On the drive from the Magdalene cave I thought of my mum. Of course I did, she is everywhere here in France, as is my dad, but especially I thought of her because so many friends have lost their mum recently, and in our party was a young friend who lost hers seven years ago when she was starting university. And so I felt it, the loss of a mother, the fact of it happening and the waves that hit when it does but driving on the A8 towards Nice, I again thought how odd it was that I feel nothing.

I’ve felt nothing since the day she died, I’m not sure I felt much before hand. At her funeral I cried, I remember that, but only for short burst of reality. Since then I’ve been absent from the grief I see in others. I see it in my friends, I witness it, the missing. I hear about the love and yearning and anger and sadness. I watch as if it is some alien happening, a thing I recognise but cannot touch. I drove and I thought about this and the A8 became another road, narrow and winding. A sheer drop to my right as I climbed, the exact place where fifty years ago my mother fell asleep at the wheel and crashed head on into another car and I shot from the green suitcase in the boot (where I too was sleeping) all the way to the gear stick. I remembered how even in daylight she would swing these corners and point out pretty things in the view and we would say please look at the road, mummy and she seemed to not be aware at all of our fear. I remember how the night of the head on collision we all stood about on the narrow strip with cars queuing up on either side and the man we’d hit scratching his head, and wondered how we were going to make the rest of the journey with only one headlight working.

Last night, home safely having not swung about those narrow, precipice roads, having driven slowly and carefully and kept my eyes on the tarmac and not the breathtaking view and not crashed into anyone, I lay in bed exchanging photographs of our week. Do you obsessively zoom in on yourself in group photos? I do, and I did and guess who I saw smiling back at me. Not me. That middle aged slightly fatter woman with the hair identical can’t be. It must be her come to haunt my picture. Identical. The same place, the same face, the same everything.

This morning I spent an hour on the mat, Tara Brach my company; yoga practice and a discussion of fear. The question, what fear are you sidestepping? And I answered, I’ll tell you exactly what I’m sidestepping, Tara, it’s the fear of turning into my mother. I unpacked it while in Warrior II Worrier II and I and III. These are shallow thoughts of which I’m ashamed, so stand by: my mum was not beautiful. My dad made it clear it’s what he thought and so it’s what I thought, too. My mum was not attractive. She was workaday, practical, clever and articulate. She was not stylish. Beauty was my currency for a very long time. It ceased to be many years ago, but seeing myself, herself in me, the horror returned. And what else? What else was I rejecting about this woman who I felt rejected by? Her coldness. Her distance. Her nothing numb physical body taking up space she’d rather was filled simply with her head. She felt nothing and I felt nothing and there it was.

I sat on the mat and I thought these thoughts and my mother walked into the hall and turned to look at me and came and sat beside me. She put her hand on mine. I looked down and saw it; old, wrinkled, a large ring. She squeezed gently, she spoke more gently and more humanly than she’d ever spoken in life. She said, you don’t know me. And in the tone of her voice was written admonishment and an ask for forgiveness. You don’t know me.

Later I stood on the gravel and discussed it with the Cyprus who knows everything. What if she never wanted any of us, but for reasons known and unknown she had us. What if that’s true. It feels that way. She was very far from being a bad person, she was focused elsewhere and that focus elsewhere had devastating consequences. And I thought about the feeling of her sitting beside me, my mother in her freed form, all about her gentle, and I felt the tremors of love. The Cyprus, giant and ancient, agreed. I didn’t know her and we are not the same. Turning to face her allows for this burgeoning of feeling. There was a huge, pre my dad part of her she kept hidden, she locked down, she couldn’t breathe into for fear of the anguish. She loved a man before my dad who left her, who died, who she never got over. It’s enough to know this. One day I will publish a novel about it.

The ways we are the same: she was a political firebrand, left wing, work obsessed and vocal. She opened her home to artists and anyone in need of a bed. She rarely wore make up and didn’t dye her hair. I look like her, as one old family friend said recently, from the nose up. You smile more. She wasn’t afraid of an argument. She loved the south of France. She loved her horse.

