The Obsessive Diary

I’ve reached the end of my retreat. Today is my last day. Tomorrow I fly to NYC. It’s been enriching, deepening, hard work and holy. All that I asked it to be. Thanks to Deirdre I’ve been meditating for longer, thanks to this house I’ve been held in Divine abeyance of normal life, and thanks to the teeming life inside and out I’ve had company. I’ve learnt that trees sleep and giant cicadas have a sense of humour. I’ve seen a fox, huge and grand; she paused as I drew back the curtains one morning, perfectly framed by the gates, one paw raised as she looked at me and I looked at her, and we both said, What the? before answering and moving on.

On two afternoons I set sail for the mountains and got lost in tangled wood, met a tortoise who told me, Shells are useful, and was beset by fears I had spiders on my back. The forests are vast and confusing. The paths ancient, they twist and narrow while cork trees tower and it’s impossible to keep track of direction. Occasionally the moon signalled west, but what did that mean? I passed a tree in which was stuck the top jaw bone of a wild boar. Was I Indiana Jones? I tripped between panic and story and a voice said, Look up, but all I could see was more sky and fewer hills; I couldn’t figure out which way was Grimaud or Cogolin; I’d make a terrible sailor. I heard bells and headed away from them. A chainsaw grew louder as I scrambled down stony gully that became a gentle woodland slope and emerged over dried river bed onto a broad sand track. I took a punt and turned right. Another mile went by before houses and tarmac explained I’d drifted all the way over to the road to Collobrières.

I’ve written a 30,000 word first draft novella which will double in size to become a novel one day, but not yet. November is earmarked to find out what all those early mornings produced. They’re a haze to me now. All I remember is getting up and saying to myself, Come on. Get to it. And we’ve begun proofing FALLOUT which comes out next year. Getting notes is never easy, but the editor at Empress Editions knows her onions.

Last Sunday I taught a class on Memoir & The Body, a guest spot in Amanda Saint‘s memoir course. Profound, strong and tender was the feedback. I’ll take that.

There’ve been Substack LIVEs punctuating each week which have pulled me out of silence and tunnelled me into contact with others. Yesterday, SLART met me in his lunch hour on the high wire. I never know where the conversations are going to go, and they always produce something that makes the whole world drop away in their insistence of the present moment.

Here’s the recording in case you missed it:

And if you want to buy his work, check out the catalogue from his latest show Memento Vivere.

And somewhere in all that, thanks to Jane Ratcliffe, I wrote an essay for Beyond on recovering reality. In case audio is your jam, here’s a recording of me reading it out loud.

So yes, it’s been enriching, deepening, hard work and holy. All that I asked for. Thank you Kemi Nekvapil , Kit de Waal & Elizabeth Gilbert . You may not know how much you inspired me during this time alone, but you did.

Eleanor

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Let me expand because we were a village of misfits and outcasts, a tribe of off-grid outer-reaches travellers with an open-door policy that attracted the lost and the lonely as much as the brilliant and brave. We were unruly, anarchic, we somehow governed each other and ourselves. Healers, musicians, mystics, those who made sure the s**t pits were dug, others who prayed and cried. Bodgers and woofers got stuck in with fences and fires, party people decorated trees, foragers taught us what to eat. The traumatised and frail, turned out by psychiatric care, they came too and spoke in tongues and claimed to be Jesus, others channelled messages from Angels and Aztecs; my actual Angel man and I accepted them all. People got together, babies were born, the commune grew. There were children and dogs everywhere. Mud beneath our nails, the kettle always on. As word spread that we were building a stone circle by hand another layer of engineers and mystics was added, those who’d made it their life’s work to understand the majesty of how and why. More benders and yurts sprang up in the woods, the metal barn expanded, Shamanic Studies HQ was busy with the ringing of the phone while the seasoned road protester slept in a coffin on a shelf and ate oats and was as gentle as a branch waving. A stage was built, a trapeze hung, for each of the eight pagan festivals we held a party, druids everywhere, and on the last weekend of every month we raised another stone. Unlike Uri Geller who’d invited us to his house to admire his crystals and bent spoons, who’d showed us his car but when it came to it never showed up, hundreds of others did. Keepers of stone circles from all over Britain found their way to us. Ed Pryn with his flowing robes, white hair and bottle glasses, John and Elizabeth, keepers of Callanish in the Hebrides, John Michell, author of How the World Is Made: The Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry who quietly put his hand to a rope. When notices from the council arrived, challenging our right to build the circle, a man who I’d known as just another face around the fire, revealed himself to be Someone High Up in local politics. He showed us how to navigate our way through the attempts to stop us. He saved us. And somewhere in all of this I flew to Sedona in Arizona, that place of vortexes and portals, and trained to be a yoga teacher.

