I Will Embrace Self-Help, I Will

When the kind publicity assistant sent me a copy of Physical Intelligence by Claire Dale and Patricia Peyton, she probably had no idea she was sending it to two of the sorriest specimens for self-help you could imagine. I was really keen to read the book, which claims that ‘the active management of our physiology – the ability to detect and strategically influence the balance of chemicals in our bodies and brains’ is within our grasp. This sounded like good news to me. The approach of menopause has hit me hard and my CFS has been back to the level of nuisance it was a decade or so ago. I’m clearly doing something wrong. In fact, my dry eye syndrome has been so awful that I had to ask Mr Litlove to read the book to me, and Mr Litlove and self-help… well it’s not the most obvious combination. Mr Litlove is fit and healthy and if a parallel universe existed in which he sang karaoke, he’d be up at the mike belting out Gloria Gaynor’s immortal line, ‘I am what I am and what I am needs no excuses.’ So the two of us together would have every experienced teacher rolling her eyeballs – one student eager but hopeless, and the other competent but deeply resistant. Would the book be equal to the challenge?

The book’s basic premise is that our responses to daily life are governed by a cocktail of eight chemicals, each of which has a signature feeling. We’d probably all recognise adrenaline and its feeling of excitement or fear, testosterone’s feelings of power and control, serotonin’s happiness. But there are others that are equally important and less well-known – oxytocin, for instance, which gives us a feeling of belonging, DHEA which governs vitality, and cortisol which creates the feeling of anxiety. The authors argue that the right combination of diet, exercise and CBT can be used to manage these chemicals as they ebb and flow according to the situations we find ourselves in.

The book is organised into four sections – strength, flexibility, resilience and endurance – with all kinds of different exercises designed to promote these vital qualities. So for instance, in the section on flexibility, there’s an exercise called ‘Relationshift’ which frankly every person in the UK ought to be made to undertake before we have to hear another thing about Brexit. Where this kind of loggerheads conflict occurs, the kind that has coagulated into a battle of wills, it’s important for both parties to be able to see the other side – such a shift reduces the sense of threat that has immediately been triggered, and sets in motion the chemistry of trust which can heal the breach. Name your emotions, the authors suggest, and be specific about the physical feelings that accompany them, breathe to stabilize emotion, and then consider what exactly is under threat here (they suggest possible threats to control, ownership, achievement, harmony, security, certainty, freedom, creativity or status, which is the sort of list one ought to carry around all the time because it explains a great deal). Then shift your perspective and imagine standing alongside the person with the opposing viewpoint and see how it looks. From this point of view, you might be able to come up with solutions or suggestions that benefit you both and meet the different needs. It’s not as touchy-feely as you may think, because thinking through a problem like this actively reduces cortisol (threat) and increases oxytocin (belonging). Minds, bodies and behaviours are all tightly linked.

So you get the idea. Unsurprisingly, there was much I struggled with. In the strength section, the authors suggested cheerfully that crunches, planks and squats were all you needed, which are the kind of exercises that even when I was in full health I would have considered a form of sanctioned masochism (one of the authors is a dancer and choreographer and yeah, proper dancers love that sort of stuff). And the exercise that I was hilariously bad at – in Mr Litlove’s estimation – was one called the ‘winner pose’. where you stand with arms and legs outstretched like a starfish. Apparently this builds confidence and power and should be used after any achievement to prevent the chemical high sort of collapsing in on itself. Well, I just can’t seem to manage it. I could do a sort of jazz-hands-by-my-face thing, but anything more brought about a feeling of such intense absurdity that I couldn’t keep it up. Mr Litlove, who has way more testosterone than any one person needs, would throw himself into winner pose every single time our paths crossed in the house, yelling ‘C’mon, Litlove!’ I pointed out that the authors of this book did not envisage their exercises being used by husbands to taunt their wives, but alas that did not prevent him from telling our son when he visited over Easter. And our son, who is training to be a therapist, immediately began asking why it was that I should feel silly? And did feeling silly matter? There’s nothing quite like one’s family piling in with the advice to make the appeal of self-help grow stronger. Some things are best done alone.

