Bridport Flash Fiction Award 2023

A little good news, very pleased to have been shortlisted for Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2023. Was shortlisted a decade ago for both their short story and flash prizes. Flash is such a different discipline to writing a novel. A long text is so unwieldy, hard to keep track of, can be overwhelming, is why it takes me so long, as I polish every chapter as I go. With flash, you move words around as it pleases you, you feel very in control and realise also how arbitrary it all is, making things up.

Many congratulations to the winners!

December, 2022

Have not blogged in so long, everything is dislocated. My darling mother passed away eighteen months ago, it can still feel unreal. Am cheered up by a woodpecker and bullfinch in front garden and pigeons puffed up like balloons in the back. Writing sustains me, have recently gone back to my novella-in-progress. Just added ALPHONSO, a flash fiction, to blog sidebar that was published in From Glasgow to Saturn, Glasgow University's literary magazine, in 2021. I wrote it when we were in the grips of pandemic, all a bit stunned.

Pandemic: foxes and sunsets and suicide

A couple of months ago, I saw a cat run across the garden with a pigeon in its mouth. I’ve never seen a domestic cat hunt such a big bird. The pigeon was upside down, white underneath. I did not see it being killed, just saw it being carried away.

I see foxes occasionally, once a year. One ran across the garden last week. It tarried for fifteen seconds or so on the wall, as if it were checking something. I was able to get a photo. It was huge - red and grey. Beautiful. I’ve seen it again since. Twice in a week.

I want it to come every day.

In between the pigeon being killed and the fox standing on the wall, uncommon events in this garden, the covid19 pandemic has impacted massively in the west. I recall watching reports from China in January, but of course did not think at all it involved ‘us’.

Now we are all affected.

Nothing feels real. 

Being chronically ill, I am used to spending long spells of time indoors, semi-isolated, but now the whole world is the same. It's getting a crash course in isolation and illness, in an alarming and dramatic way. The stuff of fiction.

Spring is happening, but it's dislocating. Daffodils have bloomed and withered, tulips are opening, the sun is warm if you shield yourself from the Scottish wind, but you cannot ever relax, the dread of this coronavirus is always there.

Six days into the lockdown, the weekend the clocks went forward, I heard my childhood friend had taken an overdose and was in intensive care. He has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The unfolding of the virus and the isolation it imposed was too much for him, he was simply overwhelmed. I had spoken to him four or five times the week before, which made the news of his overdose even more upsetting. Against all the odds, after six days in intensive care, he regained consciousness and after being treated for bacterial pneumonia was discharged to a surgical ward before being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where I hope they will be able to look after him for as long as is needed. 

I remembered that when the clocks went back last October, my friend had called me to say he had  put his clock back at 5pm, in case he forgot. Before  the lockdown he was doing a writing class and I told him I would love to see his writing, and asked him to send me some. He said he wanted  to write a book and I told him writing a book was hard. I might just write half a book then, he replied. His mother has since told me it is poetry he has been writing.

What struck me when my friend was in intensive care and we did not know the outcome was that his mother, a close friend of my own mother’s, had been a huge support in the early seventies when my consultant anaesthetist father had taken his own life, living in the same town my friend and his mother still live in.

My current writing project is a (slow) fictionalisation of aspects of my father’s life. There is an early scene in particular, with withered flowers - hydrangea -  in this friend's garden in the 1970s. The scene has been in my head for many years, real, but now re-imagined in the novella-in-progress (I was delighted to discover a couple of  years ago, this poem by Rilke, 'Blue Hydrangea'). More than ever I've been thinking of the importance of storytelling. I have also been thinking of anaesthetists  as they are suddenly very much in the media – the experts on ventilators, so much needed in this crisis. In a 1960s' Polaroid, my father looks like a poet with his Paisley pattern cravate, drinking beer in Amsterdam.

The backs of my hands are cracked, my knuckles slightly bleeding, I've been overdoing disinfecting, using too much bleach, just so very afraid of getting infected from groceries/deliveries coming in. With ME your immune system is already in disarray, and we simply do not know how people with ME would be affected by covid19. It's too frightening to contemplate, given how unpredictably and aggressively this novel virus is affecting youngish, healthy people with no pre-existing conditions. There is talk in the medical community of how some covid19 patients are bound to develop ME afterwards. (Suddenly ME is respectable, the devastating illness you can get after a virus.)

