Anstey Harris's Blog

I wrote this short story a couple of years ago about a dream my husband had. There is a lot of sadness around at the moment, but there’s a lot of love too: the world is still a beautiful place. Feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find comfort in it.

You used to think you could smell danger on the air; hot summer nights with a whisper of violence, storms brewing under heavy clouds that whistle up anger. The reality, it transpires, is that only film directors and jazz musicians make it like that. Reality smacks you hard across the back of the head without warning. It knocks the life out of you.

At first, you don’t realise what’s happening. You lift your head up from the ground and try to sit up; just like in the movies. You look at what you think will be your feet but you can only see the top of your head, the bald spot – wider than you’d imagined – with a few strands of hair crossing it, clinging to youth.

The people around provide a soundtrack and a picture of what has happened.

‘Just standing there, waiting for a cab.’

‘Out of nowhere.’

‘A bottle right across the back of his head.’

The props add to the dialogue and your eyes sweep slowly across the scene. There is blood; a thick dark violet oozing and pooling on the pavement underneath you. There are fragments of glass like diamond dust on the cold stone.

You stand on feet that no longer connect with the Earth and wonder what to do next. Energy fizzes through the air. Colours alter. Faint smells bring ideas that haven’t surfaced in decades; the skin of your mother’s neck, soft and warm: the weedy damp of ponds and the mucus stink of tadpoles in sacks. You are, at once, old and new.

The worried people are out of earshot now. They mill about below you like ants but you still feel them, just as you know they still feel you. The frantic activity is left to those on the ground: the onlookers, the bystanders, the paramedics and police with their shepherding and organising. You feel calmer than you have ever been in your life.

The striding is not the first thing that you notice. A blending of the senses comes before the climbing, the buoyancy, the freedom. There is the thick yellow smell of daffodils, the sharp green of pine, the sticky cold of pink ice cream melting on your skin, the sting of sea salt spray; you remember everything and nothing.

To take in this wide new world, you look above you. There are infinite strata of people in all sizes, shapes, colours. They are all ages and all nations; they are serene and long-limbed. They move above you with the grace of clouds. You peer up, up and up but there is no end to the striders, gossamer-fine, crossing the sky like puppets.

Your first stride takes you home. In one long bouncing step, you see your house - its warmth surrounding it like an aura - and your people. You hear what they have to say.

‘We laughed and laughed.’

‘By the time he climbed down off his high horse we were howling.’

‘How I will miss him.’

Their words are funny, poignant. They are memories in every shade and hue. Some of the stories are long and lurid with detail; you relive them as the words tumble out. In the ethereal sinews and wispy fibres of your strider self, kindness tickles like a touch.

The heart you used to have would stay longer with your people, would be drawn to them like moths and the moon, but striding is a compulsion. A wind, somewhere, turns and you move on. It is a strange breeze that you don’t understand and can’t predict but it blows you, downy and light, to and fro, here and there.

You stop by an old man in a dark room, almost touching him, close enough for him to feel you if you had a body that he could see. For a moment there is no connection, no sense of a story from him and then a faint picture comes; a scratchy memory, musty like damp wool. The old man, rheumy and bent-over, is leaving a department store. It is cold and wintery. You hold the door open and he slides, skin and bone, through the gap. It is a small gesture but it is the only gesture in a long day of loneliness. He remembers you when he sees your picture in the paper and his thoughts call you to stand beside his armchair for a moment.

Over what might be minutes or months or millennia, you become more proficient at striding. You see people and places you thought you had never been, had never touched.

There are, now and then, tiny fragments of sad conversations that you settle on lightly with your gauzy self.

‘He didn’t listen to me.’

‘I feel a little as if he let me down. Perhaps he grew into himself; perhaps he was different as an adult.’

If you had breath, you would purse your lips and blow on the people, try to warm the past and apologise but, as a strider, all you can do is wish. You wish away their disappointment and leave silken cobwebs of remorse above them. Perhaps they feel them, perhaps they don’t. You stride more lightly knowing that you have tried.

