June 2007

Here I am, back on site.
It is unusual for me  - indeed unknown for me not to update the
site each month, but I needed to finish my new book, and there were difficulties elsewhere. The only hope was to perform the Indian rope trick and vanish.

Now I am sitting in my cottage in the Cotswolds, with the kitchen door open onto the garden, watching the rain pour down. I love to have the back door open - feel oppressed when I am shut in. I don't know how my friends with smart but shut-in London flats cope with life. My hens get more fresh air than they do.

I suppose there is a big psychological difference between the urban beast and the country animal. When I have to go to London for work things or to the theatre or the opera, that's fine, but when very occasionally I have to spend leisure-time there, I find myself going mad. What is there to do in the city unless you make a list
of plans?

In the country there is always something to do - in the garden, walking, little jobs with the radio on, and then a quick dash in for a cup of coffee, or a quick dash out for a walk. I need to have ordinary contemplative life - it is easy to calm down digging a vegetable bed, or clearing out the shed or going for a walk whatever the weather, all things that can be done without spending money or being run over.

I used to love walking in London, but it is now so busy and so car-ridden that I am a danger to myself and others. But I still walk at night - always when I have supper at my favourite restaurant, Alastair Little in Frith St in Soho, I set off back to my house in Spitalfields, and it takes about 45minutes at a good clip. It would take half an hour on the tube by the time I had gone down, waited around, come up the other end - and I wouldn't have used the calories or tired myself physically for bed. Walking is good for the body, good for the brain, but most cities don't suit walking.

There are wonderful exceptions - like Amsterdam and Munich, Edinburgh and Barcelona, Rome and Madrid, even parts of Paris. The key may be size, or it may be a true awareness of what humans need to feel a desire to walk the streets. London is not human-friendly; it is a city that concedes everything to money and cars.

What London can offer is wonderful art in all its forms. If you are visiting this summer, don't miss the Antony Gormley retrospective at the Hayward. Apart from the gallery-based exhibition, he has been allowed to place life-size figures at strategic points around the city, (rather, I have to say, like Deborah Warner's Angel Project in New York City in 2003, except that her angels were alive). Look up at the tops of buildings, and you will find them, watchers over London. From the terrace of the gallery you can count them on the skyline.

June 3rd sees the opening of the new Damien Hirst exhibition at the White Cube galleries in St James's and Hoxton.

The exhibition will include a platinum skull covered in diamonds, on sale at £50million. I am sure someone will buy it.

I don't know why.

The visual arts, as everybody knows, have become the playground of the super-rich as never before. Art and money are not interchangeable, and they represent different value systems. Hirst has said that he thinks that spending a lot of money on something makes you look after it - makes it matter. He thinks that money makes art matter. This is a dismal little philosophy.

Like his work or don't like it - that's up to you.  For my money, the thinking that drives it is impoverished.

I have just finished kitting out my studio, where I won't be making skulls. Downstairs, there is a reading room, and upstairs, there is a workroom, which has nothing in it but a simple trestle desk and a bed; I sometimes need to fall asleep when I am working.

It's a beautiful space, made of oak, with doors onto the garden, so that I get plenty of light. I can't explain why I can't work in a domestic space, and need a dedicated space, but that is how it is - even though I am no clutter-queen, and even though my house is always quiet and orderly.

In the early days I used to work in various sheds and houses lent to me by others, and then gradually I acquired extra space of my own. Now, moving permanently to the place that used to be my run-away hide-away, I have had to build another run-away-hide-away in the garden.

But I like it here very much; it is not grand, not making any statements, just the thing that modest places used to be when people could afford them.  I am set alone in my wood, with a cuckoo in the mornings and owls in the evenings, and the tap-tap of woodpeckers. Not a single car has gone by since eight this morning, and that was the farmer's wife going to the farmer's market down the road.

I'm making asparagus soup for lunch, with a salad from the garden. Then a walk, then more work, then, as it is so wet and damp, I will do my favourite thing and light the fire and keep the back door open until it goes dark. Then bed. Not what you might call an exciting life - but I can do that in my head.

Is there a kind of despair that hits people mid-life?

I don't feel it but some of my friends seem to - and are exhibiting signs of nostalgia - surely a bad thing?

The past wasn't better - some bits of it were, and some things were worse, that seems to be pretty much the picture always. I think it is imperative not to give way to despair, not to feel that nothing can be done, or that we are becoming more and more helpless.

My friends with kids find the kind of social breakdown that has happened in Britain very difficult to take. I don't blame them for that - our new drinking laws mean that that hoards of horrible drunk men just roam up and down residential areas, banging on windows and pissing in doorways. Spitalfields will lose its families because they don't want to live in a 24hour swill bar, which is what has happened.

The social contract - loss of it, I mean, is serious. How we behave in relation to one another is a measure of civilisation. I agree it is looking bleak.

I don't agree that we can't do anything about it - other than move into gated communities and drive our kids everywhere in cars that look like military vehicles.

Feminism used to have some very successful Reclaim the Night marches. I think I should organise a few Reclaim the Streets marches. Everybody has a right to safety and sleep, and a yob's right to drink himself stupid is not equal to a person's right to walk without fear of intimidation, or to get a decent night's sleep.

I shall see if I can get a newspaper on the case. Reclaim the Streets anyone?

Meanwhile - back where I come from, in what used to be the industrial northern working class heartland, and is now a place where there is no industry and no work, I find the BNP too present for comfort, and something like apartheid between the white and Muslim populations. It is depressing, and something the liberal south doesn't really understand. It is also dangerous; apartheid leads to civil war, which might be where Britain is heading.

I have had to go back there for personal reasons, and apart from the astonishing ugliness of what the Council call 'improvements' (tarmac the cobble streets, rip out the York stone pavements, let terraced houses use plastic slates and Upvc windows, demolish the town centre), the race problem is scary. Making everything ugly and tearing down a shape that people can recognise, helps no-one to feel good about where they live. If you live in ugliness, if you have no work, and if you feel overwhelmed by another culture - racism will get the upper hand. Discontent and misery always find targets, and the easiest target is a stranger. That's the white side of it. 

On the other hand, I tried saying a normal ordinary 'hello' in the street to 52 Pakistanis of both sexes, and all ages, and yes I counted, and only three spoke back. This is a divided place, whatever the government says about integration, and this is why the BNP is doing so well.

We have tried hard over the years to stamp out white racism, and it needs stamping out. But now, there is a new challenge too, and that is the responsibilities of those who have come to live here towards the host country. If there is no exchange, there will be breakdown.

But I am not ending this month's column on a gloomy note, because there is much than can be done. There is always another chance. My god-child, who is eleven, says that she wants to be a human rights lawyer, to help fight injustice. If our kids are thinking like that, there is always hope.