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This is how we did it. Telegraph poles and railway sleepers, an engineer taught us how to use a windlass; a rope looped around a stone and a tree, and tightened with a stick turned clockwise, a coordination of hands to keep it winding and stop it snapping out of control and spinning anticlockwise; an arm was broken once, and once the rope broke and whipped me. But first we had to lever each stone from the pile. We used wooden poles to inch our way under, another pole, bigger and so on, inch by inch we lifted those stones onto telegraph poles placed crossways on sleepers that led to a hole in the ground at least half as deep as each stone was tall so that when it fell it would not be moving again except by rabbits who nibble and tip in that quiet way that builds mountains and digs canyons. A hundred people on a rope, rocks hauled along tracks, a bridge built across grass for a Portland stone to float towards a spot chosen by our Megalithic Giant that would mark a rise of the moon. Five hundred people on a hill for a month, living on campfire cooking and starting each day with The Dance of Life. Meetings – oh god the meetings. A talking stick, an endless circle of discussion from who isn’t doing the washing up to which stone cares that it broke in half. We had to hold a ceremony for that. The Megalithic Giant convinced us to let him try levitation. It didn’t work but we had fun. Uri Geller got in touch, invited us to his house of obscene crystals and damn spoons and boasted he’d magic the stones into place but, guess what, he never turned up. It wasn’t the showmen who got those stones moved but the engineers who spoke quietly, who knew that no fancy trickery is going to get around the moment when a nine-ton rock reaches a hole in the ground and falls in. If it lands at an angle that’s it. You can move a stone across grass but it takes more than an armful of chanting Pagans to push a rock vertical that has landed at a slant. You can’t do it. As each stone fell, we held our breath, as each landed perfectly we cheered and the tamping sticks moved in, and the didgeridoos played and the drums beat and beneath each stone is buried something to make each of us who were there smile and tease the archaeologists of a thousand years from now.

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This post is dedicated to Lourdes, who we loved. I can name her because of what happened, but it doesn’t happen yet. I have a photograph of her in her finery, dancing round the maypole in a blue satin dress, her arm raised in song moments before she met her king, the carpenter who dances behind her. She was Portuguese, Wiccan, dark curls, silk voice. She appeared in the commune that Beltane as the village rose on the hill and the stones were delivered; I don’t remember whose friend she was, who brought her, how she found us, but that year the women of the camp crowned her May Queen. It was she who sat on the throne by the Beltane fire, a wreath of ivy in her hair as the men stripped and trotted away, the carpenter taking off his hat, a crowd of male nakedness disappearing into the woods. They climbed to the top of the hill scaring dog walkers and waited for the bellow of the horn. We were gathered, hundreds of us, dressed in skins and rags and finery, the stones still a pile of rocks in the sequoia trees, as the animal call rang out and the naked men ran. Crashing through undergrowth, ignoring paths, straight down the hill, we heard them before we saw them. The hollering of ancient fire and beast, a camp of dancing Pagans on a sunny Surrey hillside in May calling them in with drums beating, flames leaping, the neighbours alerted by smoke and cries came hesitantly up the drive. Our megalithic giant in velvet top hat and loincloth raised his hands to blue sky while muddy children chased dogs and women skipped about with flowers in their hair. And there, suddenly, the naked men streamed from the wood, a terrifying leap of barbed wire and they were in the field, hurtling across grassland to be the first, to claim the Beltane Queen as their own. The carpenter won her, was crowned May King, and together they leapt the fire; she was his for a year. Tradition had it he would lose his head to the next king the next year but he lost his head to her instead. They fell in love and were joined for more than a year and it wasn’t him who died – but not yet. Five hundred pagans on a hill, we raised a maypole, we raised the first King and Queen and then we raised the first stone.