From time to time, when you join the traffic of striders, invisible to mortals, you see faces that you know. Knowing is different now; like everything else it is an understanding rather than the recognition of faces or reputations. When you pass people from history, their striding is hurried, their witnessing wider than your own. You are not called as often or as fast. The sites you have to visit, the conversations and thoughts you are compelled to hear, are almost always nostalgic; they are inevitably warm. The muscles you once had shiver when you think of being someone with more to answer for.

As a strider you saw the peaks of snow-capped mountains when you were carried in the heart of a friend, and the sparkling Patagonian salt flats with a student you met once on a train. You showed her the photographs in National Geographic and she grew the idea from a seed; it took her twenty years.

In a parched country, on bare red soil, a boy draws shapes in the dust with a stick. His grandfather, eyes wrinkled in the glare of the sun, corrects the lines and curves of his letters. When the boy falters over an ‘s’ the old man takes the stick and draws a swooping snake-shape, perfect in the sand. The old man is thinking of his school, built with money from a faraway land; he has passed on his knowledge to hundreds of children. You stand beside him in the dry heat and a tiny striped spider inches its way across where your foot would once have been.

You have dived and buried and flown and climbed. The striders thin out above you now. People still think of you fondly but they speak of you less often.

You are called more to consequences, less so to conversations. The connection can be oblique nowadays – strung out across generations - but you are a strider, you trust in the Universe. You go where you are sent.

The call to swim beside the ancient turtle is a special one. His underwater world is a wonder; tides and colours, fronds and tiny fleeting fish, blue light and yellow sand. His huge shell is scarred with barnacles.

You hear the song of the turtle like the pulse you are used to forgetting. It courses through you like a brook, and a spring woken from a winter sleep rushes through you where your blood once was. He sings to you of the wet carrier bag you once fished from the sea before some innocent creature had a chance to swallow it. You remember laughing and chasing your people with soaking hands outstretched. You pinched your fingers together and carried the bag like a bad smell to a litter bin.

You hear in the turtle’s song that he has hunted jellyfish for a hundred years. He sings to you of the clean path he followed through an almost-ruined sea; he sings of his age and his majesty, of his children’s children who populate the oceans.

The future is not as you once pictured it; it is paler and less sophisticated.

A woman sits at a rough wooden table. A small boy perches on her lap, one leg swinging in that way that boys have. His jumper is beetroot red and saffron yellow, it has been hand-made by someone who loves him.

The little boy is drawing leaves. He holds his tongue between his teeth. His pencil presses hard against the paper and you hear the drag of its dull point as he draws.

‘How do you know the leaves, Grandma?’ he asks the woman.

She kisses the top of his head. ‘Because my grandfather told me when I was a little girl.’

‘Do you know all of them?’ His eyes are wide.

She nods her head.

‘I’m going to learn all the leaves,’ says the little boy, ‘even from the trees that have already disappeared. And when I grow up I’m going to draw them for my children.’

His eyes are round and earnest; they are the exact blue eyes of child you held a hundred years ago, back when you still had arms, back when you still needed a beating heart to feel love. Oh, how you worried for that baby then, for all the things in Heaven and Earth that might hurt her.

You need not have worried. You have walked across the whole Earth; it is still a beautiful place.

You have learnt to trust in the Universe.

It Takes a Village...
... to raise a child. 
No man is an island. 
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. (Helen Keller)
There’s no ‘i’ in team.
So many aphorisms, so little time.

Today was the publication day for Goodbye, Paris (the same book that will be The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton in the UK in January). I had no idea when I first heard the incredible news that my book was going to be published (in a lot of countries) just how much goes on behind the scenes of publication. 
Every time you reach a goal (or an obstacle) on the road to publication, you believe that’s ‘it’: the end of the road, one way or another. When you’re un-agented, you think that getting an agent is the end of your journey. When you’re unpublished, you think that getting a publisher is. In fact, it’s all part of a long continuum, one that has lots of stages, lots of layers and – always – plenty of ups and downs. 
I’m stunned by how many people it takes to see a book on the shelves – how much effort from such dedicated teams.

