The Obsessive Diary

Did you catch the LIVE I did with Alisa Kennedy Jones yesterday? If not, here it is: It was a blast. Alisa has become a friend and colleague, but way before I knew her I fell in love with her memoir, Gotham Girl Interrupted: My Misadventures in Motherhood, Romance, and Epilepsy Alisa writes like she’s talking right at you, her brilliant brain firing on all cylinders and then some. I knew nothing a...

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My friends got me out. Realising I was missing from the weekends in Harare they came to see me. I remember Eddy, who wanted to be a policeman one day, sat on the floor in the hall while I faced the priest in his kitchen. He heard me tell the priest that I would report him, and he heard the priest reply no one would believe me, which turned out to be right. But my friends got me out and we went to...

My mum, who hates planes, who has a fear of flying, who at this very moment is lying in a hospital bed in the endgame of life, did something reckless and caring and got on a plane and landed in Harare and found me at the priest’s house up to my neck in painkillers, sleeping pills and whisky. The priest, large and fat, who liked to make out his pillar-ness in the community, had a wife who was small...

Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood before thirty children and tried to teach them things I thought I knew; the alphabet, how to spell “definitely”. In my hut I learnt to make dinner with one pot, a relentless vegetable stew that Willy eschewed for beer at the pub with the friends...

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A bunch of White, English, public-school kids off to teach in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong. We gathered at Heathrow, I said goodbye to my mother, we flew to Harare via a skidding touchdown in snowy Sofia. At a farmstead we put up our brand-new tents and drank beer and tried out our thin camping mattresses on each other as if we were still in Chelsea. We met the priest in whose care we we...

His footsteps on the stairs, not the boy (I’d got him) but my father whose ferry had not left for France because of the hurricane that had ripped through England, ripping it apart. He’d turned his Porsche around and returned to London, parked it in the garage below my sister’s flat and seen the door kicked open. I was on my knees when I saw his feet, his shoes, looked up, saw him. I was scrubbing...

Home was a tall, cold house in London; intellectual, artistic, my father a writer, my mother an architect, guests, lodgers, friends and strangers, the bedrooms full of us and them, paintings on the walls, politics at the table. I moved amongst it all being pretty and clever, a seventies childhood of lentils and greens and feeling unseen, the house too full, my mother too busy, my father rarely the...

I rang him from a payphone in the arrivals hall. I hadn’t told him I was coming. I saw him weaving through the crowds of families reunited, suitcases, children, the sunshine of Israel glinting through the glass walls. He wore a yellow T-shirt. Sensible trousers. His tendrils of black hair were gone. For the first time I noticed his eyes were a little too close together. He took me by the arm and t...

I sat with the Rabbi in his plush, Regency room, red cushions, a view of the park. I told him I wanted to convert to Judaism. At school I had sided with the Jewish girls, opted for Jewish prayers instead of Christian, I felt that those beginnings at a private girls’ school on Harley Street had come full circle, it was meant to be. I told the Rabbi I was committed. My feet were bare, he was kind, h...

I found my voice in the hands of a self-styled Colonel Kurtz on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. A white man running from something, he’d decided himself a temple father, fat under a palm tree handing out easy wisdoms to lost girls like me. My Israeli and I had gone to Bangkok to renew our Indian visas; with our passports stamped we travelled out to the islands for a bit more beach life, Colonel...

The Israeli was handsome and unkind. I grew fat on German pastries, he poked my backside and said so. His cool Israeli friends came over and sat about smoking chillums; a complicated series of rituals which I got wrong. How to mix the charas and tobacco in your palm, how to pack it and wrap your special ragged cloth about the base, the boom shanker throw of a prayer and touch to the forehead, how...

My boyfriend and I took off on the motorbike, a Royal Enfield Bullet heavy with luggage, and purring. We headed first to meet his brother – also estranged until now – for a few nights of giant beetles flying into my hair and then north up the Western Ghats. The monsoon chased us. We’d mistimed our travels and no matter how fast we rode, the rains caught up. We stopped soaked and freezing in tea pl...

When I was eighteen, I met a boy who told me a story of being kidnapped from his mother when he was four years old. He was taken to England by his father, never to see her again. In my mind I saw a room in southern India, gossamer curtains, a broad messy bed of white sheets, a mother sleeping with a child in her arms. I saw a man creep in, he was a pilot so I put him in pilot’s uniform, no jacket....

The days are beginning to meld into each other and it’s only August, the beginning of my working year that will end next June. Such a long way off yet it’ll pass in a flash, I know it will, time is doing that, I’m getting older and it is speeding up. Thank god I’m sober or else there’s a good chance I’d miss it completely. That’s one of the unmistakable boons of not drinking. Yes, I’m here all the...

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Housekeeping: I’ll be LIVE in conversation with Orna Ross tomorrow, Wednesday 13th 12:30pm BST. Orna is the founder of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), the global membership association empowering writers to create great books, reach more readers, and build successful publishing businesses . Their campaigns advocate for indie authors in the literary and publishing sectors, while their m...

Back in the day we made stickers and t-shirts and proclaimed the wares of Daizy Shop in Nimbin, Kaz’s shop that she brought to markets in her battered estate wagon wearing those glasses she gave me which made sure she was taken seriously. Riot Not Diet. Mean Old B***h. Professional Queue Jumper. I don’t remember the moment we met, me and Mel (can you remind me?) but we knew immediately that we wer...

A day of surprises. I met with Vicki Lesley for a zoom, both us feeling there was something good to be mined from our connection and we weren’t wrong. An immediate sense of hello, we’ve more than we can fit in this quick hour of establishing ground. She reminded me it was the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima. I lit a candle and we talked bombs. Here’s link to the post she put out in commemoration. I...

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Housekeeping: I’ll be in conversation with Cherry Coombe today, 2pm BST. Subscribe now, or keep an eye 👀 on Notes for when we go LIVE. I noticed Cherry’s skill in the way one does here, while wandering along, perusing something else, her phrases arrested me. I told her so and she took the hint, girded her loins and started serialising her novel, Rivering . So far so normal. It was only later, and...

Worked. Took M & B to the station, realised we’d forgotten the crumble, turned back, got it, drove again, they missed the train but got the next one. Rode with T. Lunch with P. Arrived early and sat with my book and fizzy water, half concentrating on Shirley Jackson, half on the table near by, one of those heavens of stuff and nonsense largesse that the English countryside makes its own. I’d seen...

Things are going to change around here. I began work this morning, and those precious first few hours of the day before the world encroaches which had been the sole ownership of this diary are to be given, now, to the novel I’m editing for serialisation. It’s called, The Moderns. I’ll say more about it once I’ve got a launch date in sight. Instead, this diary will have to find its place squeezed i...

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