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They came in droves, the druids, led by ex-trucker turned megalithic giant, Ivan McBeth. He was the friend from Longleat who’d opened my eyes to the fuckery of the man with pigtails. Next time you’re at Glastonbury Festival, go to the Swan Circle. He built it. His ghost roams those stones amongst the people off their heads, his ashes are scattered there. When I’d arrived at the farm, I’d looked from the kitchen window at a flat jut of land on the hillside and rung him. I’d said, Let’s build a stone circle by hand, knowing he’d never done it, knowing every build before had been with forklift trucks and cherry pickers, and how much he wanted to feel the rough warm haul of his ancestors. One sentence and he came. Shamanic HQ was set up in the metal barn, the megalithic call was sent out. Ovates, bards and druids, they called themselves Club Meg; the keepers of the ancient sites, from Cornwall to Callanish. And with them came the others, the Wiccans and Pagans and hippies and people of the woods, sacred geomancers, engineers, those who knew what they were doing and those who really didn’t, travellers and runaways, the brilliant and lonely; we welcomed them all. Word spread. The land filled with benders, yurts, trucks and tipis. The carpenter climbed to the top of a sequoia and fixed a chair, it’s still there if you’re brave enough to see. And as the land filled and the seasons changed Ivan watched the rise and fall of the moon and plotted its course across the sky. By May he was ready, the stones found in a quarry in Portland and delivered to the site by truck, dumped in an unceremonious pile, eighteen nine-ton rocks which became nineteen when one in its crashing course from the tipped-up flatbed broke in half. We would begin the build with a festival, Beltane, when bluebells covered the forest floor. A hot tub was built, erected on stalks like a rocket about to take off. A huge and comfortable yurt would hold our meetings, a communal kitchen would feed us, we were a megalithic village appearing on a Surrey hillside; dogs, children, sunshine, the neighbours in sensible shoes came and gawped. But Beltane was coming, and we were full of fire, and Kings would race naked and a Queen would be crowned and the first of the stones would go in.

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I finished a shitty first draft the day before yesterday and hey presto, like clockwork, yesterday I fell off an emotional cliff, caught somewhat by two Sams. It always happens; not the being caught by two Sams but the falling off. I’m locked in. I get to the end. I have a small cry. I wake up the next morning and am hit by a gust of such existential angst and, What’s the f*****g point that it knocks me right off my pins.

I should be used to it by now. I should have learnt to step away from the edge. Sam Jordison inadvertently threw out a net at the beginning of our conversation - we’d started talking before we went on air, and my answer to his question, How are you? crossed the border of the green room and took up the first five minutes of our chat (sorry about that, Sam 😂). And then the other Sam, my friend who I’ve known for a thousand years, rang from LA, about to start his own writing day, and put out two arms; one of which allowed me to moan while the other gave me a hug and told me to take a break. It occurred to me this morning that if I stopped trying so hard to prove I deserve to be here, I might not get so tired.

Then again, I’m human, and as the voices told me distinctly as I walked on the beach, it’s a pretty exclusive club. We all know what the chances are of a blink and you’ll miss it lifetime on this planet. As near zero as damn it. And as a human person? Rare as hell. I know, I know, Pol Pot and Myra Hindley, but look who else has been a member. David Bowie! Kate Bush! Nye Bevan! Not bad as clubs go. I’ve been comforting myself with the thought that I share the dressing room with some pretty amazing people (as well as the awful ones), that being human is falling all over, and being a person is failing better.

Now I expect you’re thinking, What is she talking about? Didn’t she just say she finished a first draft? I did say that and I can’t explain it. What would be expected to be a reason for celebration is always a cause for me to bury my head. I think it must be something to do with exhaustion, and my go-to embattlement when my defences are down. Another voice told me in the car as I drove back from sitting on the beach, If you want to stop feeling like such a victim, you could try not attacking yourself. F**k you and your rational, inarguable wisdom. Whatever.

Yesterday was a pity party day.

I sat at a wooden table on the beach and watched a bevvy of old women walking in the sea. I dunked croissant into my café crème and judged the ocean liner cruise ship for taking too much space. A man on a hover board appeared like a film on repeat. A child in a green Hulk sweatshirt ran after his mother, shouting at the dog. A woman wished me, Bonjour, sat at the table beside me, and ate a huge ice cream fudge sundae dripping with chocolate sauce.

