mns  2010-06-22 10:07   

I keep thinking about home and what makes a home a home. I don’t know how many places I have called home. By the time I was eight years old I had moved country and already lived in four different places before my parents bought a house next door to my grandparents in Ballsbridge in Dublin. Since then, there have been my homes in England, Italy, Germany, Malta, Ireland and England again. And yes, now back in Ireland. Of all the places I lived in, it was our apartment in Islington that I thought was the safest and the most beautiful. New and clean and fresh and ours; and within three days the bombs went off. That was July 2005 and that particular idyll was blown out of the water very abruptly.

This is something I am writing about at the moment, the idea that there is nowhere that is actually safe. This may sound morbid but I don’t mean it that way. That apartment in Islington, high up on the third floor, with a view of a garden where foxes played at night, and ducks nested on the roof of the block opposite was the closest I had ever come to a sanctuary, and somehow in the space of an hour that was shattered. I always start writing at about eight in the morning and on that particular morning, with no idea of what was happening I began my daily routine. Minutes after nine o’clock a Dutch friend in Dublin messaged me to ask were we okay, and then, just like that, everything went dead. No mobiles, no internet, just the television with its horrifying news to keep us updated, and the endless drone of helicopters over the next few days.

There have been two homes since then, one in Chester and now here in Dublin. Home is where you lock the door and it is yours on the inside. What you do with it, how you make it, the changes you choose to make it more comfortable, those are personal, but those are the things that make it pleasing when you leave and return. The odd thing is, over the past few nights, a helicopter has circled over the neighbourhood been one and two in the morning. At first I assumed it was flying someone to the Beacon Hospital which is just down the road, but standing out in the garden under a crescent moon it became clear that it was just circling. Why? Why does it keep doing this? This morning it started its circling at six o’clock.

I have finished my next novel, but I won’t put its working title here as it will undoubtedly change at least once before its birth and baptism. I am now preparing for a tip to Vancouver in just a few weeks. I am going to see my son and his girlfriend, and I’m going to swim in the Pacific, meet a friend from Seattle, and then visit Niagara on my way home.

I am uncommonly excited about this, especially as I had sworn some fourteen years ago not to cross the Atlantic again. I have not been to Canada before, and I really enjoyed all the trips to the States, but I always found the return journey beyond exhausting with a fear of losing a small child while trying to stay awake in a stop-over airport. There is one return trip that still haunts me. Boarding a plane in Atlanta, my then four-year old daughter put her little hand on the bare leg of a man seated beside her, and said, ‘Oh, what nice hairy legs.’ And all I could think was how am I going to handle this? Please take your hand off the nice man’s hairy legs? Umm, shall we swap seats so I am the one beside the hairy legs? To give him his due, he was incredibly tolerant of her admiration but I was a nervous wreck by the time we landed hours, though it seemed like days, later. Everyone reassures me that long-haul flights are a doddle when there is no accompanying child.

The big excitement though, is seeing my son and Jen and where they live in Vancouver. It’s ten months since they moved, and while I have seen him twice since, I miss him and think about him all the time. It makes me think of my years living abroad and wondering how my parents coped. It was never discussed. Back in the Seventies in Ireland it was considered unacceptable for girlfriend and boyfriend to be living together, and during those years of cohabitating in Germany my parents never visited our home. When I met them it was always in some other German city or down in Switzerland, which is sad really as they never saw the early homes we created.

I’m looking forward to seeing the home my son and his girlfriend have made, eating with them in the place they’ve created and just sitting and talking with them.

Happy days ahead.

mns  2010-03-03 09:59   

Last October, following a trip to Venice where JC fell in love with every dog he saw having their evening passegiatas, we finally agreed to get a dog. JC was in charge of the research and a few weeks later we went to England where we met and fell in love with George, a baby bulldog just eight weeks old. A few days later George accompanied us back to Ireland.

I can truthfully say that our lives changed. Instead of starting writing at 8 in the morning, I found myself cuddling this little fellow who liked to lie on my lap with my keyboard on top of him. He grew. And he grew. And the keyboard no longer fitted on top of him and I had to wean him off my lap as his weight and his girth were just too much. New patterns formed and Christmas came and went and then, horribly, George developed a problem in one eye. It turns out that this problem is typical for bulldogs and we were forced to have surgery. George came home with a lampshade on his head but he didn’t get better. An ulcer formed in the eye and now, eight weeks on, he still has his lampshade and JC and I are ministering angels to him, longing and praying for the day that the lampshade can come off and he can be just a puppy again.

In many ways things are brighter than they were in January and in the early part of February as George’s high spirits returned and he adapted to the constraints of his headgear. In the meantime he probably does not remember what it was like not to be encased in plastic. But as his owners it breaks our hearts. He can’t groom himself and a bit of me fears that he will never learn how to again as he is totally reliant on us to wash his paws and scratch his ears and to do everything else for him; but if and when his lampshade comes off and he doesn’t learn those things that puppies do, that is all right. JC and I will do them always for him.