In normal times, I spend much time sitting at my bedroom window watching birds and squirrels and sunsets. It's restorative, a gorgeous way to meditate and contemplate when you cannot do aerobic exercise. This process of contemplation has become even more important. Everyone is commenting on how much louder the birds are, they can be heard everywhere, surely a tiny silver lining of the pandemic.

A woodpecker just when I needed one

I rest a lot in my bedroom. I read there too and also watch garden birds, I have a chair at the window. It is my meditation, my way of being peaceful, my way of 'working out'. It's restorative, I lose myself, nothing else matters. I have had a dreadful few weeks with one thing and another. Last night, I woke up around three with a brutal sinus headache, I am very prone to them and can no longer use steroidal sprays because of ocular hypertension (discovered in 2009 when using steroid drops for uveitis), so I swallowed a handful of Sudafed and Ibuprofen. It's the kind of pain that can make you cry. I had a scan many years ago and have chronic inflammation, possibly from an over-zealous use of mothballs. I declined surgery. Today, I woke early with the pain still on the fringes but bearable. A few hours later, I saw a woodpecker - an adult male great spotted - I've never seen one before. I had on my old glasses and saw a flash of red at feeder, wondered why goldfinches were eating peanuts and when I held up my camera - always in my bedside drawer -  I realised it was a woodpecker. I managed to nab it before it flitted off. It felt auspicious. Today is also the anniversary of my father's death, he died in 1972, and although for many years it was not a date I ever thought about,  since I've  been writing about him, the date has much more resonance. A friend sent me this, the symbolism of a woodpecker. 

Autobiographical novel: 'a prosthetic voice' (Alexander Chee). And (films of) Guru Dutt

I recently dipped into Alexander Chee's collection of essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I find reading about writing to be reassuring: you learn things that you already knew but didn't know you knew. It's the kind of book where you want to write down fragments and keep them close to your heart. Chee describes his first (autobiographical) novel as a 'prosthetic voice', which gives voice to those things too difficult to speak about, in his case, sexual abuse. His image of prosthesis is, I think,  quite brilliant.

And so while I wrote this novel, it didn't feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel. The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

The State of Me - hard to believe it was published ten years ago, its message as relevant today - wasn't for me a fictionalisation  about something too difficult to talk about, but rather a representation of the anger and injustice that people with ME have felt for decades due to a wilful reframing/misrepresentation of the illness by a core of the medical/political establishment. The novel had to be written, but the difficulties in writing it were much more the physical/cognitive challenges of ME than an inability to voice the subject. (I also, of course, faced the structural challenges of writing a novel that face all writers, ill or not.)

Chee's concept of  'prosthetic voice' does, though, resonate for me when I go to the project/novella which is partly about my late Pakistani father, the project that often has me thinking of Bernard MacLaverty's description of writing as 'a way of trying out different fathers'. This is exactly what I am doing - when I can - and something in me is a little broken the whole time. The theme of my novella is 'not knowing'.

It's fascinating to learn about writers/artists who would have been contemporaries of my father. I've just discovered Guru Dutt, an Indian director and actor, famous for Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) and Chaudhvin Ka Chand. Dutt died aged only thirty-nine in 1964 from probable suicide, he had mixed sleeping pills and alcohol.  He had attempted suicide before. Knowing Dutt's life story made it even more emotional watching Pyaasa, the story of a shunned poet, who only finds success when he is (wrongly) presumed dead. And Kaagaz Ke Phool, a melodramatic tale of a director's flop (prescient as Kaagaz Ke Phool also flopped) - had me in tears at the end. Real tears rolling down my cheeks.  When we respond to films we are, of course, not responding to just the fictional narrative but to the narratives in our own lives. I especially love the framing of the film - the opening and closing scenes - with Suresh Sinha as an old man looking back on his life.

I thought of Saddat Hasan Manto and wondered if he had ever met Dutt in Bombay (Manto left his beloved Bombay for Lahore shortly after partition). When googling Manto and Dutt, I came across this review, which likens Guru Dutt's Pyaasa to Nandita Das's recent biopic Manto. Manto and Dutt certainly shared sensibilities, a concern for those in the margins, those disenfranchised, in Manto's case specifically those harmed by Partition (on both sides).

