The Obsessive Diary

Let me set the scene. Me and Angel man. A carpenter who looked like Jesus. A pianist, blonde, many rings, she played the Michael Nyman tune from The Piano almost constantly. A man of the woods and his Wiccan wife and her daughter. An ex-trucker turned megalithic giant. A soft-spoken road protester who’d lived up a tree. A long, thin, angular beanpole with glasses. An old man and white-haired woman...

But first I jumped naked off a viaduct in Normandy. Almost naked. We’d driven in convoy, Angel man and me, to a festival in northern France where there were more crew than punters and we lay about in the sunshine smoking pot and he said, Let’s go bungee jumping . It was appropriate, that leap into nothing, trusting a rope I couldn’t see and trusting the calculations of others who said if I reached...

The queue snaked round the block hidden by traveller’s vans. It was fifty pence on the door, up stairs so narrow you had to pass sideways. At the top, a bar fashioned out of a plank of wood across a doorway, behind us coats were thrown onto a mattress on the floor. We sold cheese and gave away booze to get around the licensing laws. The mushroom tea was free, ladled into plastic cups from a vast,...

I don’t think I’d told my friends I was the kind of girl who got keys through the post from law firms in Westminster about houses that were empty and mine, but they took it in their stride. As we piled into my camper - my tall and pretty as an angel boyfriend, his dog, some of the band, a few friends who’d been passing by - I remembered the last time I’d been there. It had been a day like that one...

I was living in a squat in Ealing when the key came through the door. Hang on. Let’s roll back a bit. The sea of bodies parted, he was six foot seven and had the face of an angel, we hugged hello and maybe we hung out a bit on that pulsing psychedelic dance floor and then we went our separate ways. The next time we met was by firelight in the woods near Newbury where a camp was set up to protest t...

I’m midway through my retreat, and midway through the first draft, and much as it feels like I’m wading through concrete, I’m on course to have a 30,000 word novella in the bag before I fly to NYC. That’s my aim. There was no way I could complete a first run at a novel in 30 days, but a treatment for a novel that will give me and my agent and pretty good idea if this idea has legs, that I can do....

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Retrieving my van from the dripping wood where I’d left it to go to Czechoslovakia, I returned to Latimer Road in West London, the house in which I’d lived before my detour to Glastonbury and snare in a ménage à trois. It was a time of parties and protests, MDMA and Reclaim The Streets, me and my split-screen camper with its twenty-one windows and a roof that slid back, a miniature sink and tiny p...

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Home to the tall, cold house in London, my ruptured disc and I, this place of my childhood where Hollywood stars lit cigarettes with survivors of Russian oppression, where refugees and royalty passed each other on the stairs. Or used to. As a child, my father’s friends and my mother’s politics built a world of artists and argument. My father was Scottish aristocracy, a Tory-voting, Maggie-loving,...

The house in France was a haven and still is. It sits on a crystal mountain on the edge of a national park, its walls hold a peace and a sanctuary. It’s where my parents spent time together without one of them disappearing off to his studio and the other packing her car on a Sunday night. There were guests, but they were nice, the rooms were broad and warm, the garden messy and secret, at night wi...

I don’t remember much because my disc was slipping. Because I was out of my mind in pain. Rainbow Gatherings are surreal places at the best of times, an army of people who believe in walking, they collect around the world in barefoot harmony, moved by a prophesy that the People of the Rainbow will make war go away. Everything is shared, there’s a sense of life simplified, a medieval camping trip w...

There was a connection with Czechoslovakia that I didn’t think of as I set off in that coach, a shaved head, a disc slipping. In the tall, cold house in London where I’d grown up, we’d had a nanny, a refugee from the revolution, the Prague Spring that was crushed by the Russians. My mother had taken many people in and this nanny was one of them, she was given the flat in the basement and the job o...

I was caught off guard by the heat; 31 degrees in September, balmy t shirt weather and I’d forgotten how much further south I was from Paris. The house greeted me with a hug and a sudden bird flying fast through the sitting room and cannoning head first into the window. I gently laid a tea towel over it as it panted half bruised and awkward caught sideways in the radiator. Outside I expected it to...

“Relationship? What relationship? You were just renting a room.” Gaslighting hadn’t reached Somerset in 1995 but even if it had I’m not sure I’d have named it, I was that shocked. In his kitchen, the uneven floor and books falling over, the dog looking up at me, I’d made the mistake of naming that other thing, heartbreak, betrayal, cruelty. He looked at me and I looked at him and only one of us wa...

They moved me out in inches. It began with a mushroom trip. Pigtails and the girl, two peas in a pod went out under the stars arm in arm. I saw them seated on a log in the herb garden that he and I had built. I left them to it. I told myself I was being mature. They stayed up, or at least out, all night. I know this because he didn’t come to bed. And the next morning when I saw them in the kitchen...

Protests in Paris, over half a million people on the streets, the taxi driver cursed blocked roads and sirens, la gendarmerie waved us from trouble into bottle necks of horns blaring, Parisians throwing up their hands. Avoid the Bastille he said as I got out at Citizen M, à côté de la Gare de Lyon. I love how the French strike at the drop of a hat, they are socialist to their core, it is written i...

It’s been a busy few days. On Tuesday we held the memorial dinner for my mum, a London affair for her London life, Susan Walker, architect and school governor. My brother hosted, the room was nicely filled, I knew a few people but not all, many of her students turned up, those who’d come to her practice as part of the study for theirs. My brother spoke, her practice colleague gave a speech and the...

I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and him; in my mind I was in bliss. For six months I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, made candles for the candle shop, labelled bottles for the incense shop, fired chai pots in the pottery, struck up friendships in the high street, fetched wa...

It seems these are a litany of relationships gone wrong, choices made to do with men and not to do with me. That’s what happens when you write a memoir. A thirty-thousand-foot view, you get to see the pattern of the streets. That summer of 1994 I was supposed to be starting an artist’s collective with the girl I’d met at the Chelsea Town Hall. We’d had it all mapped out. There was a building off P...

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I always found, “Empty nest?” a supremely irritating phrase, yet it happened yesterday. Though they’ve both been away from home since they were sixteen, when I got back on Saturday from the two hour round trip to east London delivering Blake to university, Jacobi already a week into his new life at the opposite end of town, this home felt exactly like that. A nest that was empty. It’s never felt l...

A photograph was sent to me last week by a Dakini goddess. She didn’t know I was writing this memoir, could not have known that the photo would arrive precisely at the point where the story and image coincide. Isn’t that beautiful? This process brushes with magic. Such is the way of digging and time travel. On the day it was taken I’m drifting arm in arm with my friend through the Harvest Fair, it...

Who knew that a bursting fallopian tube would burst the sense of what’s the point? I woke up with the gloves off, a nineteen-year-old in a raver's paradise, Manchester at the height of her powers. The hospital ward of pink fluffy slippers and women with no wombs held me for a week of painful recovery. My mother came to see me. So did the boy. And then I put on my brown corduroy hotpants and Minnie...

Let’s roll forward. It’s 1990, Manchester. I am in my first year at university, not yet living in the house where I would meet the boy who’d been kidnapped by his father from his mother’s arms. I am in Fallowfield halls of residence, three flights up from the smooth walkways of campus. The Haçienda is open but I haven’t been there yet. I’m trying to fit in and forget about the boy who is no longer...