If you’re looking for an agent, you could not do better than Sarah Manning of the Bent Agency and if you’re looking for a publisher, Touchstone Books and Simon and Schuster are just wonderful. My whole team could not be more supportive and I’m forever in their debt.

The most important thing about this writing journey is to never give up. Just keep swimming, as Dory would say. The only book you are guaranteed never to publish is the one that you haven’t written (or that you’ve never shown to another living soul). It took me 14 years and more rejections than you can paper a downstairs loo with – but my friends and family wouldn’t let me quit. Make sure you don’t either.

Although this isn’t a book about music (and particularly what we think of as ‘classical’ music), playing and listening to music forms a huge part of Grace’s life. Her greatest failure, the one that has held her back all her life, is totally bound up in - and related to - music. And then there are her triumphs, they too come wrapped in music; textured and coloured-in by the tunes that accompany them.

There are many different versions of the tunes below – you might enjoy searching out some different ones on the internet – but these are the versions I listened to when writing the book and the exact recordings that I imagined Grace and her friends listening to and playing.

Astor Piazzolla's Libertango
This is the song that gives Grace her wings. Piazzolla wrote this piece in 1974, and revolutionised tango music by incorporating elements of jazz and classical music. This version is played and arranged by Matthew Sharp, a British virtuoso of the ‘cello.

La Follia, arranged for ’cello by Maurice Gendron, Tanya Anismova

This is the tune David hears when Grace walks into a room and this is how she would play it on her own.

Vivaldi: La Follia

This is Vivaldi’s version of ‘La Follia’ – the same tune as above.

Invertible Counterpoint in the Finale of Mozart’s D Major String Quintet, K. 593
This is the final section of the quintet piece that Nikolai makes the six players sight read to fight for their place in the quintet. It’s really interesting to watch the analysis of the music as it’s written down and see what the different members of the quintet are reading as they play.

Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suite No.1 in G Major

Grace’s version played by Yo-Yo Ma. Nikolai told Grace that this is the best piece of music in the world to test out what your ‘cello can do.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/unaccompanied-cello-suite-no-1-in-g-major-bwv-1007-pr%C3%A9lude/380233895?i=380233897

Bach: Viola da gamba Sonatas, Daniel Muller-Schott and Angela Hewitt
This is the tune that Mathieu Scharf plays on Grace’s ’cello in the showcase. It was Jamie’s theme in the Anthony Minghella film, Truly Madly Deeply.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/viola-da-gamba-sonata-in-g-minor-bwv-1029-arr-for-cello/1155582523?i=1155583015

The Lark Ascending, Ralph Vaughan Williams
This is the tune Grace has on her music stand in the front of the shop to mark the advent of summer.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-lark-ascending/445272543?i=445272551

Elgar: Nimrod, Sir Edward Elgar

This is the tune she has to mark winter advancing and the time for reflection.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/elgar-nimrod/434978372?i=434978453

Simple Gifts from Appalachian Spring
This is a traditional Appalachian folk tune reworked by the American composer Aaron Copeland. This is best played with the volume turned to 11.

Béla Bartók - Romanian Folk Dances for String Orchestra Sz.56 BB 68
Bartok's Romanian folk dances!

Greensleeves, Jordi Savall
Jordi Savall's interpretation of ‘Greensleeves’.

I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango), Grace Jones
Grace Jones' version of ‘Libertango’!

The Ashokan Farewell, The Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines and Captain JR Perkins
This is a modern folk tune by the American musician Jay Ungar. This is one of the greatest tunes of all time (even though it doesn’t appear in the book).