Manto was seven years older than my father. Dutt was six years younger than my father. All were in Bombay in 1947. My father was not working in film, or as a writer, he was a medical student, who had interrupted his studies to join the Indian Air Force during the Second World War. What these three  men would come to have in common was an addiction to alcohol, an addiction tragically implicated in all of their deaths. They were not old men when they died, Manto was forty-two, my father was fifty-three (I was eight). I fancifully allow myself to imagine the three of them meeting up in Bombay before Partition, wondering what they would have spoken about.

I've discovered that Nasreen Munni Kabir made a Channel 4 documentary  in 1989 called In Search of Guru Dutt. I have ordered her book on Dutt. The beautiful and luminous Waheeda Rehman appears in all three films mentioned above. I understand that she and Dutt had an  affair, which ended his marriage to Geeta Dutt.  Geeta Dutt was also the hugely talented playback singer for Rehman's songs. Geeta, I have read, had a breakdown and became alcoholic after Dutt's death. She died in 1972, leaving behind their three children, two sons and a daughter, Nina (Nina was just a baby when her father died). It is heartbreaking that Tarun Gutt, their eldest son also took his own life and Arun Dutt - who was involved in preserving his father's legacy - died of alcohol-related illness in 2014.

Having now also seen Chaudhvin Ka Chand I am left with a huge nostalgia for a period in Indian film-making in 1950s I did not even live through. I think the melodrama, the heightened reality, the muted gorgeousness of monochrome all tap into a process in my head and heart (the not knowing). The wonderful singer for Guru Dutt, in these three films, is Mohammed Rafi, who died aged fifty-five (though it is Hemant Kumar who sings 'Jane Woh Kaise Log' in Pyaasa). I also loved the actor 'Johnny Walker', who brought humanity and slapstick (much needed, to balance the sadness) in his role as the masseur in Pyaasa. I have read Johhny Walker and Guru Dutt were great friends in real life.

Reading Chee's essays and watching Dutt's films, something collided gently in me - it reinforced how important art and film and fiction are in understanding our lives, both for those who create the art and those who consume. Making the hard stuff bearable.

Ten years since The State of Me - publishing & illness (&Lionel Shriver)

This August it will  be ten years since the The State of Me was published. I'm still very proud of the novel and it remains my weapon in the fight for truth about my illness. A decade has been enough time for me to get over the roller coaster of the publishing process - and I have happily mostly forgotten the shock of it all. It was like a never-ending game of snakes and ladders. As a result of the liquidation of my indie publisher, the novel did not receive the marketing it should have done - but I remain very grateful my precious work was not lost in the drama and that HarperCollins rescued the book. This review by writer Elizabeth Baines remains one of my favourite reviews.

The path to being published was though unbelievably stressful and possibly contributed to my later developing idiopathic bilateral uveitis, a rare and serious autoimmune eye condition, where your iris attacks itself. It was a truly awful time, pouring steroids into my eyes, with the side effects of increased eye pressure, which also had to be treated (I'm sure ME was implicated and I still get six-monthly checks at eye hospital). I still remember at the time a friend telling me not to read  José Saramago's Blindness, which I, of course, did read.

If I were well, I'd no doubt be on to my third, or even fourth novel, by now, but I live necessarily in the margins of the writing world. It is often said you are only as good as your last book, but I'm happy to say that my novel is still being read quietly in the background, giving people pleasure and educating about ME.

I was delighted recently that Nick Duerden, a journalist and writer who has made a good recovery from his own very disabling postviral illness, messaged me and said he found the book 'very powerful and gripping'. He also said: 'You write fear, confusion and anger very well indeed. It moved me'. Nick is author of the recent memoir Get Well Soon (Green Tree, 2018). In the same week, Scottish film director and screen writer May Miles Thomas sent me a lovely card saying how much she had enjoyed the novel. I'd sent May a copy as a thank you for having the opportunity to watch her brilliant and hypnotic film Voyageuse free online on Vimeo.  Voyageuse made me think a lot about the layers of storytelling and how we (re)construct a life. I highly recommend this film.

I have been asked by Lighthouse Books to speak about writing and disability at a one hour event with other ill/disabled writers (I identify as chronically ill rather than disabled, the social model of disability does not in my view serve people with ME particularly well). I have said yes though I never know how I will be on the day, but am flattered as it's a decade since The State of Me was published. I've been shortlisted for a couple of short fiction awards since then, and had short non/fiction published here and there - details in sidebar - but because I live with ME, every minute of every day, I am the polar opposite of prolific (my novella-in-progress in 2015 is still in progress).

