Mundane Life

Shooting for the Pot.

Self Introductions on paper are hell: In life introduction is a matter of judgement, the basis of the expected relationship defining what to include, business very different from pleasure, the landlady not quite (but including) the neighbour, the cellist introduced to a new orchestra definitely self-effacing, but the writer is different. Why do any of us write? Deep down there must be a conviction that we have something unique to say, but why it should merit anyone’s attention immediately brings one up against its essential egotism. So to add biographical detail is only to compound the problem.

Blogging forces the appraisal of one’s motives and they are not inherently praiseworthy, but perhaps they can be rescued by honesty. I live in a quiet corner of rural Somerset in a collection of barns I have converted in the hope of importing what rural corners do not provide, stimulating people to come to play music, paint, and read, and above all talk. During thirty years of hoping that yet another facility might make the difference, and building accommodation, a concert hall, running a chamber music series with supper and limitless wine, it died a protracted death. I could get back to writing full time. Since then the life of a rural recluse has dominated and contact with the outside world limited to a weekly trip to the supermarket.

I now have to remember how to communicate, and blogging might give me practice. My interests are people and the varieties of experience that might reveal the deeper patterns underpinning life, all life. Art and Music are ways to decipher these

connections, and words are the currency of exchange, words penetrate only as far as honesty permits, and warmth seeks. I write to understand the world I have encountered; half my family fought the other half in the Boer War and as a result I straddle the divide between the Old World of conservative and deep rooted culture and theNew Worldof pioneering can-do. I need both so fit nowhere. I new realize that ‘not fitting’ characterizes everything I write, most of the things that excite me and most of the mavericks I’m drawn to. My characters are all solitaries, my theories all unfashionable, and none of my written work will slot into a Dewey Index easily. It is not bloody mindedness, but the produce of my cat-with-nine lives existence, each life took on extremes of unlikelihood. Truth has always been very much stranger than fiction. I now take that as a given which is why writers interest me, and finding them the new departure at the end of a pretty solitary life.