On joy, struggle and the perfect cocktail

And why it sometimes pays to have a horrible time

For once, I had earned that Negroni (in our messy but lovely new kitchen)

Last week, in a tower block in Bow, I took an exam. It’s many years since I last took an exam. The building was covered in scaffolding and the front door was locked. I had a coffee at the McDonalds next door as I waited for someone to let me in.

The man who turned up and unlocked the front door checked my passport and handed me the key to a locker. Three hours without my phone! It was like being asked to lock away my lungs. He led me to a computer, tapped in a password and told me to click a box when I was ready to start. For the rest of the morning, I glowered at the screen. There were 81 imaginary scenarios, with four options each for a response. For each scenario, I had to pick the “best” and “worst”.

I could have spent many happy hours randomly picking answers and arguing my case. Arguing – on TV, radio and in newspapers – is a key part of how I earn my living. But I wasn’t being asked to argue. I was being asked to pick 162 of the 324 options on the understanding that they were either right or wrong.

I sweated. I literally sweated. I watched the tiny clock at the top of the screen gobble up the minutes. I had three minutes left at the end to look back at the questions I’d flagged. Nope, I thought when I looked at the first two or three. I still have no idea. And then the screen flashed up a box to tell me it was over. I felt a flush of relief and then dread.

When I told the young woman in the office that I’d finished, she marched me over to the printer and pressed a button. “This,” she said, “will give you your results.” As the machine whirred, my stomach lurched. Please, please, I thought, may I not have to go through this again. Finally, it spewed out a piece of paper. Half-way down it, I saw the word “pass”. I celebrated as I nearly always celebrate before the sun is over the yard-arm. With a trip to a nice café (that wasn’t McDonalds), coffee and cake.

As I sipped my flat white, I thought of a speech I’d heard a few days before. It was at the David Cohen Prize, a kind of British Nobel Prize given to writers for the entire body of their work. Past winners include Edna O’Brien, Colm Toibin, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark. This year it went to the poet, novelist and memoirist John Burnside. I know his work well. I’ve reviewed several of his books and interviewed him twice. And I agree with the chair of the judges Hermione Lee, who said: “He casts a spell with language of great beauty, power, lyricism and truthfulness.” He is, she added, “a strong and powerful writer about the dark places of the human mind – but he’s also funny and deeply humane.”

Beauty and truth is a writer’s job. It’s what Keats was getting at in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.  – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”. It’s pretty much my mantra, the bar you aim for but know you’ll never reach, the one with the perfect cocktail you hope to mix one day even as you keep slightly misjudging the tequila. Beauty and truth is the cocktail, but funny and humane is the olive in the martini, the cherry in the tequila sunrise, the salt on the glass of the margarita. So, when someone who can do cocktails with a kick opens their mouth, I listen.

“I think,” said Burnside in his acceptance speech, “a poem should be as accessible as it can be, as long as it does not compromise its essential nature to do so – but I do have difficulty with the label, as such.” He was talking about the pressure for poems to be “accessible”, but he could have been talking about any art. He could, in fact, have been talking about anything. Should brain surgery be “accessible”? An equal-opportunity career that anyone can pursue after watching a few videos on Tik Tok? Or being an airline pilot? Or a nuclear scientist?

“Similarly,” he continued, “I cannot quite come to terms with such terms as ‘difficult’ (in a pejorative sense), on the one hand, and ‘relevant’ on the other. In the first case, I tend to go along with the poet-critic John Ciardi, when he says: ‘The craft of poetry is not easy. It is better than easy. It is joyously difficult.’” 

Well, quite. Anyone can splurge some words on a page, but words on a page are not a poem. To write a good poem is difficult. Doing almost anything well is difficult. It means putting yourself through the four stages of learning, from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. I learnt to drive when I was seventeen and can’t remember the moment when I realised I didn’t need to tell myself to check the mirror. When I went to a typing school in the Charing Cross Road, I thought I’d be the first ever pupil who couldn’t get the hang of it. I don’t think about typing now. I don’t think about driving. But I still think about writing every time I write.

I’ve been writing professionally for years and I still think writing is difficult. It’s the structure. It’s the sentences. It’s the rhythm. It’s the words. Sometimes it flows and sometimes it feels like wading through – well, I was tempted to say treacle, but that would be a cliché. It’s like wading through an email inbox that never stops filling up.

These days, I’d say I have a pretty easy life. I’m well. I’m happy. I don’t have to pander to the whims of a boss I hate. (My boss’s whims largely relate to cocktails, cakes, crisps and interior design, but that’s probably because my boss is me.) Apart from the admin and the emails, I love my work, but I don’t find any of it easy.

In the past few weeks, I have, for example, given my first ever writing workshop online. I had no idea if I could enthuse a group of people of different ages and backgrounds who were just tiny figures on a screen.  A few days later, I went to Belgium to give a speech. I’ve given plenty of speeches in my life, but I’ve never given a speech on giving speeches. It was to an international audience in a pharmaceutical company. I was in a smart dress and heels. They were in hoodies and trainers. I felt sick as I listened to some of their presentations, all delivered without notes. They were witty. They were slick. And the speakers kept saying how much they were looking forward to hearing from “the expert”. When I started speaking, my mouth was so dry that I had to apologise for my nerves.

And then there was last week’s exam. Oh my God, the exam. It was the last stage of a two-and-a-half-year process of working towards accreditation (as an Associate Certified Coach) from the International Coaching Federation, which is meant to represent the gold standard in coaching. People think coaching is easy. They think it’s just a chat and perhaps a few words of advice. It is not a chat and there’s no advice. When it’s done well, coaching is like conducting an orchestra. It's listening at so many different levels and asking questions that will help people understand their thoughts and feelings and blocks. It’s doing all this not to help people feel better, but to do better at whatever it is they want to do. It’s about helping people think. Thinking isn’t easy. Feeling is easy, but thinking is a whole other can of olives/neurons/worms.

The joy, as Burnside said, is in the grappling. It’s sorting through a basket of tangled threads and finally seeing a way to create a pattern. It’s getting through to the end of a speech, and the awkward silence that follows the request for questions, and suddenly seeing a forest of raised hands. It’s seeing people on your computer screen quietly scribbling away and then wanting to read out what they have written. It’s getting to that moment in a coaching session when the person you’re coaching suddenly realises what they want to do and you can feel in your gut that they are going to do it.

I can’t, if I’m honest, say I found much “joyous difficulty” in that exam. I’ve never liked quizzes and it was, basically, a quiz. But as I sipped my celebratory (and nearly perfect) Negroni I realised that there’s a whole lot of joy in knowing that I don’t have to do the damn thing again.