I do, though, know about the writing process - The State of Me took probably eight or nine years to write/publish in all - and I do, of course, know intimately about chronic illness. Writing is harder when you are ill. Everything is harder when you are ill. But writing (even as slowly as I do) sustains me. I would love to publish another book in my lifetime, I may be sixty by the time that happens, and I am not joking when I say that. Approaching my mid-fifties, I find I am thinking more about life and death and what we do in  a lifetime. I'm also more acutely aware of just how much my illness has thieved from me. (Interesting to read this interview with Elizabeth Strout who didn't publish her first novel until she was forty-two (I was forty-four). She went on to win a Pulitzer.)

*

Lionel Shriver has been off on one of her wee rants again - this time she is bemoaning the fact that Penguin Random House has a diversity drive. She petulantly writes:

“Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some."

How can she be so goddam myopic and insecure? Diversity can only ever be a force for good (as long as we are talking about actual meaningful representation and not just tokenism). Do we really want to be reading the same novels about the same characters by the same people over and over again? There is an excellent response to Lionel's nonsense here.

I can honestly though say I have never felt discriminated against in terms of ethnicity (in fact, mixed race writers are all the rage) or disability, though one agent unprofessionally left her job without telling me, I imagine she did not realise just how slowly I wrote. It was a huge shock to me, but somehow I picked myself up and kept writing, slowly, slowly. Self-belief and the importance of bearing witness to the catastrophe of my illness was what drove me. But like many debut writers, I just felt constantly thwarted by the gate-keeping mechanisms of publishing in general. To be constantly told how good your writing was but because of marketing/pigeonholing there was no 'fit' for your book was soul-crushing. I think though pigeonholing is less rigid now, fiction and memoir are more readily blurred. The idea of what constitutes a novel is much more fluid.

When my novel was eventually published ten years ago, it had nothing to do with representation of illness/disability -  the notion of diversity was not being trumpeted back then. My novel was published in spite of my illness rather than because of. It was published on its own merit, as novels should be. Also, I'm mixed race but The State of Me has nothing to do with race - I'm sure Lionel would be very confused: a mixed race author with a white main character whose illness/disability informs the whole novel. Also, my character does not use a mobility scooter, but I had my first try of one a few weeks ago at the Botanics in Edinburgh and it was bloody liberating.

*

Illness brings a walling off, there are simply aspects of being a writer that are impossible for me. I cannot embark upon the circuit of readings and  festivals that is required of writers these days. The performance part is, for many, a significant part of the writing life. I was lucky that (pre-liquidation) my indie publisher had no concerns about my being unable to do the running around and promoting. It does break my heart a little that I am walled off like this, but that is the case with many aspects of my life. Many years ago in late nineties, I was shortlisted for the Robert Louis Stevenson Award on the basis of a short story. The award is a month in France in Grez-sur-Loing where RLS spent much time. It looks blissful and restful and surely promotes one's creativity. I seduced myself into applying  as my undergraduate year in France in 1983 was cut short because of the onset of ME and I felt that RLS, himself ill his whole adult life, would have wanted me to go. But had I won I would have been unable to go as I learned later that you have to cycle through the forest to get your groceries.

Still, a decade ago I had my book launch in Waterstone's on George Street (it still had the comma then, though now closed down) - it was probably the happiest moment of my life.

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.

Zaibunissa Street

I recently learned that Elphinstone Street (named after British official Monstuart Elphinstone) in Karachi was re-named Zaibunissa Street in 1970 after writer and journalist Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah. This interests me as Elphinstone was in Saddar, the area my paternal family migrated to in 1950s after Partition. I've read that Saddar was then full of book shops and (Iranian) tea houses. The streets were washed every day. Elphinstone was a street people strolled down. There was ballroom dancing on Elphinstone Street.

Today, the population of Karachi is approximately 16 million, Zaibunissa is a busy shopping street with over one hundred and thirty jewellery stores and most of the book shops have gone. Yesterday, I came across a purse that held earrings my Karachi family gifted me when they visited a few years ago after many years of little contact. The jeweller is in a building on Zaibunissa Street.