Then I came home and spent over an hour in conversation with SamJordison. I wanted to get the thorny issue of The Polari Prize out on the table. We did that, and more. Here’s the recording for the full conversation. We talked about book banning, the cancellation culture wars, and what advice he gives his authors. We also managed to squeeze in at the end a quick note about the short story prize he’s running at Galley Beggar Press. It’s a prestigious competition, past winners have gone on to glory, and he was keen to keep the submissions coming. If you’ve a short story that fits the brief, send it in now. Deadline is November 8th.

That’s it for now. Another day rolls around and I’ve begun notes on another novel. As ever, their bark is worse than their bite. I think I’m going to be okay.

Eleanor

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Let me set the scene. Me and Angel man. A carpenter who looked like Jesus. A pianist, blonde, many rings, she played the Michael Nyman tune from The Piano almost constantly. A man of the woods and his Wiccan wife and her daughter. An ex-trucker turned megalithic giant. A soft-spoken road protester who’d lived up a tree. A long, thin, angular beanpole with glasses. An old man and white-haired woman, both of them rounded like the bender they built in the wood. These were the first members of the commune. God did people go on about how great communal living would be. That’s why we did it. That’s why when I looked out on the land, I said, Well let’s find out then, shall we. A pound a week, everyone welcome, an open-door policy, communal use of the washing machine and bathrooms, you could pitch up and pitch anywhere, the house soon full, tipis, benders, yurts sprang to life in the woods and fields. Converted horseboxes found flat ground outside the old metal barn down the drive where a mechanic had been turfed out. A member of the firm behind all this, my father’s estate, had arrived looking worried in a suit, clearly instructed to do my bidding, no questions asked, and he did; we wanted the barn for ourselves. It was big enough for workshops and later a stage and trapeze. The road protester moved his coffin onto a shelf in the office. The megalithic giant announced the HQ for Shamanic Studies. The Jesus carpenter hammered and plane-sawed and got dust in his beard. A didgeridoo maker portioned off another corner, soon discovering that giant hogweed was no replacement for eucalyptus. Meetings once a week, mandatory, a talking stick passing from hand to hand around the kitchen table. A lot of tea. A lot of spliff. In the first month we sent out a call for extra help, gave everyone a sapling and an ecstasy. We planted two thousand trees that day. Word spread, the commune grew and this wasn’t the wildness of Dartmoor or some remote hilltop in the highlands where no one could see, it was Surrey, the Home Counties, not two hours from London where careful women clipped their roses and nervous men played golf.

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But first I jumped naked off a viaduct in Normandy. Almost naked. We’d driven in convoy, Angel man and me, to a festival in northern France where there were more crew than punters and we lay about in the sunshine smoking pot and he said, Let’s go bungee jumping. It was appropriate, that leap into nothing, trusting a rope I couldn’t see and trusting the calculations of others who said if I reached out my hand, I would touch the water in that microsecond halt between going down and bouncing up. A leap of faith echoed in the leap to leave the squat in Ealing and move to a farmhouse high up on a hill hugged by woodland. I don’t know why I elected to strip, just me and a pair of tiny pink shorts flying from a bridge. Probably showing off. It made sense at the time. I remember Angel man rushing up to do it again and almost jumping before they’d attached the chord. I remember someone doing it on a bicycle. I remember the ridiculous rush of stepping into nothing, my brain telling me I would die. It was a rush to catch the ferry too, that afternoon, we were late, we’d picked up new friends, we had various drugs to hide as we sped to the border. I was so blasé. Being caught – and we never were – never crossed my mind. We ruled the world. It was all about friends, new connections, wherever we went we made them. Two more that weekend who came with us back to the farm. We set them to work stripping carpets and scrubbing underlay, revealing wide floorboards. This house in the country that I owned, to which I’d been sent an ancient key had ancient stone and brick and oak hidden beneath wall-to-wall sixties interior; beige cupboards, avocado carpets and red plastic lino gave way to stone and oak and brick. Everybody worked for free and a piece of what we were building, a scene in a house in the country, wisteria dripping, sun shining, kettle always on. We filled the bedrooms with mattresses pulled from skips and filled them with people. We tore and painted and smoked and practised circus skills in the garden. Everyone was learning to juggle. Acrobalance was all the rage. We decided to start a commune.

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