The Obsessive Diary

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Housekeeping: I’ll be in conversation with Cherry Coombe today, 2pm BST. Subscribe now, or keep an eye 👀 on Notes for when we go LIVE.

I noticed Cherry’s skill in the way one does here, while wandering along, perusing something else, her phrases arrested me. I told her so and she took the hint, girded her loins and started serialising her novel, Rivering. So far so normal. It was only later, and I can’t remember how it came up but perhaps she’ll remind me, that we discovered she used to baby sit for my cousins. I mean, what are the chances? I’ll tell you.

Because the reality of this world is a network of lights connected by instinct and we find each other. I’m working on an essay about this, god knows I mayn’t have it ready before Christmas, but it’s uppermost in my mind. Substack is littered with these connections. I have met family here and I’m not talking about blood. We have joined hands and been mightily relieved. S.E. Reid echoed it when she said Substack has changed her life. Mine, too. Whatever conversations took place back in 2017 when Chris Best & Hamish McKenzie and the collective team of brilliance hatched this place, they embedded it in a starlight that we get to rove about in. The key, for those new here and wondering how to find their tribe, is to follow what fascinates your heart and thrills you; seek out what lights you up. Don’t worry about the huge wash of ocean, we are millions now but the system remains the same. Write what makes you happy and read what makes you curious, and swap those about consistently. Something is afoot. We can feel it.

And while we’re on the subject, I’m also deeply loving the work of Jim Acosta. His show generally coincides with my bedtime, and he’s become my nightly watch. His interview with Epstein survivor Jessica Michaels is essential watching. Here in the UK, memories of Jimmy Savill and the institutional refusal to heed the multitude of warnings and evidence which stretched back over 50 years before his abuse was posthumously recognised and his victims heard and believed represented then how and why such violence is left unchecked. And yet, here it is all over again. It is a severance. It is the essay I’m working on and the subject I have in mind. It is the British public school system and empire and the dying of the light. It is a divorce from reality. (❤️C). Maybe that essay is surfacing sooner than I thought.

Eleanor

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Worked. Took M & B to the station, realised we’d forgotten the crumble, turned back, got it, drove again, they missed the train but got the next one. Rode with T. Lunch with P. Arrived early and sat with my book and fizzy water, half concentrating on Shirley Jackson, half on the table near by, one of those heavens of stuff and nonsense largesse that the English countryside makes its own. I’d seen them greet each other in the carpark, a shouted hello, legs both short and wide somehow propelling two flowery females toward each other in tremendous hug and tales of traffic and late and excitable hoots - apparently it had been a while. Somebody had trouble parking, or perhaps they were smoking, but I’d already chosen my table when they chose theirs, blissfully close by, two couples, one from each the first to sit down and fight their way through rousing conversation to cover up the awkwardness of a pairing they weren’t used to. Their other halves at the bar, she asked him, If he was quite recovered now. He brushed and huffed and said, Oh yes, straightening the table cloth, all in the past, quite better. What are the odds it was cancer. Her laugh was loud, her outbursts crashing, from the look on her husband's face as he arrived with drinks, he’d battened a certain deafness to his forehead, his face pale, his features indistinct. The two women were great friends, their arms bumped and reached, they turned toward each other while the men perused menus and mentioned how small their appetite had become. The waitress said fish was off.

Eleanor

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Things are going to change around here. I began work this morning, and those precious first few hours of the day before the world encroaches which had been the sole ownership of this diary are to be given, now, to the novel I’m editing for serialisation. It’s called, The Moderns. I’ll say more about it once I’ve got a launch date in sight. Instead, this diary will have to find its place squeezed in between getting dressed and going out - this morning to run errands and pick up B’s girlfriend and be back in time for Sheryl, an hour of somatic experiencing with the master.