The ways we are not the same: she was almost entirely divorced from her body; excepting riding and gardening she did no exercise and took no pleasure in anything physical. She was a terrible cook. She was an even worse dancer. She had no rhythm. She liked jazz and opera. She wasn’t interested in how she dressed. She never wore heels. She didn’t luxuriate in excess anything except martyrdom. She showed no emotion ever. She was the opposite of glutton. She was not funny. She was a rubbish mother but then again I’m not sure she ever set out to be a good one.

The second list is longer.

I’m glad you came to see me, mum. Now I feel something.

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It was our second attempt to reach the cave of Mary Magdalene. Our first last year stymied by fire risk. Incendie, said the woman behind the desk of the tourist information centre in St Baume, forêt fermé and we’d contented ourselves with the Basilica and her skull - not that of the woman behind the desk, obviously, that of Mary Magdalene encased in gold. I didn’t know it was a temple to her, rather than the place where she resides. We were knocked down by the pagan, naked, scented glorious death of the place where her tomb was found hidden. But it isn’t where she is.

This year we tried again, a careful planning which couldn’t have known it was the one morning of the year for la chaise. We arrived at the ready, shawls and water, to be stopped at the mouth of the forest by a handsome hunter leaning into the car and spilling in rapid, sweet French we couldn’t go up this morning. We must wait till midday. We took to the monastery, coffee and sandwiches, sun pouring through pine. We waited. An hour and a half went by and my phone rang. My friend in Italy, headed for Thailand but news of his mother with cancer everywhere and a matter of months to live changed everything. I told him where I was. Light a candle for her.

We set off for the cave where Mary Magdalene spent the last forty years of her life, from where, in her nineties, she descended to St Baume to visit her brother and never returned. This pilgrimage of feet and devotion up steep, wide, stony paths shot with golden light through Lindon trees a habit of centuries, since the 5th, M tells us; M who knows Magdalene better than most, who has brought with her scents and knowing. It was a panting, heartbeat climb, sweat and plod, the rhythm of our tread a rope ladder music, one after the other, muscles complaining, staying in tune with each other. We rose to the rising splendour, eyes up, the sheer rock face coming near as others in sensible hats with flaps overtook, Norwegian walking sticks and dominant strides. On a stone bench we passed two old ladies fat with sandwiches and flasks enjoying themselves tremendously. That will be us, M and I said to each other and I wondered when I am very old if I could find a horse to carry me, already intending to do this forever.

The final climb becomes steps, stone and wide. Stations of the cross. A red arched door, open. Signs saying from here there will be no peeing, no cameras, no smoking and no talking. From here this is contemplation and prayer. The atmosphere spoke louder. Beyond the iconoclastic suffering, deeper than the sculptures of pain presented as the first thing to pass beyond the door, lay the voice of Magdalene in every breath of wind, beat of wing, rustle of trees, dip of rose and butterfly. I have the impression the life-sized Christ, face twisted, body bloodies, the men on either side and women at his feet, will break for lunch, look at their watches and climb down from the cross, stretching their arms and rubbing sore spines, perhaps eat their sandwiches in the courtyard looking out at the view of Mont Sainte Victoire, spend an hour lying in the cool of the cave, splash tired faces with water from the gently dripping pools which shimmer green there. Because Magdalene is there. Not tied up or encased in gold, not behind iron bars or stuttered in agony but here, in every rock, in the ceiling of damp, cool shadow and ground slabbed in stone, in every rough surface along which to run your hand, in the benches on which we sat and said prayers and lit candles. We each know pain and loss, grieving and terror and we each brought these to the cave.

To my friend’s mum for her safe crossing, to those who betray may they recover from such illness, to those who protect, success, and to my children may they ever be in my arms. We wrote a note doused in the perfumes Mary Magdalene used to anoint the feet of the dead and the living and wrote a prayer for the world. To all in suffering, her golden light. I am no Christian. My heart for this woman is far beyond those narrow straights. She knew a thing or two about love.

Speaking of which it’s almost a year since this happened:

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That was the year of the Oculus when B broke their foot. The year of vaccines and masks, the first summer of covid. God knows I’m not wild about being vaccinated and not because of any conspiracy. I’ve just got that irritating and entitled white liberal attitude that goes with one rule for me, an idea I should choose which bits I take part in, and on top of that a deep distrust of medical authority born of things in my past. But that was the year of rolling up our sleeves and sticking out our arms, of Pfizer versus Moderna, of scare stories and deep breaths and f**k it, I’m going to France. We had never missed a summer. We weren’t going to start now.

