September 2006

I love September, because it feels like the rhythm of new work.
Right now I am finishing the first episode of TANGLEWRECK for the BBC, and looking forward to starting the second part. I am thankful every day that I didn’t take a movie deal on this book, but was able to agree with my old friend and ORANGES producer, Phillippa Giles, to do something different for telly. Who cares about Hollywood when you can have fun doing work you enjoy?
  
And there’s another book – which I want to get on with, want to play with, want to think about, live inside, mend and make.

And by January I’ll be starting a theatre piece,

Meanwhile, my garden is full of plums and apples.
I went out walking the other day and after a big wind. The ground was scattered with windfall fruit, and nobody wanted to bend down and pick it up. There were kids, mums and dads, the usual Sunday walkers, and not a soul interested in free fruit. Is that because it doesn’t come in plastic? Is it because people think it’s either dirty or dangerous?  Is it because kids don’t eat plums and apples? 

So for us here it’s been days of jam making, freezing, bottling.
Summer fruit in winter is a treat, and there’s nothing better than your own, because it hasn’t flown round the world, it was fresh the day you preserved it, and when you open the lid or the bag, it’s not just fruit in there, it’s memories of what you were doing when you gathered it and busied yourself with a little domestic alchemy.

I expect that’s how the alchemists got started in the first place – watching the women-folk transforming windfalls into something delicious.

But there’s no time – which is what everyone says, and I’ve said it myself, except that I don’t want to be a person who hasn’t got time to attend to the seasons and spend a day, or two, or three, on fruit-duty. It’s better than shopping at Ikea or watching TV, and it doesn’t cost anything – apart from the sugar.

I’ve just had a birthday, and that is always a mortality-moment, and a moment to take stock, and either life rolls on, or it gets pulled up a little for a wash and brush up. I thought – more time, there is time, it’s the rhythm of the world that is different, but it doesn’t have to be so. So I am spending time being conscious of every bit of time, just to see what it feels like, and as we know that Capitalism depends on waste, time is bound to be wasted along with all other precious things. So I’m dragging time out of the system and letting it be. Time to be.

This is good for me as I go into major rant about this crap government and its low-grade response to the environment. Can you believe that it is the Conservatives who want a Climate Change Bill? The Conservatives are putting the environment on the main stage at their conference in October, instead of in some crummy cubicle where only three people can sit down. It is very embarrassing  - even more so for me because I have agree to go and speak at the conference – on the environment.

Why? Because they have asked me, and because I will talk to anyone who will listen, and that certainly isn’t Tony Blair.

Meanwhile, I have to pay VAT on the installation of my Geo-thermal heating system. Here I am cutting my personal household emissions by 75% at my own expense, and Labour is charging me VAT. Why would anyone take Blair seriously? The man has become a mad tyrant like all those other twentieth century Taurean tyrants – Hitler and Stalin to name but two. Also Freud was a Taurus, and we know I am a Jungian. But Taureans everywhere, do not despair – I adore Taurus, just not when it becomes a stubborn stupid raging bull.

In any case, our so-called Left wing British Government has tied us in with US Neo-cons, so in this crackers Alice in Wonderland world, what’s in a label? If the UK Conservatives come up with a serious environmental agenda, then we shall have to take them seriously in return. Any colour, as long as it turns Green, as far as I am concerned.

There will be more on this anon – but I am not getting a blue rinse, veto-ing Gay marriage, or singing the praises of the Free Market. It’s just that, the way we are heading now, there won’t be any space for real social issues and social progress because we’ll have so fucked up the planet that it will be all we can do to keep going at all.

No planet – no politics.

I am glad to be spending quite a lot of time abroad over the next few years – if only to get a different perspective on how people are thinking and feeling about the huge issues confronting us now. Living in another country for a while must be good for the mind, if unsettling for the heart. Or perhaps it will turn out to be the other way round – and anyway, you might say, Paris is not so very far away.

And at least there is a train. Anymore of this airport business and I am giving up flying except under duress. We can’t live in these invented states of emergency. Nothing happened – maybe it would have happened, maybe it wouldn’t, but to hold people hostage to their own fears, and their Government’s determination to fuel fear, cannot be right.

Joan Smith wrote an excellent piece in the Independent just after the airport chaos, pointing out that London is not Beirut or Baghdad – we are not in daily fear of a missile or a sniper, and we cannot confuse our situation with theirs. Chaos allows control – government control, and like many, I am uneasy about how simple it is becoming to make life difficult for us.

Last year, 56 people were killed in the UK as a direct result of terrorism. More than 3000 were killed on the roads. We have to get some perspective on the so-called daily threat to our lives and liberty. Is that threat coming from the terrorists, or from our own forces of control?

Look, I don’t know how we respond to the modern threat of a war that comes from anywhere and appears to involve no common enemy. I am sure that the present policies of the UK and the USA are making things much worse for everyone – on every side, and the sooner the gruesome twosome of Bush and Blair get out of office, the better for the world.

Plum jam is better than traffic jams.

Which is why I am cutting my annual car driving by 25% – at least that is the target, which is not that easy if you live in the countryside, and have a lousy rail service. But something must be done, and our masters will not be doing it for us. I’ll let you know how I get on – eek.

And it’s September, and the owls are back, hooting in the wood, and the cats are coming in with cold fur at dawn, and I am thinking – just thinking, mind, of lighting a fire, but I’ll save that pleasure until October – because simple pleasures like books and fires and good food, and the company of friends, are better than anything – except, I think, writing, which is life.