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-ashokan-farewell/219802516?i=219802577

Pachelbel Canon in D, Pachabel String Quartet
People often associate this tune with the ’cello. Pachelbel was the original one-hit wonder (unless you count subsequent use of his music – this chord progression is used in The Farm’s ‘All Together Now’ and Coolio’s ‘I’ll See You When We Get There’ and lots of other hits). The ’cello part of this is just eight notes – although three of them are used twice so only five notes really – played 52 times. The ’cello is what makes the piece.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/pachelbel-canon-in-d/522888823?i=522889316

Exciting news! My fabulous US publishers Touchstone are running another Goodreads giveaway for 'Goodbye, Paris' in the run up to its publication in the US on August 7th this year. You can enter the giveaway from today.

Last week was International Lesbian Visibility Day – I hadn’t known it was a thing but it popped up on Twitter. For anyone who thinks we don’t need ‘special days’ to raise awareness of minority or marginalised groups, can I share a couple of stories from my week?

On Saturdays I go to a bootcamp: it’s a great group, a real cross section of society (at least, within the parameters set out by our little corner of south-east Kent). One of the girls I exercise with is pregnant with her fourth child and, as we discussed over press ups, the other three are all boys. ‘Golly,’ I said, ‘If it’s a girl, she’ll be an absolute princess with all those boys spoiling her rotten.’

‘Or she’ll be a big butch lesbian with three older brothers,’ said the mum-to-be.

I was silent for a second before I managed a pathetic, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’ But what I really wanted to say was…

‘If your daughter is gay (which is, I assume, what you were trying to express by using the words “big butch lesbian”) you will love her like life itself. You might have to love her more fiercely than you love your other three children because you will spend a lifetime, yours and hers, protecting her from pejorative words used as everyday reference. The phrase ‘big butch lesbian’ doesn’t need to be used in a civilised world and it certainly shouldn’t be used in front of children (it had been) who then might pick it up and assume it’s a perfectly normal or acceptable phrase, they might even believe it’s argot for gay women.

'Until people can understand the power of a badly chosen word or phrase, or the danger of debasing labels, we will need to have an International Lesbian Visibility Day – and all the other days that support marginalised or minority groups. Think about the everyday language you use and make sure it celebrates and supports the people you are describing. Words are special things; we should never underestimate their power.'

But instead, I said, 'There's nothing wrong with that.'

A couple of nights ago, randomly browsing the TV for a nightcap, I chanced across Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s long been in my old-favourites’ list; not least for Simon Callow’s adorable (and awfully sad) depiction of Gareth (and it’s got W H Auden). I liked it too, at the time, for being inclusive: having a main character with hearing loss was forward-thinking at the time (especially as he was played by the actor David Bower who is deaf). As I watched it this time though, I realised that Charles’ brother David isn’t actually included in many of the conversations in the film; just one of the starting points for my sudden – and quite Damascene – experience.

Carrie (a role that many people still haven’t forgiven for) isn’t very nice but Charles, at his Hugh Grantest, is an absolute shitbag. His character floats adrift in a sea littered with failed relationships; some with women smart enough to laugh at him, others (like poor Duckface) who are broken-hearted. And then, after sleeping with Carrie behind her fiancé’s back, he stands Duckface up at the altar. No wonder we needed Helen Fielding to come along and show us that these men (who were being coo-ed over and judged as ‘harmless’) needed to be rebranded as ‘emotional fuckwits’. And thank God she did.

This trope of ‘men who can’t help it’ ran for years in fiction and the media. In many respects it still does. A side note here, I’ve been dying to write the word trope in a post forever – ever since my friend Tracy told me what it meant. Coincidentally, when I woke up the morning after watching the film, Molly Ringwald’s piece had appeared in the New Yorker (a piece I really recommend you read). She writes so brilliantly about art that you ‘can simultaneously love and oppose’ that I urge you to read her piece.

Women’s fiction has run this trope (I mistyped then and put ‘tripe’) for years. It’s refreshing that the decade that has brought us #MeToo has also brought ‘uplit’, fiction designed to show us that kindness is the real route to happiness, and that women’s fiction doesn’t need to involve a feckless twat being, almost, tamed into a useful life partner. Rachel Joyce, Ruth Hogan, and Gail Honeyman have carved out a genre that is far more empowering to women, friendships, and personal strength, than the traditional depiction of romance.