Some people, however, cannot be helped. I am sorry to say that Mr Litlove did not see the light. He read the section on procrastination out loud – and goodness knows he could use some advice here – while mentally singing la la la la la. I could see him doing it. You know that fur men grow in their ears as they age? I’m coming to think of it as a kind of enchanted forest designed to prevent any alternative point of view from entering. But the authors of the book had evidently seen us coming. They sensibly suggest that you should devote a month to each section of the book, picking out a few of the tips and exercises and ‘habit-stacking’ them, or trying to attach them to other habits you regularly practice.  And even Mr Litlove found one exercise at which he nodded approval and said it was really good. This is an exercise for when something dreadful and undesirable gets thrown at you. You begin by feeling the force of your resistance and saying – shouting if you want, punching the air – I won’t! I won’t have this! I don’t want it! And when that energy is worn out, then you start saying, I will take this on. I will handle it. Could there possibly be an allegory in this for Mr Litlove’s relationship to self-help? Ah well, time will tell. But I will definitely be keeping the book within easy access as there was much intelligent support to be found in its pages.

The Adventures of Big Beery

Mr Litlove is a man who works in insidious ways, and so I can’t recall how he first brought up the topic of moving house. All I can remember is being in the middle of a discussion – well a fantasy session really – in which he was painting a picture of a wonderful house surrounded by land, in which he could have a bigger workshop with an apprentice and I could have a couple of artists’ studios and/or a writing retreat to hire out. Alongside our little artistic community there would be an orchard and a kitchen garden. I think Vaughn Williams may have been playing in the background. In any case, I was feeling enthusiastic and less mindful of the hellish process that is simultaneously buying and selling a house..

I last moved house twenty-one years ago and at the time I swore never again. There were very good reasons for this. I’m not sure what the situation is in other countries, but here in the UK, moving is something that only happens despite the caprice of the buyers and the best efforts of estate agents, house surveyors, land registry officials and conveyancing solicitors. It is wildly expensive and fraught at all stages with distrust and uncertainty. I had my eyes wide open and will no doubt come to regret it. But Mr Litlove reeled me in with a killer persuasive phrase. ‘We’re ready for a new chapter,’ he said. ‘We need one.’ And I knew what he meant.

Now I love my house and so I wasn’t quite ready to be fully on board until we’d found somewhere that was right. After six weeks of looking we did find somewhere that was pretty much right. That meant putting our own house on the market (whilst worrying that some other buyer would come along and snap up the one property we’d seen that we loved). And that meant removing 21 years’ worth of clutter and tidying places we hadn’t even looked at since we moved in. I have collecting genes in my family line, and Mr Litlove has hoarding genes in his; this was going to be a major operation.

Naturally the photographer was scheduled for the end of the hottest week of the hottest summer since records began. Mr Litlove and I toiled away, cleaning and scrubbing and throwing out, feeling boiled alive in our skins. Mr Litlove is so untidy that we have designated areas for him to inhabit in the house and most offered problems so complex and shaming that we simply closed the doors on them. Not an option for the utility room, however, whose counter tops I hadn’t seen in over a decade, thanks to Mr Litlove’s collection of tins containing useful half inches of leftover paint, the gardening equipment and woodworking tools that were vacationing in the house ‘en route’ to the workshop, and all the other bits and bobs he’d bought at Screwfix without yet using. But by the end of ‘Furnace Friday’ as the papers dubbed it, the utility room was so clear that it was almost aggressive in its nakedness. The whole house was unnatural in its tidiness. Then, when the photographer came. for the first time in more than six weeks it began to cloud over. A spattering of raindrops fell. The photographer dashed outside to shoot pictures of the garden and the front of the house and when I next looked out of the window it was on scenes that could have come from reportage of a typhoon in the West Indies. The village green was obscured by driving horizontal rain, the howling wind lashed the trees, and inside the house we ran around shutting all the windows and doors, forgetting alas, the skylight in the conservatory through which water poured. It was positively biblical.