I remember hippies who’d snorted more white powder than was good for them taking umbrage with the unknown chemicals of the covid-19 vaccine as if they suddenly had a degree in biochemistry. I remember thinking of the years I’d spent injecting whatever I could get hold of into my veins and the absurdity of worrying about blood clots now. My body was no temple. I’d already put it through the mill. I downloaded the NHS app. I safe-distance queued at my local centre. I did the same for my children. I’d already had my first dose of the real thing; caught early on, I think it was February, I’d been to London, it hit on the train coming home but the likeliest Typhoid Mary was my friend Davey who came for tea and told me about his friend who’d just come back from Wuhan. Isn’t it funny to feel that name in your mouth again, all these words, Wuhan, Pfizer - tied to the past like strings to a fever dream, they take me back.

Do you remember the masks? Of course you do. The endless pulling up and pulling down, the sweat and elastic, the disturbance of not being able to read faces. I remember the toilet roll panic, how we watched from the farmhouse the images on tv of supermarket shelves emptying and trolleys piled high as if shitting would be the biggest problem. I remember the weather of the first lockdown in the UK, how it felt like we’d woken up in Eden. The endless blue and sunshine, the sky free of planes, dolphins reported in Venice canals. For us, the first lockdown was heaven. We’d already done a decade of homeschooling. Our neighbour lent us ponies. The roads were clear. The pressure of having to go anywhere was taken out of our hands, the threat of anyone dropping round was lifted. And when June peaked its head over the travel ban we made a plan.

“We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are in superyachts. Some have just the one oar.” Damian Barr

There is so much to say about covid. Those who caught my open call on Notes recently will know I’m inviting anyone who wants to talk about their experience to get in touch. I’m running a series of short, live interviews - The Covid Talks - here and on instagram as a way of getting this conversation started. Perhaps it’s already started in myriad other corners of the universe so to rephrase, to be part of the conversation because I want to know, I want to hear, I want to help the covid fever dream land in our collective as something that happened to all of us. As Damian Barr said in a tweet that went global, “same storm, different boats”; a tweet which has given rise to the film The Same Storm by Peter Hedges - it’s time we put those years somewhere we can see them. If you’d like to take part you can leave a comment here or DM me and we’ll set it up. There’s no agenda save remembering what happened to you, how it was, how it is and what you’ve brought with you.

Eleanor

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Carnival took up Monday but I kept it on the low-down, a quick early morning dance at the wings of the parade which passed so close to my flat I practically ran out there in my pyjamas, the women and men and gender queer glorious in their collective finery; the beauty on show took my breath and gave it back in armfuls of fish net flesh and feathers. I noticed me noticing the complete absence of eyes on me which just goes to show how used to I am to being visible, a creased and funny-looking white lady out dancing like she doesn’t care who’s watching which after years on dance floors in all kinds of weathers, I don’t, but it turns out I am used to being watched. The ego of me shamefully taking a reckoning, the whiteness of me revealing its thousand year old entitlement to the centre ground. Carnival is truth, a complicity of community in action. It’s happiness and fun a challenge to a thousand year old story that says I am the trunk and you are the boughs. Oliver Radclyffe talked about this when we explored how cis het is not a neutral position. And sam baker and Angie Browne and I talked about this on Wednesday when we converged our thoughts around menopause and women and visibility.

I have been visible for much of my life, certainly to the exterior world outside my childhood home, I had all the attributes granted high status by an environment constructed of the thesis it’s the fittest who survive - fittest being white and western and wealthy and heterosexual and cis-gendered. If in the seventies such words and examination were the norm, these would have been all my labels. Andrew Wille and I have since proudly declared ourselves politically queer and non-binary though the idea of labelling myself anything feels laughably right-on and inappropriatly young. As Dora Carrington said, “I’m a female human and Iive in Mexico.” I’m a writer. Everything else is secondary to that.

But to pick up the river of my thoughts from that small diversion - I noticed how I noticed I was of no interest whatsoever. There were no eyes on me apart from the occasional smile across oceans of dancing, the rhythm being our language, and it stood out to me, this noticing, that without noticing at all I had been used to being visible. These reckonings come in stages. This was another and it fed into the river of conversations I’ve been having, adding and enriching, as did a Radio 4 programme I happened upon where a group of scientists questioned why the famous “survival of the fittest” adage which Darwin never said, has been taken up as THE story when all of nature bears out the truth that it is in fact survival of the symbiotic, the most collaborative, those life forms which recognise and value community.

