The Obsessive Diary

I don’t remember much because my disc was slipping. Because I was out of my mind in pain. Rainbow Gatherings are surreal places at the best of times, an army of people who believe in walking, they collect around the world in barefoot harmony, moved by a prophesy that the People of the Rainbow will make war go away. Everything is shared, there’s a sense of life simplified, a medieval camping trip without the toothache. There are no nations or nationalities, only feathered hippies, their children on their hips, scant possessions fashioned onto homemade toolbelts, a tin cup and wooden utensil, a knife stuffed down the back of loose trousers, a staff you’ve carved yourself, beads swapped for tobacco. That’s the look and premise, anyway, although try separating a Rainbow Warrior from his special stick if you want to see something nearer the truth. Humans are humans the world over. There was a lot of purposeful striding across soft grassland, tipi doors thrown open, shawls readjusted and elders muttering in private circles. A sense of a bunch of people trying to find something more important to talk about other than how sick they were of beans. There was a lot of bowing. And nakedness. Each day an enormous circle was formed of anyone hungry, volunteers ladled offerings into bowls held aloft. More beans. There was a lot of drumming. I teamed up with the renegades who’d made a camp of their own in the woods. Fewer prayers. Less sincerity. I remember the devilishly handsome Frenchman who took Datura and lost his mind, fell in a river and died. I remember the full moon appearing like the third eye in a skull. I’d made it into a tent when the disc between my fourth and fifth vertebrae gave up its efforts like the appendix and fallopian tube before it. When a sound came out of my mouth that I didn’t recognise, I thought I was channelling a demon. But it must have been screaming because three women amassed like angels above me, then the face of someone I knew. A friend from the West Country, who one day would die but not that day, appeared out of nowhere. I didn’t know he was there. He gathered me in his arms and carried me to France, to the house I’d trashed when I was fresh out of school, where my parents were on holiday. We arrived dirty from the road, unexpected and unannounced. Amongst palm trees and clean sheets, he laid me down.

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There was a connection with Czechoslovakia that I didn’t think of as I set off in that coach, a shaved head, a disc slipping. In the tall, cold house in London where I’d grown up, we’d had a nanny, a refugee from the revolution, the Prague Spring that was crushed by the Russians. My mother had taken many people in and this nanny was one of them, she was given the flat in the basement and the job of looking after us. She had curly red hair, and she was traumatised though I knew her as frightening which was why as I set off on that coach for a Rainbow Gathering in the Gratzen Mountains, the seats replaced with armchairs, a bed at the back, I didn’t think of her. I had shut her, and the crazed rampage of her, out of my mind. But everything is connected. We got the ferry to France, drove up the coast to Holland, stopped in a park in Amsterdam where my friends went out for the night and I stayed on the coach smoking pot. A man peered in at the many windows, circling. I huddled on the bed growing frightened, scenarios of rape and death ripping through my mind. I knew if he boarded the coach I’d be trapped. Something took me over. I went to the front, opened the door. Outrage at his imposition had made me wild. I doubled in size. I screamed fury at him, threw all the knives in my heart. He backed away and was swallowed by the night. I went back to bed. My friends returned. Somewhere in Germany a dawn filled with birds had us piled on the dirt road stretching from travel. I hung off the door frame to straighten my spine and bent on my knees to a tree seeing god in a halo of light. In the wooded mountains of Czechoslovakia we parked in a clearing, took acid and walked the last few kilometres of sandy road, collecting others as we went, this amassing of bare feet and blankets, dreadlocks and staffs to a place of tipis and fire and incessant drumming. Smoke curled into blue sky. I watched it circle the camp, giant and white above us, a snake, its mouth open, eating its tail.

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I was caught off guard by the heat; 31 degrees in September, balmy t shirt weather and I’d forgotten how much further south I was from Paris. The house greeted me with a hug and a sudden bird flying fast through the sitting room and cannoning head first into the window. I gently laid a tea towel over it as it panted half bruised and awkward caught sideways in the radiator. Outside I expected it to fly off as soon as I revealed its freedom, but it didn’t.

I sat on the swing chair, Yves Klein blue against ancient peeling white, tea towel red chequered, feathers shades of brown, black eye, beak translucent bone with shades of pink and curved like a shortened hummingbird. Gravel grey beneath my feet. Sky like the cushions, palm trees rustling, grandmother Cyprus silent as the grave in her knowing, like the presence on my hand which hopped in a small neat circle, proving it wasn’t stuck.

