“Another interesting piece “ wrote SR generously “I don’t know how you do it.” Neither do I. Years ago, I wrote about the balancing act between trying to charm
the Muse into kissing your brow and pursuing her with a hatchet. When I faltered, Snowdrop reminded me of this phrase. “Only someone committed to writing would think of that, the tension in the idea…” He was a senior academic, he must know … and I trust his taste in life, never mind writing. I continued to learn to write.
I learned there were ideas that came and you worked on them. I learned that you sat down at a blank screen as you once sat before a blank page and stuff came out of your fingers, in sentences. And how to hammer it
into a slightly different shape.
I learned heartfelt appreciation of and respect for the subconscious mind. I had it anyway but I would wonder “Where did that come from ?” But it came.
Last week I met the first person who ever wrote to encourage me with annalog. We have stayed in touch for all that time and never met. It’s like a radio friendship but he had read me too, and seen me on bits of tv. He commented on something I’d done recently as courageous. I had not thought it brave, just truthful. And no, we are not going into that discussion about your truth and my truth. Perception is to do with
acuity, will, upbringing, personality, education, every one of those senses we take for granted and several we don’t know about.. You miss what you miss and you see what you see. And I generally want to see more. And speak as I find.
There are exceptions. Although (thank God) it never happened to me, I find reading about sexual abuse difficult and deeply uncomfortable. Same as rape in war. So do a lot of other people so they “blank” it. I read an excellent piece by a woman, herself abused, who went to every day of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and was pursued after it in making a contact of the one person who came under the new sex trafficking statute. I thought of Jeffrey Epstein as silenced rather than suicided. Vested interests.
When there is something I admire,I long to write to the writer. Never a mistake to say something good.
Of course you can cast pearls before swine (no reply) but that’s the risk. There is a whole list of things I don’t write about because everybody else does and long ago, the lovely Linda (manager/agent/friend) and I decided that, as everybody else was chewing news till it was spent gum in the mouth, I would do issues. Issues have a much longer life and they involve people very directly.
My first love was magazines which fell out of fashion as too expensive, superseded by other media, while women’s magazines, where I began, constituted second class journalistic citizenship. I was an agony aunt (everybody else’s title,not mine), not a proper journalist. I was told this on several occasions. And then, I worked in independent radio which was – well – questionable. When I had my first professional money, the local newsagents (still called that then) held a raft of stuff for me, I took what I wanted, paid and said thank you for my source material, often American, a jumping off point for further investigation this side of the pond.
Perhaps, I thought as I looked back over annalog which I don’t often do, what I tried to do was to create the best of a magazine in microcosm,
something intelligent or funny with references you could trace and unexpected pictures and images.
I do try to write “up” when the world is down because the endless recycling of down gets us nowhere. I do occasionally haul off and write in a way which is a journey for me – but it is always a journey for me. You remember how the runaways in children’s stories had a few essentials in a red and white cotton kerchief,
to go on a stick over the shoulder ? I have such a bundle, always at the ready, but the pattern is black and white.
The Lasting Harm: witnessing the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Fourth Estate, £22)
Annalog 