I’ve become interested in understanding us as stories, and this story, that we are top-down, zero sum, every man for himself creatures of selfishness and singularity is the story becoming singularly fiction in its visibility. Isolationism, monoculture, and separation are across the board the ingredients for a miserable life and death by a thousand lonely nights. Look at an Oak marooned in a ploughed field. Feel closely and you’ll hear them cry. We need each other. You don’t need me to tell you that. Even the solitary writer, getting up at 5am every morning to plough on with a novel which may or may not grow and seed and sprout into something you’ll one day hold in your hands needs their family of friends as antidote, which is what I’m doing now, off to celebrate C with lunch and then off further to St Pancras International, the Eurostar and France.

Eleanor

ps

Also, this happened. I’m so chuffed and thrilled that I actually feel shy about it.

Thank you, Kit. This is community in action.

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Thank you Elissa Altman, Sara Santa Clara, Angie Browne, Jeanne Elbe, Sophie Ellen Jones, and many others for tuning into my live video with sam baker! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Dipped and dived, ear plugs in and avoiding the main drag which thumped and ground at an almost standstill so close to the flat I thought the windows might break. Purple paint, the many colours deciding after much deliberation to become this one deep violet haze coating everything. Two girls walked past and I couldn’t tell what parts were naked. Fishnet, bikini, t shirts and skin. From my window, Jab Jab mas returning from their dawn parade, horned helmets and chains and taking their own pace against the tide, Black skin slicked with black oil, one after another in a line dragging chains, heavy iron rattling on road. Magnificent.

I found myself like a carnival homing pigeon returning to the spots I used to love, Talbot Road and Ledbury, Gaz’s Rock and Blues. There I met A & H, like homing pigeons too and we laughed at how old everyone had become; same hats, different faces. Up on the stage, M could be spotted as usual. And suddenly there was J and his mates and I did my best to get them all up on the trailer, too, but those days of sneaking past security are gone. Thumping bass and live band, brass and MC and round the corner harder jungle rave. In Colville Terrace a stage and queue to get in, the park packed.

Coming out of my flat later, a family on the doorstep, three little kids and their parents. I took them upstairs to use my bathroom; toilets are at a premium at carnival. Family Day meant children everywhere though in decibel it felt pretty adult. There’s so much I don’t see. The workshops and barbecues and children’s parties. The procession of electric blue wings and sparkles; only seeing tired small faces, frilled and sequinned with tiaras in their hair and hands loosely up to their mum or dad, gave clue to the day they’d had.

Bumped into IO and L and S in one of those crowded moments when you turn around and there they are, as if planned. Will wonders never cease. We hugged a lot. And finally D & L & D at the Tabernacle and my legs giving in to the trance-like sweat and beat of ancient reggae on ancient turntable, 45s dropped onto record player, needle miraculously not jumping except when enthusiastic fans placed a hand on the tower and the whole thing slipped in a haze of crackle and stand back, don’t touch. And the garden was lit with looping fairy bulbs and the air a fine chatter of laughter and I kept thinking, this is how it could be always and how astonishing that this momentous cultural celebration isn’t magnificently celebrated as the national institution that it is. Imagine Brazil sidelining Rio as a fringe event that is annually threatened with closure. Absurd, insane and stupid.

I walked back through streets echoing with voices, dustbin men and women already bulldozing the crazy mess of hundreds of thousands of revellers into piles to take away. A lone figure in the middle of the road, too far away to make out clearly, seated, spread like wings at rest, occupied the central ground.

Eleanor

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The thing about carnival is it begins long before it begins. And I’m talking for us, the receivers, the partiers and dance-abouters not the givers, the great families of carnival, the community leaders and organisers whose floats and costumes and pans and rehearsals have been at it for months in advance. But for me, who only sees the result, it started with council signs going up that parking is suspended.

Then the boards go up on shops and across stucco fronts; the tourists and influencers who come for the bookshop and blue door and ice cream coloured houses melt away before plywood spray-painted and tagged. Cafés close and our usual Friday market coffee is moved to Golbourne where we talk about our plans, will we be going in, which walkways are closed and when to get a wrist band for the Tabernacle. There is excitement in the air. And rain.