We have a robot that does the vacuuming and George has learned how to turn it on and off, and how to stand in its path so that it can’t progress across the room. He rushes to remove his toys from the robot’s way and we rejoice in his progress. He has also learned how to do High Five – and he raises one paw and puts it into our hands. It’s reassuring how we all (George included in this) adapt to situations and are grateful for small things.

I have been working with my German translator on Revenge. I love working with this translator and Aus naechster Naehe is due out in August published by Droemer. Michaela Grabinger has translated each of my novels and the questions she asks are always inspiring and also reassuring as I know she is truly brilliant at what she does. The more I work with her the more I am puzzled at how many translators don’t ask questions of the author, especially as I imagine that most authors would like to assist. I certainly do.

What a long cold bleak winter this has been but there have been good times during it. Two visits from my son who is living in Vancouver cheered things up. Then there was a wonderful wedding in Galway where good friends got married in the freezing cold and most of the wedding party got stuck in airports or were snowbound somewhere, but those of us who made it there had the best time imaginable.

If I wish for anything right now it would be for the sun to come out and the trees to come back to life and George’s eye to get better so that he can enjoy spring and summer.

mns  2009-11-25 14:44   

Finally ‘The Umbrella Tree’ is out and I opted not to have a launch as I always get upset at my own launches (although I love everyone else’s). I always have the feeling that I give nothing at a launch and that I’m just receiving, and that I don’t have time to give to the individual people who turn up, and I get very stressed. Having said that, I felt really sorry on Monday that I wasn’t having a party of some sort because it is a celebration to have the book out in the shops.
The last months have been full of tidying it up combined with a wonderful week in Venice. I suppose, like many things, it is the actual seeing of Venice that staggers belief. I had read so much and seen so many pictures and photographs, as well as films based there that I did not think it would have the impact that it had. It is such an amazing city emerging from the lagoon like some mythical place. I am still amazed at its intricacies and its beauty, all the tiny narrow streets and little bridges linking the city, and its magnificence probably most visible in St Mark’s Square. It is, unfortunately, ferociously expensive and for the most part even the Venetians no longer live there but travel across to work which seems very sad, the more so when one considers that originally Venice was created by refugees from Attila the Hun who came and hid in the marshland just to survive. And now the real inhabitants of Venice are refugees from their own city.
If you are going there let me recommend a company named Viator which can be found on line. They do the best guided tours I have ever gone on. We went on two, one of which was the secrets of Venice and the other was of the Doges Palace, and in both cases the guides were fantastic. At one point I asked how the Venetians felt about most of its art, that Napoleon had stolen, still being in the Louvre, and with a wry smile, the guide said, ‘Well, we stole it before Napoleon did.’
It raises the question, at what time does something belong to someone else? My feelings are that when it has been purchased then it belongs to the buyer, but when it has been stolen it, mostly, ought to be returned. I say ‘mostly’ because I fully accept that there is plenty of art that only survived because it was stolen, the Elgin Marbles being a prime example.
Speaking of art, the Peggy Guggenheim collection is the best modern art collection I have ever seen. Her home, now the gallery, is on the Grand Canal and it has been beautifully modernised. If I am ever fortunate enough to return to Venice that is one of the many places I would like to see again. The audio guide was a personal friend of hers and had insight into why she purchased different paintings and what she saw in them, and I, who have never been a fan of early cubism, am now a convert.
The Edvard Munch exhibition is on in the National Gallery and JC won two tickets, so we are all set to go there as soon as there is a day without rain! Poor Ireland is awash with rain and wind at the moment and it has been very miserable. Time to get back to the next novel...

mns  2009-09-04 16:50   

‘The Umbrella Tree’ is finally finished and is due out late in October or early November. I am sorry to see it go as I had become a part of it and there is a feeling of loneliness at saying goodbye, but I think every writer must feel that.

Goodbyes have been relevant of late, not real goodbyes, but farewells, as my wonderful son moved to Canada; Vancouver in fact, which is as far as you can get – almost. It made me think of when he was sixteen and went on a work-exchange to Hamburg and was held-up with a knife to his throat and I still shudder when I think about it. Some years later he found himself in a ‘bad’ part of Chicago having taken a wrong turn, and was approached by a member of a gang who asked him for money. Brilliantly, he paid the gang member to get him to a bus stop and to stay with him until a bus arrived.
It always struck me as being a truly ingenious thing to do. I miss him, but am so aware of the joys of modern technology (not to mention flight); we can email, chat online, telephone any time we are free. Very often weeks pass like that when he is in the same country as me and there is no feeling of sadness attached to that.

His move makes me think of when I was very young, and recently, in the same context, I was writing an article for the Daily Mail about a particularly difficult time when I was in my late teens and was au-pairing in Italy. I had been an au pair before and on this occasion I thought I was quite mature and in control.

