 |
||
Filming the new video |
||
Thank you, darling Louisa, for putting up the lovely pics from our fun day filming together. I have broken my phone – dropping it on the garage floor does this, apparently. Who knew? – so until I get the time to plug it into my computer and have its brains taken out so I can send it off to be fixed, it is not taking photos. It’s probably sulking at me.
I do so want to take a pic of my new hen mat from inside the back door. John thinks it’s bonkers but it was a) in a sale and b) has a lifelike picture of three hens, which myself and the boys have named Blanche (white hen), Henrietta and Penny (Rhode Island Reds). I have hens – yes, I am obsessed – in my new, JUST FINISHED novel, Between Sisters (out in October) and they all have unusual names, given them by a fashion design student. It’s about two sisters who adore each other but who have great pain from their childhood because their mother walked out when Cassie was seven and Coco was one. Raised by their grandmother, Pearl, and their father, who has now died, their mother leaving them is the great pain of their life. I loved writing it. |
||
It’s finished! |
||
I have not sorted out the pile of ‘writing clothes’ – Jack Russell fur-covered leggings – or tidied my study or brought the books back to the Royal Dublin Society library. SORRY! And in the kitchen, the baking cupboard is still a riot of old ‘cooking’ chocolate (half eaten by me), elderly flours jammed one on top of the other, sultanas so old they are now currants and random muffin cases that have escaped their boxes. |
||
What I’m watching and reading |
||
I’ve watched Gandhi (lots of it I couldn’t watch, actually – too painful), some of the new House of Cards season (how are Claire and Frank Underwood so compelling when they are so baaad, and why do I want my hair cut like Robin Wright’s when it would not suit me?), and am holding off on watching the latest Orange is the New Black because I’m too tired to do obsessional Netflixing. I’ve been reading a great psychological thriller, You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, about a New York psychoanalyst who has written a relationship guide which says not to marry the guy if he gambles, idly says he once thought of being gay, and so on, because chances are he will turn out to be a gambler or gay and not really be marriage material, and you will spend years in therapy trying to fix a marriage that is unfixable because of basic incompatibility which was there from the get-go. And then it turns out that her paediatric oncologist husband isn’t what she thought he was . . . Ooh, so good!
|
||
Happiness |
||
Finally, I am doing yoga every day by myself. The thing is, I hit a wall when I write a book – a cortisol-induced slump, I think. That great gallop is over, and something in me sinks and I forget the things that cheer me up. Yes, I know I have nothing to be sad about because I have been to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan and that is something to be sad about, but sometimes people get sad. Some wise person said, ‘Humans evolved to survive, not to be happy,’ which is depressing but possibly quite true. We need to work at the happiness. And in some strange way, we forget how to heal ourselves. Yoga helps me, and I have remembered, so am stretching and doing my asanas, and it’s like taking a deep breath. Remind yourself of what your happy things are: talking to a friend, walking, knitting, writing in your journal, doing yoga or a workout, and then do it. We are all so busy and so often forget ourselves, but remember: it all falls apart if we fall apart, so take your few minutes, darlings. Sending you love and light and hugs,
|
||
It Started with Paris will be published in paperback on 2 July. Read an extract or listen to an extract read by Olivia Carrey. Buy It Started with Paris now from Pre-order Between Sisters from |
||
     |
||
|
|
||