made out of pages of books by Su Blackwell and sent it to me and to the manager of our book store. Once we had exclaimed excitedly about the installations – and they are extraordinarily exquisite and gorgeous – she began to tempt us with weasel words about having a go at making something similar. Oh I remembered how it all went back in childhood, watching the presenters of Blue Peter making some amazing model of Tracy’s Island out of egg boxes and cereal packets that you believed you could reproduce perfectly, only to find your sagging, shedding model, bound up like an S & M victim with desperate quantities of sticky tape, bore no ressemblance to anything other than the sum of its diminished parts. But I am older now, with better motor skills, even if no wiser. And so it was with some excitement that I arrived at Ms Thrifty’s house one evening last week, with a copy of Colette’s Gigi that I had saved from the recycling bin, ready to craft an artwork.

I’m sure an art therapist would have had a field day with the different approaches that we took to the task. Ms Thrifty started snipping up a cereal box to make a basic framework, our adorable manager let rip with a Stanley knife on the pages of a hardback book, and I started fiddling around with a quantity of wire. In the meantime, in the way of women through the ages, we found it very easy to talk about all the things that were bothering us, while our hands were creatively engaged. Ms Thrifty had a friend staying over who is going through a difficult divorce. Our manager had had to undergo a formal interview to secure funding for another year of PhD research. Ms Thrifty is very busy at the moment with a geological museum project. And you know all about me already. It struck me how very 21st century were our concerns, all mostly career-related. Wouldn’t our mothers or our grandmothers have had a very different kind of conversation over their tapestries and their crochet?

In the end, we were pretty pleased with the results. Ms Thrifty made a dinky little cottage with a tiled roof and  a collage of windows and doors (see it here). Our manager made a pop-up style scene with pine trees and ghosts and directional arrows that rose from the open pages of a book. And I made a tree:

Considering that my husband and son had been convinced I would return home with my fingers glued to my head or the seat of my jeans, this counted as a roaring success on my un-dextrous terms. Afterwards, Ms Thrifty and I got a bit over-excited and imagined a whole scene for the windows of the bookstore at Christmas, with a Santa sleigh and a little hamlet of houses. I think this was wishful thinking, but we’ve said we’ll have another art evening soon and try again.

While we’re on the subject of making things, you may remember my son’s extended project at school, which was to bake a series of fancy cakes. Well, on the weekend he produced the cake that started him off on all this, a rainbow cake:

Pretty neat, eh?

The Week In Bullets

1. I seem not to be reading at the moment. I absolutely hate it when this happens as my head becomes progressively messier and messier. The reason I am not reading (I think) is that I have several new projects to start, and because I can’t decide where to begin, I am rushing about in a state of confusion, not actually doing anything. I need to start on one and focus, and frankly any one will do. I don’t know how I can manage to be so busy and yet achieve nothing; it’s a complete mystery to me how easily this happens.

2. Mister Litlove told me about a stirring speech by Armando Iannuci, given at the BAFTA television awards. Iannuci is the creative force behind programmes such as The Thick of It and its American counterpart, Veeps. He argues that the system in the UK for commissioning new television programmes is dysfunctional; the relationship between the people holding the money and those with the creativity is all wrong in its power imbalance. Money rules, leading to what he terms ‘a culture of caution and compliance’. In other words, too many programmes are made to order, based on previously successful shows, spawning that irritating rash of clones, and pared back to the bone economically, all of which strangles the proper creativity that could actually produce exciting new television. You can read the lecture here. I think it’s perfectly applicable to publishing at present, too, and it’s good that someone important is speaking up about it. It pains me that creativity, one of the very best human assets we have, is so beleaguered and undervalued. On a different note, when I asked Mister Litlove to give me the details of this story again, he had just taken a bite of lunch and so I thought the guy’s name was Amanda, which was very confusing. Once we’d sorted that out, I asked for the surname again. But he’d taken another bite and we could both see the wisdom in giving up at that point.