Shall we check back in to this weekend? I got back on the LIVE horse with S.E. Reid on Saturday, and as well as learning of the gentleness of her faith, the brilliance of her brain and mighty loving nature of her heart, the event solved a puzzle. Ever since I downed tools at the end of June, closing my workspace as I ran for the train from Penzance to London, Heathrow to Nice, I’ve felt drugged. As in fifteen jellies and a valium to boot. Unable to raise my head, open my eyes, find even an inch of energy. I thought initially, okay, I’m on holiday, this is what happens, the year catches up, and, I’d no idea how much I’d been putting in. All of which is relevant and true. But it carried on. No matter how much I slept, and I slept a lot, no matter how little I did, and I did very little, the malaise, the fatigue, the dragging my limbs through sludge persisted.

It persisted as friends came and left, as the cacophony of yoot was replaced with the quiet of just the five of us, even as I packed my bags to come home. It’s travel, said Andy. You always feel weird when you return, which I do, it’s true. Maybe I’m deficient in iron I said to Margaret on a voice note, worrying that something was really wrong. And then Saturday swung around and with it a scheduled LIVE interview with Sally Reid. About 30 minutes before we were due to go on, my adrenaline kicked in. Holy sweet mother of Mary. That was it. For 6 weeks, the tap had been switched to off, quite rightly too, we all know the damage of living permanently on a rush. The adrenals suffer, the kidneys wilt, the nerves become fraught, it can’t go on, but without it, my god how I slumped. I’d forgotten. The tap switched on, the rush resumed through the pipes of my system, that drug which I love, to which I know I’m addicted and hey presto, I landed. So, thanks, Sally. You brought me back into the room.

Okay. Gotta go. Appointments loom. B and I went blackberry picking over the weekend, just to say that too. It felt ancient. As long as there have been hands and thorns there’s been blackberry picking season, fingers smarting from the stings of nettles entwined, spiders tickling, fat buzzing flies leaping into fury as we harvest. We made crumble, apples falling into our hands from the tree. B is reading Braiding Sweetgrass. They spoke of only taking us much as we needed. Their understanding stretches through centuries.

Eleanor

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Housekeeping: I’ll be LIVE in conversation with S.E. Reid today 4pm BST / 8am PDT. Sally writes Talebones, an ongoing collection of character-driven speculative fiction with a spiritual, supernatural, or uncanny twist. Though we know each other here in the pages of Substack, we’ve never met. Let’s see where the conversation takes us.

Keep an eye 👀 on Notes for the live link.

I can’t seem to get the engine started. Literally yesterday, B’s car wouldn’t start and we strained and pushed trying to get it up hill through gravel, failing and throwing on the handbrake before it rolled over all three of us and crashed backwards into a motorbike and a wall. That’s what I saw happening as we took a breath. Jump leads and a lesson in car maintenance and I was off to the aerodrome where empty jumbo jets leaned against each other in the heavy light. They make movies here. The track was the home to Top Gear. Once upon a time a long time ago an annoying neighbour convinced me I should send my tiny babies to nursery here, a 10 month stint I regret deeply. The hangers and wide open spaces reminded me of searching for Greenham on the day they buried the Queen.

While the entirety of England sat down in front of their tv’s or lined the Mall or held sombre pastiche’s in their living rooms, I drove the blissfully empty highways to Berkshire, pictures in my mind of 1982 and fences, of women with shaggy mullets and policemen in bobby helmets, Thatcher and Reagan, the British Empire fallen but its reputation still intact. In 1982 England still didn’t think it had done anything wrong.

The place as a whole is easy to find, there are signs for Greenham Common and even for a peace garden that represents in tragic, rubbish strewn neglect the nineteen years of the women’s camp. It was lucky I’d done my homework - if the first you knew of the protest site was that circle of brambles, a small plaque commemorating a woman who died - you’d let your dog off the lead for a pee, check your phone and move on. It made me even more wild with determination that Fallout would be a success, that it would reach people, tell the story of Greenham to the ears and eyes and sensibilities that would not forget. In the silence of a land in mourning for a Queen I tracked the place of Main Gate, drove silent paths, stopped amongst low buildings and a picnic bench where unmonarchist bikers gathered with styrofoam cups.

