The collector

I'm watching you.  On the train, in the coffee bar, even when you're in the park with your children.  I see everything: where you go, what you read and what you eat. The way your eyes narrow when you don't believe what someone's telling you.  I see it all and I take notes.  I never know when I might need them.

Which one are you?

People say you're either a Wuthering Heights fan or a Jane Eyre fan.  Not both.  My husband prefers Wuthering Heights, but for me, it's Jane Eyre all the way.  I can't help wanting to tell Cathy and Heathcliff to 'pull themselves together.'  Harsh I know, but honestly!  Don't get me wrong, I like a good love story as much as anyone, but it's all so overwrought.

Jane Eyre, on the other hand, just gets better and better.  There's always a danger when you study a favourite book, that you'll analyse it to death and it will lose all its appeal. Not so this time; even the litcrit is interesting - the madwoman in the attic and all that.  There's nothing like a touch of Gothic horror for a dark and stormy winter's night.

Guess what?

Some parents complain that their children ask too many questions.  It's 'why this?' and 'why that?'  No sooner have you answered one, then along comes another.  I know that we're supposed to encourage inquisitive minds, but there is the occasional temptation to say 'because it just is, okay?'

I have a different complaint.  It's about the guessing game my son plays.  'Guess what I did today?' he says.  And  you have to guess. Not once, not twice, but three times.  Not all guessing games are so easy.  'Guess how many runs Bell got today?' he asks.  Not having even cottoned on to the fact that there was a test match, it was always going to be a struggle.

But now and then, we strike lucky.  Like the time some enterprising kids from down the street knocked on the door holding a jar of sweets.

 'Guess how many sweets are in the jar?'

 'One hundred and twenty seven,' my husband replied.

The boys walked back down the path, shaking their heads in disbelief.  Don't they know that teachers have psychic powers?

Teenage kicks

How times have changed.  When I was a teenager, despite access to the school and town libraries, I never had enough to read.  I read anything I could find, from Mills and Boon to George Orwell.  Often in the same week.  For a while my dad subscribed to Readers' Digest and I looked forward to the arrival of the next dark red volume.  I still remember Call of the Wild and The Citadel, but I'm sure there were many more.  I never managed to get my hands on anything very subversive though.  I 'borrowed' my mum's copy of Lace, but I never found the smutty bits and it was too bad to read from cover to cover.  I thought that A wife's guide to pleasing her husband might be more informative, but apart from a useful reminder to remove one's apron and warm one's husband's slippers before he arrived home from work, there was little to interest an eighties teenager.

Nowadays there is a plethora of teen fiction to choose from.  I've never banned my daughter from reading anything.  I'd like to say this is out of liberal-mindedness, but in fact it's more due to apathy.  She'd read most of Jacqueline Wilson's books 'for older readers' before I ever noticed that they weren't all about sleepovers. On principle, I couldn't ban anything I hadn't read myself and I just never got round to it.  Now I come to think of it, there was one book that achieved 'banned' status in our house:  Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. Of course, being banned gave the book special appeal.  When I finally read it, I thought it was an excellent book. But then all the glamour had gone, in my daughter's eyes.

Speaking of glamour, half term ended with a trip to see Katy Perry at the MEN.  Never have I seen so many wigs, flashing headbands and mini skirts no wider than belts.  And that was just the audience.  Yes, I know I'm showing my age but it was truly a sight to behold.  The show was spectacular too: fireworks, dancers, pink fluffy clouds and more dress changes than you could possibly imagine.  Fabulous.

Voices

Sometimes I hear voices.  Or just one voice, to be precise. It sits somewhere behind my right shoulder.  It's a nasty little thing and this is what it says:

'Ha! Call yourself a writer.  You don't even write anything. Writers write, that's how they get their name. Get it?'

At this point the horrid creature turns its back in a huff.  Sometimes it's worse than that; it looks over my shoulder as I begin to type and howls with laughter or pokes me with a bony finger as I try to set a new high score on Bejewelled Blitz.

I am a patient woman, but enough is enough.  Yesterday, I picked up the horrid beast, its skinny arms and legs dangling, and gave it the boot.  I kicked it good and hard, sending it sailing over the Lancastrian roof tops.  It landed somewhere in the shifting sands of Morecambe Bay.  I hope it comes to a nasty end.

I've made a pact with myself.  I will finish my English degree, learn Italian and write my blog. Apart from that and until my degree is finished, I DON'T HAVE TO WRITE ANOTHER WORD.  I can't tell you how good this feels.

That was yesterday and then, this morning, what happens?  I wake up wanting to write.  Just a few hundred words of a story that's been swirling round my head for a few months now. I didn't write much, but that's absolutely fine.

When the music stopped

How many people, I wonder, listened intently to the Top 40 on a Sunday afternoon with a finger poised over the record button on their tape recorder?  I'd listen to the dross for an hour on more and then still miss the first few bars of my favourite song.

I think back to the soundtrack of my youth, from the first album I bought - Duran Duran from Woolworths in Durham - to U2's Joshua Tree on my Sony Walkman, listening when I should really have been revising for my O levels.  'White Wedding' always reminds me of a brief encounter under a Christmas tree at a sixth form party.  The Cure and The Waterboys kept me company through my student years.  Not in a bedsit exactly, but the mood was the same.   I wandered the streets of Heidelberg singing Smiths songs with my best friend.  I listened to Joni Mitchell with the same friend in a flat above an accordion shop in Switzerland and then, after I graduated, I drove around London in my sales rep Sierra to the sound of REM.

