books

As of this blog I have now surpassed myself. In age I mean. I have yet to experience the dizzy delights of turning 61 and yet, quite without the right boots, here I am. Post Woman’s Hour.

My mum used to listen to Woman’s Hour a hundred years ago whilst I enjoyed Listen With Mother, sitting as comfortably as I ever could manage. I loved the stories of Creatures and Fairies and Kings, and Animals with huge brains, and a great sense of right and wrong. Noddy and Big Ears, The Famous Five, Rupert the Bear, although, to be honest, Rupert was more a boy’s bear. Winnie the Pooh, on the other hand was anybody’s bear. Something to do with his lack of public schooling I think. He just bumbled about in Hundred Acre Wood and got stuck in doorways and had bonkers ideas that always made me smile.

Now it is not only I who listen to Woman’s Hour, but I was actually one of Jane Garvey’s guests last Monday May 27^th, talking about my own book, Island Wife, published by Two Roads.

Who would have thought life could become as it has? From that little uncomfortable girl to a 60 year old with a book hitting the shops, a blog, some new songs in the making and book signings ahead next week in Edinburgh. A full day, in fact, beginning at the Edinburgh Book Shop at 9.30 and spinning through many more by bedtime. The next day, I have to be at the BBC Studios (again!) for an interview with Sally Magnusson for her programme ‘Sunday Morning’.

Next Sunday 07:05 BBC Radio Scotland (add it to your diary now so you don’t miss out)

All I did was write down my life. The feedback, the comments tell me it is unusual to write with such honesty, but I have nothing to hide as you will see when you buy your own copy. As stories I read during my own years on earth have helped and guided me, so I hope mine will help you in some way. Someone once said, wisely, ‘we read to know we are not alone’ and that person was spot on. It could be Avatar or Winnie the Pooh. It could be a quest to Everest or a lone woman canoeing the Amazon. It could even be a text book although all those proven facts worry me somewhat in a world where nothing is as it seems. I can lose myself in someone else’s life, picnic, journey, song and there will be something inside it that touches me, lifts me, teaches me something I may have known but didn’t know at all.

I don’t know what I thought my life would become, although I always knew the Hundred Acre Wood was an important part. When a writer lays down a story for children, he or she is not a child, but is looking back through their own lives to take hold of truths they still hold dear. The sparkle and twist of a sugar spun tale comes from experience and it is a gift we have who can bring it into today’s light and make it sparkle anew. We seek the values that take us out of our ordinary lives and into one that makes us dance. We read on because we want to know what happens in the end.

And when it does end, what then? Do we lift our sights higher, consider how we might change the parts of our textbook lives that bore the shenanigans out of us? Or do we put the book aside and do nothing?

It takes courage to step out. But therein lies the key. We don’t have to know how to do anything. We just have know why we want to do it.

That’s when Lady Providence steps out of the shadows to walk beside us. Inside every one of us lies genius.

We just need to believe it.

By now, my book is out there in the world and you may even be reading it. You may be loving it, you may not, and over this bit, I have absolutely no control. It is how it is. My responsibility ended as I caught the words from the air around me and laid them down upon a blank sheet of A4. The thoughts and feelings that will arise in you as a result of reading those words, in the order I chose, will relate to your life, not mine, and, in that moment of connection, become something new.

Over the years I have found such connections myself as I devoured the stories of many folk in many places and times. Sometimes I have been tearful for the writer, the hero, or for myself as I become lost in a life that connects deeply with my own. Sometimes thrilling with delight at the way a story bubbles and chatters over the stones like a clear fall of mountain water after new rain. In a well written tale, I can hear the voices and see the landscape. I can smell the wind and taste the grit of it in my mouth; I can feel the warm skin of a dancing child and shiver at the ice cold of a closed mind or a bitter Arctic night. I can twist and turn in the sweaty damp of an unfriendly sleeping bag and I can pull quickly back into the shadows to hide as a cruel drama unfolds before me. I can waken in the night to remember, and then wish I could forget. In short, I become part of the story, and yet play no part at all. I may follow this person, or that. I may long to go back, to see what happened to the child, or the old woman, even knowing that I may not; not until the writer catches the words and lays them down for me on the page. Sometimes I even forget to breathe, so lost am I in the story.

And every one is real.

Although it may be a work of fiction, you can bet that the writer is in there somewhere, for, if not, the tale would be as dull as a Monday shopping list.

But it is not just in books that I can connect with another life. I can find stories in faces along the island roads and they can touch me just as deeply. Of course, we don’t often get to this level on a daily basis – merely exchanging husband news or word of new additions to the family, new accomplishments, new sofas, new guests and so on, but the eyes are the windows to the soul and no mistake. Some bright chirpy person can tell me one thing with their mouth and quite another through their eyes. I do it myself, did it for years.

You are always so bright! They told me, and because it was the done thing, I kept doing it.

Just like you do, or most of you. There are some that might consider leaving their list of ailments and complaints at home, for we all have them to some degree or other and I have found from experience that those with most to complain about, usually don’t. And when I meet those people, who have made a decision not to bore the bejabers out of the rest of us, telling us things we can do nothing whatsoever about and causing rain to fall on that precious moment of shared sunshine, I find my supplies of compassion and respect, verging on reverence, threaten to overwhelm me altogether. My whole day changes as I guess my way into their life and out again feeling humbled. Suddenly my load lightens, supposing I thought I had one in the first place.

There is always an argument between reality and fairyland. I have always preferred fairyland, finding reality way too matter-of-fact for me, and, as we know, these Matters of Fact change daily according to the latest discovery/statistic/breaking news. Shifting sands I reckon, whereas fairyland is always fairyland and you can depend on it remaining so forever, for in that world (the real world in my opinion) we are allowed to be individual in our response to that which we observe. All views are acceptable. Nobody is right and nobody is wrong, for we all see things in different ways according to our creed, birthright,childhood and experiences. And we should stand tall and proud inside our own story, and sing it out, for it is the only one we can really tell.