But you never quite know what life is going to throw at you, and in this case it threw a truly horrible child at me.
My charge was a ten year old girl, a spoiled, indulged, cruel child with whom I tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to bond.
The very first Saturday I was there, she sold the family dog outside the supermarket while I was inside buying the family’s breakfast. I searched high and low to try to find the dog, but to no avail and with a heavy heart I went home to tell them what had happened.

The Signora, the mother of this little monster, seemed to think it was a good idea as the dog, she said, barked too much anyway. The reason the dog barked so much was because my charge teased it.

My job was to hover over this child, to make sure she didn’t drown in the sea or get lost or stolen, to check the temperature of her bath water, to hand her a towel when it was required, and to generally indulge her as she had been all her life.
One afternoon when the Signora was away, my charge, upon waking from her siesta, gathered four of her friends and took us up an avenue into a neighbour’s garden where some twenty of the tallest and largest sunflowers I had ever seen, stood gazing at the sun. It was a brutally hot day, a cloudless sky, the temperature soaring above 30⁰. She shared her plan with us. She was going to chop down the sunflowers.
‘Over my dead body,’ I said, herding them back to our garden and suggesting we find something else to do. They appeared to accept my authority – fool that I was. A game of hide and seek started with me as the seeker.
‘Stand by the pole,’ my charge instructed me. The plastic-coated wire of the clothes line was attached to the pole at one end, while the other was lying on the ground.
‘Close your eyes, and count to a hundred.’
I leaned against the pole, closed my eyes and counted backwards as I thought it would be more interesting. By the time I had got to ninety-seven she had trussed me up, my back against the pole and the wire wrapped tightly around me. Plastic-coated wire has no give in it. In fact, the more you pull against it, the tighter it becomes, and I was tied up with the sun burning down on my bare head as the gang headed off out of the garden with malice in their hearts, ignoring my screams to be untied.
At some point I became aware of an army of ants making their way across the grass. I kicked out as best as I could as they scurried over my flip-flops and started up my feet and legs. The more I struggled, the more they bit me. The more they bit me, the more terrified I became, not just because my charge had escaped, but also of the red weals that were appearing on my feet and legs, and the terrible sick feeling that was rising in me. Eventually, mercifully, I blacked out.

I came to, to find the Signora slapping me across the face as waves of nausea rose in me.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ she screamed at me.
I felt so ill that I could not find the words in Italian to ask her to untie me, and I had to wait until she had vented her fury at my inadequacy as an au pair, before she finally unwound the wire and, covered in ants and bites, I collapsed to the ground.
I was suffering from such severe sunstroke, and was so badly burned and bitten, that a doctor had to be called and I spent the next twelve hours crawling between bed and bathroom.
In the meantime an angry neighbour was searching for the criminals who had decapitated his prized sunflowers.
Asked if I knew anything about this, coward that I was, I said ‘no.’

My pay was docked for the time I was ill. I felt demeaned, belittled, humiliated beyond words at what had been done to me. I waited until my free day the following week, packed my bag and left a note saying, ‘Arrivederci’, and I ran.
Somehow that summer has metamorphosed into a magic memory. On the train, on my break for freedom, I bumped into three Americans heading for Greece. I went too and spent the next month on a Greek island, sleeping on the beach and purging myself of the true awfulness of my au pair experience.
However, I am afraid of plastic-coated wire, insects, ten year old girls, and I never go out in the sun without a hat.
Speaking of sun and hats, we are off to Venice next week, and I can hardly wait.

mns  2009-06-17 11:20   

JC and I went to the launch of ‘Best Love, Rosie’ by Nuala O’Faolain. Posthumously published in Ireland this is a beautifully written book and well worth reading. There were very mixed emotions at the launch, the sadness in that Nuala is gone, that almost a year had passed, and yet the joy of her family coming together to see this book finally coming out.
Years ago when I first read ‘Are You Somebody?’ which is Nuala’s autobiography, I remember thinking that it was one of the best and most moving autobiographies that I had read, and it still is. I highly recommend both the autobiography and her new and last novel.

On a completely separate note I would like to advise anyone in Great Britain who is thinking of opening an account with Southern Electric or Scottish and Southern Electric to think twice. I am inserting my latest letter to them – and please bear in mind I left England eleven months ago.