Unsurprisingly, most of the photographs had to be done again. But it did give us a chance to see how the original set came out and to make some alterations. One obvious problem was in our son’s bedroom.  We have a photo of him, aged about eight, standing against his bed and hugging Goldie – his favourite bear – under his chin. Behind him towers a magnificent mountain of cuddly animals that dwarfs the two of them. He clearly inherited both the collecting and the hoarding genes as those cuddlies were still there, under his bed now rather than on it. I’d rather dreaded doing the cull as I feel tender about stuffed toys and don’t care to have their beady, accusatory eyes pinned upon me in silent reproach. Mr Litlove is ruthless, though, as I’d already witnessed from his own soft toys in his childhood bedroom, all individually bagged in plastic and stored in a cupboard like a furry kapok-stuffed version of the film Cocoon. We set about the holocaust using the movie principle: if they didn’t have a name or a back story, they were sent to the black bin bag. Our old cats liked to sleep under that bed and it became clear that coated in cat fur was also a criteria for disposal. Being lippy didn’t help. At one point Mr Litlove passed me a small, grubby chick which I binned. When he found what appeared to be the same chick a few minutes later he was completely nonplussed. ‘How did he escape out of the bag?’ he asked. I fished about in it and brought out an identical chick – evidently there were twins. Unfortunately one chick turned to the other at that moment and cheeped: ‘We’re surrounded by morons.’ Neither saw the light of day again.

Surviving that original cull, however, was Big Beery.  My son in his youth was a very enthusiastic car boot and jumble sale attendee.  One year on holiday with his cousins, they had been taken on foot – and therefore unwillingly, bitching and moaning the whole way – to a nearby car boot sale.

Once there, our son homed in on a huge, ugly, disreputable looking brown bear and insisted on buying him. As unlikely as it seems, his cousins also found a huge teddy (in better nick) and all three returned home with the bears slung over their shoulders, skipping and singing as they walked.

Heading home from the car boot sale

 

This was the arrival of Big Beery, a bear who looked like all he needed was a hand of poker in one paw and three fingers of whiskey in a cloudy glass by the other.

Although he was always very tight-lipped about it, one look told you that he had definitely had a past, and it hadn’t been kind to his fur. When we hauled him out from under the bed, Mr Litlove acquired an expression of distaste, but I rooted for Big Beery. After all, he definitely had a back story and apart from anything else, he was way too big to fit in the bag.

When those photographs came back, however, all you could see, despite our best efforts, was a still-huge collection of cuddlies. There was going to have to be a director’s cut, and it was fairly obvious that Big Beery wasn’t going to make it.

‘But what are we going to do with him?’ I wondered.  The rest of the toys had been taken to the charity shop where they had been warily accepted. But no one in their right minds would take on Big Beery.  I just couldn’t bring myself to throw him away and a car boot sale with him as our lone stock was out of the question. We could have stuck him up in the loft but a bear of that age has his dignity and – who knew? – maybe his underworld contacts to come and get him out. In the end, we put him in the spare bedroom while we thought it over, Big Beery propped up on one side of the bed, dropping ash on the nightstand and cracking his knuckles nonchalantly from time to time. ‘We’ll come up with something,’ Mr Litlove said.

Of course, by the time the photographer was due again, Big Beery was still there. We flew back and forth past him, scooting the rising tide of objects out of sight. In the end, he was our last outstanding problem. ‘I’ve got it!’ i finally said. ‘Put him in my car.’ This was a satisfying conclusion. I could picture him, a chunky silhouette in the back seat, waiting for darkness to fall and his driver to come and take him to the wharf.

So the photographer came and the photos were re-taken and after a bit more hassle our house was finally on the market. And it was…. August. The deadest month of the year apart from December for selling houses. So this is where you find us, scarcely begun on the process and already doubting its feasibility. I feel like a small miracle has to occur to create the extraordinary synergy required.

