April 2005

I am excited to say that I have delivered my children's book, TANGLEWRECK to Bloomsbury. It was the eleventh hour and fifty fifth minute, and I was numbering the pages in biro on the train to London, but it is finished. Good thing too, as my editor had to fly to New York with it the very next morning.

And now I miss them all - and for the first time ever I can see it might be fun to write a soap opera; at least you get to keep the characters.

But no, I am not going to write a soap opera.

What am I going to write next? No idea, because next comes the trip to Canada and America, and I can't see life beyond that yet.

All the tour dates you can book are on the site this month, but if you are wanting the 92nd St Y in New York, on the 18th of April, hurry, hurry, because it's selling out fast.

It will be great to see everyone again, and I hope some of you US readers will come and visit me on my travels.

Please note that no one will be dealing will site emails or inquiries from the 8th to the 21st. I will need the all the help I can get just to run the rest of my life while I am away, and my long-suffering assistant Jayne will be very busy, and she has the cats to entertain. If you have any queries about the tour please email jhockensmith@harcourt.com

The Silver-cat-small-pest is going to have Taurus kittens in May, thanks to a last minute visit by an evil Tomcat with a boxer's jaw.

I have decided to let her have one litter to see if it sorts out her mental health problems - she is the wackiest cat ever, and just great, but a bit of grounding by a few babies might do her good.

What it will do for me, I do not know.

So much for Silver. Minnie and the rest are fine and dandy, and the hens are laying, and there will be chicks soon, and all the usual spring excitements of birth and new life that remind me to have plenty of birth and new life myself. This is a good moment to throw out the winter worries.

I don't know if you have read Susan Greenfield's The Private Life of the Brain. She is such a good writer and thinker, and one of the interesting things she talks about in the book, is the way our neurons group together in overlarge masses when we obsess about things. These unwieldy clusters are linked to depression and inertia. Like scar tissue, these clusters have to be broken up, so that new connections and fresh neural pathways can be formed.

We are what we eat. We are what we think. What you dwell upon becomes you - and doesn't all this make sense with positive thinking and affirmations and all that stuff?

It is right to think things through and to use a combination of memory and intelligence to make sense of what happens to us, but we all know the difference between trying to understand a thing, and being helpless under the weight of it.

I wrote a while ago about my good friend Mona's answer to our depressed days - decide NOT to sit under the weight of it, just for 20minutes. Give yourself a job to do - something physical, like changing the bed or cleaning the windows, and refuse to let the weight in while you're doing it. Think clearly and strongly about something or someone good in your life, just for that time - and of course, it starts to work. One of the things it does is give the brain a rest from its obsession.

I suppose this a kind of meditation in miniature.

I have found that learning poems and reciting them out loud helps hugely with unhappiness. The rhythm of the language probably alters our brain waves, and the sense of realness in the poem fights against the unreality of so much of our unhappiness. Far from being escapism, the poem is an escape; a route out into reality, away from the shadows and monsters of our minds.

And for the big things - like death and loss, the poem provides a form for our formlessness, a shape for our shapelessness. As our boundaries and our sense of self collapse, the poem can hold us steady.

It is good to have poems ready. To have learned them. To have spent time with them. The day you need them, they will be there.

I go to the gym a lot, because we all need an hour a day of exercise, and modern life doesn't provide that for most of us. I know that there is no such thing as getting fit, full stop; there is only a continual commitment to fitness. The muscles have to be worked or they fail. Our minds need the same kind of regular exercise. It's no good letting ourselves be content with that we know, we need new challenges, new ideas, the stuff that makes those lumpy neurons slim down and re-connect.

It's well known that when the brain is confronted with something it can't fit into an existing template, it has to re-configure itself. The chemical make-up of the brain, your brain, actually changes.

To prevent the kind of depression that comes with feeling bored or jaded it is essential that we expose ourselves to newness. To keep our brains as healthy as our bodies (I hope your body is healthy!) we need to work our brains too.

I've often said that art is the part of the newness that we need in our lives, which is why art has to be made new, and why we need to keep putting ourselves in the way of it. Go to the theatre, read books, listen to music, get out more!

You don't have to like it all, and quite a bit of it will be junk, but don't worry, just give your mind something to do. Watching TV is not an option.

It's a beautiful sunny day here today as I write this, and my spirits are lifted by the simple pleasure of nature and light and warmth. There is so much to enjoy as well as so much to change. Make a day to enjoy life.

The day after, change it.