The Obsessive Diary

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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...

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...