3. Last night the bookshop where I work had a party. This was perplexing to all the people walking by on the street who could see the lights on and the staff milling about but couldn’t get in the locked door. It was a very pleasant evening, although I wasn’t in a party mood. I’d sat down in the chair at a quarter past four and the next thing I knew I was waking up at six, and all evening I had that feeling of not being fully conscious. I do work with some amusing people, though. When I arrived, it was to find the manager and one of the most senior volunteers sizing up whether to have another glass of wine (or at least persuading themselves that they could). ‘Now that I’m past 70,’ said the senior volunteer, ‘I find the chances of having a really wild night out are few and far between.’ That made me laugh.

4. Mister Litlove was also telling me about a new kind of predictive text that analyses your messages and starts to make suggestions for words before you have typed anything at all. I call that plain presumptuous. He told me about this after I’d described texting on my ancient phone under the benignly contemptuous gaze of my son, who marvelled at the inconvenience of it beeping with every key I pressed. But at least it is not so rude as to claim to know what I’m going to say before I’ve even said it. It made me want to take the app on, just to prove to it that there would be some people whose messages it could never guess. It makes me want to shout: Resist these attempts to curtail your individual uniqueness! I really do not think I am the prime recipient of new technology.

5. This weekend. Clear head. Finish books that have been hanging around for ages. Fresh start. I don’t even want to suggest titles of books I might read next. I feel the need to surprise even myself. What’s everyone else doing?

6. Oh and I forgot! I happened to catch this blog on technorati, where it turns out I’m in the top hundred book blogs. I found that really cheering as I usually do dreadfully on league tables. So that was a good thing. I must remember now never to check it again, and thereby avoid the inevitable disappointment.

Near Misses

This has been a crazy week in which much has gone not-quite-according-to-plan and yet disaster has been narrowly averted. I think it began midweek when the exhaust fell off my car. It went a few weeks back for the first time, not quite so drastically, but so that I felt I was driving a souped-up rally car. There’s no mistaking that gutteral roar of a perforated exhaust. Anyway, Mr Litlove took it in to be mended and returned it half-fixed, with the instruction to ‘see how it went’. Yeah, right. So inevitably, on Wednesday, I was headed into town when the bad noises started up again, and as I tried to get back home, things took a turn for the worse. It was clear I was dragging something screeching and protesting beneath my wheels, and what a spine-crawling, teeth-gritting sensation that was.

I limped to the nearest exhaust and tyre place and watched my poor car go up on the ramp, where the damage was clear to see. They said they’d fix it that afternoon, once the part had come in, but this was not the sort of salubrious joint where you can hang about waiting. It was like an oily aircraft hanger with three office chairs in a row, none of which I particularly wanted to sit on. So I rang Mr Litlove to outsource the thinking as my brain was already overloaded, and he said: get a taxi home. I persuaded him to come back from work a bit early so we could collect my car later in the day. But this was all very unhelpful and time consuming as I had a little book club gathering at my house that evening for which I wanted to prepare. Well, I did manage to tidy the house and fix up some snacks and even print out some questions for us all – this was a clever feat by Mr Litlove as the ink cartridge claimed to have run out, it being that kind of a week. But he printed them out in blue and that worked. In the end the car was sorted, food and questions were ready and we had a lovely evening.

The next day I was scheduled to go to London to meet with an editor I know. All was going okay until that last five minutes before leaving, which always stretch to ten and make you late. It began to absolutely pour with rain and could I find my umbrella? Well obviously not, and I still haven’t located it; how can I possibly have lost another? What do I do with them? I had a walk to the station and did not want to sit drenched on the train, so in end I remembered I had a cute hat. You might like to see it, so here it is:

So, late already, off I set and because my brain was frazzled, I took the wrong route to the station and thought I’d missed the train more times than was comfortable as I sat in queues of traffic, mentally rearranging my day. But by a miracle, I made it with about half a minute to spare. One of the things I did in London was to visit the Persephone shop. What a dinky place! Tiny front part, box shelves around the walls full of Persephone books, and beyond, desks piled high with papers, a stacked wall of boxes of copies, so clearly a shop, the office, the warehouse and distribution centre all in a few square metres. But it has such a charming old-fashioned air and feels very cosy. Naturally I came away with a few books: Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple, The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens and Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins. Ah, joy.