Kismet, really, that Charles and Carrie should end up together. She was prepared to cheat on poor old Hamish, although she said she ‘wouldn’t do it once they were married’ and he jilted Henrietta at the altar: AT THE ALTAR, let’s think about that. We were rooting, through that not-so-real-rain, for a boy and a girl who were both emotional fuckwits.

I’ve only got one thing to say to you, Carrie (or, for that matter, Charles), be careful how you get them, because that’s how you lose them. And that trope doesn’t ever change.

My friend Jess owns an eyebrow salon. You take your eyebrows there and you come out svelte, groomed and attractive. While Jess was shaping and grooming my brows the other day, she told me how incredibly lucky she is. She has a great and growing business, staff she adores (and who adore her), two terrific kids, and a beautiful home. And she was surprised when I told her none of this is luck.

Jess has worked hard to get this ‘lucky’: she worked out of a shed in her garden when her babies were tiny; she took business risks and leapt forward wherever she could; her staff members are great because she both picks them well and treats them well. Are these things luck? Or are they the results of measured risk, hard work, and a good portion of ‘balls’.

Professor Richard Wiseman studied luck and how you find it. In 2003, I bought his brilliant book, The Luck Factor, for the ‘Women Returners’ I was teaching in Staffordshire. Some of them said they found it difficult to do their homework or get to college because they were single parents. I was a single parent who’d recently finished a first and second degree, so I didn’t have an awful lot of truck with that as an argument. The real reason those particular women couldn’t get it done was that they didn’t believe that they could (I hope a year at college proved to them that, in actual fact, they could do pretty much most things they put their minds to). Of course there are barriers: logistics; health; childcare; money (especially with student fees at an all-time high) - but the optimistic mind is far better prepared to scale these obstacles.

In an article for the Skeptical Enquirer  in 2003, Wiseman wrote that ‘lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.’ They also, he found, have optimistic memories. Lucky people remember fewer failures – and therefore take more risks. The more risks you take, the greater your chances of one paying off. Unlucky people remember the failures and are more guarded in future choices.

I’ll be talking about making your own luck on the Path to Publishing at the Kent Festival of Writing on April 14th. Writers have to do the necessary work to get lucky. We have to put in hours of making, ligging, creating, reshaping. We have to follow instructions, keep to deadlines, and respond to criticism in a positive and useful way. Much like any other job you want to do well really...

When I first started getting feedback from agents and editors, I used to rail against their comments – furious that they thought I had one character too many or my plot was implausible. The most important thing I learnt on my writing journey was to listen, to make the changes that people with more experience and a better eye suggested. And now, funnily enough, the more I take their advice on board, and the harder I work, and the more risks I take – the better I get at being lucky.

The best story from Wiseman’s research is this: I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

And then it gets better: Just for fun, I placed a second large message half way through the newspaper. This one announced: “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

I’ve seen The Greatest Showman twice now and intend to see it twice more before it leaves the cinema. It’s a glorious, old-fashioned musical and I heartily recommend it.

PT Barnum was no saint, if the storyline is to be believed, but what’s so interesting to me is the part of his personality that makes him – constantly – doubt his own self-worth and his achievements. I have a huge, and sometimes insurmountable, streak of this in me: one of my school-friends once described my daughter (as a child) as ‘like you if you’d had confidence’.

I have absolutely no doubt that this deep-seated doubt and need to have friends and family constantly prove their allegiance comes from being an adopted child. I was adopted at 9 weeks old, and have no way of knowing whether I was with my natural mother for that time or in foster care. I was born in an unmarried mothers’ home in Liverpool and my research shows that mothers were encouraged to keep their babies with them while they were in the home, partly as it made it easier to care for the infants, and partly to make sure the mothers ‘learnt their lesson.’ When my parents picked me up, it was from a foster home in Liverpool where a number of babies were being looked after. No one knows, or at least remembers, how old I was when I arrived there.

