Well, here is a new thing
What I am doing.
For some time, certain friends have suggested I write a Substack.
"Do it! You love writing! People will pay you!" they'd shout in varying stages of inebriation.
And for ages, I, in my own varying stages of inebriation, have declined. Resisted. Rolled my eyes and asked if they wanted crisps with that. Until this year when the urge became stronger and I found myself writing little vignettes (that's a lovely word to say, the snapping of the 'ette,' the hissing slide of the 's,' is very satisfying), stashing them away on my computer and I thought...maybe.
So here I am on Ghost, a full twenty-four hours after watching Hamnet in a tiny theatre with HARD chairs, which had the benefit of distracting me from doing any wholescale Weeping In Public. I do not like WIP. Although I will admit to swallowing hard against the lump in my throat, wiping my eyes and breathing for a moment before leaping from the chair and trying to jiggle some life back into my lower half.
Discomfort aside, what a sumptuous film it is, full of rich colours and sounds. Mescal's Shakespeare has a mischevious glint, a soul-deep sadness, we see him growing into a man before our eyes. Buckley is a fearless - and I don't use that word lightly - intensely physical actress, the angles of her face like a painting, the emotions exqusitely caught. And the boy, oh the boy. He will make your heart break.
Anyway, go, go see it. Let it carry you back and away.
If you have, reader, made it this far down, you may be wondering what to expect from this site. Me too!
Actually, that's not strictly true. I do have planssss...which I have written and deleted three times now. Not because I don't know what I'm doing (this is not my first blogging rodeo) but because putting it out there in a "I'm definitely going to do this and then I'll absolutely be doing that" way is not my style. Certainly not my writing style anyway.
Ah yes, writing. I am currently writing a book which, for reasons I am not fully in control of, has turned into a work about an alternate Britain, one that we might have had, had the plague not left our shores, had mankind not been so resilient. For the witch wandering through this alternate Britain, suspicion is all too ready to land on her head. Written in the white-hot wilting heat of last summer, I'm now editing back, checking the facts, honing the story. It is by far and far away the very best thing I have done, the most fun I have had, and so absorbing as to remove me from the real world every time I open the manuscript.
Outside of my window, I can see more houses, grey and shining in the drizzle that is falling relentlessly this morning. We have been blessed with a few days of, not sunshine exactly, but a break in the endless rain (we had forty days of rain! I am drawing up the blueprints of my very own ark!) and dark skies. Luckily, I am wise to this kind of February trick and I did not cast off my vest or leave my coat at home. It cannot entirely catch me out.
March will do much the same, rush in and rush back, teasing us with glimpses of a brighter, warmer, not-quite-so-sodden future. But the hedgerows and verges are full of daffodils, the snowdrops have been valient in their attempts to raise our spirits. Under our acer in the garden, the pale blushing hellebores have nodded shyly, bravely, in the rain-lashed face of winter. It is important to have plants, I think. They bring hope when the days are darkest. And even for me, winter lover that I am, these last few days of winter are very dark indeed.
I am a little fidgety today, a little distracted; one moment staring out of the window, the next frantically scribbling down dates and numbers. You see, I am about to start a new role and it will be the first time I've ever held this type of job before. I will be (takes a deep breath) CEO of a museum and art gallery from April. Yes, me! CEO! I have never been one of those before! Oh, I have worked in museums before, for a long time in fact, and for the last five years, I have worked freelance in the sector, advising, supporting, occasionally hectoring (I wrote these - yes, I did! See, hectoring). Well, now I'm going back to actually Doing The Damn Job, because I miss it. I miss being in a museum, the excitement of a new exhibition, the chatter and hum of volunteers and staff, the collections and planning for new things, the biscuits (note to self: do NOT eat ALL the biscuits). I miss it so much, in fact, I will be working in a completely different county, in the gnarly, bosky glorious bit of the Cotswolds before it becomes Wiltshire and after we've left the celebrity nonsense of the North Cotswolds behind. I. Can. Not. Wait. Except that I do have to. Until April, anyway.
And now, anonymous reader who may or may not find their way here, who may or may not decide to stay, possibly subscribe, possibly think "god, that was all a bit weird and pointless", thank you for getting this far down. I have to leave to get on with my day. There will be meetings and plannings and soup for lunch and friends in the evening. I hope yours is as nice a day too.
All spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, split infinitives (I love a split-inf) and Oxford commas contained herein this post are my own. I make no apologies. Not even to my grammatically pendantic friend (you know who you are).