I stared and she stared.

“You banged your head.”

“You knocked yourself clean out.”

“It must have hurt.”

This conversation, which was audibly one way but visibly mutual, went on for a while until it became clear that she was staying of her own accord and I felt myself dropping like a drug into something inducing splendour. I couldn’t help it. I fell asleep. In my micro-dream there were four people passing something between them and a voice over which I woke to, caught the tail end of, which said passes from Paul to *names I couldn’t decipher* to Emily to Paul and bang, I was awake and the winged poem blinked at me and I felt the weight of her in my hand. Thirty minutes had gone by. And then she flew away. Welcome to Les Aumarets.

On the third night there was a storm. I’d felt it coming. Looking up into that thundering blue my nerves felt the build. In clear skies and heat was written the inevitable breakage, even before I saw the mountains climb and colours rumble and heard the first roar while trying to sleep and failing and wondering, what was that noise? I got up and opened the curtains. The entire valley lit up in theatrical overplay. I put on a dressing gown and slid open the doors, stepped outside and stood on the wall. The urge to open my arms to lightning was overwhelming. I watched the forests squeal in sheet echoes and shimmer in bolts. I heard the rain before it came.

Enlivened by life itself I retreated before I got soaked, and saw on the rug a huge cricket had decided the same. It glistened and glimmered, it looked in that half thunderous light as big as my arm. At the moment I spotted it, and took in my bed, a few feet from it, and wondered what to do, and turned on the bathroom lights and off the bedside lights and hoped I could shut it in the bathroom till morning, at that precise interchange between glory and panic, there was another mighty whiplash crack and the power went out.

I turned on my torch and the giant cricket as big as my arm flew right at me. of course it did. It was going towards the light. I screamed, hurled my phone on the bed, panicked some more and then crept again to the torch where it lay face down, muted. The cricket as big as my arm was resting on the counterpane. The thunder crashed, the lightning hurled, the world was pitch black and lit up and pouring and gingerly I stripped the bed of counterpane and cricket, flicked it over on the floor, prayed the cricket and I could sleep peacefully, separately, and tried to find warmth beneath a single sheet. Deirdre told me later that crickets bring messages of wisdom and connection to nature’s rhythms & spiritual messages, transformation and the unseen forces of the spiritual world. Welcome to Les Aumarets.

Giant Cricket Update: She’s taken up residence on the curtains. Everyday I open the doors and invite her to go outside. Everyday she says she’s happy where she is. I’ve decided she’s keeping an eye on me.

Oh, and the writing’s going fine.

Eleanor

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“Relationship? What relationship? You were just renting a room.” Gaslighting hadn’t reached Somerset in 1995 but even if it had I’m not sure I’d have named it, I was that shocked. In his kitchen, the uneven floor and books falling over, the dog looking up at me, I’d made the mistake of naming that other thing, heartbreak, betrayal, cruelty. He looked at me and I looked at him and only one of us was brazening it out. I went to stay with my friend at Longleat, a yurt dry and mossy hidden from the tourists where I slept to the roar of lions. My friend was building a stone circle for Lord Bath. He’d built the one at Glastonbury festival, he’d built the one in the garden I had left. He told me, He doesn’t love you, as firm and solid as the stones he handled. I tripped as I went from yurt to kitchen fire and almost fell in it, had the impression of flying straight as an arrow, both feet off the forest floor, toward the iron frame that held the cooking pots suspended in his outdoor home. Pigtails didn’t love me. It was true. I returned to the farmhouse on the Somerset Levels with its wonky kitchen and uneven floor and unfair advantage and said goodbye to the dog. I packed my bags. I don’t remember the goodbye. He was probably whining on about unconditional love. Still itching, still with hurt snaking from ankle to hip, I drove my pink camper to a cottage buried deep in a dripping wood where a folk band lived who were kind, who I knew, who let me stay. In their bathroom I cut off my hair with kitchen scissors, and with a razor shaved it down to the skin. When I looked in the mirror I cried. In the sitting room was a crowd making plans for a Rainbow Gathering. They had a coach like the ones used for school trips to Box Hill, thirty children racing for the back row, someone being sick only this one had all the seats ripped out and sofas put in. Curtains were hung on the many windows; a kitchen had been installed and there were no children or anyone racing anywhere. There was a bed, large and messy, where me and my agonised spine and shaved head were installed as we waved goodbye to the folk band friends, the cottage in the dripping wood and set off for Czechoslovakia.

