I once went on a motorbike in the Austrian Alps. It was for a travel feature for The Independent. I had to borrow someone else’s leathers and they were so tight that the words ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ sprung into my head as I zipped them up. I finally managed to swing one taut leg over the seat and could feel myself blush as I looped my hands around the waist of the man whose bottom was inches away from my crotch. It had rained all weekend and the rain was still coming down in slabs. I was meant to be looking at the mountains so I could write something nice and descriptive, but all I could see, through the rain-splashed visor of my borrowed helmet, was blurred lines.
I pulled the visor up and then the rain was like needles on my face. I was cold. I was wet. The bumping against my crotch reminded me of the time I went down Mount Sinai on a camel. Biking, I discovered, is not my glass of Aperol Spritz. But it’s Frieda Hughes’s Veuve Clicquot. Like Winston, she’s hooked on the buzz. She even met her current partner through biking. He was surprised to find a fiftysomething woman who did track days and who, like him, thought that maybe one motorbike wasn’t enough.
I’ve never really got into any kind of sport, but my father and brother were both sports mad. My father played rugby, cricket and squash. My brother played football, rugby and volleyball. For them, going to a football or rugby match, or even watching one on TV, was a shared and sacred rite.
For Rolien, stuck in her miserable job, sport was part of her escape. ‘I went cycling one afternoon,’ she told me, ‘and went past a field where they were playing softball. Softball,’ she added, ‘is a great passion.’ She googled the field, found the team and within a couple of years was captain of it. ‘It opened a massive new network and support system,’ she told me. ‘Through those connections I went on fantastic holidays. There were baby showers and weddings and endless, endless memories.’ And through one of those connections she found the job she now has, and loves.
For Grant, swimming, running and football have helped keep hovering clouds at bay. Katherine’s seven-mile walks kept her feet literally on the ground when she sometimes thought the tantrums at home might send her reeling over an edge. Maxine, too, is a walker. She says the rhythms of walking clear her head. Even I, who have tended to take my mother’s view that there’s not much point in walking down a road that isn’t lined with cafés or shops, find that I miss exercise if I don’t do it. When I was lying in my hospital bed, wondering if I would ever be able to stand straight again, I decided that if I ever could, I would run. I don’t run marathons. I don’t want to run marathons. I trot round the park and then often stop for a cup of tea and a scone.
I’ve only been to one football match – at White Hart Lane, to write about a poet in residence at Spurs – but I understand why, for many people, going to a football match is like going to a church. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a football field or in a theatre. It is a spiritual experience to see human beings performing at their peak.
People often talk about their ‘hobbies’. Rolien would probably say that hers are music, theatre and film as well as sport. When she was living in her miserable shared house – a house she hated so much that the words ‘West Ruislip’ still, she says, trigger ‘a physical reaction that crawls over me’ – she would save up to go to the theatre. When she couldn’t afford to go, she would ‘rent a bunch of DVDs’ and spend the whole weekend on a ‘movie marathon’. Being swept away to another world gave her strength to cope with her own.
Since Melanie’s husband left her, she has started to discover the power of the arts. ‘I think,’ she told me, ‘I was diminished in that relationship. I’m finding who I am at forty-eight and I’m not finding the person I was before. I feel there are things bubbling away in the background and I really enjoy that. They’re about connection, also about valuing aesthetics. They are what I need for my flourishing.’
And for Laura, stuck in her abusive marriage, dreams of interiors helped her imagine a life beyond the one she was in. ‘I’ve always loved home stuff,’ she told me. ‘I had an idea of studying interior design. Home had completely ebbed away. Our bedroom, there was no colour to it. It was all white. I had no choice in what we ate, or how we had the home, how our money was spent. So I had a little fantasy of a pink room, a dusky pink, and of my own space, where I could just do what I wanted, and have all my favourite books around me. I started buying little things for my new home and hiding them in this cupboard we had in the attic. That,’ she said with a dry laugh, ‘was my way of coping, creating a mini home in hell.’
The word ‘hobby’ comes from ‘hobi’, the Anglo-Latin word, from about 1400, for a ‘small, active horse’. The modern use of the word, as ‘a favourite pursuit, object or topic’, is from 1816, a shortening of ‘hobbyhorse’, which was a wooden or wickerwork figure of a horse, used as a costume in a morris dance or a child’s toy. It was, to put it another way, a horse that’s going nowhere, an activity that has no obvious use. It is also described in the dictionary as a ‘sideline’, a ‘diversion’, a ‘divertissement’. But I don’t think we’re talking about things that pass the time. I think we’re talking about things that can save a life.
It was the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi who came up with the idea that people are happiest when they are in a state of ‘flow’, a state where they are so absorbed in what they are doing that they hardly notice anything else. In this state, he says, ‘the ego falls away’ and ‘time flies’. It is, in other words, the exact opposite of a pastime or a ‘diversion’. It’s when there aren’t enough hours, minutes, seconds to do this thing that allows you to forget your worries, your ego and your self.