The meeting with the editor was very useful. I had a couple of ideas to run past her and she liked them both but needed to see full proposals. I’d been kind of hoping to avoid that, as the one thing I have consistently failed to crack over the years is proposal writing. Twenty years of academia has hardwired my brain and it just can’t seem to change. But it was good to be able to talk it all over with a professional, as it’s usually just me in a room with the thoughts going round and round in my head. She’s a really lovely woman and a lot of fun, so we had a good laugh. Nothing settled and a lot of work in prospect, but at least it’s clearer now what I have to do.

So, out I come from the offices and figured that if I picked up a cab, I could beat the rush hour home. I was walking down the road when I saw a lit up light. Once I’d got in the guy did a u-turn and started laughing, as I’d been walking in the opposite direction to King’s Cross. I really like cabbies in London as I’m usually lucky and get one who’s keen for a chat and a joke. This one thought I was hilarious and milked it for all he was worth, wanting to know where I was going and suggesting that if I’d kept walking I might have hit Cambridge before I got to the train station. In fact, I think I was extremely lucky, as the two other branch lines in my area were affected by accidents while I managed to travel home unhindered.

So, I sailed home, feeling invicible. Walked into the kitchen, noted the absence of my dear son, and decided to send him an arch and teasing text asking if he was eating at home tonight or staying over at his girlfriends’. Only of course, this being the week it was, my thumb slipped and I sent it not to my son, but to the window cleaner. He has not deigned to let me know what he thought of this, and I have yet to decide on my strategy next time I see him in the bookshop. I either rush forward full of apology or lurk in the back, avoiding eye contact. At least I provide entertainment for people. Mr Litlove laughed like a drain when, mortified, I told him what I’d done. Oh let’s hope for a smoother week next week….

Everyday Dramas

The bookshop was the scene of drama yesterday. I was making tea for the three of us on shift that morning and chatting to my manager in the back of the store, when she was called away to the front desk. This often happens, I thought nothing of it. But when I came into the store myself, carrying our tea, I saw that something unusual was up. My manager was in a huddle with a group of people, a couple of them rough-looking, another dispensing some sort of practised authority. The elderly lady who has been working for the bookshop for longer than anyone can recall and who seems to have her finger permanently on the pulse of community life in our little area was also there, looking anxious. Then, with one accord they disappeared out of the front door. I asked the other volunteer minding the till what had happened but she wasn’t sure; some sort of break-in, she thought. So we sat there, sipping and ringing up purchases and all the time waiting.

After a quarter of an hour or so, our manager returned. The Indian restaurant next door to us had been closed for renovations for the past couple of weeks, or so we thought. It seemed that a few days ago, it had been broken into and trashed, with a thoroughness and a rage that spoke of personal vendetta. The floorboards had been broken up, the toilets had been smashed, the lights ripped out. The place stank of sewage and was in complete disarray. What to do first? Our manager knew she had to contact the police, but also wanted to be assured the restaurant would be made safe and boarded up; would the police do that? Should she ring the council? She went off to make phone calls while a stream of concerned locals trooped through our door. The lady who runs the Salvation Army a few doors up the road appeared to see if she could help. Her job had necessarily put her in contact with the police, and she suggested the city’s environmental offer be alerted. Our manager reappeared: the police weren’t answering the phone, always reassuring in a crisis, no?

‘It was so horrible in there,’ our manager said. ‘You could feel the violence in the air, the anger and hatred. I kept expecting us to find something any moment.’