I forgot about Big Beery until a few days ago when I was considering taking the car into town. ‘Where did you put him?’ I asked Mr Litlove. ‘Not in the driver’s seat, I hope?’ I was imagining the journey into town with Big Beery hanging out the passenger window and declaring ‘Just off to get some bear necessities, mate!’ at passers-by. Mr Litlove looked a tad shamefaced. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘he’s in the boot.’ Big Beery was in the boot! I was shocked and a little apprehensive – what kind of state would he be in when we got him out? But then I thought about it, and in a strange way, the trunk of the car had a certain… appropriateness for him. But every time one of us drives out, I can’t help a scenario from forming in my mind in which we are pulled over by the police and invited to leave the vehicle while they search it.  ‘You appear to have the body of a bear from the criminal fraternity in your car, Madam,’ they will say. ‘Can you explain it?’ And as I look over their shoulders, Big Beery will catch my eye and send me a sly, disreputable wink.

My Last Essay And Other Stories

Well, the middle of August is not the best time to pop up in the blogworld after a lengthy absence, but the lovely Numero Cinq online magazine is coming to a close and I have a final essay in it on Doris Lessing. I’ve had a wonderful time writing for my gorgeous editor, Douglas Glover, who is also an excellent writer himself (do check out his story collection, Savage Love, it’s incredible).

Mother Tongue | On Doris Lessing – Victoria Best @Litloveblog @NumeroCinq555 https://t.co/VdEH7nrzAk pic.twitter.com/aDcS1nkztb

— Numéro Cinq (@NumeroCinq555) August 13, 2017

And I also promised a catch-up, if there’s anyone out there who would still like to catch up with me. Basically, I haven’t been blogging because I still have recurrent marginal keratitis. I seem to have a genius for developing conditions that can’t be cured but only unreliably managed, and despite my best efforts with every eye gel, drop and lotion on the market, it still flares up, especially when I read. So I hope you’ll understand that I haven’t been around visiting blogs because a) the reading is a bit much for me and b) it’s sort of depressing to hear about the lovely books everyone is reading or looking forward to reading, etc, when I’m so restricted these days.

I got excited a little while back over Manuka honey, after finding an account of a man who’d had my condition for four years, lost his job because of it, and tried everything to fix it. Nothing worked until he bravely attempted an experiment with the honey, putting it directly onto his eyeball. How he managed this, I do not know, as I bought an eye drop with a small percentage of honey and to say the red fire ants are consuming my eyeballs when I use it is an understatement. You should have seen the comments – so many people desperate for a cure who had had marginal keratitis for up to 25  years, all hopeful for the first time. I’ve been using it for six weeks now and maybe it’s helped a bit; it’s hard to tell and there’s certainly no great change or return to stability. But I will persevere.

In more positive news, Mr Litlove launched his furniture-making business at the start of July over the course of two Cambridge Open Studios weekends. He had a terrific response: on the first weekend we had just under a 100 visitors to his workshop and the little gallery we’d set up. The second we roped in our son for reinforcements and had somewhere between 60-70 visitors which was definitely more manageable. Since then he’s done well with orders and enquiries. He’s currently making a desk and chair, with a shelving unit, coffee table, eight chairs and a table and another table lined up, a possible further six chairs in the pipeline. So he’s really happy.

As for my novel, well, it’s been a very odd experience. I did well to begin with in my last submission round at the end of March. Four agents requested the full ms. One backed out almost immediately but that was fine as she was a non-fic person standing in for a colleague on maternity leave, and I wasn’t sure how that would work anyway. But then the next three just went quiet and four months later, I hadn’t heard a thing. One finally turned up about two weeks ago with a no, which I was expecting after all that amount of time. The other two, still not a peep. I mentioned my experience to the online writing group I belong to, and one woman replied to say that her last submission round came up with 10 requests for fulls. Of those, there were seven rejections (that took 6-10 months to arrive), two r & rs (not sure what this is but think it must be rewrite and resubmit), and one whom she had not heard from despite numerous prompts. She had finally saved up enough money to get a professional report on her book and now felt she had a good direction to take it in. Two years after submission.

