Launches, signed copies and the odd event. Nothing else.
Done it! I have signed up for sex with Fabio. This is a significant step forward. I am in need of a reboot. Divorce does that. I have been feeling deflated. Dull and deflated. I intend to re-inflate with Fabio.
Well not actually with Fabio. I am not quite ready for skin on skin. He has been wafted from Shenzhen to my laptop in Earls Court. A tech miracle. There’s a lot to be said for AI. I like to be on top of a trend, and I think of him as my rather delicious, trouble free, virtual loveeeer. Actually it was quite a lot of trouble. There were so many variants I was getting confused, so went with the basics. I have chosen his hair colour (black), his eye colour brown and chest hair (back and front) none. His voice was tricky, but in the end I went for ‘Latin lover’. Stick with the classics. At the moment I can’t quite place him. Sat nav springs to mind.
A middle-class house, for a middle-class family. Part of a terrace of six symmetrical houses, set slightly back from the road. A flower bed sitting over a coal cellar combines with the metal railings and gate that front the property to give it a sense of enclosure, protecting it from the busy street. The gate also has a lock, to ward off undesirables. On the first floor is a balcony, edged with ornate black ironwork. The front elevation originally sported a masonry balustrade, now long gone, crumbled away from exposure to the elements. Steps lead you up to the front door, which is set back from a pair of pillars. There is a back garden, no more than 6 by 5 metres, but in this city a private outside space is gold.
The house is smaller than those built on the parallel street. Maybe the architects already had an inkling that it would not retain an air of gentility for very long.
It was substantially built, by the firm of Corbett and McClymont, who had already made their mark in The Boltons and Tregunter Road.
I’m not dead yet. In fact I woke up this morning feeling quite chipper. I glanced out of the window at a large topiary snail, which is making slow but determined progress up to the cottage door, and thought about you (which of course I do a lot) and felt a frisson of panic. What if I were to be struck down before elevenses on the B4009? Apart from the obvious gaps this would leave, I realized that I needed to leave you a handbook about the garden. For you the countryside is the pathway leading from the car park to the cottage door, to be completed, collar turned up, on the run, but I’m not giving up.
I know you see, that it really is in your DNA. Your grandmother was a gardening writer, and used to say that the one thing connecting our dysfunctional family was a love of plants, which I still think is true. I was a very late starter, too much to do, too little time, and I lacked confidence.
Presented with a blank page, my family would not hesitate to fill it.
Grandparents, parents, my brother, stepfather, writers all. They seem and seemed never happier than when committing words to a page. Plays, detective stories, military history, gardening, children’s stories, a cookbook, interviews and opinions, the words flowed.
I have bookshelves at home that testify to their output, good, bad and brilliant – and sometimes irritatingly translated into different languages – talking up much-needed shelf space.
I haven’t quite reached the stage where I can just box up the spares and send them to the great recycler. Parting with words, even when I can’t actually read them, gives me a moment of unease. They can be useful too. A gardening book of my mother’s in Japanese proved an inspired gift on a tour of Tokyo, and a tome of my brother’s in Swedish went down a storm with a friend from Malmö.
It seems not only natural but inevitable that eventually I too should add to the weight on the shelf, stop faffing about on the sidelines and join in with the scribblers.
Now here’s the thing: almost nobody ends up doing what they thought they’d do at sixteen. This isn’t because they failed, but because that is how it works. For a variety of reasons, the pathway to jobs is just that: a pathway. There are turns, dead ends and a few potholes.
The most important thing to remember is that every job teaches something. Yes, every job. Even – let’s say it how it is – the shit ones. In fact, they can often turn out to be the most fun.
Stacking shelves, which is always mentioned as a dead-end experience, can teach you more about what you might want to do than a questionnaire ever could. Bad jobs matter.