For my acupuncturist, Yana, it started when she was clearing out the loft. ‘I was bringing out the summer things, putting away the winter things,’ she told me, ‘and I suddenly felt my heart break.’ This was when she was forty-eight. Her father had died when she was six. It was only when she was writing Christmas cards that she found out he was dead. ‘I would write “love from Mummy, Daddy and me”,’ she told me, ‘and my mother said, “You’ve got to cross out Daddy.” That’s got to be the worst possible way of getting to know that somebody was dead! I only knew that he’d gone to hospital and that my mother couldn’t stop crying.’
For years, she had carried the pain around without knowing what she was carrying. She went to see a shrink, the same shrink she later recommended to me. ‘Then I realized,’ she said, ‘that this is actually what I’ve been feeling all my life. There must have been a memory of clearing things or packing them away, heartbreak that I’d never been able to express. I sobbed and howled. I do,’ she added, ‘howl like a wolf if I ever howl. There was this howling heartbreak and then I never had it again.’
It was after that that she started to paint. First she went to classes, where she learnt to draw. Once she started, it just poured out of her. ‘I felt I’d woken up the next morning and had wings. I didn’t have to walk, I didn’t have to do anything. I could fly and I’d be immediately there.’
Yana has taken her heartbreak and created paintings that are bursting with colour and life. Maddy Paxman has written a memoir and given her grief a searing voice. Mimi Khalvati has channelled her pain into deceptively delicate poems that pack a fierce emotional punch. Frieda Hughes has created landscapes and poems of blistering bleakness and savage beauty. ‘If I can’t paint or I can’t write,’ she told me, ‘then nothing’s happening. It’s how I process everything.’
Laura held on to her vision of a dusky pink room. She got through the court cases. She got through the cornflakes for dinner. She now has a job she loves and has created a beautiful home where her son visits her. ‘When I say goodbye to him,’ she told me, ‘I know that for two days I’m going to be really sad. Before, I used to try and fight it. I actually plan a day off after he’s gone. The first thing I do is wash his bedding. I sniff his pillow and have a good cry. I give myself two days and after that, usually it’s fine.’
When Laura lost custody of her son, she
did not think that one day it would be ‘fine’. When they were parted, he was five and a half. ‘He was,’ she said, ‘still clinging to my legs. It does get easier. He’s fourteen. Our relationship is good. I think he sees me as a strong woman. He knows that I’m always there for him, and that I did everything I could to make sure our relationship stays strong. He doesn’t,’ she added, ‘see me as a victim.’
When I go to my Italian bolthole, the first thing I do is look at the guest book signed by people who have rented the flat. I’m always pleased that so many people seem to love it as much as I do. Some of the couples who stay there are on honeymoon. When there’s a honeymoon, I always leave champagne. I sometimes think that I’ve created a little love nest and that I’m the only person who stays in it on my own.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes feel a stab of envy. I would also be lying if I said I was lonely or bored. Even on my own, I’m hardly ever lonely and I honestly can’t remember feeling bored. I often get the feeling Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes when I write. I’ve had it from reading all my life. Books are my food, my drink, my canapés, my Casanova. Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt that books understand me in a way sometimes other people don’t. Books have made me. Books have taught me that you are never in a place that someone else hasn’t been in before.
Nine years ago, just before I found Yana, I went to the Red Sea. I thought I had won my battles against my body, but the pains had come back and I was in a state of screaming rage. Somehow, I hobbled on a plane. A coach took me to a hotel that was a slab of concrete in a desert. That week I stuck my face in the sun and read War and Peace. I didn’t know how to get rid of the pain that racked my body, but something inside me said that as long as I could read and find a way to stick my face in the sun, I would be OK. Then I got back and found Yana, and I was.
I have learnt that there is nearly always a way to stick your face in the sun. I hope that I’ll be able to hang on to my little chunk of the watchtower, but there was sunshine before I found it, and there will be sunshine after it has gone.
In the nearest town to my village, there’s a statue of Dante. In my first year of learning Italian, as a subsidiary subject to my main degree in English, I had to translate some chunks of his Divine Comedy. ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,’ it begins, ‘mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita.’ Or, as Clive James puts it, in his translation: ‘At the midpoint of the path through life, I found / Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way / Ahead was blotted out.’
As I sat and looked out at the olive trees, and the cypresses, and the terracotta roofs of the houses on the other side of the valley, I allowed myself to write what was on my heart. I thought of all the times that I felt I had been lost in dark woods. And I thought that the darkness had always cleared, as it was clearing now.
A big cone
It was my birthday. A year since the Ottolenghi recipes, and the beef that set off the smoke alarm. A year since the leather-bound Sentimental Journey, with its open ending and its promise of a world that is not ‘barren’. I had been invited to a conference run by a think tank on ‘character’.
Resilience, said the chair of the conference, is not enough. Resilient people can join the mafia. What the organizers of the conference wanted was for people not just to have ‘grit’ but to ‘flourish’.
The shadow health secretary said that schools throughout the world were looking at how ‘character skills’ could help raise standards of achievement. A man called Paul quoted Churchill. ‘Failure,’ he said, ‘is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.’ A woman from an exam body said that some skills that help build character can be taught. She said that when thinking and reasoning skills were taught in prison, rates of reoffending dropped. A Paralympian who had won gold medals for swimming said that you build quite a lot of character when you do 8000 metres a session and when your alarm goes off at 4.40 a.m. every single day. A man called James said: ‘We know how important the development of character is, but we’re still not clear how it happens.’