I admire her grit enormously, because people, the timescale here! I don’t think I have it in me to stick with a novel for the two, three, four years it must take anyone to find a home for it. In the four (almost five) months of agently silence, I have fallen out of love with the old novel, started another that’s now much more interesting to me, resurrected a non-fiction project and have joined in with two friends on an interdisciplinary artwork that should be sheer pleasure. Maybe something will come out of these things and maybe not, really who knows? The system, such as it is, for turning professional with art, seems to me hopelessly overwhelmed to the point of brokenness.

But I don’t want to self-publish novels either. That’s just another way of dropping your work into an ocean of verbiage from which little is ever distinguished. Unless you are some sort of marketing guru, that is, and I am not. So I don’t know. I suppose I keep enjoying a writing life, and try not to worry too much about a writing career. That works better some days than others, of course.

 

 

Storytelling and Compassion

One of the many wonderful things about books is that they give us a safe space in which to encounter difficult and frightening thoughts. The structure of a book, with its perceptive narrative voice and its promise of an ending, guarantees us at least one of the four great anti-anxieties: meaning, wisdom, truth and resolution. Whatever darkness the story brings, these four are the light.

How much darkness we can take, how much light we need is, I think, a very personal ratio. When I was younger, I had a lot more capacity for difficult and demanding novels. I had more stamina for reading about suffering. These days I can endure a great deal less. I’m sure this is in part because I am increasingly interested in what it means to be compassionate in the world. I’ve been reading a book lately that defines compassion as a two-part process. The first part is to look squarely at the pain, but the second, and equally important, is to think how suffering can be eased. This is not to say that bad events and the pain that accompanies them can be avoided. Alas, no. But what it does mean is that whatever pain we – or others – endure, the important part is to seek to minimize the extra and sometimes unnecessary suffering that clusters around it. The news, for instance, only thrusts the pain of the world in front of us – it has nothing to say about what can be done about it – and so it is essentially unkind. But literature is quite different. A well-told story is constantly helping the reader to stay clear-sighted and engaged while conflict takes place, so that we can think about it without being overwhelmed.

These thoughts have been running around my mind lately, after listening to two quite dark tales. The first, Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was very rapidly dubbed the ‘harrowing book’. Set in World War Two, it follows the fortunes of three young friends – Mary, who skies down to her finishing school the moment she hears war declared and packs her bags, hoping for adventure; Tom, who is in charge of education in a capital soon to be deserted by evacuation; and Alastair, Tom’s friend who has been working at the Tate as an art restorer, but who signs up immediately.

Mary is set to work as a teacher – not at all the sort of adventure she was longing for – and finds it surprisingly fulfilling. In particular, she forms a bond with Zachary, a dyslexic child (though no one understands this in 1939) whose father works in the Black-and-White Minstrels show in the West End. When Zachary returns from the country, having learned that rural prejudice is more dangerous than German bombing, Mary ends up in charge of a class of rejects. Children with learning difficulties or behavioural difficulties for whom the beauty pageant of evacuation has been a disaster. She also begins a love affair with Tom, who cannot help but admire her daring, courageous intentions, even while deploring the trouble she causes by them. People tend to have this mixed reaction to Mary – her well-born, well-bred mother, and her best friend, Hilda, being other examples. There is a long-held tradition of Mary pinching Hilda’s men, and so when the friends go for a double date during Alastair’s leave, the tradition raises its head in especially dangerous ways.