In the 1960s, 150,000 children a year were put up for adoption. At the end of that decade, the Abortion Act became law and far fewer young women, and babies, were forced to go through the trauma of separation. My granddaughter is nine weeks old this week: she smiles, she communicates, and she looks at her parents with such love and adoration. It cannot be possible that losing that security and bond, even at that age, leaves no effect on a human being. Attachment Separation Anxiety is a very real thing that can follow people throughout their lives and can make relationships very difficult, even just with yourself.

When I introduce my, rather naughty, spaniel to people, I always excuse him because ‘he’s a rescue.’ There was a time when we didn’t extend that amount of understanding to human beings. I was a tricky child, an awkward teenager, and even as an adult I’ve never shaken off some of the demons – nowadays, I try and ask myself (before I think it’s my fault or that those around me might not really love me) ‘is it because I’m a rescue?’

It’s so important to think twice about people’s behaviour and what it is that might be behind their motivations. We can almost never know. It’s important for writing too: a writer needs to be absolutely aware of these chinks in the character’s armour, of traits and motivations that the character may never have actively recognised in themselves, if the character’s actions are to be in any way robust or plausible.

I know the echoes of this Separation Anxiety can be very tiring for my family and friends and often put a strain on relationships but luckily for me, like Hugh Jackman’s P T Barnum, I am loved by more than just a few good people.

"The scariest moment is always just before you start" says Stephen King in On Writing.

In 2016, BBC Get Creative asked me to share my top five tips for getting going on creative writing. Here they are again, followed by a couple of short case studies showing what writing creatively could bring to your life.

Your stories will never happen if you don’t write them. Believe that writing is for you. You want to do it and that’s, literally, all that you need to start. Classes really help. Ask around for a good teacher that people would recommend. In one fell swoop you gain encouragement, a tutor, an editor, and a writing tribe of new friends who are on the same journey as you. There are lots of online courses and forums of writers if you prefer to do things over the internet.

And then read some more. And then some more. The more you read, the more you will be able to write. Don’t worry that you’ll end up copying someone else’s style – you simply won’t. Name your own project. As soon as you tell people you’re writing, they’ll ask you what you’re working on. If you can say, ‘I’m writing a short story called ‘___’ or a novel about ‘________’ you’ll feel much more confident in yourself as a writer. Reading will improve your writing. Writing will also improve your writing; practice really does make perfect.

When you say the words on the page out loud, you can instinctively feel which phrases sparkle and resonate, and which are less engaging. Your brain has been working hard on sorting out words and sentences all your life; listen to this finely tuned instrument and take note of what it tells you.

Use your experiences and other people’s to build stories and characters. In schools this is known as ‘magpie-ing’, collecting shiny details and interesting traits from wherever you might find them. Carry a notebook everywhere you go.

Make your characters rounded and deep. Find a real-life stranger who looks interesting and ask yourself, what is their name? Where do they come from? What do they carry in their pockets and why? What do they want more than anything else in the whole world? Dress your characters in the clothes you see people wearing, add real life characteristics – a hand gesture from one, a voice from another, the way they run their fingers through their hair. Remember that hands are every bit as expressive as faces.

When your characters speak, keep it neat and short. In real life we splutter and repeat ourselves and use the same words over and over, those things don’t work in print. Use ‘said’ rather than ‘exploded’ or ‘spat’ or ‘whined’. Believe it or not ‘said’ becomes invisible in writing – check in some of your favourite books.

 Believe in yourself and your ability to write. Just get words onto the page. You can chop out things that don‘t work later on and no one will even know they were ever there. The beauty of writing is that it’s infinitely revisable. No character, phrase or storyline is ever lost. Keep the things/people you’ve cut from a story in a file of clippings. I’m about to write a novel using a character I developed and then cut ten years ago. And always remember, you don’t have to know how a story ends when you start it.