I’m looking for Greenham I called across the sprayed grass.

The what? They called back.

The airbase. You know, Greenham?

You’re in it, said one, like Captain Barbossa to Miss Swan. And as he spoke, the airbase swam into view. What I’d taken for prefab put me up shacks were mess halls and bunk rooms of an American Army long gone. I was standing in the US airbase that thousands of women had relentlessly broken into, larked about on, hot wired jeeps and strung with wool. The chainlink fences in which they had cut doorways, on their bellies amongst nettles and thorns watching army legs walk by, were vanished. The gates they’d chained with bike locks were taken down. There was no trace of tarpaulins and ropes and fires, the buckets of blood and maggots thrown at them, the singing in the air. All that fight, almost two decades of non-violence from the women in the face of the ultimate violence from government had removed not only the nuclear warheads from British soil and common land but all trace of their existence. England had relented but in a final act of vengeance and shame, taken their memory with it.

The Silos remain locked behind barbed wire, but that’s it. There is a concrete post, all that remains of Blue Gate on which a snake is painted. On the other side of the common, the lookout tower has become a cafe. There’s an information sign but it gives nothing of the true history of the place. Herstory, as Bridget would say.

Rachael Spavins sent me this picture yesterday, a painting from the summer exhibition at the RA, and Greenham is on my mind. I’m reproducing it here with the kind permission of Adam Foreman, the artist.

And also, we have a cover for FALLOUT. It’s coming soon, next year, April 2026 and though there’s much to happen between now and then, here’s a sneak preview with credit to the genius that is Alisa Kennedy Jones and the team at Empress Editions…

Eleanor

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There are eddies in a house, places where things collect. I’ve come home to the river needing clearing. The chattels from my mother’s death take up a wall in the sitting room still wrapped in bubbles and held in bags collapsing. Round the corner in the office is another heap belonging to my brother. The kitchen dresser has become loaded with notes and pens and pieces of string that need moving on. The sofa in my bedroom is piled with dresses I no longer wear that I’ve promised to send to a friend. I ache all over. I’m not ready for the new working year to begin yet I am home, France behind me and so it has.

The garden is an explosion. My diary is already full till November. Somehow I’ve got to edit a novel for serialising by mid September and deliver the first draft of a new one by Christmas. I can’t imagine how I’ll manage any of it. In France I feel light, alive and capable. In England, everything closes in and heaps upon my head. I want to lie down, hide, say no, I can’t do any of it. Returning to England is always such a shock.

I know the rules. One thing at a time. Unpack. Clear the eddies. Get my house in order. Begin work on Monday. This is the first year of no school; B & J leave home and I’m going to change my practice to something more sustainable than 4am starts. Not that I didn’t sustain it for over a decade, but it made evenings tricky. I’m going to shift the creative ring fence to midday. The world shall not encroach until after lunch. No emails, not even this, my diary. If I can preserve mornings for writing novels, maybe I’ll get somewhere.

I’m resisting using the o word. It’s not a war zone, it’s just me facing up to my ambitions. All that I want to get done. What was the gift of this year’s summer? To hold the work lightly. As we left yesterday, the car winding quietly down the drive, the guy at the wheel stopped and pointed. Lapin. He meant lièvre; we looked, and there she was. The hare. Listen. Easy does it. Be light on your feet.

Eleanor

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I think I figured it out. Grief-Magdalene-Prayer, and yesterday I went in search of the Queensbury house. I remembered the road, its roof was in sight of our garden, they were that close, and the turn onto their track a right hand before the crocodiles. I’d been meaning to look for ages. Andy drove, I leaned forward looking for the door. There’s a photograph of us all, me and my siblings and them - Alice, Emma, the whole crowd in our infant summer bare-foot sand and crinkled eyes to the sun shapes, brown bodies and straw hair. I remember the door and how it led to the courtyard in which long lunches were had by drinking adults. My mother and father were everywhere in my thoughts.