Dear Ms Barry,

Your letter re: Account number 392276121

I am in receipt of your letter dated 24th April, 2009 which I received on 19th May 2009.
While appreciating the kindly and conciliatory nature of your letter, I find myself reading it over and over and I try to make sense of it. Yes, on 19th December last, following a conversation with you or someone in your office, I sent a cheque for £700 stg. in full and final settlement of a bill on a/c no. 3922761219.
Let me run through the series of events that led to that. I lived in Bridgegate Chambers in Chester and you billed me for a property called The Shedman in the Isle of Man, and then threatened me with legal proceedings despite many phone calls from me telling you that I owned nothing in the Isle of Man and had never heard of the Shedman, and in fact have never been to the Isle of Man. Eventually when I told you to take me to court, you suddenly stopped billing me. I asked you to get the account for Bridgegate Chambers up and running. I rang several times about this. Nothing happened.
Eighteen months later, after I had moved back to Dublin, you suddenly set up an account (No. 39227 61219) and my first knowledge of this was a threatening letter from you telling me you were taking legal action against me. At no point have I wanted to shirk paying what was owing, and please bear in mind that I tried to pay you repeatedly during my tenancy in Bridgegate Chambers.
Now, having sent you a cheque for £700 stg. last December which you admit you received but then lost, you have started billing me for a whole new account. Your latest letter is using account number 392276121.
Let me clarify what I have had to do in the meantime (and this does not take into account that while living in Chester I must have phoned you ten or more times as well as repeatedly writing to you): I have tried to track the cheque which in the meantime you admit to having received. I have written to my bank, and today I phoned them – long distance – to have a stop put on the cheque. The phone call was almost a half hour long as they waded through my bank details to see if the missing cheque had in fact gone through. It had not, and they have charged me £10 stg. to have a stop put on it.
I am really concerned that if I send you another cheque that it too will disappear into the Kafkaesque labyrinth that is Southern Electric or, as your latest missive says ‘Scottish and Southern Electric’. It would be unclear to anyone at this point which account number is correct or indeed which company is billing me.
I have, however, decided to take a leap into the dark and send you another cheque for £450 in full and final settlement of all monies owing. I was under the impression that I was dealing with Southern Electric and am therefore making the cheque payable to that company.
Never in all my life have I encountered such treatment of a customer.
Yours sincerely, etc...

Now that I’ve got that off my chest I shall return to the re-write of my next novel. May the sun come out and may all badly run companies get their due desserts but not at the expensive of their unfortunate customers.

mns  2009-04-01 09:00   

March brought with it multiple changes and events, including the acceptance of my next novel, 'The Plane Tree', which will be published at the end of the year, a preface for the book 'Written Off' which is due out this month to tie in with the television series of the same name and numerous articles on topics which were really interesting.

Searching for Home came out in Serbian 'Dugo putovanje kuci' by Meri Stenli. I had not realised that the author's name could be translated and I smile every time I think of it. Of course it makes sense, but it was just something I hadn't considered. And you whom I thanked in the acknowledgements, let me thank you again in your Serbian names, Lori Sajklana, Zani Hornbi and Patriku Grantu, Lusi Stenli, Takiju, Doktoru Martinu Brejdiju and Doktoru Dzastinu Korfildu.

And then it was off to London for a wedding - JC's brother Mark married Polly. The speeches were so funny and so good that I filched the one from the father of the bride, the actor Milton Cadman, who kindly said I could put it up here, and that is what I am going to do - or at least some of it.

'When I said to a friend of mine that I was to give a speech at my daughter's wedding, he re-assured me that I couldn't be as bad as the bride's father at the last wedding he had been to. The man had stood up, looked at his audience and fainted. I didn't find it all that re-assuring then... but I do now. I'm already doing better than that guy.
When Diana Spencer was about to be married to Prince Charles I remember her father, the earl of Spencer, saying to the telly and indeed the whole world that, when born, his daughter was a fine physical specimen. The old man was barking of course, but even so, it seemed an odd thing to say. But, now that I am, as it were, where he was - I too feel a proud urge to tell the whole world that my second born was also a fine physical specimen. Obviously it would be monstrously embarrassing to Polly if I did, and so I'll refrain - but she was a fine physical specimen.
In the hospital where she was born and only a few hours old she repeatedly climbed to the top of her crib, a crib that was sloping upwards. A number of times we picked her up and moved her down to the bottom, but no, off she went climbing again. The muscles; the coordination, the sheer mulish determination.
May and I looked at this spectacle - remembering the sweet placid calm that was our first born and said to each other, 'She's going to be trouble!'
And so she was....'

There was five minutes of this incredibly funny and endearing speech about a truly wonderful person, someone whom it is a privilege to know.
In truth the three speeches from the father of the bride, the groom and the best man (my JC) were so good that they would make a fantastic comedy sketch in the Apollo.
Funnily enough Mark had asked me to do a reading at the ceremony and had sent me the number of the Shakespearean sonnet that he wanted. I misread the number and was very puzzled at his choice - fortunately I was so puzzled that i did a double-check, and found that it was sonnet CXVI which was rather more appropriate.

The weather held, and St Albans is a truly brilliant part of London, a place neither JC nor I had visited before. It seemed to be a hub and hive of activity and reminded us of our years in Islington. It was also like a magnet and my brilliant agent came to see me which was exciting, good fun and quite focussing - I always seem to need work to justify my existence. Two close friends we had met in a queue at the Uffizi Gallery a few years ago also came on the last day and we talked till time and times were done before braving the airport and Ryannair and the journey home.

