The Circle of Stuff

So I went to London, to help my friend move house.  It seemed like such a good idea – I would help her but also lose myself in cleaning and packing, in lugging stuff around and then reversing the process at the other end. Pass the parcel. Pack, unpack. A circle of stuff.

I even took my running kit, thinking I’d jog round the streets and parks of North London. But instead I sort of came undone. I unravelled.  I became more and more unreal.  And, as if to compensate, in a vain desperate attempt to pull me back to the here and now, my body started to hurt…badly. 

I hadn’t quite realized where she was moving to, hadn’t clocked it was nearly back where I used to live, twenty years ago or more. And past and present collided and left me winded. Neither here nor there.  A nobody person lost in nowhen nowhere.

And I was reading this amazing book, by Sandie Dent (don’t bother Googling it – the few agents she tried couldn’t see the gemstone glittering in their darkness), and that just compounded the schism somehow. A woman, around middle-age, goes back to her teenage home and clashes into old friendships, past loves and remembers/dismembers the past.  Dis – the Roman god of the underworld, of course, fell Hades.  And I, such a wan Persephone, always in love with darkness.

‘Do you like pomegranates?’ said my friend as she flung stuff into a trolley at Waitrose.

‘Not any more,’ I replied. Maybe I never did. 

Nothing makes any sense.  Maybe it never did.  Ain't life funny?  

I thought I’d go out, once the boxes were unpacked, once things were transferred to corners, in piles, trying to adjust to their new spaces.  I thought I’d wander down Church Street, maybe have a drink in a café, bob in and out of a few shops, trace my fingers over the gravestones in the cemetery.  But I felt too alien. It would all have felt fake. I walked past my old house, past the places where I lived and loved and laughed and cried.  And none of it felt like it belonged to me.  Now even my memories have turned tail and run run away. You gotta laugh, right?  

So I walked back, to the place that wasn't the place I loved, across the wide space of the park and came across an enclosure of deer.  My memory has no deer.  Were they always there and I didn’t know?  Or maybe I didn’t notice. Maybe their entrapment didn’t bother me then, when I had no fences around me.  Back then, when I thought I wanted to be encircled.

And there was a goat too.  It looked at me incuriously. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a cliff or a mountain or even a tree on a beach to climb?’ I said.  It turned away.  Either it didn’t care or it knew that it didn't make any difference. Wherever you go, there you are.   

I limped back to the new place.  Worked on through the pain.  Because every muscle and joint in my body was/is hurting.  It feels like I’m being pulled apart at the seams, bone by bone, cell by cell.  I think I would like to crawl away now, into that hole in the forest where hurt animals go to lick their wounds.  It would be…peaceful. Piece fall? 

Stoke Newington Literary Festival

Stoke Newington.  A chunk of my past I’m set to revisit next weekend.  I lived there 20 years ago, in the sweetest house tucked away down a side-street, nearly backing onto Abney Park cemetery (one of the great Victorian graveyards of London).  I loved that house. Loved Stokey.  Crazy happy days.

Anyhow, some good friends still live there and one of them, the lovely Liz, launched the Stoke Newington Literary Festival last year. It was, to put it mildly, a resounding success.

"A literary festival that's thrown its pretensions in a skip" The Londonist

"The coolest literary festival of the summer" Authonomy (eh, what?)

So, year one was fabulous but year two looks like it’s going to be even bigger and better.  Hence I’m hoiking myself up to London again and taking myself for a trip down memory lane.  Past the pub  that banned me (totally unfair – case of mistaken identity); past the flat I used to visit on my astral travels; through the cemetery where I wafted with bits of old lace tangled through my white haystack of hair…

But don’t let the idea of my old mad molecules still floating round there put you off.  Stokey is a fab place – a little hidden village in inner city London.  It revels in a rich literary heritage and if gothic, supernatural, ghostly and horrific rocks your boat, you simply cannot afford not to go.  But don't take my word for it: here’s the blurb.

“2011 is the second Stoke Newington Literary Festival, created to celebrate the area's long and influential literary history and to keep the spirit of radical thinking, debating and story-telling alive.

This year, we'll be shining the spotlight on some of the people that have helped put Stoke Newington on the cultural map, in particular Edgar Allen Poe and Mary Wollestonecraft. We'll also be bringing you some of the UK's most exciting debut novelists, a superb line-up of poets who'll be popping up at events throughout the weekend as well as a programme that covers ska, dissent, cycling, punk, gangs and ghosts.”

There are loads of events and it most certainly isn’t Poe-faced (sorry, that was unforgiveable) – there’s tons for children (from age 3 upwards) so if you want your children to love books, this could be a way to lure them in.  I’m going to as many events as I can squeeze into one weekend without going word-blind but, in particular, I’m looking forward to meeting some of my online friends who’re doing a gig on Saturday – The New Libertines at the Baby Bathhouse at 4pm. 

Check out the programme.  Book some tickets (but hurry, they're selling out fast).  Come and tap me on the shoulder (just be warned, the waist-length white hair has gone – and thank feck for that!).

A few highlights (well, the ones I like):

Friday 3^rd June: 2pm: Chainsaw Gang – have modern vampires lost their bite? Four rising children’s horror authors bite, snarl and growl.  12+ (unless accompanied by brave adult)

2pm: Arsenal Story Telling Event – er, right…”fun football stories, games and riddle” – fun and football don’t sit happily together in my lexicon but hey ho…might encourage reluctant readers. 6-12 years.

4pm: In Conversation with David Walliams.  ‘nuff said.  Except I didn’t know he wrote children’s books.  Family event.

8pm: The Life and Works of Alexander Baron – his cult novel about the London underworld, The Lowlife, is considered a major antecedent to punk.

Saturday 4^th June: 10am – Dr Seuss event.  Including a visit from the Cat in the Hat. 5-8 years.

3.30pm: The Life and Influence of Edgar Allan Poe – Poe lived in Stoke Newington and a panel discuss his work before Steven Berkoff discusses his own adaption of The Tell Tale Heart.

Sunday 5^th June: 1pm: Pete Brown’s Beer and Book matching – what ale should you read while drinking Dostoevsky?  Pete’s a good bloke – this should be a cracker.