Things I Have Learnt This Year OR One Thing I Have in Common with Madonna

Everybody is piling the internet with things they've done this year, books they've read, good wishes they want to share, more stuff that they've done, anything they can think of. Well I'm going to add to that pile of virtual, often useless and sometimes warming information.

What have I learnt through another year in northern Italy, trying to write my way out of a wet paper bag?

That I love getting up before dawn. I like the blankness, the unwritten quality, the last coursing of the night between trees in the yard. The way stars fade or the moon delivers its final beams. I like having a clean mind, breathing in cold air.

That I dislike jellyfish. Although I have a gigantic shark phobia that makes each swim I take in Corsica a risky trial (I see them snaking along the sandbed, I imagine fins.. everywhere), I have now realised that jellyfish are not-so-loveable. I had my first huge jellyfish sting this summer and it lasted a month. Ha! And due to global warming the global jellyfish population will only double, triple, quadruple in the next few years. Jellyfish have no predators - not even man! They appeal to certain Chinese palates but otherwise none of us have devised a culinary way to cull the jellyfish population. This could mean more jellyfish stings for all of us. Speaking from experience, it ain't funny.

photo:Paul McVeigh/Word Factory

That I like reading in public. When DLC came out last year I had shaky hands and BREATHE written all over my speech. I even had a speech! These days I've learnt a couple of reading tricks. Practice your piece as though it were a sonata to be played for Carlos, my maestro. No mistakes! Oh and a pint at the pub around the corner is essential.  


That there is a God. This higher entity encouraged my current favourite writer to walk through the bookshop door at my reading in Soho last Saturday night. This higher entity allowed the tongue in my head to move and speak words in English.

That I understand the rain. Going to London quite a few times this year means I've learned what it means to have rain trickling down your face, into your scalp, down your back, in your shoes. It means nothing. It means that you will dry off later. It means that you will go into a bookshop and drip on the floor. It means you will smell like a dog on the tube. Before, I used to despise the rain. Now I've bought chunky boots that are as eager as frogs for a good puddle. As Madonna says, damp weather is good for your skin.

That it's hard to sell books. This is not a surprise to me, although it is. I thought some uplifting force would thrust my books into the public eye and they would be purchased over and over. That uplifting force is me. And I can't even lift more than three bags of shopping. I am skinny and distracted and my internet connection is weak and my computer makes me cry. I have learnt that my efforts are not in vain, but just about. This no longer upsets me. What sells, sells.



That a writer should go home and write. Ha! you laugh. She didn't know that? Oh I've heard it bandied about many times. Writers write. Builders build. Musicians perform. But I wasn't connecting the dots. I was writing - yeah - but I wasn't putting up a brick walled fence between my writing time and my social media time. Things were getting mushy. Lately, they are not.

That most of our problems are very minor.


Let me know what you think you have learnt this year. Are we taking ourselves too seriously here? No chance.

MERRY FESTIVITIES AND DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE

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