On Friday night there’s a Pans rehearsal on All Saints, mesmerising and rich; they’re so fast, how do they know, who are they watching to conduct them. Sixty or more and bodies jumping and music singing out, a handsome man, his arm around a pole, central to their throng, sticks in his hand has all their eyes upon him. I bump into A and L and others, it’s amazing and yet not at all that when you let go and move with the river, you find friends. The crowd packed tight and happy, jerk chicken barbecues throw smoke, backs flatten against walls to let others pass and we move sideways, smiling. A downpour stops the music and we wait and they wait and when pans are dried, up it starts again, this music central to Caribbean festival. This is a gathering of celebration begun to bring people together in the face of racial murder and division. It is second in size only to Rio. It is magnificent. And that was Friday. It hasn’t even begun yet it’s begun.

“If there weren’t race riots in Notting Hill I don’t believe that we would have had the Notting Hill Carnival. If it wasn’t for the murder of Kelso Cochrane, Carnival wouldn’t have happened.”The late Political Activist and Broadcaster, Darcus Howe

It’s Sunday and I woke as usual to work but the flat is filled with the sleeping bodies of J and his friends who all gathered here last night, and I am moved to a wobbly table in my bedroom with the window open and outside, moving with anticipation, groups of young people, bonnets and black leotards, head on up to where they will dress and climb and be the show for the children’s parade today. The street is free of cars, only Ladbroke Grove swishes with tyres. A police van is parked outside my door, also in anticipation, and the casual racism and unconscious racism and everyday conscious racism which walks these British streets is on show, too, in passing comments about being careful, in the assumption that trouble will come because this is a Black celebration, a Caribbean party; outside of West London white people nervousness is just as much on show.

“We felt that although West Indians, Africans, Irish and many others nationalities all live in a very congested area, there is very little communication between us. If we can infect them with a desire to participate, then this can only have good results.” Rhaune Laslett

I’ve just been out - a walkabout as it builds and Ladbroke Grove is a wild sea of paint and whistles and last night’s party running into today. Bodies prepared in plastic are rainbow spattered with the shower of colours from bottles sprayed into the air. There are girls doubled up in laughter and wide lines of friends in horned helmets, a post apocalyptic head gear of goggles and wide strides. There are bikinis and g-strings and heavy boots and horns blowing. Boys caped in flags, arms linked owning the street and sky.

And from my window:

It is glorious, and this is only the beginning. Sunday and not yet 10am. I’m going out again soon to get a wristband for The Tabernacle so I can come and go as I like, dive in and out as is my preferred way of being, moving alone so there’s no one to lose and nothing to chase or wait for.

More later…

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Each morning I wake at 5:03am. If my brain knows why it’s not telling. 5:03am and the dread of what’s the point yet I must because what else is there when you’re this deep in? I can’t go back. I am more than a year and 44,000 words lost in the forest of this book. It is dark. I can’t see my way except this one directive, to get up each morning and meet it at my desk, at my fingertips, as the sky turns pink and parrots escaped from cages settle in the trees. I wish I could say more about it. I wish I could talk about her but I fear this would ruin what already feels broken. I fear that would be the end of something that began as all novels begin, with the seed of an idea containing multitudes. I am disappearing. I am growing more silent by the day.

So I’ll write of other things, how I tried to cross London to meet WS for a long planned afternoon at V&A east, and how the gods disavowed it; South Kensington, shut. Sloane Square, shut. The tubes District and Central disrupted by minor works and major tragedies and nothing running to Stratford that would get me there on time. I hate letting friends down.

How J and T went out last night in war paint made from my eyeliner to dance up the dawn somewhere far south. I heard T knocking about as I woke and J fell in the door, just as I finished work; covered in dust and laughing, how I gave him water and put him to bed in my room. I’m on the train now, a Sunday emptiness and I’ve stolen a first class seat because no other carriage has a table.

I could write about how the weather cooled this week and I heard a friend who’d been at a festival - predominantly white, predominantly with feathers in their hair - argue the heating of the planet was nothing to do with us while in the same breath that “they” control the weather.

But I feel spectacularly separate. As if all the talking is done.

Eleanor

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