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.

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.

Learning to swim in Lahore; Muriel Spark and Kjersti Skomsvold

I recently reviewed Isambard Wilkinson's Travels in a Dervish Cloak, this passage stays in my mind:

Pakistani novelists of  a certain vintage remember a golden era in Pakistan's first decades when Anglo-Indians danced at Karachi's Metropole, hippies spun vinyl at discotheques, Pakistan was advertised as an exotic holiday location and Dizzy Gillespie beguiled a Sindhi snake charmer's serpent with his trumpet. That innocent age, if it ever existed, was dead.

It makes me nostalgic for a Karachi I barely know. We visited in 1974, two years after my father had died. I find myself scraping those memories up, trying to build a narrative (I have a letter that a visiting British doctor staying at Hotel Metropole left for my father who was then working at Jinnah Hospital in mid-1950s). I recall that we stayed in Lahore for a few days in the Intercontinental and that was where I learned to swim without arm bands. A far cry from the swimming lessons at primary school back home, where you would shiver as you were checked in line for verrucas. There was also an earthquake when we were in Lahore and all the dishes shook on the hotel breakfast table.

*

Many of us have been giving  Muriel Spark for Christmas because of the centenary of her birth. I've just re-read The Driver's Seat. I read it when I was about sixteen and didn't understand it, I am not sure I understand it any better but I much more appreciate the elegance and construction of this slim,  disturbing novel. And the humour is marvellous.

I just got a copy of Norwegian writer Kjersti Skomvold's MonsterHuman, which is now available in English. I blogged about her a few years ago and read her debut novel, which she started writing on post-it notes when she was very ill with ME. I'm obviously very interested in autobiographical, fictionalised accounts of ME and look forward to MonsterHuman. I see on Wikipedia that Skomvold also studied French at L'Université de Caen, which is a great coincidence as I was studying there in 1982/3 when I first became ill with Coxsackie virus, which later evolved monstrously into ME. We got ill at a similar age though I am a good decade older.

I love the start of new year, a whole new pile of to be read books on the bedside table:

Stairs and Whispers is an anthology by deaf and disabled poets that I have just started dipping into. It looks brilliant.

Syrian National Orchestra (and my tiny memory of Damascus)

I often think that literature and music and art are what keep us going. This is reflected in the moving story of the Syrian National Orchestra for Arab Music - forced to fragment as many of the musicians have now fled Syria - which reunited recently for a short tour in Europe.  One of the violinists, now a refugee in Germany, finds comfort in playing, it helps her express 'all this homelessness and loss and blood'. She teaches music to refugee children. Another musician, a qanun player, a refugee in Sweden with his wife and young children, says he doesn't find solace in music when he is sad, rather he struggles to play, as he feels 'destroyed inside'. The majority of the orchestra still live in Damascus. Whenever I hear the word Damascus, I think of us stopping off on our way to Karachi (my one and only trip there) in 1974, my Scottish mother taking me and my brothers to visit a year after my Pakistani father had died. There was a man at the airport in Damascus drinking tea in the cafe - a huge Formica circle-shaped bar - and I was scared as I was sure he was a ghost. I was only ten and had not met many dark-skinned men so it was not odd that I thought this man with sad eyes was my father.

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:

Writing, Rituximab & a Japanese film about death

Three pieces on writing I have recently enjoyed:

An interview with Janice Galloway, who has a new collection of short stories out. Speaking about the blurring of memoir and fiction, she says: 'It’s all stories, as far as I’m concerned and your job is to tell the story interestingly and not be dull.'

I agree with her wholeheartedly.

Here, writer Fiona Melrose on how a Caravaggio painting she loves makes her think about story and construct: 'Someone central in your story has to want something that drives some sort of journey, even if the thing they want the most is to stop everything from changing.'

I think that's an interesting point. Writers learn early on their main character has to want something - I remember reading years ago that your character has to really want something, even if it's just a glass of water - but wanting things not to change is often a driving force in real life, so of course applies to fictional characters.

And a very interesting essay on ethnicity and writing - should ethnicity limit what a writer can write? - from  Susan Barker, who describes herself as 'British — mixed-race English and Chinese, but linguistically and culturally British'. I too am British, a Scottish mother and Pakistani father, and I certainly feel culturally and linguistically Scottish. 

I've been thinking recently that Helen Fleet my main character in 'The State of Me' is white, it never occurred to me that she wouldn't be. My novel is about illness, not race. Writing Caucasian characters is natural to me, whereas writing Asian characters is harder as I did not have much Asian influence in my childhood. I am less confident with Asian characters, but that does not mean I should not write them. After all,  fiction-writing is pretending to be someone else. And I am in the slow process. 

I tried to say more about this in the comment thread of an excellent blog post about diversity and fiction  back in June by Nikesh Shukla.

Going back to Susan Barker's essay, she says: 'In a best case scenario, what should determine the legitimacy of fiction is the writing itself, and though this is not always the case, fiction writers should not be deterred from writing from other cultural perspectives.'

Indeed, it's the writing, always the writing.

*
 

Also, good news on Rituximab last month, phase 2 of the Norwegian drug trial was published. I feel cautiously optimistic. Just so gratifying to see actual science in progress, after decades of buffoonery.

And I highly recommend this Japanese film from 2009, 'Departures', a gorgeous film about death.

'Trying out different fathers' - my thoughts on Omar Sharif

Had tears today, hearing that Omar Sharif has died. Sad for his family, but happy for him that he no longer suffers the ravages of dementia. To me, he is more than the handsome Egyptian actor who glittered in Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.

I grew up hearing that my father looked like Omar Sharif. My father was my mother's first husband, she met him in the sixties when he was a doctor and she was a nurse, a Mills & Boon romance without the happy ending. My father died in tragic circumstances when I was eight. My memories of him are hazy. He looks handsome in photos, and I can definitely see the resemblance (though I think Omar had the edge). When I first saw Dr Zhivago - aged thirteen? - I couldn't watch Omar Sharif without thinking of  my father. The tram scene had me weeping, and not just because Yuri  doesn't get to see Julie Christie again. I've since seen Dr Zhivago many times over the years, and the tram scene is me watching my father dying, which sounds fanciful, but that is the truth. My memory also tells me that I first saw Dr Zhivago in Karachi, when we visited in 1974 (after my father had passed away), but that is not true, I watched it a few years later at the cinema in Glasgow.

And I still can't even listen to Lara's Theme without welling up.

In May, when the media revealed that Omar Sharif had dementia I had a lump in my throat, having recently lost my beloved stepfather to dementia. To know that this brilliant actor now had dementia  touched me. And when my stepfather passed away, five months ago, I was unable to contemplate even a sentence of the novella I've been slowly, slowly writing, based on my father. My head was full of Greenland, there was no room for Karachi (my father was my father for eight years, my stepfather was my father for thirty-eight years).

The character based on my father is called Omar, I'd juggled many names but Omar fits best. Recently, I've ventured back to the novella when I have 'spare' energy - creative writing is much more physically and mentally demanding that you would think - but I'm a different person writing as I no longer have a stepfather, there is a huge gap where he should be. Moreover, fictionalising my father has its own griefs and complexities: I  think of Bernard MacLaverty who has spoken of 'writing as a way of trying out different fathers'.

I say to my mother sometimes, Did he really look like Omar Sharif? Yes, she says, he did.

RIP, Omar Sharif.  In the meantime, I will try out different fathers.

*I watched Monsieur Ibrahim last year, I recommend it. ** The character is no longer Omar, but I am not saying who he is now, don't want to jinx.

Colm Toibin & Hanif Kureishi & Bach

This is just perfect from Colm Tóibín, a five minute film on writing generally, and specifically on fictionalising family trauma. I agree with him about having to write the loss: using fiction to fix it and 'get it back'. A kind of rearranging, putting things back in place. I strongly feel my own writing of fiction is a response to catastrophe. I also love his comment about being able to go back to a piece of writing ten years later (what I'm currently doing, my progress is a just faster than glacial but I'm happy with the words I'm getting down). And I've been listening to Hanif Kureishi snippets on Radio 3's 'Essential Classics' - he always has gems. He says that in a world of 'lies and silence', we need art and music and novels - especially novels - to tell us the truth (1 hr and 45 mins in). I've fallen in love with this Bach piece - Prelude in B minor - from the same program (1 hr and 38 mins in). And writing this I have realised I have something in common with both these writers: like Colm Tóibín I lost my father at a young age (though I was younger), and like Hanif Kureishi I have a Pakistani father. I don't think, though, I have anything in common with Bach.

Books, glorious books, and a moth that looks embroidered

In the last week, the postman has brought three classy books.

I won a copy of Maggie Gee's  Virginia Woolf in Manhattan on Twitter  (Saqi Books asked which woman writer we would most like to meet, I said Ismat Chughtai). Lovely to have this gorgeous hardback to add to my bookshelves. And I very much look forward to reading (though my TBR pile is simply scary).

My publisher, The Friday Project, sent me up Charles Lambert's wonderfully titled With a Zero at its Heart. It's getting great reviews. Though as I am in the fragile process of fictionalising childhood and fathers - at such a snail's place it feels like slow motion, but I will get there, fingers crossed -  that I may hold off on reading it. This meticulously constructed book of fragmented, themed memories is very different to my novella-in-progress - but you don't necessarily want another writer's (brilliant) words to be in your head when you are writing. Though I won't be able to resist and will dip in. It's a beautiful book to touch too.

And I ordered the second edition of Dr Melvin Ramsay's 1986 book on ME: Postviral Fatigue Syndrome: The saga of Royal Free Disease from the ME Association. My original copy from the mid-80s is worn out so I wanted to update. This is such an important, informative and honest text - I just wish more doctors and health editors and journalists would read it and educate themselves. And the references to Professor Behan and Coxsackie virus in west of Scotland in 80s, obviously resonate for me.

And last but not least, I love this moth, it looks embroidered.

I used to hate Twitter, now I love it

Before I'd ever used it, I hated Twitter, I was a bit Jonathan Franzen and thought it was nonsense. Now, I love it. It's perfect for low energy, you can dip in and out and say what you need to in 140 characters. And there are links to some great resources: I can bookmark articles in a jiffy and read later when my head is up to it (in truth, not all that's bookmarked gets read). My ME symptoms have been pretty bad this last ten days, that feeling of having weights in your head and neck and legs. And dizzy, so damned dizzy. I have fought it, tried to go out - I have shops on my doorstep, literally - only to end up spending long spells of the day in bed. I do restrict the number of people I follow to 500, otherwise it's too much like a flashing cockpit that I can't process. And I'm always tweaking who I follow: I hate to give up on someone whose tweets I like, but needs must.

The truth is that Twitter can be an Aladdin's cave (of course, it can be a hell-hole too, but you just don't go to those dark places of jabber-babble). I was so pleased before Christmas to discover The Mushin Museum in Cardiff, I was directed there by an anaesthetist when I was looking for information on anaesthesia in 1950s/60s for a novella I'm slowly, slowly writing, inspired by my doctor father. You don't use all the facts you learn, but you still need to know them, you need the mental 'furniture'. The curator at the Mushin museum  has been enormously helpful to me. By coincidence, I learned from an old CV just this week that my father had actually worked under Professor Mushin  - whom the museum is named after - in the early 60s. That gave me shivers. 

Then, the other day, I discovered artist/writer Nancy Campbell when she favourited a photo of snowdrops I'd put up that found its way to her. I learned that Nancy has written a gorgeous book called How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic, which I know will be perfect for my stepdad, it will revive his Greenland memories, so important now as he slips further into dementia. Through Twitter, we were able to be in touch directly and I have ordered her book.

I also came across The Istanbul Review recently. This gorgeous Turkey-based literary journal, 'with a presence in Edinburgh', is distributed in the UK by local indie store Looking Glass Books. I submitted some flash fiction to them last week on the off-chance and was delighted to have it accepted.

We all know Franzen gets his knickers in a twist about writers bragging on Twitter, sure, that happens, there can be dreadfully off-putting self-promotion - across all platforms - but you just avoid it. For me, social media is something of a godsend as I can't run around all over the place promoting my novel - but most of us use Twitter wisely when we self-promote - and why the hell shouldn't we publicise our writing, after the blood, sweat and tears that goes into writing, and having a book published!  But we also have a generosity of spirit towards other writers we admire, and that is invaluable.

Twitter is also a great tool for those who are chronically ill,  especially in housebound or bedbound phases. You can feel like shit with a capital S, but send out a tweet, a wee firework into the world, from your pillow. I often think back to my horribly ill days in 80s: unless you had physical visitors, it was a case of writing letters and phoning. Hard to believe now. I was 'amused' - if that is the right word - to come across a young woman with ME who had her many symptoms listed on an App on her phone, ready to present to the specialist she was seeing. We were both diagnosed at twenty, with the same hellish illness, but very different worlds, technologically. Her blog is here, she makes me smile. She loves her lipstick too, never a bad thing.

And, of course, Twitter is great for hearing about the latest research papers on ME - and the skulduggery - without having to trawl through the internet. I follow the excellent Tom Kindlon for this.

Fathers & stepfathers & childhood homes

I was surprised - and flattered - last week to learn I'd been nominated for a *Scottish Asian Women's Award, in the 'achievements against all the odds' category. I wondered what I had done to qualify: it's five years since my novel came out, though perhaps someone saw The Scotsman story or the repeat of the BBC Alba documentary.  I don't, to be honest, feel particularly representative of Scottish Asian women, though I am proud of my Asian roots, they are part of who I am.  If I see an elderly Asian man in the street, my heart collapses gently. I often say I feel  'fake' mixed race as my Pakistani father, born in British India, died when I was eight and I didn't really grow up between two cultures; I am more in tune with what an alcoholic father is than a Pakistani one (I'm in the painfully snail-slow process of writing about him - unexpectedly painful in several ways - although it is a highly fictionalised account). He was doing his medical degree in Bombay at the time of Partition, and I'm fascinated by what that must have been like for him.

I actually withdrew my name from the awards as I couldn't attend the judging panel, it was far too short notice, I must always plan my energy meticulously, though I think they are still trying to arrange a later date for me. I do, of course, feel representative of women (and men) with ME and if this nomination can spread awareness, that is fine and dandy.

I spent yesterday with my Greenland-born Danish stepdad, he continues to drift into his own wee twilight world of dementia. Sometimes, I sit with him and google Greenland just to see what comes up. We look at videos of Ilulissat, the town where he was born, and he exclaims, That's the hospital! Or That's where Per and I had our confirmation, pointing to the beautiful old church. The house he grew up in is now an art museum with a permanent collection of Emanuel Petersen, a Danish  artist. He was overjoyed when I showed him this.  

I was in my own childhood home last summer for the first time in almost thirty years. Last year, some of my Pakistani family visited Scotland, I hadn't seen them for many, many years, we went out to Loch Lomond in two black cabs, ten of us, and we stopped outside the old house. Like a scene from a movie, we lined up against the wall and had our photos taken. The owner was in her garden and kindly invited us round the back to have a look. I was  physically and emotionally shattered from the trip and when I saw my uncle's heels disappearing into the kitchen I thought I was dreaming, but sure enough the owner had invited him in. I went in after him and it was surreal to be in a house that was mine and wasn't mine. The stairs up to the bedrooms seemed so steep and I remembered how I would have to sit down to rest halfway when I became severely ill with ME. The most surreal thing was to look out the window of the back bedroom and see my Pakistani cousins' children playing on the swing.

*update: Uuganaa Ramsay won the Scottish Asian Women's Award 2014. I reviewed her book MONGOL here.

Radio 3: Childhood, memory, autobiographical narrative & fiction

I have been for some time now been attempting a novella which involves a fierce scraping of my memories in order to fictionalise events in the life of my Pakistani doctor father. Apart from the usual writing/energy challenges, it feels like quite a brutal mining of myself, and for reasons beyond me the narrative is emerging as third person omniscient. A writer friend suggested that the technical challenges of this point of view mirror the emotional challenges. I like that theory.

I am, therefore, fascinated more than ever by childhood, memory and  narrative.

Some interesting radio programmes from Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' series:

Autobiographical writing and Contemporary Fiction', a 15 minute essay slot which explores the complex intertwining of autobiography and fiction, the blurring of selves: 'These gaps between the different versions of the self leave spaces for fictional invention'.

References are made to Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.

I also liked the sentence: 'Memories are revised every time we remember'.

And here on childhood and memory, a longer 45 minute programme: 'Who's Got Hold of Children's Imaginations', writer Patrick Ness suggests that writing is 'the novelist's way to pin down the world and . . .  contain anxiety'. (8.30 mins)

Who controls the story?

I've been not particularly well this last week and reading Joseph Anton in bed, it's a long book - 600 pages, which on a Kindle can seem endless, you don't get the same sense of progress you get with a paper book - but compelling even though Salman can be a bit up himself. Whatever you think of the man, he can write, and this book is like a banquet of Michelin food and junk food (the bitchiness, the gossip), on which you gorge and have indigestion afterwards and need to take a break. It is also repetitive, necessarily so, and lots and lots of detail. 

I feel linked with Salman's books as I read Midnight's Children when I was very ill in mid-eighties. I had to stop and start, stop and start, but persevered. Reading this novel was my window on real life when my own life was suffocating and claustrophobic, bedridden as I was with ME. Then five, six years later when all the hullaballoo started I was in London trying to find part-time work, heading (unknowingly) for a catastrophic relapse and the news on TV was of books being burned and I recall watching with my flatmates and feeling baffled, and so very ill (for neuroimmune reasons). Fast forward another six years, and I saw him speak in Edinburgh, I think the Traverse Theatre, and we had to go through airport security (as usual, I had to sit while others kept my place) and  afterwards we left with signed copies of The Moor's Last Sigh (which I still have not read, but I will). Salman says in his memoir that when he was writing TMLS he was annoyed he could not travel to India to do the research and was worried about 'authenticity', but many writers have to imagine the places they are writing about (and he already had much experience of India). I would love, for example, to have the option to go back to Pakistan, I have family there, but I can't risk the vaccinations, or not having the vaccinations, and so I have to rely on memory (of a 6-week trip as a child) and my heart. (Salman's exiled Somalian writer friend Nuruddin Farah advised him to write from what he'd kept in his heart.)

My favourite line so far  is: 'At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?...'

I am struck (not for the first time) by this concept of 'who owns the story', who is in control of the narrative, and while I am trying not to write about ME as I am so fucking bored with it, this is what happened with my illness, the narrative was stolen and distorted by a clique of medics/health editors, and the story has been spun and spun like a spider's web. Thankfully, science is the opposite of these 'purveyors of untruth' and is making headway in spite of it all. This from Open Medicine Institute is encouraging.

And, this is good, an essay on why writers should use Twitter. I used to hate Twitter, thought it was bollocks - and there is a lot of bollocks on there, like the internet in general - but it is also a lovely thing, for many reasons, not least  because it takes hardly any energy. I recently came across this short interview with Dr John Chia via Twitter, he researches treatments for ME triggered by enterovirus (as mine was). And unlike the purveyors of untruth he is very interested in the  original virus that has actually caused ME.

And if anyone is interested, here is Zoe Heller's review of  Joseph Anton, shortlisted for hatchet job of the year. I think she is a little hard on him. And a more sympathetic review here from writer Laila Lalami.