So far, I’ve made this book sound quite appealing, I hope, and mostly about love and friendship. But the majority of the narrative is concerned with the experiences of these characters during the Blitz and – in Alastair’s case – in Malta during its lengthy siege. And oh my lord, Cleave does not hold back with the horror of wartime. In fact, it is fair to say that the characters now undergo a series of traumas that will leave them broken and spent. I found long sections of this book very hard to listen to, and quite often I put my fingers in my ears and sang la la la la a lot. I only listened to a certain amount of it each night, so as to get to sleep. And then, when the horror never abated but seemed to be piled on and on, relentlessly, I found myself starting to laugh because I just couldn’t stay in that engaged place. Sometimes more is just too much.

Why did I stick with it? Well, essentially because of the quality of Chris Cleave’s prose. Here I owe the man an apology, because I seem to have contracted a prejudice about him. I thought he wrote just sensational stuff, all about making an audacious impact. And whilst this is sort of true, he can really, really write. He also keeps the characters’ interactions light. I’m not sure that everyone in wartime was this witty, but it’s nice to think so. There’s a real British spirit operating here (Brits really do whine during good times and then discover a sense of humour in awful crises), with the characters quipping away at one another, refusing to show they are rattled by means of deadpan humour. When a group of men are clinging to a too-small life raft off the coast of Gibraltar, the talk is all of the fish and chips they’ll have when they reach Brighton. The dialogue is very good, sharp and smart and pithy. Does it make up for all the characters go through? No, not really. It’s a bit like glitzy nail varnish on a corpse. But the ending is very gently hopeful, and the story is apparently based on the experiences of Cleave’s grandparents during the war (this bit was missed out of the audio book – shame!) and so you do believe there was the possibility of a happy ending eventually.

The second book I listened to was Salley Vickers’ Cousins. This was a very different beast – still beautifully written, but in a more straightforward way, less consciously literary. It was also very much informed by Vickers’ previous job as a psychotherapist, something that always thrills me in novels as I love a properly astute psychological framework in a story.

This novel begins with teenage Hetta being woken in the night by her parents. They have just received a phone call that changes everything: Hetta’s older brother, Wil, was climbing the tower of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, where he is a student, when he fell. The family make a stricken dash through the night from Northumberland to Cambridge, fearing that Wil may die before they arrive. In fact, what happens to him is worse than that.

What happens next in the story is, essentially, the slow, gradual retelling of a long family saga. We have to understand Wil’s fall as the culmination of all sorts of family tensions and secrets which Hetta is determined to uncover. In the immediate present, the fall seems to be linked to a forbidden relationship between Wil and his cousin, Cele, a young woman who has been much neglected by her mother, and who has sought refuge while growing up in Hetta’s family. Brought up almost as brother and sister, Wil and Cele have been a great deal more to one another than that. And this turns out to be a repetition of an earlier family root. Hetta’s grandparents were also first cousins, but they managed to marry – though not without an indiscretion of Hetta’s grandfather which produces a child, Nat. Nat’s mother is killed during the Blitz, and so Hetta’s grandmother brings him up as if he were her own. In fact, she feels closer to Nat, more loving of him than she does of her other children – Belle, Cele’s selfish mother, and Beetle, Hetta’s timid and sensitive father. Then tragedy strikes Nat, and a long string of family consequences ensue.

This is a novel of two parts. The majority of the narrative is concerned with retelling family history, and it switches between the hands of Hetta, her grandmother, and Belle. But the latter stages are quite different, a courtroom drama of sorts, and I found the change of pace and direction a little disorientating. However, there is much emotional resonance in these events, as it feels as if the unpunished, unseen ‘crimes’ of family life finally reach a sort of fruition in an actual court of law. And what happens here, how the crisis is dealt with by the family, is an outright attempt to make amends for all that has gone before.

Cousins is not a smooth book. The start is rather slow, the end is rather surprising, but I enjoyed it very much. Salley Vickers has a gentle hand with tragedy, allowing the narrative to touch it and then move away. Funnily enough, this was the book that brought me to tears on a couple of occasions, which goes to show that you do not have to put the reader’s heart through the wringer to be assured of creating an effect. In fact, I often think it is kindness and simplicity that are really tear-inducing. And maybe that’s because we weep when we encounter compassion, since we are so sorely in need of it.