Marrying My Muse

One popular myth about writers is that they are tortured souls whose work derives from unrequited love, financial hardship and general misery. They scratch away at their manuscripts by the light of a guttering candle in some solitary garret.

Not me. I dispensed with my misery in my childhood. Thirty four years ago this month I got married and my success as a writer, such as it is, I attribute to the emotional stability I have enjoyed for a third of a century. I work best when I’m happy. I run all my writing past Rosie, my wife, and if she says something needs to be cut or changed, I cut it or change it.

However, back in 1972 the announcement of my intention to get married was not well received. The seventies followed hard on the heels of the intoxicated sixties like the onset of a colossal hangover. Social norms had been toppled and were lying all about us in disarray. The job of clearing up after the party had not yet begun. Perhaps that explains the general negativity of my friends at university. One flatmate summed it up by responding to the great news with the question, ‘Why?’

‘Because we love each other and we want to spend the rest of our lives together,’ I told him. He looked unimpressed. ‘You don’t need a piece of paper to do that.’

My parents were even less enthusiastic. ‘Don’t tell your father!’ was my mother’s reflex response. ‘I think he might notice, Mum,’ I pointed out. ‘At least wait until the end of the summer,’ she begged.

Wearily I agreed, eighteen years of living with my father having conditioned me to a process of walking on eggshells. When the end of the summer came I decided I would wait no longer and broke the news. His reaction was entirely predictable. He objected and said he would not be coming to the wedding. I told him he wasn’t invited. That was the end of communication between us for a very long time.

In the end he did come to the wedding. He was prevailed upon by his sister, a nun in Philadelphia, who came over from the US with the specific intention of making him do the right thing. She was my father’s younger sister but the only person on earth he seemed to fear. A ferociously patriotic, hard line Republican, she was not standing for any nonsense. He was going to the wedding whether he or I wanted him to and that was the end of the matter.

Earlier that summer I had come to the end of my time at university and was working on a building site while applying for work as a secondary school teacher. The news of my impending marriage had leaked out onto the site where it was greeted with ironic amusement. One of my fellow labourers, a hard-drinking man, gave voice to the considered wisdom of the site in a fine example of metonymy: ‘It’ll be all sweetness and light until she gets you to the altar. Then you’ll see a change. You’ll come home at night to the cold dinner and the hot tongue.’

I’m pleased to say that his prediction proved wide of the mark.

The Unexpected Wedding Guest

This blog is supposed to be about writing but you can’t help life sneaking in sometimes. Like now, for example when all real writing has become impossible because I am suffering from what I can only describe as a wedding-related virus.

Just before my elder daughter’s wedding last September I came down with something similar which meant that on the day itself I looked like death warmed up and, after delivering my speech, was unable to speak again in anything above a whisper for days.

Now it’s happened again. I was in bed for most of the last two days while an invisible demon kept driving a nail into my skull just above my right temple, filling my mouth with sand and shoving a rotten tomato up my nose. At the same time one of his associates seemed to have extracted rather a lot of blood from my body so that it has become like a badly inflated air-mattress.

Everybody is sympathetic but I think they also can’t help laughing at me. Just a little. And in the nicest possible way. And who can blame them? It looks like a huge attempt to steal the limelight. However, I am determined to recover and rebound in time for a week next Saturday when I will have two married daughters.

In the meantime I am having regular draughts of Lemsip. If you are reading this in a country where Lemsip is an unknown quantity let me put you in the picture. It is a remedy for colds and influenza that comes in powdered form. You add hot water and get a hideous luminous yellow concoction that tastes and smells like low-level radio-active waste. But it does seem to do the trick better than most.

Recently I’ve learned that among the guest list at the wedding will be at least one unexpected name. Both my daughters seem to have inherited the family tendency to receive messages from beyond the grave in their dreams. Recently Emily announced that she had seen her maternal grandfather (long since dead) in a dream and he told her he was very pleased to have a chance to talk to her, that he was delighted about the wedding and that he would most certainly be there.

I know this steadfast belief in an after-life seems like so much puerile self-delusion to those like Richard Dawkins who zealously insist that there is nothing but what you see in front of you. To them I say, with all the careful consideration that their arguments deserve – ‘Yeah, whatever…’

I Can Talk The Talk, But Can I Walk The Walk?

Public speaking is on my mind at the moment. I have been busy learning my speech for my daughter, Kathleen’s wedding in three weeks’ time. It’s the second wedding in eight months so I have a clearer idea what to expect this time. However, this speech is decidedly more difficult than the last one because the first few sentences are in Greek, since the groom’s family are Greek Cypriots and quite a large number of them are coming over from Cyprus especially for the occasion. I don’t actually speak Greek so I am learning this parrot-fashion.

I also heard this week that a school in Essex has won me as a prize, or at least they have won a visit from me as part of a competition organized by a website called Reading Zone.

Some writers are daunted by speaking about their work in public. I’ve got a friend who writes literary fiction for adults. Her novel came out about a month ago and she is utterly terrified every time she is asked to speak about it. I’ve tried telling her that the audiences at book events are generally supportive but she says that I’m missing the point. It’s the whole business of getting up in front of strangers and talking about who you are and what you do that she finds so excruciatingly painful.

I think I had this knocked out of me by being a secondary school teacher in Inner London for ten years. If you’ve stood up in front of thirty stroppy teenagers day after day and tried to control the ravening beast that is their collective psyche, any speech, whether to wedding guests or bibliophiles, holds very few terrors.

I remember one occasion when it had been snowing heavily in London. The roads had been partially cleared but huge mounds of dirty snow and slush were piled up at the kerbs.  In those days I rode a bicycle to and from school. When I set off for home that afternoon, almost the entire class for whom I was responsible was standing at the bus stop. As I drew level with them, the wheels of my cycle began to lose traction, spinning hopelessly on the icy surface. Then, slowly but surely,  I started to fall sideways, landing unceremoniously in one of the enormous drifts of snow.

When I re-emerged, totally soaked and utterly humiliated, it was to a great roar of delight from my students. Shivering, I re-mounted my bike and cycled home in the certain knowledge that in less than twenty four hours I would be facing that same audience, trying to make them concentrate on Shakespeare.  By comparison, delivering a speech in Greek is going to be a piece of cake.

No, public speaking does not worry me. The thing that really terrifies me is public walking. I have this recurrent nightmare that I am proceeding with great dignity up the aisle, my daughter on my arm. A string quartet is playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The groom and the best man are standing ready and waiting. The guests are all looking at Kathleen and smiling benignly. And that’s when I step on the hem of her dress. There is a ripping sound, she stumbles and falls forward. The music stops abruptly. The guests give a collective gasp of dismay. Kathleen looks up from the ground with tears in her eyes. Her ankle is broken, the wedding is ruined and it is all my fault.