I’m not sure how it happens either, but I’m pretty sure where it all starts. It starts with your parents. It starts with love. And it starts with the shock of finding out that you are not the centre of the universe, after months as a tiny baby feeling like a god.
William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. I once saw it in an ice cream. It had swirls of vanilla rising out of a cornet, swirls that had been dipped in chocolate and brushed with nuts. It was called a Storstrut, which means a ‘big cone’, and it cost one Swedish krona. My father said that that was too much. I could, he said, have a Zoom, which was an orange ice lolly, but I didn’t want an orange ice lolly. You could almost say that the next seventy-odd years are about how you deal with the fact that you want a Storstrut and sometimes get a Zoom.
Jean Piaget studied the behaviour of children for more than sixty years. He started off with molluscs, and then moved on. Children, he worked out, partly from studying the three he had with his wife, moved from a position of ‘egocentrism’ to ‘sociocentrism’. They start off by sucking everything in reach. They literally suck the world and see. He called the first stage of development ‘the pre-operational stage’. During this stage, he said that children were able to form ‘stable concepts’ as well as ‘magical beliefs’. Their thinking at this stage is still ‘egocentric’, but from seven to eleven they move into the ‘concrete operational stage’, where they learn that not everything is about them. He called this a process of ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’.
It’s fine to avoid the ‘accommodation’ stage of development if you’re going to run Zimbabwe or North Korea. If you’re going to do anything else, it isn’t.
There’s a book that has become very fashionable recently. It’s by an American social scientist called Angela Duckworth and it’s called Grit. In the book, she talks about how her Chinese father would yell at his children that they were ‘no genius’ or ‘no Picasso’. Duckworth’s response was to forge such a successful career that she has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship, which is also known as ‘the genius grant’. She has spent years studying how people overcome setbacks, with passion, persistence and what she calls ‘grit’, to achieve success.
There are an awful lot of books about success. These books tell you how to work hard. They tell you how to believe in yourself. They tell you that what matters most in your life is what you achieve.
In my first week at university, I met a young woman on the same course as me. ‘The important thing,’ she said, as if she was making an obvious point, ‘is to get on in life.’ I was shocked. It seems ridiculous now, but I honestly was shocked. I had always been told by my parents that the most important thing in life was to be a decent person and to try to put other people first.
My father believed in public service and he did it so well that he had what most people would describe as a very successful career. After a double first at Cambridge, he worked in the diplomatic service and then transferred to the civil service when I was nine months old. He ended up running the Department of National Savings. He ended up being made a Companion of the Order of the Bath and being given an award by the Queen. He still wouldn’t use the office phone for personal calls. He was sometimes offered a car, but he would always take the bus.
When he retired, he volunteered for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, spending several days a week giving advice to people who were down on their luck. In the instructions he left for his funeral, he said that there were to be ‘no personal comment or tributes’. He wanted ‘the main point of the address to be that the greatest rewards come not from being in charge of thousands of people, but in trying to help individual vulnerable people’. The occasions, he said, ‘when I was able to help sad people in the Godalming Citizens’ Advice Bureau were the most fulfilling of my life, and my many years of trying to help my daughter Caroline to cope with mental illness were my most challenging task, supporting my heroic
wife’.
I have never been in charge of thousands of people. I have tried to help ‘individual vulnerable people’, but I have not tried nearly hard enough. I had my parents’ example. I don’t need a conference to tell me that the most important thing in life is to be kind.
After the conference, I went and bought a dress. I bought a red dress because I like the colour red, because it’s energetic and passionate, and because it was my birthday and I was going to a party. It was not a surprise party organized by a lover, in a pod on the London Eye. It was the Sunday Times books desk Christmas party. It was a very nice party. I saw quite a few people I like and quite a few people whose writing I admire. I was still thinking about the conference when I left and remembered something John Ruskin once said. ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.’ I’m not sure it’s ‘the greatest thing’, but I do think it’s worth a lot.
Afterwards, I went to a pub round the corner for dinner with some friends. We had steak and chips and delicious red wine, and when they raised their glasses to wish me a happy birthday I had a sudden urge to cry because I thought I was so lucky to have such lovely friends.
I told them about something that had happened a few weeks before. It was in the green room at Sky. I was on with Matthew Syed from The Times. We were meant to be choosing articles to talk about from the next day’s papers, and he had picked out a comment piece in The Independent. It was by the young man who had taken over my boss’s job, the young man the managing editor told me had vetoed my contract for a column. I saw the name on the piece, yelled ‘I don’t think so!’ and then told Matthew about my last day on the paper, and how I had shouted at the editor and never been back. Matthew touched me on the arm. ‘Do you mind,’ he said, ‘if I give you some advice?’ I suddenly felt nervous. Even I could hardly hear my whispered ‘no’. ‘You need to let go of your anger,’ he said, ‘or it will eat you up.’
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 28