I looked up Monstuart Elphinstone, a Scot born in Dumbarton in 1779. I grew up five miles from Dumbarton - in fact, my GP practice was there - that's where we had our innoculations for visiting Karachi in 1974. And in early-mid eighties Coxsackie virus was locally being called 'Dumbarton Disease' because so many had become ill. I love how narratives link together, little synchronicities often appearing.

'Re-writing the hurt' (Jeanette Winterson)

Podcasts can fill me with dread because *sometimes* they are dull and you (often) can't fast-forward. I listened last night - lying down with my eyes closed - to a Jeanette Winterson podcast from 2012, it is a joy and delight. Her clarity and honesty soar and you could listen to her forever. She talks about 're-writing the hurt' in order to be able to cope with the narrative or the memory of what happened. On the writing of truth versus fiction she says she realised - with sadness - after Oranges are Not the Only Fruit that she had written a story that she 'could live with', the other was too painful, she 'could not survive it'. 

As I write slowly, slowly about my Pakistani father, often weeks, even months, with no writing - always thinking, though, always - I understand this more than ever: the stories we (re)write often make the truth bearable. I often say truth comes more easily through fiction. I think it's one reason I had to fictionalise my illness for The State of Me - the physical hell and wilderness of  this illness  -  being a political football, to hell with actual patients - is just too painful.

*

I'm reading (non-fiction) The Upstairs Wife by Rafia Zakaria. It's beautifully written and the Partition elements resonate for me, particularly descriptions of Saddar in Karachi, as that is where my father's family migrated to from north India in late 1940s/early 1950s.

I'm also reading (fiction) Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, which is funny and clever and heartbreaking, told from the point of view of three polar bears, an unnamed grandmother/memoirist, her daughter Tosca (though Barbara, her trainer, narrates parts too), and Tosca's son Knut (based on the real Knut in Berlin Zoo). The memoirist polar bear starts off in the circus and when being trained to get up on hind-legs by appliance of heat says: 'I'd always thought it was the floor feeling pain - not me - so it was the floor that had to change - not me - to make the pain go away'.

*

I watched Toni Erdmann on DVD a couple of weeks ago, very different, funny and quirky, if a little unsettling. It is three hours long though and I had to watch it in two parts, no big hardship. It doesn't feel long, and that is the main thing. And is a film that leaves you feeling happy.

Dr Avindra Nath's research. And lovely books

I'm so very, very heartened by the research that is currently going in USA at the National Institute of Health with Dr Avindra Nath as principle investigator (PI). Dr Nath is a neuroimmunologist and exactly the calibre of scientist we need in ME research. His hypothesis is that ME is 'triggered by a viral illness that results in immune-mediated brain dysfunction'. His work is described as a 'deep-diving' into the disease, he is looking at not just one aspect but every aspect. Long overdue!!! Brian Vastag is a former science reporter for the Washington Post, now disabled by ME - he got ill almost five years ago. He's one of Dr Nath's patients - you have to have had a clear infectious trigger and been ill for less than five years - and has been tweeting some interesting details of the study. This is a lovely photo of doctor and patient (from Brian's timeline) - such mutual respect and warmth on display (can you even begin to imagine that scenario here with our so-called 'CFS experts'?).

More than thirty years ago, Peter Behan, the consultant neurologist who diagnosed me, was  looking into viral damage and mitochondrial dysfunction (I recently came across this article from 1985 in the The Journal of Infection. He describes muscle abnormalities in fifty ME patients, I'm uncertain if I was one of them but I had all the tests he refers to):

His paper states: 'The illness was severe, with a high morbidity, and a disastrous effect on their lives'. Of course, medical technology is way more advanced now and I'm optimistic about what will be uncovered in the years ahead. Just tragic though that a core in the medical profession, specifically UK psychiatrists, have held back biomedical research with their self-serving theories of false illness beliefs, and their wilful and sinister conflation of ME with 'chronic fatigue'. That's thirty-three years of my life I'll never get back - thanks, in no small part, to their biopsychosocial idealogy.

*

Been meaning for a while to mention Marion Michell's book Supinely Sublimely (2016).

Marion is a German-born artist, based in London. She is very severely ill and I can imagine what it cost her to produce this slim book of meditations and art. I love the cover, which if you look closely has tiny paper boats as faces. There is a sense too of being shackled, at least, I see chains, and what is ME if it is not a kind of prison, in all its grimly fluctuating, punitive severity. The book is perfect for dipping into and there are gems such as: 'Limbs, jaws, skull, the hair on my head hurt, my hands had been stamped on, and something pounded my ribs and stole my air. Half a week later, I am still returning''.