We knew she meant a body.

‘It has to be closed up properly,’ the Salvation Army lady insisted. ‘It’s an environmental hazard as it is.’

‘I know,’ replied our manager. ‘The place is full of wires hanging loose.’

‘So someone was hoping it would catch fire?’

I think it was only at that point that the other volunteer and I both realised the seriousness of the situation. If the place had been rigged to go up in flames, it was not good news for the large pile of kindling we represented, sitting right next door to it.

It turned out that the restaurant hadn’t been closed for renovation, but because of some sort of court case pending. Rumours began to fly around about the owner of the place, who was supposed to have issued death threats, and to have tried to run a man down in his car.  At this point, an Indian man, short, squat, powerfully built, charged into the store, a bunch of keys in his hand. ‘She’s in the back, is she?’ he asked, and without really waiting for a reply, headed off for the office where our manager sat. I hopped off my stool and ran after him; we were startled and the purposeful way he was walking was unsettling. But when he opened the door, our manager (still on the phone) waved and greeted him by name, and I thankfully peeled away. Quite what good I could possibly have been in a confrontation, I have no idea. When he walked past us again on his way out he smiled and thanked us cheerfully, completely transformed.

Eventually the police arrived; one little homely looking officer in a bulky vest strapped about with walkie-talkies. I revised my opinion of how well I could do in a confrontation after a brief comparison with him. He was not exactly helpful. Having ascertained that a crime had been committed, no one was allowed to enter the building until the police had conducted their research. Quite when that would happen, no one knew, and until then, the restaurant would continue stewing in its sewage and broken fittings and loose electric cables.

 

This was not the only plotline, as it were, unfolding in the bookshop that morning. While we waited to hear what had happened next door, an attractive young Frenchwoman turned up with leaflets for us all, informing us of the details of a funeral that would take place the following day. When she said the name of the woman it concerned, we made the connection to an article torn out of the local press that had been left on the counter. This woman had been primarily responsible for organising the Winter Fair that closes the road for one day in the run-up to Christmas. I’d been told about this, because I hadn’t witnessed it myself, and assured I was in for a treat. It’s a special occasion, when the traders set out stalls and the street performers come and entertain the crowds, one of those genuine moments of community in a part of town where ethnic minorities co-exist uneasily, where the students and the down-and-outs cause colourful trouble, and where many small businesses scrape a living in scruffy stores (you should see ours). For that one day, the road is transformed with decorations and festivities and goodwill.

To honour the woman who founded this, it had been decided that the hearse should be diverted to travel the length of the road, so that the traders and the residents nearby could come and pay tribute in the street as it passed. If customers weren’t talking about the break-in, they were talking about this, and doing so with tears in their eyes. How much it would mean to the family, to see the gratitude and respect their lost loved one had inspired, what a chance it would be for the people who knew her, even just a little bit, to pay their respects and to say goodbye.

It is strange for me, to find myself staking a tiny claim in this part of the town where life is lived with so much more naked emotion than the other places I have been. It is all on the surface here, love and hatred, violence and celebration. I felt there was a strange, natural balance at work, that nothing could prevent or diminish the horror of that vandalised restaurant, or the sadness of death, but that they cancelled each other out, or at least, they demonstrated once again that there is always more to any situation than one story. When we watched the riots across London on the late news last night, it felt horrible, but also so unreal after my experiences that day. This is the trouble with the media and the way we take in information; all we were shown was the hatred and the violence, without a glimpse of all that would be happening around it, all sorts of stories of love and sorrow and reparation and rescue that would forever be hidden. Nothing can justify those riots or make them any less appalling, but people are not just bad, communities are rich in every kind of human resource, we know how to work together and heal and mend. The bad stuff is so much easier to believe, but we do ourselves a disservice to focus on it exclusively, or to lose faith in the power of what’s good.