spring
Another note from me, it’s because it’s April, my favourite month, especially here in London, where the weather is just that bit better. This blustery breezy bit of year with blossomy trees and boozy book parties…it all feels more beautiful to me than ever because it is (likely) my last London spring.
The story Mother’s Day in my book was born of the feeling of this time of year and now that I think about it, it’s the most London story of all – I’ve asked the (excellent) actor reading the audiobook if she can read it in a British accent (I hope that won’t be confusing for listeners, as the rest of the stories are set in/about Ireland and hence read in the actor’s own Irish accent). It’s also a very non autobiographical story – it’s about a wealthy woman in her forties trying to reconcile with her mother, a not-wealthy woman who failed to achieve her dream of becoming an artist. It came to me very quickly, I had the sense of it on a blustery spring day two years ago, just before the first lockdown, I travelled to Crystal Palace to buy some chairs off a bloke on eBay, it took ages to get there and allowed for a lot of time for thinking.
I had a sense of a mother and a daughter and a museum or art gallery and that was it, the story arrived ready-made and I wrote it a few days after the Crystal Palace expedition – actually on Mother’s Day itself that year. It was one of the first stories I wrote, way before I had even a sense that I would have anything like a collection. It’s kind of a south London v north London story: I have the sense of the daughter growing up in a little-discussed corner of the city like Penge or West Wickham or Catford and then transcending it for the mythologised climbs of Primrose Hill or Highgate. I always wanted to live north but was always too skint to afford the rent there but now that I’m leaving, I feel more patriotic about Lewisham than I do of my own homeland (brón orm, Éireannaigh, I’ll get over this).
Also, and especially at this time of year: I think it’s really important to have fun. I think we don’t let off enough esteem. I spent a few minutes (or maybe it was an hour, I was hungover, it was hard to tell) scrolling the Twitter account Chaotic Nightclub Photos and when you see the kind of derangement on show there, I feel like it’s very healthy to have a space to express that in, and then to go home and not talk about it. I heard once that in a healthy town, there is an equal number of dance halls and churches and I feel like that might be true. We seem to have fewer of both and maybe that’s the problem. When I was growing up, my little town of 25,000 people had five nightclubs and it was still hard to get in anywhere on a Saturday night. I’m not sure how many there are now. Hopefully I will find out soon.
happy easter all.
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