And home we are now and the rewrite of The Plane Tree is about to start, the sun is shining and I feel happy. Eleanor Roosevelt said something like 'happiness is not an end in itself, it is a by-product.' It's a great by-product.

mns  2009-02-04 09:52   

Christmas came and went and the New Year approached, first to be celebrated in Dublin and then in France later in January.
I always have the feeling of some unseen momentum come the First of January, a feeling that I need to be doing something and an awareness that it has sneaked up on me and that suddenly I’m there with the chance of a whole new beginning. This of course is total nonsense as every day is a new beginning with a chance to get things right or to improve things or to bring about some damage limitation on the previous day.
Once upon a time on New Year’s Eve, I used to think, ‘next year I will lose weight’. This phrase used to come to mind as champagne glasses were lifted to toast in the New Year and everyone said, ‘have you made your resolutions?’ I even said it to myself when I weighed a mere 6 ½ stone as I couldn’t think of anything else to wish for.
Years ago as the old year ended and 2001 began I stood at one o’clock in the morning on a balcony in Malta overlooking the sea and for the first time ever I really thought about what I wanted to do. I was frightened and I was alone and I found myself looking into that New Year with a feeling of emptiness and dread. Below is an article I wrote about The Optimism List – a list I began in 2001 and I am still adding to it and working on it.

2000 had been the worst year of my life. In the space of a couple of months I had been diagnosed with a benign but inoperable tumour in my head that was growing, my husband and left me and my mother had died. I went away alone for New Year not with the idea of thinking or planning, but with the idea of forgetting and getting through one more bad night.
As I stood there with the sea lapping just feet away it finally occurred to me that I couldn’t go on living just the way I was. I tried to imagine something to look forward to, some reason to exist other than just going through the motions for the sake of my children. It was then, for the first time in years that I thought about ‘me.’

It occurred to me that we can get dulled by existence and that the dreams of our youth dissipate with time; that we slot into routine and then something happens to destroy that routine and an aching void opens in front of us.
And that was me, standing in the dark on a balcony. I remember thinking ‘who cares whether I am 6 ½ stone or 10 ½ stone?’ At that moment not even I cared. I had a sickening awareness of the meaningless of my existence. I have always loved being a mother and that is sacrosanct, but the other roles I had fulfilled had now emptied. I was no longer anyone’s daughter, nor was I someone’s wife.
The only thing that I could think of having to do was to write a novel. My first was finished and with a publisher and the signed contract stated that they wanted another.
I went back inside and I wrote on a piece of paper ‘write a second novel.’ That was the first thing on my Optimism List.

I have always found that if I make a list of things to do during the day I am much more likely to fulfil it. There are a thousand things I mean to do but unless I have them written down I forget them or I put them on the long finger, even things like do the ironing, go to the bank, and collect the dry-cleaning – everyday things on an everyday list.
That night I started what was to become the first of my New Year Optimism lists, a list of things to do over the course of a year, a reason to get up in the morning and to achieve something during the next 365 days.
And so it began: Write a second novel; See my first novel published; Paint my bedroom white and make white curtains so that I will feel like I am floating when the window is open and the wind is blowing; Don’t be afraid, face the bills and the leaking roof; Get on top of the garden; Go on a holiday with my children.

I look back and I see that it was a list on how to survive. I put it on my laptop, and each year since I go through the current list, ticking off what I have achieved, carrying forward anything that did not happen if it is still worth the aspiration. Last month I began my list for 2009. I look at the world and I know that my list is very small in the light of everything that is happening, but it is my list, my reasons for getting up and doing something, my way of knowing that the year will not pass me by ever again.

After I met my partner Justin in 2004 and discovered that he played the piano, I wrote on my list that year that I would hear him play. It’s taken over four years for that to come to fruition as we lived in small apartments in England where there was no room for a piano. But this year, coming back to live in Ireland, there was finally room for his piano and so it was taken out of storage and came with us, and finally I get to tick it off the list. Last year on my list of fifteen goals was the plan to go abroad. I’ve never been to Venice and we had wanted to go back to Florence where we had spent a wonderful week the previous year. As it happens we moved back to Ireland instead of having a holiday so that will be carried forward to the list for 2009. I am not sure if we will achieve this in 2009, but I want to see Venice, and if I don’t get there this coming year, I will carry the aspiration forward to the next.

In the year 2001 I had met Tacchi, the World Bridge Federation photographer, and he invited me to stay with him and his wife in their home in France. Every year I go back; we play bridge in his local club, eat a lot (he’s a truly brilliant chef) and drink even more. Visiting him is on my list every single year and in fact I hope it will be the first item on the new list that I will be ticking as we are planning on going over in January.

There are things on my list that I am a bit embarrassed to write about, things to do with equilibrium and peace of mind, things that I lost in 2000. I fight to find that equilibrium again. I have on my list that I must not be grumpy – that is an ongoing battle. I try to live more within the moment rather than waiting for the next one; and at the same time I try to keep the door open for new things to happen and to find reasons to embrace the future. One thing I am very sure of is that I really wish I had started writing an annual list a lot earlier in my life.