A few exercises to get you going:

Describe your walk from home to somewhere familiar. Make sure you use all five senses. What did you smell? What did you touch and how did it feel in your hand? What could you see, which colours, shapes, surprises? Where there tastes in your mouth, what were they like? If you include all these things in your short journey, you will be showing, not telling. This will keep your reader right in the action. Now change your story from first person to third person (or vice versa depending which you instinctively used)

Look at first and last lines books you love. See how much of the promise of the book they carry. Write a story that starts with someone else’s first line

The rules, rhythms and shapes of ‘art’ are the same across disciplines. Go to an art exhibition, a concert, a dance, then write a story based on the feelings it invoked. The Greeks called this ekphrasis

Put two characters together and let them swap some dialogue about something simple like a meal Make them have different opinions and speak in different ways (perhaps one is mousy and one bombastic - maybe one is loquacious and the other curt)

Write a short passage about something you know and others might not. Perhaps you have climbed a mountain or been inside a castle. Imagine that the person you’re writing for has never seen this place and tell them about it

I started my blog on International Women’s Day by coincidence, not by design but it does chime with a recent experience of mine. In January I was lucky enough to go to my daughter’s Baby Shower. I was a bit unsure: weren’t Baby Showers a twee American import involving lots of coy games and fluffy notions of what birth and babies will entail? Maybe once they were. But I had seriously underestimated this group of strong, modern, and – frankly - hilarious young women.

The young women that I spent that January evening with are the embodiment of feminism; they have shaken it down into a supportive, liveable, workable, way of life – they are a team. They make their own choices, celebrate mistakes and triumphs, and support each other through – despite not being quite into their thirties – miscarriage, cancer, and relationship breakdowns. They have allowed themselves to enjoy sex, to discuss their own physicality, and to be proud of all their choices; whatever they may be. They are comfortable with their bodies, with their sexuality, and with their right to make their own decisions. I applaud them. I am glad that, one day, they’ll be able to discuss the menopause openly in a way that was denied to my mother’s generation and is still only the thin end of the wedge in mine. These girls can make cupcakes AND work/laugh/DIY/have whichever relationships they want. They make their own rules.

I was afraid of feminism when I was young; my aunt wore a badge throughout the 80s that said ‘anyone who wants to be equal to a man lacks ambition’ and, whilst funny, I didn’t think it was awfully helpful. I thought that feminism was, by default, aggressive and bombastic. My mother, on the other hand, never emblazoned herself with such slogans but would quietly lay a patio if one needed laying and expected proper women to own an electric drill; and yet,  as a very young woman, I didn’t see my mother as a feminist because she loved to knit and sew. At school I was taught that my ambition – to raise a large (noisy) family (tick) was letting feminism down, and that didn’t help my perception of feminism or myself. Now, I know my mother was the prototype post-modern feminist. Knitting, sewing, embroidering because she wanted to (and because she was very good at it), not because she had to.

It wasn’t just me struggling to assimilate feminism and my place in society. I remember asking a friend (an Oxford graduate) out on a ‘Girls’ Night Out’ in the early 80s. She refused on the grounds she couldn’t disgrace feminism in that way. If I changed the title to a ‘Women’s Night Out’ she said, she would come. I didn’t, she didn’t: the rest of us had a right laugh.

And talking of laughs, my daughter’s Baby Shower wasn’t fluffy, or coy, or even particularly pink. One of the girls organising it (yes, Pauline ((the Oxford Grad)), I called a woman in her late twenties – a working woman, someone’s mother, a home-owner – a ‘girl’ because I can and because I want to) asked everyone to bring a copy of their favourite childhood book and to write a message to the baby in the front of it so that she would have a, very personal, library of her own by the time she was born. The messages were beautiful; I couldn’t read any of them out loud without crying. They celebrated friendship, they offered love, and they told my daughter’s unborn girl that she could be anyone she wanted to.

There was wine, and pizza, and cake. And then we played games, in teams of women: how many items can you remember that the Hungry Caterpillar ate; how much do you know about the mother-to-be; and – my favourite – a picture round called ‘Labour or Porn’. It’s a wonderful brave new world.

Happy International Women’s Day to girls, women, mothers, daughters, boys, men, fathers, sons, and all the other feminists.

(6 weeks later...)