The Obsessive Diary

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Let me expand because we were a village of misfits and outcasts, a tribe of off-grid outer-reaches travellers with an open-door policy that attracted the lost and the lonely as much as the brilliant and brave. We were unruly, anarchic, we somehow governed each other and ourselves. Healers, musicians, mystics, those who made sure the s**t pits were dug, others who prayed and cried. Bodgers and woof...

This is how we did it. Telegraph poles and railway sleepers, an engineer taught us how to use a windlass; a rope looped around a stone and a tree, and tightened with a stick turned clockwise, a coordination of hands to keep it winding and stop it snapping out of control and spinning anticlockwise; an arm was broken once, and once the rope broke and whipped me. But first we had to lever each stone...

This post is dedicated to Lourdes, who we loved. I can name her because of what happened, but it doesn’t happen yet. I have a photograph of her in her finery, dancing round the maypole in a blue satin dress, her arm raised in song moments before she met her king, the carpenter who dances behind her. She was Portuguese, Wiccan, dark curls, silk voice. She appeared in the commune that Beltane as the...

They came in droves, the druids, led by ex-trucker turned megalithic giant, Ivan McBeth. He was the friend from Longleat who’d opened my eyes to the fuckery of the man with pigtails. Next time you’re at Glastonbury Festival, go to the Swan Circle. He built it. His ghost roams those stones amongst the people off their heads, his ashes are scattered there. When I’d arrived at the farm, I’d looked fr...

I finished a shitty first draft the day before yesterday and hey presto, like clockwork, yesterday I fell off an emotional cliff, caught somewhat by two Sams. It always happens; not the being caught by two Sams but the falling off. I’m locked in. I get to the end. I have a small cry. I wake up the next morning and am hit by a gust of such existential angst and, What’s the f*****g point that it kno...

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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...