It’s very easy to make half-hearted resolutions as I did for years. The best resolutions are small ones because small things are easily achievable. But if you add up a dozen small things you can actually change quite a lot. I recommend an optimism list to others as a way to see fulfilment.

Even now when New Year sneaks up on me I still have the Optimism List and I make the time to add to it and to work on its content.

We can’t always get what we want but we can try.

mns  2008-11-05 13:06   

They came. They destroyed my house and then they left. So long tenants, and thanks for all the silverfish.
That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I must admit I don’t feel stronger. I just feel exhausted. It is four months since we moved back to Dublin to repair the damage, and in that time we have three rooms up and running but found we had no choice but to replace the kitchen. It wasn’t just the insects, or the destroyed electrical apparatus (fridge, cooker, dishwasher), it was also the burn marks in the worktops and the fact that they had split, water had got in and they had swelled and separated. Getting the kitchen replaced has meant that we have had to put a lot on hold until next Spring, but we are just coming to the end of this phase and are going to get on with our writing and enjoy Christmas.

There are wonderful things about being back in Dublin. I sit at my desk overlooking the garden and it is full of birds and the leaves have almost all fallen from the trees, and today the sky is blue and clear and I feel happy.

Of late I have thought a lot about happiness and about not always understanding that I am happy until one more awful thing happens and I realise that the happy moments slipped past while I was not looking.
I was sitting in the car last week waiting for JC who was at a meeting. I was reading Indian Summer (if you have the vaguest interest in the Raj and the incredible changes that took place in India in the last century, then do read this wonderfully written historical account of events there) and I was totally engrossed in the book. I was happy but I didn’t realise it until suddenly someone drove into the car and my peaceful half hour came to an abrupt and noisy end.
Nothing happened that cannot be repaired which obviously is great, but like when any accident occurs there are irritating consequences, getting estimates, feeling shaken and then the realization that I had been totally happy just prior to it and I hadn’t really known it.
So as I sit here writing this I am now conscious that no matter what is happening around me, and all of the awful things of the last four months, I am happy. The sky is blue. The bird feeders are full. The garden is full of birds. I am not going to fret over the rest of the damage done to the house and the fact that we have neither the energy nor the time to do more at the moment. I sit here with my espresso and I can hear Rachmaninov’s music wafting through the house from JC’s study, and I feel totally at peace.
Today I rejoice that my German publishers have told me that they have sold 15,000 copies of Ohne Eine Spur (which is Missing, my second novel). I rejoice because an Italian student has just done her PhD on me and The Lost Garden, and she sent me a copy of her thesis and I was amazed that someone could find so much to write about me and my work and I was and am so pleased.
There is happiness in a single moment and I am very glad to realise that.

mns  2008-08-27 11:01   

Thank you everyone who wrote, phoned, invited us to dinner, fed us, watered us and in general cheered us up. We are still coming to terms with the abrupt change to our lives. There we were, living happily in Chester, and then, out of the blue everything came to a sudden halt.

I am putting in the article I wrote for the Daily Mail which will explain. Since writing this article dozens of other problems emerged in the house, mostly to do with insects, live wires, and grime. To give a better picture here is my article, written a week into July:

Last Tuesday my partner and I drove from England to Ireland for the launch of Party Animal, Marisa Mackle’s collection of short stories by Irish writers in aid of a variety of animal charities.
For work reasons we were cutting it rather fine as the ferry docked at 17.05 and we had to get to my old house in Goatstown and then back into the city for the launch at 19.00. We were planning on selling the house, and wanted to see that the tenants had left it in good condition. Within a few seconds of opening the front door, though, it was obvious that the house had been completely destroyed.

My four-bedroomed house (complete with Granny flat) had been rented out for almost three years. In their departure the tenants left a trail of destruction in their wake, sickening me to the core. The state of neglect and of damage has meant that not only are we unable to sell the house, we are now moving from England back to this once-lovely home to try to restore it to its former glory – a job that will take months of work, and thousands of euros.
In case you get the impression that this was ‘normal wear and tear’, allow me to paint you a picture.
The cooker was barely recognisable. They somehow managed to burn layers of filth into a once perfect hob to the extent that it is unusable (plumes of smoke emanate if anybody, in a moment of unbridled optimism, should attempt to switch it on). The grease and grime on the cooker is of a level seldom attained by even the least salubrious chip shops. They even took the trouble to break one of the knobs off the cooker (now disappeared), just in case anybody should wish to attempt repair.
The washing machine did not escape the attention of my tenants, who broke the handle off it, rendering it useless.
In my naivety, I had got a new upright freezer installed in the garage, just to provide some extra space. Instead, the tenants preferred the option of disconnecting it and leaving the door shut. On opening it (in hindsight, a mistake), I felt physically sick when confronted by the thousands of insects who had made my freezer their home. No exaggeration – there were thousands of the things, a mass of teeming life.
My tenants’ tastes in music could be gleaned by inspecting which of my cds were to be found out of their cases, wrecked, and now unplayable. We aren’t talking a scratch or two – it looks like they used them as coffee mats, or maybe just attached them to the underside of their shoes for a couple of days.
Every sofa and armchair in the house now boasts a number of cigarette burns, including the leather chairs that I have owned for years.
Slightly oddly, considering there were five young men in a house with a modern alarm system, security seems to have been a major issue of concern. To that end, the tenants decided to make assurance doubly sure by nailing large bolts onto the back of several doors. In a rare moment of thrift, they troubled to remove these bolts prior to their departure (with a claw hammer, if looks are anything to go by), leaving holes and breaking two of the doorframes.
There is a level of dirt beyond anything I have ever encountered before. I don’t just mean the floor to ceiling cobwebs of a type seldom encountered outside of horror B-movies. I mean filth – toilets that have clearly not been cleaned in the three years of my absence, the toilet seats destroyed, the toilet roll holders broken. They even managed to break a bath tap that I would have imagined it was impossible to remove without great fortitude and a sledgehammer.
The tenants, when on their way out, took with them several items of my property, but were generous enough to leave many more items of their own behind – clothing, congealed paint, court summons – that type of thing.
The desecration just goes on and on. And I haven’t even told you which variety of pet they nurtured in what was once my bedroom. Suffice to say that the insects in the freezer would have fed it for some time…