*

Another book I very much enjoyed recently is Zeeba Sadiq's 38 Bahadurabad (1996), a gorgeous mix of fiction and autobiography, it describes a young woman growing up in Karachi in 1960s with a doctor father who has spent time in Britain. I loved it, especially the chapter called 'Lame Auntie', the writing is exquisite. I was truly sad to learn that Zeeba had passed away suddenly in 2010 after suffering a brain aneuryism, we're almost the same age.

On fathers: Om Puri, Hisham Matar and some short writing

Saddened to learn that Om Puri has died aged only sixty-six. I loved him, of course, as the flawed Pakistani father in East is East. And as the taxi driver in My Son the Fanatic (based on a short story by Hanif Kureishi). I watched him more recently in Satyajit Ray's 1981 film Sadgati/Deliverance - Puri, in his early thirties, gave a devastating performance as an 'untouchable'.

*

The last book I read in 2016 was Hisham Matar's The Return. Anne Enright describes it as a terrible and lovely book, and it is: the writing is lovely and the truth is terrible, the knowing and not knowing the brutality of his father's death at the hands of the Gaddafi regime in the nineties. I underlined several passages as I read, words that stay in my head: 'I have always wondered if it is possible to lose your father without sensing the particular moment of his death'.

*

Happy that 2017 will see with the upcoming publication (print and digital) of Bath Flash Fiction anthology - I had a story longlisted almost a year ago - 'A widow with a bowl of wine and lipstick coming off'. This flash was inspired by seeing my dear stepfather in the funeral parlour in February 2015, the image still shocks me, though it was one of peace, but nothing about it was real, nothing.

I've not written much flash fiction, I've read more, but I think flash titles are very important, they act like a hinge for what's unfolding. I see flash fiction like fireworks - small with a beautiful punch - but still demanding time and energy in creating. Flash lends itself well to low energy writing. And as you tweak even 300 words,  you know more than ever, as you shift the words around in such a small space, how arbitrary it all is.  The story was accepted by an online literary journal at the same time as it was longlisted and I had to decide where I wanted it placed. I look forward to seeing my words - which with time passing now seem 'remote'  - see the light of day.

The world is fucked and books are all we have

The world is fucked and books are all we have. When things are tough, I look for illumination in poetry, nothing has helped, but then a few days ago someone tweeted 'Apes' (1990) by Adam Zagajewski.

 Apes

One day apes made their grab for power.
Gold seal-rings,
starched shirts,
aromatic Havanas,
feet squashed into patent leather.
Deeply involved in our other pursuits,
we didn’t notice: someone read Aristotle,
someone else was wholly in love.
Rulers’ speeches became somewhat more chaotic,
they even gibbered, but still,
when did we ever really listen? Music was better.
Wars: ever more savage; prisons:
stinking worse than before.
Apes, it seems, made their grab for power.

Poem by Adam Zagajewski, from Without End

 *

On my bedside table just now are these:

Last weekend, I read Claudia Rankine's prose-poem Citizen, which is startling and unsettling (for me, more prose than poem, but well worth reading). I often stop books for no good reason and take weeks/months to go back, it may be a concentration thing. This summer, I stopped The Vegetarian a third of the way through and started a thriller (Apple Tree  Yard by Louise Doughty, which I loved). I will go back to The Vegetarian soon (I also really liked the story behind the translation). The Blue Devils of Nada by Albert Murray is a gorgeous dipping-in book of essays and there are some gems there. I will also, of course, go back to James Baldwin (started and stopped for no good reason). Jackie Kay's Trumpet is a secondhand book passed on to me, which I look forward to.

*

The Goldfinch painting by Carel Fabritius has come to Edinburgh (how sad he died aged 32), which prompted me to start my Kindle version of Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning novel - I've had it for two years, unread. I'm 100 pages in and love the plot, but the style is too wordy for my liking. The micro-details clutter the prose, which is exhausting to read. I recall mixed reviews at the time. Julie Myerson was not too keen. Not sure I can stay the course. I think it would make a great film though.

