Wishing you a magic circle this Easter
On deadlines and - well, read the piece
Sometimes the words don’t come. I am not talking about writer’s block. Any journalist would snort at the idea of writer’s block. Give me a blank page, a deadline and job I will lose if I don’t fill it, and I will give you some words. They may not be the best words in the world, but if it is your job to produce them, trust me, you do.
It is not my job to write a Substack newsletter. Some writers have made it their job and produce several a week and manage to monetise them and create a whole community that hangs on their every word. I am full of admiration for them – I honestly am – but that is not me, or at least that is not me at the moment. I normally write a newsletter when I have something to say, but for the past few weeks I have felt I have nothing to say, or nothing to say that I can easily put into words.
If any of you are worrying now, please don’t. I’m fine. Anthony is fine. We are well and the building site we have been living in/on for the past five months is gradually turning into a home. In that time, I’ve made many, many cups of tea and coffee for the men who have been helping us with this, most of all for D (I’m not sure he’d like to be named) who has turned up every day at about 7.20am and kept us, in so many ways, on our toes. He’s nearly sixty and has been working as a builder, initially in school holidays, since he was fourteen. There’s nothing about building he doesn’t know.
D is like a whirling dervish and when he does pause for a coffee or tea makes it his job to keep us entertained. He’s a brilliant storyteller – and a straight talker. When he saw the yellow paint we were planning to use in the sitting room, he clamped his hand to his jaw, opened his mouth and made the universal sign for vomiting. But when we’d finished, and put our books and furniture and rugs in the room, he gave a terse nod. “I could,” he announced, “live in this room.”
It was a similar story with the kitchen. When he’d finished the tiling, he called me over to inspect his handiwork. All perfect, of course. “When I saw these tiles, I thought they were fackin’ ’orrible,” he said. “And now I love ’em!” I felt like someone who had just been handed back an essay by their most demanding teacher and discovered they had been given an A+.
We have escaped for Easter and D is still sending us videos of mended window sills and freshly painted pipes. I wish I had his energy. I wish I had his productivity. But I always learn from seeing someone who is a master of their craft and D is certainly a master of his.
This, as you will have gathered, is all a bit of a digression because I’m still resisting the thing I feel I need to write about. Yes, I am fine, Anthony is fine, and I should be able to get a bit more work done now that the banging and hammering has calmed down and I have a functioning study. We are fine, and as hale and hearty as people can be when they haven’t bothered to do much proper exercise for a while and have swapped the doctor’s traditional advice for an aperitivo a day. The trouble is this: that while I am fine, quite a few of my friends are not.
In the past few weeks, I’ve realised that what I really want to do is draw an invisible line round everyone I love. Actually, not just everyone I love, but everyone I know. It would be a kind of magic circle. It could be made of mushrooms, like the circle of mushrooms that suddenly appeared on the lawn of Anthony’s house in Northamptonshire, that friends who were house-sitting sent us in a photo on WhatsApp shortly after they arrived. It could be a ring of daisies. It could be a circle of dancing unicorns or even a mini-Stonehenge. I don’t care what it is. I just want something that will keep the people I love, and the people I know, from harm.
For a while, I’ve felt I have a certain privilege. It’s a weird one, but it’s still a privilege. I don’t worry about my family. Many of my friends spend a lot of time worrying about their children, their siblings or their parents. I don’t. I don’t worry about their mental health, their future or what they might be up to. I don’t worry because I don’t have children and I know exactly where the others are: in a grave in the Swedish section of Brookwood Cemetery. That, I think we can all agree, is sub-optimal. You don’t need me to tell you just how sub-optimal. But even awful things sometimes have their compensations.
When I had my mastectomy, for example, and the surgery on my stomach that made me feel I had been cut in half, which then got infected, there was a gain. Yes, I got something where I used to have a breast that looked, and looks, very much like a breast. I also got a nice, flat stomach. However much I eat, I have a nice, flat stomach. That was an unexpected bonus.
Which brings me to my friends. One friend has recently had major surgery for breast cancer and is now going through some gruelling chemotherapy. Another friend has just heard that she will need an urgent operation and a biopsy. A former colleague has been unexpectedly diagnosed with leukemia. My neighbour has just had surgery for spinal leaks induced by a Thai massage. Before they found out what it was, she was flat on her back for months. And one of my closest friends has been in a very serious car accident. For weeks, I dreamt of car crashes nearly every night.
In the past few weeks, I have been to three different hospitals. I was impressed by all of them, and particularly by the cakes at Guy’s Cancer Centre. I found myself resenting the fact that there weren’t cakes like that at the hospital where I was treated for mine. That’s the thing with cancer – and, in fact, with everything. You can think, at the same time: this is a really delicious cake and I don’t want my friend to die.
One of the friends in this list took me into hospital when I had my mastectomy and reconstruction after my cancer had come back. She brought me Vanity Fair and, of course, coffee and cake. Years later, she told me that when she left the hospital ward, she collapsed on the floor of the corridor and howled. A nurse came and comforted her and made her a cup of tea. I was bit annoyed by this, to be honest, because the nurses weren’t very nice to me. But I also understood what it had cost her to keep it together for me.
This is why I haven’t felt able to write. I’ve been trying to keep it together, trying to will my friends to be well. I feel as if I have been holding up the sky.
We arrived in Umbria on Monday. We rarely watch TV, but thought it would be nice to flop in front of a rom com. We found one about an American artist who meets an Italian chef in Florence. It’s charming. It’s visually gorgeous. And can you guess what happens? The chef gets cancer and dies. Definitely not your bog-standard rom com. Definitely what the doctor didn’t order, along with the aperol spritz.
As it happens, I am hopeful about all the people on my list. I’ve learnt that the body has an extraordinary capacity to heal. And love heals. I really do believe that. Love heals - and particularly when it’s accompanied by first-class medicine.
With any luck, my friends will be around for many years yet. But we are all going to die. The question, as the poet Mary Oliver put it in the poem of hers that has now become a meme, is: what will you do with what’s left of your “one wild and precious life”?
I was lucky. I had an early glimpse of a looming deadline and we journalists love a deadline. I’ve had 21 years of life I didn’t expect to have. For those 21 years, I have tried to structure my life around the things that make me happy. It’s why I write. It’s why I go to parties and have people round for meals and see as much as I can of my friends. It’s why I bought a tiny flat in Tuscany when I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay for it. It’s why I’m sitting on an Umbrian hillside now. Sure, I would have liked children. I didn’t get children. But Italian property is cheaper! I think it’s probably also slightly less hassle, but have to admit the jury’s out.
I wish I could send you a magic circle, of mushrooms, stones or dancing unicorns. Instead, this Easter, I wish you more of whatever makes your heart sing.
Do more of what makes you happy!
Coaching is all about focusing on what’s important, in life, work and the whole caboodle. If you would like some help in thinking this through, then do get in touch. In businesses, I work for commercial rates, but for individuals I offer a sliding scale of fees, depending on what people can afford. You can find out more about my coaching, and see some testimonials about my work, here. And also, here.
I’m also trained as a group coach, and planning to run an online coaching group with a focus on doing more of what makes you happy. There would be no more than six people in the group. If you’d like to find out more, then email me at me@christinapatterson.co.uk.
Sending you love. As always, such a great piece when the words did eventually arrive. I’m with you on both the worry and the renovations (and the way they do seem to prevent you from thinking about anything else in any kind of productive way!)
How wonderful that you're here (in all senses).