In case you feel that I was a bit naïve in renting the house to five males of the species in the first place, let me assure you that I was not. On the contrary, I employed property agents whose job it was to visit the house every three months and to keep an eye on it for me, let me know of any problems, and so forth. In the event that the tenants started damaging the house, I would thus be informed about it promptly, and able to remove them, deducting the cost of any damage from their deposit, right?
Wrong. Very, very badly wrong.
I received the odd email from the management company over the last few years saying that all was fine and there was no damage beyond what a pair of marigold gloves and some cleaning spray wouldn’t fix. When it came time for the tenants to depart, said company cheerfully returned their deposits with barely a pause for consideration. If you are thinking of renting your house out, feel free to drop me a line and I will gladly let you know which property management company should be avoided like a freezer full of insects.

Assuming that the agents didn’t somehow manage to go to the wrong house, it seems to me that one of three things must have happened. One, they didn’t bother to visit my house, and just told me periodically that everything was fine whilst pocketing my cash. Two, they visited the house, but somehow failed to notice those subtle indications of neglect, (such as broken windows, cookers, washing machines, taps, and the like). Or three, and perhaps most infuriatingly of all, they actually considered that this extent of damage (obviously criminal damage, incidentally), was to be expected.

Call me old-fashioned, but I had rather imagined that the house would be returned to me in more or less the condition that I left it. Of course I expected there to be some signs of wear, but it did not occur to me that I would lose thousands of euros worth of belongings.
In the last week I have already had gardeners and two skips to deal with the hedges and the grass (care of which were included in the contract), and that is before I even start on the inside.

As I leave my apartment in Chester today, I would be ashamed if I left so much as a bin bag in it, and yet my tenants have left wardrobes full of old clothing and shoes, a garage full of giant pots of paint, cement and other items relating to their employment; the garage sink is embedded with paint…
Any single piece of the damage I have described above would be deducted from my deposit – and yet my agents took it upon themselves to return the whole deposit to my tenants. I have complained to my agents, but was told that this was the norm, that it was impossible to force adherence to the contract, and what did I expect anyway?

I expected a level of respect for my property; I expected decent normal behaviour; I expected adherence to the contract. I did not expect the mixture of negligence, arrogance and stupidity to which I have been subjected.
I cannot even begin to wonder what the property management company thought they were being paid to do if it was not to ensure that the contract was being adhered to.
My agents, both in returning the deposit and in their attitude generally have condoned a level of behaviour that any right-thinking person would see as being reprehensible. Talking to people about this over the last week I have discovered that I am not the only person who has been at the receiving end of such arrogance. I find myself wondering what has happened to a society where such things are just accepted.

My parents belonged to a generation where their property was sacrosanct, anything that got broken was repaired, and anything that got dirty was cleaned. I belong to that in-between generation that learned about replacing things as the old electrical repair shops closed down, and a throw away culture began to raise its ugly head and little attention was given to the problems of landfills overflowing. Fast food and readymade meals have become part of the lives of today’s youth. If you don’t learn how to cook you have little interest in keeping your kitchen equipment clean. Mammy minds you while you live at home, and when let loose on the world you have no idea how to maintain the standards with which you were raised.

I don’t believe my tenants deliberately burned holes in the furniture and yet I can’t explain how every single piece of soft furnishing is destroyed. Surely if they did such a thing in their own homes their parents would be down on them like a ton of bricks. I think back to my own student days and I am quite sure my bedroom was horrendously untidy, but despite that I had a respect for my own goods. The frying pan I bought as a student lasted me for years, as did the few mediocre pieces of kitchenware that I purchased with my hard-earned money from my student jobs.
When I left rented accommodation over the years, I have never owned enough clothing that I could afford to leave it in the wardrobes, nor did I ever have such a lack of dignity that I would consider dumping my things in someone else’s home. I have been told that it will take two more skips to clear my tenants’ belongings from the house – and that is before I even begin to throw away my furniture.