*

A couple of weeks ago, I watched John Berger and Susan Sontag discussing the process of reading and writing in 'To Tell a Story' on Channel 4 in 1983. The discussion was part of a series called VOICES (I don't remember VOICES, Channel 4 had just started and I was at the beginning of the nightmare of what turned out to be ME). Berger and Sontag are so compelling, you agree with both of them even when they have opposing views. Their earnestness almost seems quaint now, but I was struck by their respectful disagreement with one another. They are mesmerising to watch and listen to.

And I have just discovered Scottish doctor, filmmaker and  poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999), what a remarkable woman. (‘Emily’: ‘Emily Dickinson shut herself in a room / And wrote about her pain. / She wrote too about joy’.) You can hear a recording of Margaret Tait reading 'Emily' and other poems  here on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

*

And Leonard Cohen is dead, that is hard to know. Since 1980, I have loved his poetry and his music and his beauty. He was old-ish, I guess, 82, but I have so many folded-up memories that his songs unfold again. 'Suzanne' is mentioned in my novel. ('...and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China' has to be one of the most beautiful lines ever).
 

I cried last Wednesday morning when I learned Trump was elected and I cried again two days later when I learned that Leonard  had died.

The world is fucked and books are all we have.

Penelope Lively on ageing reminds me of getting used to being ill at twenty

I've just started Penelope Lively's memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish, I had not heard of this book and am glad that artist and writer Nancy nudged me in its direction. For a long time, I've been reading about South Asia in 1940s and 1950s in an attempt to put together some kind of fictionalised version of my father, and Nancy told me Penelope talks about Suez in 1950s, which is perfect as my dad travelled by ship from Pakistan to UK at least once in that decade (I even found the passenger list). I'm not yet at the Suez part, but Penelope's chapter on old age makes me smile. Talking about adapting to old age - she is 80 - she says:

You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps - myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative - perpetual rage and resentment - would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.

Getting used to a different incarnation is, of course, very different when you are young and the catastrophe of illness has punched into your life. I always say it takes about a decade to get used to having ME. That's probably how long it took me. In The State of Me when Helen is still horribly ill, aged 21, in bed, she lists 10 things about her old life:

6. Looking at photos of other self in other life. Tracing finger over old self, a smiling girl in a hockey team. My hockey stick lay like a corpse in the back of my cupboard, club foot poking through my clothes, reminding me of my frailty. I had tried to throw it out twice, but Nab had brought it back in.

And in real life I didn't really ever have difficulty accepting, it just was, though at the beginning, when acutely ill, I was more terrified than anything of how ill you could feel and not be dying. I think I have always dealt with my illness with dignity, but there may well be some rage at the fucking circus of psychiatrists who have made life so hard for us by denying our illness is physical. The PACE trial is crumbling though. And we have Americans - journalist and academic David Tuller and professor of psychology James Coyne - to thank for that.

(And I had to look up ammonite. )

The Appa Dance (made us happy as carpets)

We had much hilarity with MadLibs over the holidays. My eleven year old nephew introduced us to the game. You're asked for adjectives, adverbs, nouns, names and places, but only the questioner knows the title of the story. A narrative emerges, flash fiction, nonsensical and surreal. Appa is my nephews' nickname for me, sometimes they will call me Appa instead of Auntie Nasim. (My brothers and I had a very old aunt in Pakistan when we visited in the seventies, we knew her as Auntie Appa, we did not know then that 'apa' was Urdu for elder sister, we thought Appa (two 'p's) was her name.

The Latest Dance Craze

Have you heard about the latest dance craze sweeping Paris? It's called The Appa! Slip on your hunting shoes, turn up the speakers on your Christmas tree and let's master the moves that put this bleak dance on the map: put your hands on your shins, stomp your nose and strike a sad pose. Take fourteen colourful steps to the left, spin irresponsibly, then take two boisterous steps to the right. Throw your mouth in the air and sway your foxes from side to side. For the big finish, stick out your belly button and wiggle it excitedly. Repeat all of these circular steps until the song is over.

It reminded me of The Time Warp in Rocky Horror. In the early eighties, we spent many a happy night as students in the cinema, doing all the actions. In another Madlibs,  'happy as carpets' came up. I want to use that gorgeous phrase in a story.

*Update I received this photo on Twitter of the 'happiest carpets I know', stunning image of dyed rugs drying in Tangiers: