What do we think we’re doing?

And, more specifically. what do I think I’m doing? Celebrating Christmas, I mean, or rather the midwinter festival that goes under the name of Christmas, though its connection with Christianity is at best hardly more than sentimentality. Some while ago I wrote a piece about the cognitive dissonance of celebrating at all when the world is in such dire straits and even winter itself has become a season of rain rather than the snow we still happily depict on Christmas cards. And how could we justify celebrating this year, when Bethlehem, the place where the events in the story happened, had to cancel its celebrations because of the atrocities taking place in what’s still referred to as the Holy Land.

Nevertheless millions of us in this country did, perhaps limiting the crass commercialism because we had less to spend this year, perhaps making a dontion to the food bank and/or a refugee organisation in acknowledgement that not everyone is in a position to celebrate, perhaps but decorating a tree, putting up lights and sparkly things, and almost certainly enjoying some of the usual goodies and, in the words of that cringe-making song, trying to have ourselves a merry little Christmas. 

So why do we do it? Is it just the pressure of advertising and conformity or does it meet a deeper neeed, whether religious or not? Firstly, it seems to me there’s the power of tradition. Christmas is something that for most of us has always happened. Many people have fond childhood memories of it that they want to keep alive, and there’s the ritual element of eating certain foods to celebrate certain holidays and festivals. There’s a reassurance about doing the same thing at the same time every year, perhaps with the same people, whether it has religious connotations or not. Before Christianity there were midwinter celebrations seeking light and renewal at the coldest, darkest part of the year, and on a more mundane level the dark and cold call forth an elemental longing for warmth and brightness, comforting food and things that cheer us up.

And, let’s be honest, despite the strains of the modern Christmas there is pleasure in it. Eating and drinking much too much, getting embroiled in family rows and being lumbered with unwanted gifts may not be highly pleasurable, but enjoying good food in good company, giving and receiving presents which, even if small, have been chosen with thought and care, delighting in some tinsel and sparkle for a while and listening to beautiful Christmas music certainly are. (I have to be careful here not to let my aesthetic snobbery creep in. The fact that I like colour co-ordinated, relatively understated decorations and carols sung by well-known choirs doesn’t mean I have to condemn people who light up the whole front of their house in shimmering red and blue or listen to songs like Fairytale of New York that I can’t stand.)

Despite the conspicuous – or not so conspicuous – consumption there is another side to the pleasure of Christmas. Last week the choir I sing with took part in an evening of carols organised by the local Methodist church, with the Salvation Army band. Apart from having a jolly good sing, I was touched and uplifted to hear of all the work the Salvation Army and their volunteers do with homeless people and their genuine care for those in need. I felt happy to donate to Crisis at Christmas, the charity they were collecting for, and to feel I could contribute, even in such a small way. Afterwards I went to the Co-op and made my Christmas contribution to the food bank. Again it felt good and right – what Christmas is about – to be sharing some of the goodness I’ve received with others who have so much less. The Co-op having run out of Christmas cake and mince pies, I put in a chocolate Yule log along with all the sensible items and hoped very much it wouldn’t get squashed. I wanted a family who might not otherwise have a treat to enjoy something a bit special.

The Buddha talks about the happiness that comes from even a little generosity and it seems to me it comes from sharing – realising that this is isn’t about me and my pleasure separate from the rest of the world, but that others’ needs and pleasures are essentially the same as mine. There’s an openness and inclusiveness – or at least an aspiration towards it – that intrinsically feels good, and that we tend to lose sight of in all the obligatory entertaining and gift-giving. Of course cynics would say that what really feels good is our opinion of ourselves – I’m such a generous person; look at how much I’m giving – but even if that’s present I think I can differentiate between it and the open-hearted feeling of connection with the world.

Over the years I’ve also learnt to differentiate between that genuine open-heartedness, which is a gift in itself, and what I might call forced generosity, which arises from guilt and unhealthy self-denial and easily becomes censorious of others too. When I was in my twenties and trying to be a Christian (I say trying because it never felt entirely natural), I used to feel how wrong the commercialism was – ‘leaving the Christ out of Christmas’, people would say – but I still got caught up in it, struggling to find an alternative. I ended up simply feeling bad, at odds with my Jewish atheist family who had no qualms about celebrating the secular festival. I wanted to escape the whole thing, or at least to open up the tight family circle and offer something to others. I don’t think I was entirely wrong in that, though it didn’t work, but I remember how any donations I made to charity were squeezed in the grip of guilt and because of that pretty joyless. I was trying to do what I ought to be doing, despising what was going on around me and myself for taking part in, it rather than allowing myself to take pleasure in what I could have enjoyed. I remember feeling angry and upset in Brent Cross shopping centre at the gaudy tinsel, the mindless Christmas music, the endless inducement to buy things we didn’t need. I’d still feel those things now but would be more able to sidestep the whole issue – and probably not go there in the first place.

Since those days I’ve become more accepting of the need to gladden ourselves at midwinter, but also more acutely aware of the suffering and distress that lie so close around our comfortable enclaves. I can see how easily acceptance slips towards greed and self-indulgence (did I really need to make mince pies and a Christmas pudding?), and how easily the impulse towards generosity is corroded by guilt, or by the endless ‘me first’ that makes me hold back. It’s paradoxical, but when I feel less bad about myself I don’t need to hold on to so much to make myself feel better and so have more available for others without punishing myself in the process. There seems to be a middle way, and perhaps I’m getting a bit better at finding it.

Those dreaming spires

I started writing this post back in May and either chose to leave it or else forgot about it. I’m now about to go to Oxford for another New Year.

The last time I was in Oxford was at New Year, when one of my very longest friends (so to speak) hosted a New Year walk and lunch party. From the early 1990s this has become as much of a tradition for us and some other friends as our Christmas Day celebrations. It hadn’t happened for the past two or three years because of Covid and then my friend’s illness, but this year here we were again, striding down the towpath towards Folly Bridge and round Christ Church Meadow, where, incidentally, we saw this plaque commemorating balloonist James Sadler.

The Folly at Folly Bridge

For once we arrived back dry and relatively unmuddied for the traditional lunch: vegetable soup followed by baked potatoes and sweet potatoes (this year’s sweet potatoes baked almost to extinction because the oven was too high) with cheese, hummus, salads and homemade chutneys – all simple and delicious. Lunch is followed by silly-clever games round the table and, in due course, afternoon tea with assorted sweet treats. All very middle-class and middle-aged-to-elderly and all very Oxford, even though my friend and her friends are artists and musicians rather than academics. It always reminds me how much I love Oxford and feel at home there.After I finished university I lived in Oxford for several years, doing nothing very notable but mostly enjoying it. It was only after the death of the person I lived with that I went back to London and engaged in Real Life. I’d had plenty of time to know and love Oxford as a place, regardless of its university associations. Though those will never go away, they aren’t the whole of my Oxford. When I went to a college Gaudy (reunion) some years ago, I chose to stay at my friend’s house rather than in college and bunked off a worthy academic talk to go to the Cowley Road carnival, which celebrates Oxford as a real town where people live.

The river was high and there were several sunken boats

Perhaps that sums up my relationship to Oxford. It’s the beauty of the place that captivates me every time I visit, but it isn’t just the beauty. Bath is another beautiful city I love and feel at home in, but it isn’t ‘mine’ in the way Oxford is. I haven’t lived there and – crucially – it hasn’t represented anything for me, other than the pleasure of being there. I defy anyone who has studied at Oxford  to see it simply as a place. It’s an aspiration, both because of the effort and luck it takes to be accepted as a student there and because it promises success and career opportunities – if you know how to take advantage of them, which I didn’t. And of course there are the famous writers and thinkers who have lived or studied there, in whose footsteps people aspire to follow. All that is in the air, and for me is inescapably part of my Oxford ,even  if not the major part.  For me those spires are still dreaming,, somewhere at the back of my Oxford-trained mind.*

Looking towards Folly Bridge. Merton College and Christ Church Meadow are to the right

* The phrase comes from Thyrsis by Matthew Arnold, The poem isn’t as well known as some of this others but the description has stuck.

The a-word again

Back in 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd which forcibly made us aware of the horrifying level of violence against Black people, I wrote two pieces on this blog, one about my own unconscious racism and one about antisemitism. I wrote a third one about homophobia which I circulated to some of my friends, but I decided not to post it here as it felt too personal. When I wrote the piece about antisemitism I was careful not to imply that I thought it on a par with racism against people of colour – except by white supremacists, Jews are usually assumed to be white – but I did end up saying that, like homophobia, it is a real form of discrimination in our society. Watching David Baddiel’s 2021 programme Jews Don’t Count and reading his book of the same name has made me see more clearly why I think so.

Although I don’t agree with everything Baddiel says, his main point, that antisemitism is either not seen or not considered discrimination, particularly by those on the left, seems to me to carry a lot of truth. The recent purge of antisemitic elements within the Labour Party has apparently focused more on those who have expressed sentiments critical of Israel or sympathetic to the Palestinian – even if those people happen to be Jewish – than those who have been hostile or discriminatory towards individual Jewish members. Not that the two can be wholly separated. There are some on the left who believe that anyone Jewish must de facto support Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, because all Jews must be militant Zionists. It doesn’t seem possible to them that some Jews are not Zionists, or that Britain was largely responsible for the creation of the state of Israel as we know it. There are also some who, in their identification with the Palestinians, are prepared to believe demonstrably fake documents such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was created in Russia in 1903 and purports to outline a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

As Baddiel and more heavyweight writers such as Deborah Lipstadt have said, one problem is that the Jews have always been seen as simultaneously powerful and contemptible. Power is not attributed to other minorities in the same way, although there are there are conspiracy theories about gay people taking over the word which resemble the Protocols. The trope is that all Jews are rich, privileged and money-loving – how often have you heard someone described as ‘Jewish’ as a synonym for ‘mean’?  – and somehow in league with  the Jewish bankers who supposedly control the world. The fact that Jews became bankers in the first place because many other trades were forbidden to them, and were given the dubious honour of being allowed to lend money on usury in order to keep Christian consciences clean, isn’t usually mentioned. At the same time, stereotypical Jewish features such as dark colouring and a hooked nose have been used by the Nazis and many before them to caricature ‘the Jew’ as someone inferior if not downright evil. Think of Fagin, for instance. David Baddiel notes that the man who scrawled ‘Dickens was racist’ on the wall of the Dickens Museum was upset by Dickens’ racist stance on the Indian Mutiny but seemed to have no difficulty with the depiction of Fagin.

Another problem is that being Jewish is both about religion and about race – or at least inheritance, which by the Nazis was perceived as race. (When I had my DNA tested recently, it came out as ”99.9% Ashkenazi Jewish’). Judaism isn’t a proselytising religion and the way most people become Jewish is by being born into a Jewish family, traditionally by having a Jewish mother. As Baddiel says, the Nazis weren’t interested in whether or not someone was a religious Jew; what counted was their ancestry and, in the case of those who were half or even a quarter Jewish, how Jewish they happened to look. One of their primary concerns was that Jewish blood might pollute the purity or the so-called Aryan race. (Ironically, the term ‘Aryan’ was originally used to describe people of Indo-Iranian origin) . However, he shows anti-racist campaigner Whoopi Golderg saying that the Holocaust wasn’t about race because Jews are white. In her view, the Jews were targeted  because of their religion – despite the fact that many German Jews were highly assimilated and not religious, and this went no way at all towards saving them. Whoopi Goldberg also states confidently that  if a member of the Ku Klux Klan approached a  Black person and Jewish person, the Black person would run but, being white, the Jew would be safe. Not only are both these statements erroneous – Jews are not safe from the KKK – but what Baddiel highlights is that nobody challenged them  in the way they might have challenged statements denying other forms of racial discrimination.

Baddiel gives many other examples where antisemitism is apparently downplayed: attacks on synagogues that are described as ‘not antisemitic’, a swastika spray-painted on a synagogue wall categorised as a ‘micro-aggression’, a man shouting ‘F**k the f***ing Jews’ at a football match who was not penalised for hate speech as the club’was busy dealing with racism and homophobia and felt bringing in antisemitism might be seen as a deflection (the club’s policies have now changed), a speech at a Labour Party conference that described itself as inclusive of all minorities – and majorities – but didn’t include Jewish people. In my previous post about antisemitism I gave an example of this: the speaker in a seminar on whiteness who. listing oppressed white minorities, included Irish people and travellers but failed to mention the Holocaust. I didn’t say anything about it and neither did anyone else, and this is precisely Baddiel’s point. Other forms of discrimination (except ageism, I want to say) would be taken seriously, but often the assumption is that because of their supposed wealth and association with capitalism Jews don’t need protection, whereas other groups suffer economic deprivation and therefore deserve to be protected. Aside from the fact that not all Jews are economically privileged, it seems to me this is insulting to other minorities. Are there no Hindu or Muslim entrepreneurs, no middle-class Black people, no LGBT+ people who have successful careers? Nobody assumes that because some people in these groups have a level of economic privilege, and therefore power, the whole group forfeits the right for its experience of discrimination to be taken seriously.

In Baddiel’s programme several speakers, including novelist Howard Jacobson, talk about the paradoxical ways in which Jews are seen: powerful and abject, white and not white, too visible and sneakily not visible enough, a race and not a race, oppressors because they are all assumed to support Israel’s policies and antisemites themselves when they say they care about the Palestinians. And annoying and self-obsessed because they cry antisemitism when none is consciously intended. Blame the victim indeed. Miriam Margolyes, who is as openly Jewish as she is openly gay, says bluntly, ‘People don’t like  Jews.’  Given this array of stereotypes, can you wonder?

In my previous post I described how I had often ignored or even colluded with casual antisemitism, even though I felt uncomfortable doing so. Listening to David Baddiel, I realised he was articulating many of the things that had been troubling me about it: the desire to fit in and not make a fuss, the internalised antisemitism, the casual discounting of Jewish experience.  Thinking about it afterwards, I realised how angry I was. I’m aware this post is more of a polemic than many of the pieces I write here, but I’m not going to apologise for feeling strongly about it. Discrimination is discrimination, no matter who its target is.

Doing it myself

Not so long ago, paying someone to publish a book of yours, called ‘vanity publishing,’ was considered a demeaning thing to do. If your book wasn’t good enough to be published by a proper publisher, you had no business to be putting it out into the world. Only someone with an inflated opinion of themselves and money to waste would do such a thing, unless they happened to have a pet project that they knew would only interest a handful of people and was too specialised to for any publisher to take it on.

Gradually, though, self-publishing (as it’s become known) has taken off and all sorts of people self-publish all sorts of books, from family memoirs to self-help manuals to historical research to large-scale fiction. Some of the books are of publishable quality, many are not, and many will never sell more than a small number of copies, but the important thing is that people feel entitled to have a go. If you want to be taken seriously in the literary world it’s not a great way to go about it – though of course there are authors who have started by self-publishing and have then been taken up by a commercial publisher – but if you have something to say and want to have a book, or books, to your name, well, why not? These days a lot of people self-publish through Kindle, which is inexpensive and at the DIY end, but there are companies that enable people to self-publish with more style, though at greater cost.

Some time ago I self-published a collection of pieces from this blog (under the title The Belated Writer) via the Amazon platform CreateSpace, now incorporated into Kindle. I had qualms about going with big, nasty Amazon but I’m afraid I did, as it was cheap and fairly user-friendly. To save money I used one of their off-the-peg cover designs – I could choose my own colour scheme – and their layout and book design are fairly standardised too, but the book came out well enough and sold all of 20 copies. The great thing was that it was print on demand, so I wasn’t saddled with an expensive box of books I’d never be able to sell. I only did it for fun and for the experience of doing it, so I wasn’t bothered that it didn’t sell in large numbers and I didn’t do the vast amount of publicity that might have enabled it to sell more. I hoped it worked as a book, though, and on the whole I thought it did, just about, though it’s the sort of book you’d dip into rather than read from cover to cover. The pieces I’ve written on this blog have always been more like little essays and it was gratifying for me and Adelina (my co-author, who wrote the ‘Forward’ and the ‘Afterward’ and contributed some of her unique wisdom) to see them collected together in a literary sort of way.

Having had three books of poetry published by recognised poetry publishers (I say this so that my vanity will not accuse me of ‘vanity publishing’), I’m now about to self-publish a fourth, a pamphlet (short collection) of poems based around food and clothes. The reason I’m self-publishing it isn’t that I think it’s any worse than the others but that it’s a difficult length to have published. Several of the publishers I know of who would have published a pamphlet that’s on the long side (29 poems) are either not publishing at the moment or have stopped publishing, and though I could have gone on looking for others who might take it, I decided to take the matter into my own hands and get it out into the world sooner rather than later, with the help of a local imprint which has a high standard of design and has worked with some very good poets, one of whom has even won a major prize. It will cost me, of course, but I have a chance of covering a good part of the cost by selling copies. Many poetry publishers require you to buy a certain number of books at a discount price, and this can work out almost as expensive as self-publishing.

So within a month or two I should have a little book ready to release upon the world. It’s no less well edited than it would have been had I had a publisher. Most poetry publishers don’t edit very much at all and I always get editorial advice from poets whose opinion I value. And I’ll still do all the things I’d do if it had a publisher: hold launches locally and online, advertise it on social media, look for opportunities to give readings, foist it on friends and family who I think might be interested. I’ll list it as one of my publications, too, as I feel it’s no less a proper book than my other ones. I won’t give a lot of detail about it now but will just say that many of the poems are memories from different stages of my life. When it’s ready I’ll no doubt give it another mention here, in case anyone who reads this blog might like to buy a copy. Poets always live in hope….

It looks as though I may be getting a novel published too (by a publisher) but more of that anon.

Narcissism

I’ve been reading and thinking about narcissism – not just the egregious Donald Trump and Boris Johnson kind but the more subtle kinds that many of us fall into when the right (or wrong) buttons get pressed. Hands up anyone who, hearing about someone else’s achievement, has ever countered it with ‘And I’ve done X’ or who, when someone has said they feel hurt or upset, has taken it as a criticism of themselves and then blamed that person for making them feel bad. Or who has tried to bully the other person into seeing things their way because of course they are right, or has felt envious and deflated because someone else has done better than they have at something they pride themselves on. The list is long and I suspect a good many of us have done some of these things some of the time. It doesn’t mean we are all ‘narcissists’, as though these were some other species who don’t quite deserve the label ‘human being’; it simply means that many of us have, at some time in our lives, have been shamed and humiliated and made to believe we’re not good enough as we are, or not as good as A or B. There are two main reactions to this kind of shaming. One is to crawl away into a hole and feel we don’t deserve to exist; the other, which is more usually labelled ‘narcissistic’, is to deny the shame and belittle or hit out at the other person, making them feel bad in order to feel better about ourselves. Whether it’s the bully in the school playground or the President of the United States, the same mechanism is at work.

Although some people disagree, I believe that even the most grandiose and apparently self-confident narcissistic behaviour comes from this intolerable sense of shame. To say this isn’t to excuse the cruel, exploitative and murderous behaviour to be found at the extreme end of the spectrum (think Hitler, Stalin, Bolsonaro et al) or the bullying, self-centredness and refusal to take responsibility that we’ve seen closer to home. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that anyone who as a child has suffered shame and humiliation, or idealisation alternating with contempt, will become ‘a narcissist’ in this way, but it does show, I think, how prevalent such dynamics are in our society. Many of us, in childhood or later, have been valued, or valued ourselves, according to what we do, and sometimes what we have, rather than our intrinsic worth as human beings. Many of us have come to rely on what psychologist Carl Rogers called an ‘external locus of evaluation’, needing other people to praise and validate us in order to feel OK about ourselves. Many of us compare ourselves to other people, seeing if we come out better or worse and trying to be better than them. I can certainly recognise those tendencies in myself, and can feel the shaky self-esteem that has driven them.

So what is the answer, and why does it concern me? On a personal level, it feels important to recognise both my own narcissistic behaviour and the way I’ve been caught up in appeasing and trying to make things better when people have behaved narcissistically towards me. I don’t wholly buy into the dichotomy between ‘narcissist’ and ’empath’, where the narcissist is simply the bad one and the empath simply the good one. It’s a little more nuanced than that: the empaths have their own reasons for doing what they do, and fear of loss, fear of rejection or inability to separate from the other person may all play a part. But even if the empath’s behaviour may sometimes reinforce the dynamic, that never justifies the bullying and abuse. The narcissistic ‘It’s not my fault. She (more rarely he) made me do it’ will not wash. At the same time, hard though it may be to see, the narcissistic one is also suffering.

There are a great many articles, podcasts and videos by psychologists who claim to be experts on narcissism. Some simply demonise the narcissist, taking the grandiosity at face value and seeing all the behaviour as nothing more than a calculated series of manoeuvres to control, entrap and manipulate. Others, like Dr Elinor Greenberg, take a more nuanced view and see the underlying lack of goodness and self-worth. The question then, of course, is what to do about it. Nobody will benefit from therapy if they don’t want to engage with it, and it can be easy for a therapist, especially a not very experienced one, to collude with the narcissistic version of things so that nothing actually changes. It can be a very long, slow process to help someone tolerate the seemingly intolerable feelings their narcissistic strategies have enabled them to avoid, and they have to be motivated to do it, as well as to change their behaviour. The therapist has to be motivated too. When I was a therapist I rarely refused to work with a client. One client I did turn away – as respectfully as I could – was someone whose grandiosity, contempt for others and apparent lack of feeling I found almost impossible to sit with. A therapist with more compassion – or a less strong reaction – might have been able to stay with them, and I hope that was the case. But I knew my limits. Seeing my reaction, I realise now just how easy it is for psychologists and others to demonise narcissistic traits: they aren’t pleasant to be with. But the person is still a person who deserves help.

On a political level, many people have questioned why our leaders seem to be becoming more self-centred and narcissistic, and why we tolerate or even idolise them. I don’t pretend to have any answers. People with strongly narcissistic traits have always looked for power over others and will push themselves forward when others may hang back. Someone who has these traits is likely have charisma that draws people to them as admirers and acolytes. Perhaps there is something in us that is drawn to people who create myth and drama rather than those with more solid qualities: Churchill had a far greater following than the quietly competent Attlee, despite all that Attlee did for the country. In recent years we’ve given ourselves away to people who – if we’re not taken in by the myth – simply don’t know what they’re doing, and then we complain about it, unless we remain in thrall to the myth and fail to see it tumbling about our ears.

Enough of that. The political system can’t be changed by individuals but individuals can, if they choose, become more self-aware and less caught up in their own patterns of behaviour, whether they are disentangling from another’s narcissism or facing their own narcissistic traits.

Coronation thoughts from Adelina

Hello Everybody

(This photo was taken a long time ago, when I was Much Younger.)

I haven’t written on this Blogg for quite some time, what with one thing and another, but as our new King is being Coronated next week I thought I should mark the Occasion. I’m not old enough to remember the Coronation of the Queen, who did the Job for so many years, so all I knew was that she had always been On the Throne. Whatever you think about her, you have to admit she was very good at Being There and people could rely on her Doing her Duty, whatever happened. Only of course the time came when she wasn’t there – which is what the Budd-ists call Impermanence.

It’s different with the King as he’s spent most of his Life not being King. He got into a Mess with his Marriage and seems to be good at saying things that Upset People. He tries to be Environ-mental, though he still Hunts Deer and Catches Fish, which I don’t think is Right. In other words, he’s more like a Person, but the Queen was always the Queen and was Strong and Stable like Mrs Tweezer May was supposed to be but wasn’t. Now he is King people say he has to stop being a Person, but they don’t believe he will do it. It’s not good for a King to have Opinions as some people might not like them. Some People don’t like Royalty anyway (I mean Kings and Queens and not the kind that Authors get paid, if they’re lucky). They think it Costs Too Much and it’s Out of Date and all about Privi-Ledge, which it is, really. Not that many people live in Palaces and have their own Private Trains.

Anyway, the King is going to get Coronated as Charles III, which still looks rather Strange to me. His Wife Camilla will become the Queen Consort, which seems Proper as she has Consorted with him for so many years. The last time we had a King Charles, he was called the Merry Monarch and bought a lot of Oranges from a Lady called Nell Gwynn. He seemed to like her more than his Wife, which I suppose isn’t that different from our King Charles liking Camilla but marrying Somebody Else. It is very Complicated, isn’t it? My Husband and I have never Consorted with anyone and we have always lived Happily Ever After. But then my Husband isn’t a King and wouldn’t want to be one. He prefers a Quiet Life and so do I, though I am rather more Talkative by nature.

Are you going to watch the Coronation? We are here, on the proper Television and not just the Computer. I will enjoy seeing the Pomp and Ceremony with all the Colours and Uniforms and shiny Gold, and I like the Hymns too, though I myself don’t sing. (Aardvarks don’t, as a general rule.) The King and the Queen Consort will have their Crowns put on, which must be Very Heavy, and then after that they will have to wear them on Suitable Occasions. I don’t think they wear them most of the time as it wouldn’t be very Convenient for things like riding Horses or having a Bath. I believe the King has a bigger Crown than the Queen Consort, to show he is the Most Important Person. Or perhaps it’s just that he has a bigger Head.

After the King and Queen have been Coronated, they will ride back to Buckingham Palace in their Gold Coach. (In this area there are Buses called Gold, but I don’t think that’s quite the same. They’re not drawn by Horses, so far as I know.)  The King and his Family will have to stand on the Balcony of the Palace for a long time and wave, with smiles on their faces to show this is a Happy Occasion. Perhaps Prince Harry will smile too, if he isn’t too Cross with his Family. There will be a special Lunch and everybody will have to eat Coronation Quiche, even though it’s got Lard in it, which won’t do for the Jews or Muslims or Vegetarians, as well as Eggs and Cheese, which won’t do for the Vegans. It seems a bit hard on the Diversity people the King is supposed to be so keen on welcoming that there isn’t any Coronation Food they can eat.

I don’t think I shall to be watching the Television all day, as it is rather Tiring. I do like seeing the Soldiers Marching, though, especially the ones who look like Match-sticks in their big fuzzy Hats. It must take a lot of Practice for them to be able to March in time with each other like that, and all in the Right Shape. They’re not allowed to Trip Over or miss a step, which must be Very Difficult for them. I would be Very Nervous, but they mustn’t show any Expression, even though they have to wear those Chin Straps right across their Faces. I’m glad I don’t have to take part in a Royal Occasion, I must say. But then most people don’t, except that we’re all meant to be eating a Big Lunch and then going off to Be Helpful like the King says. I always like to be Helpful and will think about how I can be More Helpful. I hope the Belated Writer will think about it too, whether or not she eats a Big Lunch.

I hope you all enjoy watching the King’s Coronation and having an extra day’s Holiday.

With love from

Adelina xx

This novel thing

After several years of not doing all that much on the fiction front and feeling I probably couldn’t write fiction – despite some evidence to the contrary – I’ve just started sending out a novel to agents to see if I can get it published. I’m less starry-eyed this time round, less in awe of the commercial publishing world and more realistic about the odds against any novel making it. I may find an agent, who may be able to find a publisher, and I may not. If not, I’m happy to try one of the smaller presses who accept submissions direct from authors, and I won’t feel it’s a failure if that’s where the book ends up, though of course I’d love to be published by a well-known firm. The way the smaller publishers work is more like poetry publishing, and some of them publish poetry as well. Although there wouldn’t be any money in it (as there isn’t in poetry) at least there might be publication, by a publisher who cared about the book and felt it suited their imprint, and who wasn’t only interested in how many copies it would sell. 

It’s surprising how easily I can slip back into novel-writing, when I let myself. Somehow, magically, the pages start to get filled. A character says or does something and then something else follows on from that, or another character comes in and moves things on. What I’m doing now is rewriting the novel I wrote for my MA and sent out unsuccessfully to agents some years ago. I think I knew deep down it wasn’t quite there yet: although it did well in the MA and tutors said nice things about it – the nicest, probably, that it had a ‘beating heart’ – other people said that the protagonist seemed too passive, the focus of the story was confused and it should be set in the 1990s rather than the present day. My writing group – now, alas, no longer formally a group, though it lasted a good ten years – advised me to try rewriting it with different main characters. For a long time the idea seemed completely alien, but then I started, with a protagonist who’s less timid and a husband who’s less staid and stuffy. The third main character, on whom the book hinges, remains the same. (I won’t reveal too much about that character.) What’s interesting is that changing the characters also changes the story. The outcome may still be the same, but the way they arrive there is rather different. I’m using the previous version as a skeleton and grafting bits of it in where needed, but I can see how my writing too has changed since I first wrote the novel. I’d like to think it’s become easier and more natural, which means I’ve had to give some of the grafted-in pieces a bit of a makeover. I’m tempted to say that writing and publishing poetry has made me a more confident novelist.

My gut feeling is that the more recent novel stands a better chance of publication, but it would be very foolish to bank on it. The way I’ve approached agents this time round feels more confident too, perhaps because I know rejection is the likely outcome and don’t feel so overawed by them. To date I’ve had one rejection, a standard one (meaning, presumably, that they don’t rate the book enough to comment on it), from an agent I really liked the look of. I’m disappointed, of course, but I know these things happen. I’ve got six more to go from this present round of submissions and will then try another seven (I’m sure someone told me seven was a good number) and then another seven…. I’m sure I’ll know when the time has come to give up and look at other means of publication. I wouldn’t even be averse to self-publishing, if nothing else comes my way. I did it once, just for fun, with a collection of pieces from this blog, and I have a novelist friend who, having had several novels published which sold well, now finds it so hard to get a commercial publisher that she has taken to self-publishing, with enjoyment.

I know how ruthless the world of commercial publishing is. At least three of my poetry friends, all of them excellent writers, have had novels accepted by mainstream publishers and then pulled at the last minute, presumably for commercial reasons. It happens all the time, seemingly, and I’d be far from completely surprised if it happened to me. Despite all that, and despite the  difficulty of getting an agent in the first place, there’s a bit of me that would still like to get my novel out there and even be paid some money for it, though advances for first-time authors are usually fairly small. The publishers are taking a gamble, and if the book doesn’t earn its advance they will make a loss. I know of people who have been paid large advances but whose books have failed to earn them, making it harder for any future work of theirs to be published commercially. 

In other words, trying to publish a novel is a bit of a mug’s game, and yet I and other people keep on trying. I’ve got one friend who actually is a best-selling novelist and earns serious money from it, but that person is definitely the exception rather than the rule. Most published novelists don’t earn enough to make a living, and many very good novelists are not even published at all. It’s far easier to get published if you’re a reasonably good poet than if you’re a reasonably good novelist, but everybody knows you can’t expect to make any money as a poet unless you’re a very big name or happen to win one of the big prizes. Most poetry presses are run by one or two people in their back rooms, working at it in their spare time and publishing poetry they like and believe in. I’m fortunate that some publishers have believed in mine. I’d love to be a published novelist – who wouldn’t? – but in the meantime I can still enjoy being a published poet.

 

Blocked

I’ve always wanted to write and I’ve always suffered from writer’s block. I picture it as a large oblong block of wood, or sometimes concrete, filling most of the space but leaving just about enough room round the edges for the writing to sneak past it. Despite having published three books of poetry and written three novels – none so far published – as well as short stories, autobiographical pieces, children’s stories, skits and sketches and a substantial number of these blog pieces, there’s still something in me that says I can’t do it, I shouldn’t be doing it, and why would I want to do it anyway?

For the past few months I haven’t written very much, apart from a few poems, because my head has been full of students’ essays and dissertations and other kinds of work – or at least that’s my excuse. Behind that, though, are all the fears and disappointments that make up the block, and that solidify more when I don’t write. I love writing; something in me comes alive when I’m doing it that’s missing from my life when I’m not. And it’s the hardest thing I can possibly do: it brings me up against all the edges and uncertainties and painful places I’d rather ignore (or part of me would rather ignore) as well as all my limitations in feeling and imagination, as a person as well as a writer.

So why do it, then? asks the insidious voice from the block. Why not just give it up and do other things instead? Easier things, things that are more useful to other people, things that don’t demand so much of you? If that was all the block was saying, it wouldn’t be so hard to get past it. But ‘why bother?’ is only the surface layer. Deeper inside the block, ingrained into it, are other fears: that I really can’t do it and am only kidding myself I can; that I’ve got no imagination and there’s nothing there anyway; that writing will bring up terrible feelings I won’t be able to handle; that spending time writing is simply being self-indulgent, fiddling while Rome burns. All of them have some truth but none of them is a reason to stop writing.

I know I’m not, and will never be, as good a writer as I would like to be, or as good as many of my writing friends and acquaintances. On a bad day that can put me into a state of crushing envy and utter despair. On a better day I can simply acknowledge it and go on writing to the best of my ability. For many years I was inhibited when I tried to write by the fear that I would be ‘wasting my time’ – meaning my writing would never be good enough to publish and was in all probability laughably bad. For a long time writing classes were torture because criticism, however kindly meant, seemed to justify that fear. It wasn’t until I had my interview for the MA in Creative Writing and a highly respected novelist said she liked my work that I began to realise this was something I could actually do – that I might in fact be the writer I thought I was.

I’m not so afraid now of having no imagination and nothing inside, but the fear has been with me for much of my life, right from primary school days. When we had to write something in class, the other children would all start straight away, while I was left staring at the paper until suddenly, if I was lucky, a burst of inspiration would come and I’d race to finish the piece in time. I always believed my imagination wasn’t as vivid as other people’s – though I don’t necessarily think that was true – and I was deeply ashamed and disheartened to find that many of ideas I’d had were based on things I’d read or, later, heard on the radio or seen on TV. I didn’t know then that this happened for other people too, particularly children who don’t yet have that much experience of their own. Despite the above, the primary school headmaster was impressed with my writing; I found out later he had kept some of my ‘compositions’ in his desk drawer.

The fear of nothingness goes deeper, though, and dates back to a time in my mid-teens when, for reasons I won’t go into here, and which may never become totally clear, I cut off from my body, my emotions, my imagination and went into a state of profound and frightening inner emptiness – a void that I felt physically in the solar plexus. All that seemed to be left was a thinking mind that contained nothing but words – words largely devoid of reference to the outside world. But that wasn’t all it was: amidst the emptiness was a profound hatred and contempt for myself and – though I didn’t like to acknowledge it – other people who I thought resembled me, a lack of ability to connect with anyone or anything in the way I had before, a despairing inability to believe in the future, and a loss of the sense beauty and goodness. If that sounds extreme, it was. It was diagnosed as depression, and for a time I was given anti-depressants that intensified the blankness and utter inanity. I remember writing ‘boredom is a disease’ in my school notebooks. If I’d ever thought I could write, I knew now I was entirely empty.

Since that time, my whole life has been a journey back towards finding myself again – the person I lost when I left myself all those years ago. Along the way I have written – I can’t seem to help it – and some of what I’ve written has been finished and put out into the world. Writing is one of the ways I’ve had of reconnecting with myself. More than twenty years ago I wrote a book (unpublished and largely unpublishable) as my project for a personal development course. I wrote in the introduction that the project was about ‘remembering and re-membering’, and one of the strands in it was a revisiting of that time in my teens when I seemed to have lost everything. It included extracts from an autobiography I’d written for my first therapist when I was twenty-four, a turgid rumination shot through with vivid scenes from that terrible time. Writing about that time, many years after, brought back the horror of it and took me again to those blank places inside me – places where I still didn’t dare to go. In the book I also confronted my doubts and fears about writing, and to some extent allayed them. I was writing, seemingly I could write, and several people said the book was ‘beautifully written’ – I’d never thought beautiful writing was something I could do.

Although the block became less intractable after that, it’s never wholly gone away and I’ve still been seeking that ease and fluency of connection with myself that I hoped would spill over into my writing. Over the years I’ve worked with writing in different ways: morning pages (from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way), Natalie Goldberg’s Zen-influenced writing practice – writing short, spontaneous pieces on particular themes – and keeping a personal journal, which isn’t ‘writing’ in a public sense but can certainly open things up. I can go to poetry workshops now and produce some sort of writing, even if it seems dreadful at the time (though sometimes less dreadful afterwards), and I can write pieces on this blog, which sometimes helps to get the writing flowing.

Slowly, slowly, through therapy and Focusing and meditation and simply through living my life – and of course through writing too – the reconnection has gone on happening. I have far more of myself now, as a person and a writer, than I had in my twenties. I can’t be sure – there have been many false dawns – but it feels to me as though at last I may be finding again the person I lost back then in my teens, and may be able to meet whatever it is in myself that I’ve so long been afraid to face. I don’t know, but if not now, when? Whether being in closer contact with the person I once was would affect my writing I can’t say, but I’d like to think it might mean the block wouldn’t be so intractable.

Giving it up

I never thought I’d choose to stop being a psychotherapist. I imagined I’d go on doing it till illness or old age prevented me and would then give up regretfully, wishing I could have carried on. But here I am, still able to continue if I want, knowing that at the end of this year I will stop seeing all my clients – not that I have very many – and some of my supervisees. I’ll go on seeing a few supervisees who are still students until they graduate next summer. (For those who aren’t familiar with the term, ‘supervision’ means support, consultation and what’s known as ‘externality’ –  helping the therapist/counsellor to see, for instance, where they are getting caught up in their own agendas.)

I first started seeing psychotherapy clients in 1995, a good quarter-century ago. It took me a long time to gain confidence and my practice was slow to build, but I stuck with it. For quite a while I had other work too, and in those early years I also trained as a Focusing practitioner and teacher.  Sometimes the balance of my practice has swung more towards Focusing and running workshops, at other times more towards psychotherapy and supervision. For a while, when I first moved to Devon, I did very little work of either kind, which meant I wasn’t earning much money to supplement my pensions. I had more time for writing but didn’t enjoy the nagging worry about money. Gradually the psychotherapy started to build up again and things got better financially. I ran a few Focusing courses and took on more work for my training institute, marking essays and tutoring students for their dissertations. All of which meant, of course, that there was less time and headspace for writing.

Back in 2009, when I decided to apply for an MA in creative writing, I’d got to a point where I felt most of my time was devoted to being there for other people. This included helping them express their creativity, whatever form it took. It was rewarding but it left me with little time or emotional energy for my own creative work. Not, of course, that psychotherapy isn’t creative. Many psychotherapists see it as the main outlet for their creativity, and it would have been much easier if I could have done so too. However, something in me has persisted in wanting to make something of my own, especially in the form of writing. I’ve always had a nagging feeling that doing something primarily for myself, which I may or may not be any good at, isn’t as valuable as doing something which is manifestly for the benefit of others. How can I justify – in other people’s eyes or even my own – spending time writing a novel that may never get published, or a poetry collection that only a handful of people will read? The logical conclusion from that way of thinking is that while I can encourage other people to be creative for themselves, it’s not OK for me. But if a psychotherapist is meant to model living the kind of fulfilled life the client hopes to lead, there seems to be something not quite right here.

In the real world, I know of course that it isn’t either/or. Quite a few of my psychotherapy colleagues are writers or artists or musicians, and they don’t feel they have to subsume all their creativity into working with other people. It is juggling act, though, stepping out of one way of being and into another. Most of the time I’ve loved the work of psychotherapy and been absorbed by it. When I look back at the clients who’ve come to me, a significant number have found their sessions helpful, even transformative, and there’s a sense of privilege, as well as profound human connection, that comes from being alongside someone in their deepest, most vulnerable and most open places. I’ve always loved listening to stories and learning the story of someone’s life, however similar to or different from mine, is endlessly fascinating.

There are other aspects of psychotherapy that aren’t so easy: being there regularly, week in, week out (apart from agreed breaks), showing up even when the client doesn’t, carrying the difficult feelings and areas of trauma that a client may not yet be ready to feel; sitting in stuck places that can feel never-ending, weathering times of missed connection, being on the receiving end of anger or rejection or contempt. It’s hard work, even if all this can change and often does.  It’s hugely rewarding to see someone becoming more confident, more open to life, more in tune with who they are and what they want, and being a psychotherapist has changed me too. It’s given me more steadiness and patience and a greater tolerance for being with whatever comes. It’s a training in developing a wise mind and a compassionate heart and in not taking things so personally, trusting in the wisdom of the process and the greater love and holding that extend beyond the personalities of client and therapist. At its best it’s a beautiful thing to do, and I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to do it. But I know I’ve had enough.

Perhaps it’s been working online for the last eighteen months or so, rather than in person, that’s tipped the balance. Although good work can still happen, seeing a head and shoulders on the screen isn’t the same as being in the room with a real person and often it feels more draining, even though I’ve got used to it. Or perhaps it’s simply that I’ve come to the end of my need to do the work. For most of my life I’ve carried things emotionally for people, one way and another, and now something in me is saying ‘No more’. It feels like taking off a heavy coat that I’ve been wearing for so long it’s almost become part of me. Life without it may be lighter, but undoubtedly I’ll miss it.

I’m not giving up altogether. Apart from seeing the students I’ve mentioned, I’ll still be doing some marking and dissertation tutoring, and some Focusing work. Although Focusing works with inner sensing and can reach some very deep places inside us, it isn’t psychotherapy. A Focusing client can book a session as and when they want, which may be every week or at much longer intervals, and the understanding is that they will look after their own process in the meantime and take it to therapy if they need to. Someone doesn’t need to be with a trained professional in order to Focus effectively. (I’m using the capital letter to distinguish it from ‘focusing on’ something in the usual sense.) When I teach the skills of Focusing, the expectation is that people will then be able to use them alone or in a reciprocal partnership. They may still want to have a session or sessions with a professional, but that’s up to them. When I run workshops I usually find I get as much out of it as the participants, and I come away feeling more expansive and more in tune with myself. The workshops I’m planning to run will be on themes that I want to explore and share with others, and there’s an interest and excitement in that.

So here I am, reinventing myself again as I’ve done several times in my life, pointing my compass in a different, albeit similar, direction. And what about writing? Yes, I’m wanting to make more space for it and find, at last, what I really want to write – which of course changes and evolves all the time I’m writing and even when I’m not. I’ve now published three books of poetry, two collections and a pamphlet, and I’m finishing a novel which I hope may get as far as publication – though that’s always a lottery. I’ve got ideas for more writing too, and after a period of relative stagnation I feel I’m beginning to move on again. Beyond my own bubble there’s the wider world and all the terrible things that are happening now, and inevitably the question: what can I do? The challenge, as in the rest of my life, is to do what feels alive and authentic and necessary, and not lapse into what someone once described as a ‘hardening of the oughteries.’ I’m giving up psychotherapy but I’m not giving up on life, however long or short a time I may have left.

 

In Competition

The poetry world is surprisingly competitive. Hardly a week goes by without a deadline for one or more competitions – for single poems, pamphlets of different sizes or full collections – and if they are so inclined poets can spend a lot of money on entering them. It seems paradoxical that this should be so, when the nature of poetry is that it can’t easily be graded or classified and one person’s spine-tingler can be another person’s what’s-all-the-fuss-about. Nevertheless poets enter them in flocks, or droves, or anthologies, or whatever the collective noun for poets is. Everyone wants the kudos of having won one, or preferably several, especially the bigger and more well-known ones. It helps when submitting books for publication and it looks good on the back-cover biography. And it tends to raise the poet’s work in other poets’ estimation – or at least in their awareness. ‘Oh yes, Emily Splodgett. Didn’t she win the Cricklewood last year?’ (I do hope there isn’t a real Emily Splodgett or a real Cricklewood prize.)

It isn’t hard to see why there’s such a plethora of competitions. Poetry festivals, of which there are many, can’t rely on ticket sales alone to cover their costs, and in these difficult times poetry publishers, most of whom operate on a shoestring, may well need to boost their income by – in effect – charging people to submit their work. But neither the costs nor the benefits are all one way. A big single poem competition, which may attract several thousand entries, will pay not only substantial prize money but a hefty fee to the distinguished poet who judges the entries – and if there are that many entries it’s likely there will also be fees for the readers who select the poems to be passed on to the judge. A poet who wins a pamphlet or collection competition, i.e. has their book selected for publication, will usually be rewarded with a smaller or larger number of free copies which they will then be able to sell. Even if the poet doesn’t win a prize, being named on a longlist or shortlist, or better still commended or highly commended, is a reward in itself – certainly more of a reward than simply being turned down by a publisher who chooses not to publish your book.

Not all competitions are equally prestigious. There’s a broad range from the little local ones and the niche themed ones to the major national and international ones. The best-known of the latter are the T S Eliot Prize (the poetry equivalent of the Booker), the Forward prizes, the Costa Poetry Award, the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Prize, the biggest of the festival competitions. Work has to be nominated for the first three of these, so even to get a nomination a poet’s work has to be pretty exceptional. I know people who have had poems nominated for the Forward single poem competition and one or two who have won it, but I wouldn’t put my own work in that league. There are no restrictions on entry for competitions like the Bridport and the National, both of which I’ve entered without success. I know people who have won prizes in them, though, and again their poems have had something exceptional about them, although – without in any way denigrating these poets’ work – I could name quite a few other poets whose work has seemed to me exceptional but who haven’t won a major prize. According to a friend of mine who is a selector for one of these big competitions, the majority of entries are not from people who have much knowledge of contemporary poetry or much skill in writing it, which makes the job easier than it sounds. What the judge has to do is decide which of the remaining poems, which will range from good to outstanding, deserve serious consideration.

I’ve never won a prize in a single poem competition, though my work has sometimes been longlisted, shortlisted or commended. Until recently I’d never won a competition for a collection or pamphlet either, though again my work has been shortlisted or commended. Perhaps part of the reason is that I haven’t entered enough competitions. This time round I entered a pamphlet for four publishers’ competitions – more than I’d done before. It got nowhere in three of them and I hadn’t heard from the fourth, which was not a good sign. I entered it for a different competition run by one of the first three publishers and then was surprised to hear I had won the fourth. Having agreed to its publication by this publisher, I heard soon after that it had been shortlisted in the other publisher’s competition. It didn’t win, so I wasn’t faced with the dilemma of having to choose which publisher to go with, but it did feel a bit like the bus stop effect.

I’m not arrogant enough to think that my pamphlet was any better – whatever that may mean – than anyone else’s on the shortlist. I know competition judging is by its nature subjective. As I’ve said above, different people are bound to like different things. I recognise my work just happened to fit that particular publisher’s brief at that particular time, and I’m grateful for it. It’s given my confidence a boost – so much so that I’ve decided to enter a new pamphlet for another competition, run by the publisher who shortlisted the previous pamphlet. Of course I’d love to win this competition too, but there are some excellent poets entering whose work deserves to win at least as much as mine does. I know luck is not something to be taken for granted, and having had some success it seems greedy to expect more. I’d be absolutely delighted if this pamphlet won and was accepted for publication, but if it doesn’t succeed there are other publishers I could try, who might publish it without my entering a competition – except that submitting work to a publisher is always a competition: inevitably there are winners and losers.

If you are a poet and have entered work for a competition, I hope it does well. My new pamphlet, Last of the Line, will be published by Maytree Press in October this year.