All of this is exorbitantly expensive and has meant that I have to move country. It has been carried out by people from whom I expected more, and it is condoned by those paid to supervise.

It is heartbreaking.

*****

It is weeks since I wrote this, and we are still camping in the house, using a barbecue to cook, eating outside, but gradually getting on top of the mess. Of course there are wonderful things about being back in Dublin ('back' in my case, whole new life for JC), but we have our computers and are beginning to get back to work, and a more normal life will emerge soon.

mns  2008-06-23 19:59   

We drove to Derbyshire for the first of two appearances in the Derbyshire Literary Festival. The Peak District is stunning, green fields, stone walls, rolling valleys among the hills, with sheep that looked like they had been painted onto the grass. I was reminded of one of my friends telling me she had gone there looking for Mr Darcy. As I had my Mr Darcy in the car with me my mission was somewhat different.

I get very nervous before ‘appearances’ but both talks in Clay Cross and in Chesterfield went well with brilliant audiences and excellent questions. I love the question and answer part and I met the nicest people. My favourite member of the audience was a guide dog who watched me carefully while I spoke, splayed on the ground in the front row, and then happily (and unnoticed) helped himself to some chocolate cake after the lecture.
Both evenings ended with the long drive back to Chester into the sunset.

Then it was off to Germany where my second novel, Missing, is on the universities’ reading list. If I was nervous before Derbyshire it was nothing to how I now felt. My greatest fear was not being understood, but my opening joke about five Germans in an Audi Quattro went down to roars of laughter. This was very reassuring as I was using it as a sounding board for comprehension.
It’s odd how the stories of our past which are so much a part of us are, in fact, interesting or intriguing to other people. We think nothing of the oddities of our own upbringing – after all, that is all we know; but when we relay tales of the past to other people it becomes clear by their reaction that one man’s norm is definitely not another’s.

I had forgotten what it was like to be in my late teens and early twenties and I can only hope that I was as enthusiastic as these students were. I also realised that when you are that age you don’t realise that adults in performing mode can be absolutely terrified by the sight of eighty unknown faces looking at one with interest.
A few of my German friends, both real-life and from online turned up and that added to the sense of reassurance that I had got from my joke – a joke which JC had said no one would find funny.

I have this story about David Lodge which I had told in Derbyshire to illustrate how authors take ‘things’ they hear and mould them into their own books. I discovered just before my lecture in Germany that the students had been studying David Lodge, so I included my story and they enjoyed it.
This is how it goes:
Back in the early 1970’s, my mother who had played hockey for Ireland, was now the non playing captain of the Irish Ladies hockey team, and she and the team were going to the States for an international tournament. My mother was, understandably, very excited – though I think we thought she should be at home cooking for us and minding us in general. Anyway, the mother took off on her plane with her team in tow, and a third of the way over the Atlantic one of the engines failed; the pilot turned back and then a second engine failed. It became clear they would not make it back to Shannon Airport, and the pilot was forced to crash land somewhere in the west of Ireland. My mother, being the most senior person on board, was asked if she would lead the passengers in a prayer. I doubt if this would be the norm in any other country, but this was the early Seventies and it was an Irish aircraft and a prayer was required.

I do understand that the whole experience was terrifying and who knows how my mother’s mind was working, but, for reasons best known to herself she could only think of the Grace before meals, and that is the prayer she led the panicking passengers through. Think about it; ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful…’

Anyway, the plane came down in a field, and the passengers were evacuated off through chutes. My siblings and I were watching the news that evening when we saw what had happened, and heard, with the embarrassment of children at their parents’ actions, how she had said the Grace before meals. I think we were as concerned about the prayer as we were about our mother’s ordeal.
Put that thought on hold.

Years later my sister read Changing Places by David Lodge; when she finished it, she passed it to me and asked me to read it urgently, not saying why. So, I’m reading away and I come to this hysterically funny paragraph about this unfortunate person reciting The Grace before Meals as a plane is about to come down.
On the one hand I can see that this is very funny (because it isn’t my mother) but on the other I’m struck, as my sister had been, by the coincidence in the stories.
We wrote to David Lodge and asked him was there any way he could have known about our mother and the prayer. And he wrote back and said that he had read it years earlier in Private Eye and he had cut it out because he had thought it was so funny, and that it was indeed based on our mother and her plane crash landing.

I loved our time in Germany, my friend Orla’s hospitality, sitting in her wonderful garden, visiting the local bridge club, and meeting new friends. I loved the event in the university and the students’ reception, and the Eis-kaffee in the Orangerie of the local castle afterwards sitting in the sun both relaxing and recovering. Having once lived in Germany and having once been married to a German I did not think it was somewhere I would be visiting again, but I am so glad I did. It was a truly brilliant experience.