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They moved me out in inches. It began with a mushroom trip. Pigtails and the girl, two peas in a pod went out under the stars arm in arm. I saw them seated on a log in the herb garden that he and I had built. I left them to it. I told myself I was being mature. They stayed up, or at least out, all night. I know this because he didn’t come to bed. And the next morning when I saw them in the kitchen, leaves in their hair, ruffled as if they’d slept on grass, there was a smile to them. I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, pulled weeds, smoked pot. John Lennon taught me how to make lasagne; a voice channelled in my head, don’t ask me what it meant. It meant lasagne. I heard his voice and followed his recipe and Pigtails and the girl said something had been discovered. They said I should move into the spare room. Like the good girl that I was, I listened to them through the wall. The girl’s mother arrived and moved into the yurt at the end of the garden. She said they’d always been like this. Inseparable. I set to clearing the vegetable patch; nettle roots straining my arms, leaves stinging my hands. My back hurt. I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog and stood outside for a UFO to flash its lights upon my head and as suddenly be gone. Pigtails said his love for me was unconditional. He said, Couldn’t we all live together? and suggested I move into the yurt. The girl’s mother gave me scabies. I itched through terrible spring, slept beside that terrible mother in a damp and leaking yurt and cooked and cleaned and fed the dog and lived this ménage à trois because all I could hear was him saying, Don’t go, and all I could see was my grip upon this life and all I could feel was my love for him, this man who deserved not an inch of me. My back hurt more. I got sciatica. One evening the girl and I were alone. She said, You’ll never win. I hadn’t realised it was a competition. I’d thought it was a problem of my heart, that it wasn’t big enough, that I couldn’t love unconditionally like he could. That absolute f****r. I’d been taking my spine to healers, asking them, Why the pain? Believing they could make it better. I’d thought the hurt snaking down my leg was my inability to let her in. But the tension that had me crouched at night clutching my leg to my chest was not a signal from the universe that I was small-minded, it was my vertebrae giving up, my body saying enough, my disc about to slip.

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Protests in Paris, over half a million people on the streets, the taxi driver cursed blocked roads and sirens, la gendarmerie waved us from trouble into bottle necks of horns blaring, Parisians throwing up their hands. Avoid the Bastille he said as I got out at Citizen M, à côté de la Gare de Lyon.

I love how the French strike at the drop of a hat, they are socialist to their core, it is written into their constitution and it pleases my anarchist heart. Power to the people.

So I avoided the Bastille and instead walked along the Seine to Notre Dame where tourists teemed irrespective of the uprising. I wanted to look inside since the clean up and after the fire. As ever, I didn’t stay long; a full church makes me rile at doctrine, an empty is full of god. It was the opposite of empty.

On the way back to my hotel, hurrying with thoughts of preparing for the London Writers' Salon class I was teaching that evening, I was drawn into a gallery that said simply Biblioteka Polska Czytelnia. Knowing nothing, I found an exhibition of dark faery oddities, echoes of Pan, and William Blake, demons and angels and devils and myth, claws and winged lions, the gargoyle grin and cursed motifs of magic, the dark arts and spells.

I’ve since learnt that The Polish Library in Paris is a major centre of Polish history and culture, and was founded in 1838 by exiled Polish intellectuals after the November Uprising. According to Perplexity, it’s a “beacon for Polish heritage abroad and is one of the oldest and most important institutions of the Polish diaspora.” Who knew. I went into the next room. An area was curtained off. I slipped inside the green drapes to find a sculpture of a man with his head in his hands, a black rose on his plinth, and a voice loud and clear in my head repeating, Get out, get out, get out. So I did.

At my hotel, the woman who checked me in mentioned in passing that she was a writer but was terrible at turning up. She was looking for a community to help her be accountable to her work. Funny that, I said, and told her about The London Writers’ Salon, whose m.o. is exactly that. She replied, Isn’t the universe amazing.

Class on serialisation - hosted by London Writers' Salon and the room held by Lindsey Trout Hughes (thank you, Lindsey!) - done, with thanks to everyone who came. I hope it was useful. Any follow up questions, dm me. Always happy to help. I went to bed and woke early and headed out to the Gare de Lyon. I took notes again as I waited for my train.

