“I am Actually Quite a Good Writer”

Admission is often hard. Before the actual words involved have a chance to scratch and scrape the throat as they make their escape run, the mind will go to extraordinary measures to prevent their release. Diversion. Distraction. Entire fabricated histories to convince you that the truth has no validity are all common tactics.

For years I have labelled myself a simple hack. Accepted my own lack of talent. Dodged all those compliments paid to my writing. Yet last week, sitting in Mr. Dedopolus’s Life On Mars Towers living room, the words finally broke out. “I am actually quite a good writer.”

The statement probably sounds like rampant self-importance. Public preening. A shameful example of a writer’s bloated sense of his own value. Yet it is not. It is a shocking and painful revelation to me that on occasion I am quite good. A lot of people have been right for years and I have been wrong. I am repeating it on the blog as both apology and communal declaration so that there can be no backsliding from me.

The words said destroy my excuse for not attempting several projects. They corrode the sense that I fall so short of the genius of certain writer friends that I would embarrass myself to even attempt a novel. The admission obliterates my capacity to take on a commission to turn out crap just to pay the bills.

For an alcoholic, honesty is the first stage in an ending denial and putting down the bottle. For me, honesty means turning down £3,500 advance against royalties to write what would be an appalling 1001 book. Yes I could knock out 80,000 words on financial ruination in less than three months, but I now know I should not.

Flesh is finite. The meat cage is the ultimate prison. If I aimed to write a book per year for the rest of my life I would at best only produce 30 titles. Admitting that on a good day, I can actually write means it would be an appalling waste of me, as well as trees, to write anymore bad gear. I will now have to find some other way to finance Syrian adventures.

The Subtle Ecology of my Heart

I am not a natural gardener. The archetypal male who believes the only things worth planting are those that you will one day be able to harvest and eat. Aside from a brief childhood spell where I took delight in taking pansy seeds and snowdrop bulbs and helping guide them towards flowering; it has usually been about the crop.

Back when I was a teenage scoundrel, I took a bag of mistletoe berries into my woods. My hands, stiff with February cold, I ran them over bark brail of branches. Read stories in the trees cracks and wounds, translating these into openings for my translucent, sticky pearls. Months later, checking to see which holdfasts had survived dry summer and animal weeding, I took a pride totally unrelated to my planned reward a couple of years hence of a nice Christmas earner.

A few years later and I was scattering bluebell seeds in the same woods. Trying to encourage a mass of nodding flowers as an act of remembrance. Changing the local environment to reflect the ecological disaster that had made my heart barren.

The fun went out of mistletoe farming after that. However, there was still some small satisfaction in seeing the plants I had introduced thrive. While the matriarchal gardening gene might be absent, the simple human joy of being partly responsible for growth is clearly somewhere under the surface.

These days, the subtle ecology of my heart has been restored. Love flourishes within it. This might explain a returning desire to grow things. Granted it is still in male mode – edible crops only – but I want to raise plants. I look at Tim’s balcony in Life On Mars Towers and I envision filling it with bags of black soil from which will rise bell peppers and cherry tomatoes.

Canalside not offering me the deep, well-drained stretch of land needed to charm asparagus crowns into appearing, I have started a pot garden. Every morning, the sand of sleep still in my eyes, I check the progress of my basil, oregano and the greenery which I hope may one day turn into chilies. As they all push higher, groping ever sunward, I experience childlike awe at seeing my seeds turn into plants. Even before I have anything to eat, I have already harvested enchantment.