I found it, sort of, the door gone, the wall rebuilt to make terrible modern gates and divided land. I think I found the house. I stood and recalled us all where somewhere in some parallel world we still run amok unseen and only heard vaguely over the wall, a seventies childhood of absence and freedom. As I got into the car I said, I think I’ve worked it out. We’d been talking about the messages coming, what did they mean. Earlier that day I’d had a long conversation with a sibling about her. And my mother’s kaftan had made a reappearance. We all have our own parents, what I mean is, we share them in name and body but not experience. And this: I think I need to grieve her.

Since she died I’ve felt liberated. I did so much work before. The last half decade was my own fiftieth and the turning point, menopause and memoir and each brought an untangling. When she died I felt at peace. We saw each other. She said sorry, and thanked me. It was a conclusion. My mother died and was gone, through the doors and on to some other place where she is probably just as busy, in fact I know she is. But we all have our own mother, and as we bumped along the dirt road away from the Queensbury house, I said, I think she’s asking for my help and at that minute, as we paused at the junction, Andy said, Hare. There she was, smaller than the one I’d seen before but unquestionably sat upon its sprung hind legs, ears cocked, a pause like us before another car came screaming past and she bounded away into vines.

I think she’s asking me to help her. Which undoubtedly I will but also, there’s something typically rounded about this, given the circumstances. Love is so simple in its giving and so obvious in its missing.

Eleanor

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Much as I want to get away from categorisations, it does tend to be the men who find the confrontations of this house more challenging than the women. Excepting being if you’ve grown up here, I suppose, it being deeply in your bones. But it is the men who, on meeting themselves, dig in, become stubborn, project and squirm and find any which way out that doesn’t involve stillness and subservience to the lessons being delivered. A disquiet, a something troubling is blamed on an outside source. A rumbling message coming down the tracks is diverted into argument. I have seen it summer after summer. Some never come back.

I wonder if it’s the fixedness of the cultural conditioning, the allowance to be right and refusal to be wrong, the absolute alien nature of not knowing or whether it is purely biological in that women learn to live with discomfort month by month, are taught to not panic when their bodies take over the reins. Even the close call of that is still a something outside of us as in our physical presence is one step out from ourselves. We learn to submit, culturally and materially and though the entirety of the former is a problem, the latter is useful. This house awakens our shadows. Year on year women put their heads in the mouth of the demon while men revolt and find fault with anyone but themselves. There is a humility required to be here. Digging in never goes well.

But I don’t want to gender it. I am against gender full stop. It has served its purpose and let’s move on. It is a polarisation we don’t need. So let’s instead call it a fixedness of nature as opposed to an agility. A stubbornness that requires relenting. A wide open vista that only needs stepping into. Summer after summer Les Aumarets sits quietly while her contents meet themselves. She is my reset. My inside out.

Andy and I got up earlyish for an adventure on the bike over the mountains on an unusually overcast day, rain and low dark cloud, the beach when we reached it almost empty but for a family of many small children, parents grateful for the shade. As we put-putted on the Enfield up the dirt track we could have been in India surrounded by jungle, so deep and untrodden, such sheer crowded drops into the belly of tangled trees. There will be hares here (here hare here) and wolves. There will be wild boars. The day feels silent as the contents of this house settle into submission. I can feel a knocking. I am watching. There is confrontation rumbling down the tracks.

Eleanor

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The Literary Obsessive is on holiday

The Literary Obsessive is winning at tennis, losing at backgammon, getting over zealous at poker, becoming blasé at blackjack, swimming lengths, lying about a great deal, eating occasionally and in all ways doing f**k all.

Please bear with

Normal service will resume at some point

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