A large buddhist monk in red and orange robes plus beige anorak and red trainers, and carrying a plastic bag, accompanied by a small blonde woman who looks happy. She smiles at me as they walk past. I love seeing monks on the move.

An aged and beautiful woman in ancient flapper shoes. She circles me close and disappears.

Railway worker on the far platform at Marseille, the silhouette of him; tall, elegant, in high vis orange trousers and white vest. Balletic, arms swinging as if at the bar, ready for a plié and pas de deux, his feet at ten to two, even his walk has rhythm.

And now I’ve arrived at the place I love most in the world, my home in the south of France ( Kit de Waal , we never had time to compare Provencal notes, but if you ever need a writing retreat in this part of the world, just say the word…). I’m here for a month to do exactly that, retreat and write. As such, I’ll be mostly be posting chapters from my memoir while I hide away, with the odd Substack LIVE thrown into the mix. Wish me luck. I’m meeting a new book….

Eleanor

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It’s been a busy few days. On Tuesday we held the memorial dinner for my mum, a London affair for her London life, Susan Walker, architect and school governor. My brother hosted, the room was nicely filled, I knew a few people but not all, many of her students turned up, those who’d come to her practice as part of the study for theirs. My brother spoke, her practice colleague gave a speech and the former head of Marlboro School described how much my mum had meant to her. It’s funny hearing of these other versions of her, the love and high regard, the softness she showed to some. Her steel was apparent everywhere but the care was less familiar. We had dinner after, just family. I was glad to be sober.

Wednesday dawned with my usual butterflies, a Substack Live and with none other than the great (there’s no other word for her, she really is great) Kit de Waal. Here’s the recording:

There was much that amazed me, not least the incredible bon chance of talking to an author immediately on the heels of reading their work - what a gift - and much I learnt about her; her immense respect for the craft, that she’s a plotter, that she doesn’t let it out the gate until she’s confident it’s perfect. Reading her novels, the mastery of technique and how clearly she’s studied this, is obvious. It’s how she makes it look so simple and why the reading experience is so without effort. She’s done all the work so that we don’t have to. This is regard for readers in action, a quality I’ve been thinking about and seeking to hold in mind for the next book I write, and it was pure delight to hear her say it plainly, and emphasise it’s importance. Watch and learn, Eleanor I thought to myself as I listened. Watch and learn. You can subscribe to Kit’s Substack here:

Fast on the heels of sending out the recording, I was up and out of my sister in law’s office and on my way to the launch of Broken Horses, the new novel by Kate Beales that tells the story of Georgie Carruthers who crosses the ocean from England to Puerta Natalas to forget broken love and start a new life as a governess. Set in the aftermath of the Great War, it ranges across the wilds of Chile and brought back memories of riding there two years ago.

This is how to throw a party - food, drink, music and all in the heat of the old horse hospital in Bloomsbury; cobbled floors and high ceilings, books and gossip, the love for Kate and this brilliant book were palpable. Also, my just left home children met me there, glorious and fledgling, we hung out, remembered our adventures in Patagonia, and then they disappeared into the night while I stayed on to chew the fat until the lights were switched on and we were ushered out.

And yes, Blake’s expression is hilarious.

Late home, a veggie burger eaten hurriedly at last orders in a dive in south ken, I slept and woke early to catch the Eurostar to Paris. Drinking coffee in the terminal, a street girl joined me at the wobbly table. Few teeth, with those remaining, brown and jagged, she was young, and thin and when she held out her hand to shake mine it was blackened with grime. She introduced herself, sat down, apologised for the state of her palms and fingers. Can I have money for a hostel? Of course. She stuffed a waffle in her mouth. Can you make it £20? Yes. If you give me £30 I can get food. Okay. £40 and… Now you’re pushing it, I replied and she smiled and we settled. She drank her coffee hurriedly. A ragged man greeted her as he walked past. She looked at my bags. Why have you got so much luggage? I told her I was going away for a month to write. She shrugged, came round the table for a hug, and we parted. I think she was an angel. The kind that avenges and sees.

I wrote notes on my phone as I joined in the long queue through security, passports, while waiting in the terminal, sliding up to platform and onto the train. Here they are:

A couple bent at the same angle cannoned into one another, she went crashing to the floor in blue anorak.

