Teju Cole event at The Portobello Bookshop

I very much enjoyed the event with Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole at The Portobello Bookshop last night, chaired by Roxani Krystalli -- I accessed the event online. Cole is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of Creative Writing at Harvard.

He was charming and funny - and illuminating on the writing process. He talked of writing as a way of not forgetting, a sense of 'if you don't write it down it will vanish'.

I was kind of relieved when he said that TREMOR, his new novel, is the least morose book he has written. He referred to having been a 'serious melancholic' in his younger years - he is now almost fifty - and made play of the fact he is no longer such a 'misery guts'. I had read his first (highly acclaimed) novel OPEN CITY in 2012 and confess to not having loved it, the writing is immaculate but I got weary of the heaviness of tone (I reviewed the book here on Goodreads over a decade ago). 

I am only two chapters into TREMOR and loving it. 

Near the end of the event, he alluded to the current assault on Gaza and mentioned a Palestinian friend who is just now harvesting olives. I was very glad he mentioned Gaza. I think it must be hard to perform just now as artist/writer and not mention what is going on in that part of the world.

Thanks, too, to Porty Books for making the event accessible online. Hybrid events are maybe the one good thing to have come out of the pandemic.

Blue shoes with zips and advocacy for ME

With all the focus on #millionsmissing just now I have been thinking about the shoes I was wearing in September 1982 when I went off to do my (ill-fated) year abroad in France, not yet nineteen. They were blue and pointy with a diagonal zip - I got them in Schuh and later fictionalised them in a scene in The State of Me where Helen is on a ferry returning home from France because she feels so hideously ill. In real life, I came home from France twice - I  actually went back, because my GP couldn't find anything wrong and thought I was homesick (months later, a locum GP discovered I had Coxsackie virus - he'd also had it - he recognised my chest pain, the feeling of having a heart attack - and luckily recovered). I still recall, going up the gangplank, if that is what it is called, on my way back to Normandy, so determined to beat whatever the hell was making me feel so ill - a wee fucking soldier, really - little did I know I was only storing up more hell, not allowing myself to rest. 

I have looked for photos online of blue shoes from Schuh from 1982 but I can't find anything. They were hideous (I also remember watching Boy George singing 'Do you really want to hurt me?' on television in our host family's living room).

I'm not officially involved in #millionsmissing Edinburgh, but I know it will be brilliant. Carol Monaghan MP has taken up the cause of slaying the toxic dragon that is PACE and also Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian will speak. I may bus/taxi to the Mound event on Saturday - a hop and a skip from me - Edinburgh is very walkable, if you are healthy and able -  I will see how I feel on the day. I was so shattered emotionally and physically after the Scottish Parliament event in January, and I have been advocating for ME sufferers for decades, in one way or another - I really need to step back now and focus on other things (novellas-in-progress, for example).

I was delighted to see that the fabulous Lighthouse Books has a display of books with blue covers in aid of ME Awareness Week - and The State of Me is there (photo nabbed from Lighthouse tweet). It is a little ironic that my France shoes were blue as blue is also the cover of ME Awareness.

I am also delighted that there is a feisty new generation of activists, they do us all proud, many of them advocating from bed with hellishly diminished lives. I do think the climate is changing, finally, though I don't honestly expect a cure for ME in my lifetime. I just hope newly diagnosed twenty-year-olds will not go through another thirty years of life-changing illness as I have done. I always say it takes a  decade to adjust to ME, and I hope soon others will not have to make such an adjustment, as the illness will be eminently treatable if not curable.