The Obsessive Diary

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Here are three other memories I carried unbroken and unquestioned. Every night I would slide down the banister of the tall, cold house, curving polished wood beside stone, and when I reached the dark ground floor, I’d slide all the way up again. But one night I didn’t. I waited, my legs dangling, waiting as I had outside for him, and realising slowly that with him the magic had gone. I remember di...

When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees who knew her and that is their best guess. Our home, the tall...

He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the candles turned black. He said it was an attack, he was always in battle with dark forces. I wrote my first novel over those six weeks, a story of a girl who goes to India and loses her mind. When he returned, I put it in a drawer. We went to...

There’s a blank wall of silence in my mind when I try and think back, to capture the essence of what it was like to live and work with a boy from Kent who called himself a shaman, who’s still out there, working. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t know where to start. Is it enough to say that we ran sweat lodges every three weeks, hordes of naked crying people crawling in and out of a pitch-dark dome in...

It’s going to be all right. This story that has been going from frying pan to fire has a happy outcome in the end. I feel the need to tell you that because from here on in it gets darker and the oh no what’s next can be exhausting. So remember as we dive and the air becomes stifled and the pressure builds that there is a lowest point, and when we get there, we’ll turn around and start coming up fo...

A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious. Of all of them he was the worst, not because his delusion was any greater but for his intent. The others – the people who had crossed my path and abused their power – were convinced, if they thought about it at all, that they were doing me g...

I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted into this thing we’d started, a commune in Surrey, everyone else getting on with it but I was lost. I’d set about my bedroom floor with white gloss, a fresh start, and forgotten to leave a way out. Barefoot, dripping paintbrush, my back against the wall, he appeared in the...

I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have to remind myself that these are not a fluke, these daily posts that I get up and write every day. These episodes have been churning for decades. But here’s the thing, it’s only now when I string them together that they tell a story that I d...

That motherfucker. He smashed my brain. I’d moved to a flat in Tottenham with other students, a place we could watch our thoughts, police each other and go limp together. I would wake at five and make my packed lunch and drive to the freezing outdoor pool in Hampstead where I’d dive in and swim thirty lengths. At school by six, within a term the third years had given me the keys to open up the bui...

It didn’t say cult in the brochure. It said, We will make you the best actor ever , or some such s**t because he was full of grand claims, the man who ran it. He’s dead now, of a cancer that had any student brought to the table, he would have ridiculed and shamed. He was like that. He believed in breaking you down. He’d been trained through Est, a psychotherapy system that was watered down into Th...

There was a song we used to play, the words had her name in them, Lordy don’t leave me, the Carpenter listened to it over and over. Her name was Lourdes, she’d arrived in our lives when the sun shone and everything was new, our first May Queen, she had black ringlet hair and the way she would say his name I can still hear now, the slant of a Portuguese accent, she seemed so knowledgeable. It was g...

And all this time we’d been building a stone circle. Inch by inch over slow grass from pile to track to hole in the ground, the rise and fall of the moon marked in rock. A year and a bit, from Beltane to Summer Solstice, the last weekend of every month. In sunny weather crowds came, through winter hardly anyone at all. One wet and miserable December with only twelve of us up there we’d put in thre...

We’d gutted a rabbit on the central stone the day Father Juniper came to exorcise the children. Blood and entrails smeared a rock. It didn’t look great. We saw him lumbering up the field towards us, an enormous wooden crucifix over his shoulder. The hem of his brown robe was dampened by grass, his sandals snagged dandelions, his string of beads swung with every step. A squat woman followed dressed...

Because every good story needs a sacrifice and something lost. Jesus – devilish handsome, funny and sweet, an electricity coming off him like fire – god we’d had fun that summer; the sparks of something forbidden, an escape from a commune that had taken over and a marriage I hadn’t meant to make. In the normality of the Director’s house I laughed and ate ham and felt like just a girl. Jesus was my...

Not the real Jesus, obviously. The actor playing Jesus, and the effect he had was unholy. It was instant, that thing I didn’t know I’d been missing. With the Director, who still makes me laugh to this day, I found a real friend and with Jesus I found something biblical. It fizzed. It was alive. From the moment we locked eyes. I remember walking into the Director’s kitchen and thinking, S**t. These...

Remember the girl we sprang from Hackney Marsh psychiatric unit where we danced to the broken strip light in the lift? We returned from Scotland to a chaos expressed by her – pyramids of used teabags all over the fields, and in the house, wedged into corners, teddy bears facing mirrors. She’d broken down. My man disappeared into Vispassana, meditating twice a day but I had no faith. And the stones...

I was on the phone to Suzy. She mentioned Joe Dispenza, who I’d never heard of. It’s my last day in NYC, I woke crazy early and after the call I pottered about for a bit, packing, then came down to the salon at 4am, as has been my habit this past week, with my bag of mushroom coffee where the night porter sorts me a pot of hot water. As the lift doors opened I heard the voice of a man talking abou...

Shall we take a breath? Because it’s hard, this memoir business, and what happened yesterday and twenty-six years ago, was painful. A man died on my wedding day and we never talked about it, Angel man and me, at least I don’t remember we did, not how I would now when something scarring like that happens. I know we were in shock but we were also young and without the tools and wherewithal to unders...

It’s true, I rode side-saddle, barefoot, silk butterflies tied to my toes, glass jewels about my eyes, a white slip hemmed with pearls and roses, a Victorian veil, a crown of flowers, nine maidens. Our guests divided, the women with me, the men with you to the wedding circle high on the hill. Flautists in the trees, drummers on the path, gongs hanging from branches made echo in the wind, a late-su...

Yesterday a package arrived from my brother’s office, a file of things my father had kept, the notice of my birth, letters from me to him, addresses of all the places I have lived from Zimbabwe to Australia, and among it all was the newspaper article about my wedding in the woods. That’s what happens when you open cupboards, all this stuff flies out, brothers, without warning, send you packages th...

On the way up 7th from the west village, a man whose jaw stuck way out said, “I like being abused.” His lower teeth prominent like tombstones on a shelf, the opposite of buck. His friend nodded. On the way back, at the same spot, a woman behind me said, “Where do you even keep a horse in New York?” And in between these golden nuggets, hundreds of thousands of people, banners held high, marched in...

We used to hang out at the Bonnington Café in Vauxhall, but he didn’t propose to me there. He chose a farm trailer parked by the metal barn, straw bales against my back. He’d written a song and I didn’t see it coming. He was always singing something, devoted to his band, they wanted to make it big. My six-foot-seven Angel man; when we’d moved into the farm, I’d gone out to an architectural salvage...

I spent a month in the desert of Sedona training to be a yoga teacher. I hung out with a man and his guitar singing songs that sounded like Paris, Texas. I hitched a ride in a camper and drove down through Utah and New Mexico where the rocks are piled like coins. I met an old friend and got hit by a truck on the highway, nearly turning us over. I flew home with yoga fitness to a commune thriving w...

I’ve reached the end of my retreat. Today is my last day. Tomorrow I fly to NYC. It’s been enriching, deepening, hard work and holy. All that I asked it to be. Thanks to Deirdre I’ve been meditating for longer, thanks to this house I’ve been held in Divine abeyance of normal life, and thanks to the teeming life inside and out I’ve had company. I’ve learnt that trees sleep and giant cicadas have a...