A small woman, black hair in a bowl cut fighting with a suitcase whose wheels didn’t work. The son took over and walked backwards.

Matching luggage, hard baby blue, antlers logo, incredibly unhappy, both of them. Thin and taut and mouths downturned. Side by side not talking. Used to the impasse. I wonder what happened to their love. She wears a wedding ring & engagement ring. He doesn’t. She has a thousand mile stare.

And my favourite moment:

Hunched in felt and soft furnishings, wheelchair, aged, a captive of her daughter whose laugh was a like a beating - the son in law asked her the wrong question, pursued the wrong line when she said, “My father used to go to Paris on his own. He used to go a lot. On his own.” And the son in law said, “Did you ever go to Paris?” Infuriating. I almost turned around, interjected, asked her the question she was hoping for: “Why? Why did he go alone?”

This is enough for now. I’ll write about Paris tomorrow.

Eleanor

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I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and him; in my mind I was in bliss. For six months I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, made candles for the candle shop, labelled bottles for the incense shop, fired chai pots in the pottery, struck up friendships in the high street, fetched water from the Chalice Well. I watched his mind at work and thought it brilliant, watched his hands describe the mathematics of business and thought him the king of Glastonbury. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage gone wrong, his wife was a traveller, their child lived with him on and off, she was sweet but I don’t remember much mothering on my part, I was practically a child myself. We made a horoscope bed in the garden for his herbs and planted them according to the moon. We cleared brambles and had bonfires. Where his land ended and the levels began, he’d built a low stone circle. Beside it was a yurt, green and damp. Murmurations swept across the glass Isle of Avalon, my father came to tea and named him Pigtails. Supper at the scratched kitchen table, ducking our heads to see out of dusty windows, the floor uneven, books falling over on shelves and in the evenings, we’d settle in the sitting room, he in his armchair smoking and reading, and I in the nook of the enormous fireplace writing and rolling joint after joint. We flew to Goa for Christmas and danced on the beach, banishing ghosts he wasn’t aware of. We came home and he told me about a girl who was coming to stay. I was yet to read my Simone de Beauvoir. She was the daughter of a friend. He’d been at her birth. He said, You’ll love her. He said they were two peas in a pod. I remember the day she arrived. Her lean in the doorway of the kitchen, I in the sitting room saying hello. The confidence of her. The smile as she took me in. Her black hair and rosy cheeks. The immediate command. He was thirty-five, I was twenty-three and she was seventeen.

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It seems these are a litany of relationships gone wrong, choices made to do with men and not to do with me. That’s what happens when you write a memoir. A thirty-thousand-foot view, you get to see the pattern of the streets. That summer of 1994 I was supposed to be starting an artist’s collective with the girl I’d met at the Chelsea Town Hall. We’d had it all mapped out. There was a building off Portobello that we were about to sign the lease on, we’d had meetings with financial advisors, we were going to be the answer to artistic poverty. Then the man with pigtails happened. Glastonbury was a detour, a final stop on a beautiful summer before returning to London to get on with it, but no one had told me about the Tor. As I drove towards town it came up on my right, this outrageous Somerset monument, a marker on the land. I veered right up the narrow street past the Chalice Well, parked at the bottom of the hill amongst the other camper vans. At the top of the Tor I met a girl who said she had a friend in town, we should go, he’d give us tea. She led me to the courtyard on the high street, up the steps to a pottery; he was tall, thin, angular, his hands patterned with dust, blond hair to his waist plaited into two long pigtails. Leftfield boomed from the CD player. He smiled and offered me a lump of clay. In those days I didn’t know the difference between connection and boundaries. I thought if the feeling was there, I must make myself available, this was destiny calling, who was I to get in the way. We made chai pots; he invited me to dinner. I followed him to his farmhouse on the Somerset Levels; a ragged kitchen, low doorways, a fireplace you could sit in, a yellow Labrador. We stayed up for three nights talking. I rang my friend in London, told her the artist’s collective was off. She was furious and took twenty-five years to forgive me. I made one trip in my camper van to collect all my stuff from the happy house in West London. I moved in with this man who I didn’t know but thought I did, into his life, his farmhouse in Avalon, this king of Glastonbury who had a finger in every pie. I thought, This is it.

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