But then, at some point in my mid twenties, the music stopped.  I had a career, married, started a family.  There is no soundtrack to these years, unless you count The Tweenies.  I didn't notice it at the time, but now I wonder at this silence.

It's only gradually that I've come to miss the music.  I can't after all, spend the rest of my life listening to eighties bedsit music.  Through my husband's band, whole new musical vistas have been opened to me.  I am certainly a latecomer to The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. Next week I'm taking my daughter to her first 'big' concert - Katy Perry at the MEN.

It's time for a new soundtrack.  My song of the moment is by a local band called The Lovely Eggs.  What's yours?

Camping in the graveyard

It was surely the quickest hour and a half of the week in the company of Carol Birch and Jo Baker at Lancaster Litfest last night.  The two writers read from their latest books, Jamrach's Menagerie and The Picture Book, and chatted like old friends.  I'd not come across Jo Baker before, but I was impressed.  Both writers have degrees in English Literature, yet neither could say that this had helped them in their writing.  They agreed that they couldn't imagine writers not being readers but Baker, who read 'from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf' at Oxford, said that for several years she felt like a writer 'trying to pitch a tent in a graveyard full of monuments to dead people.'  It took her a long time to 'get over' her studies before she could settle down to serious writing.  As an aspiring writer in my final year of an English Literature degree, I know exactly how she feels.  By the end of the year I will have slaked my thirst for great writers and literary analysis.  The thought of reading on a whim and finding my own voice...  I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, I shall squeeze in Julian Barnes' Booker Prize winner between Middlemarch and Dombey and Son and look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Jamrach's Menagerie

I'm sitting comfortably with a glass of Pinotage awaiting the Booker Prize announcement.   I must admit to a vested interest here.  Carol Birch, author of Jamrach's Menagerie, lives in Lancaster.  I've just finished her book this evening.  In the course of reading it, I've gone from admiration to horror and travelled from East London to the middle of the Pacific.  I've marvelled at her fantastic imagination.  Just how do you write like that and then turn off your computer and cook dinner?

I'm looking forward to seeing Carol Birch at Lancaster Litfest tomorrow evening.  Just as football fans revere their favourite striker, or others love to celebrity spot, I find myself in awe of writers.  I've seen Wendy Cope and Carol Ann Duffy at previous Litfests and, although I've enjoyed both evenings, I felt a little disappointed at the ordinariness of them.  Surely they should have some special aura of creative genius?  The truth is, of course, that they are really just like us.  They have days too, I imagine, when there's too much to be done to have time to write.  They have days too, perhaps, when they read what they've just written and despair.

Perhaps there's hope for us yet.

Don't Knock

Three or four years ago my husband bought a second-hand electric guitar and taught himself to play it.  He persuaded a couple of fellow teachers to form a band with him.  I'd like to say he was driven by a desire to express himself musically, but I suspect it was more to do with wanting to be on stage in a leather jacket and shades.  Their progress to fame and fortune has been hampered somewhat by parents' evenings, rugby matches and having me as their promoter.  Despite these obstacles, they've done five concerts, cut a disc and had their own song played on a local radio station.  Okay, so the DJ's description of them as 'an exciting young punk band' was perhaps stretching a point a little, but I was secretly rather impressed.

As he says himself, his chances of being called up by King Kenny on a Saturday afternoon or playing rugby for England may be rather slim now, but there's still plenty of time to become a rock star.

So that's enough shameless publicity, here's their song: 

Mr Smith

Rereading Northanger Abbey does not transport me to Regency Bath, but rather to an unassuming comprehensive school in a northern town.

Northanger Abbey, along with Keats and Othello, was a set text for my English Literature 'O' Level.  My teacher was Mr Smith. To my teenage eyes, Mr Smith was already old, tall and wiry, dark skinned and dark haired.   He had the dubious pleasure of teaching Austen to a disaffected class of teenagers last lesson on a Friday afternoon.  He never did succeed in interesting us in the finer points of Northanger Abbey, but he did make us smile. He'd slip into his storeroom and emerge in his moth-eaten graduation gown.  We'd never seen such attire and thought it was hilarious.  As he dictated his chapter by chapter analysis of the novel, every time he came to the hero's name his voice dropped a couple of octaves.  'Hennery,' he would say, and wake us briefly from our daydreams of school discos and Duran Duran.  I can't read NA now without hearing Mr Smith's bass voice.  He had a habit too of raising one eyebrow unfeasibly high whe he made a significant comment.  It was a sort of visual bold I suppose, although I always had the impression that I was the only one who noticed.

I don't know what became of Mr Smith.  I was never one to talk to my teachers in class, let alone chat to him in the street.  If I were to meet him now though, I'd thank him for his patience on Friday afternoons and tell him that I didn't think Northanger Abbey was so bad after all.

We are three sisters

On Saturday evening I went to the Dukes in Lancaster to see Blake Morrison's We are Three Sisters,  a play about the Brontes with 'a nod to Chekhov.'  I read Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard a couple of years ago, and despite writing a successful essay on comedy in the play, I was left rather dazed and confused by the experience.  After seeing Morrison's play I think I understand a little better.  I laughed, I despaired, I felt the sisters' frustrations.  I enjoyed the doctor's performance, a flawed unhappy man, but still good at heart.

It was a warm evening and a full house.  There were complaints from the audience, but air-conditioning is so rarely needed in Lancaster.  Ladies paraded in their summer frocks.  I felt hot and frumpy and so consoled myself with a mint cornetto.