not really dead

Eleanor of Aquitaine - just resting for a bit

The Grumpy Old Bookman writes: "Madame Arcati has two stunning interviews with Molly Parkin, part 1 on 13 April and part 2 on 18 April. Surely, few writers can have lived life with such energy and commitment."

That'll be me, then. Since my return to The World I have managed to achieve not one thing in my writing life. I read Joan Wyndham's teenage wartime diary, Love Lessons, which is not very long and is about as taxing as - well - as lying in bed reading something light for a little while. I've written half a blog post about it.

I've written, in instalments, half of a post about Life on Mars, now about two weeks out of date. In the intervening time I have watched two episodes of Doctor Who and thought I might cleverly incorporate the Doctor into my Life on Mars time-travel post. But it's half done and I don't mean the half where it makes sense.

I bought Poetry London and flipped through it thinking, "what kind of poems does Maurice Riordan want for this journal? I mean, that I write? Oh, I'd have to write some new ones. He wants different ones. Oh, and maybe not by me." Which was just silly, except for the part about having to write some new poems.

I went to the launch of the new Poetry Review issue: an exclusive little do in Borders, Charing Cross Rd. I had to sit down a lot and went home at 8pm when they all went to the pub (I say "they all" - I mean about five of the fun people of course, ring-led by my friend Jane "Are you two sisters?" Holland, ex-snooker pro, poet, jobbing writer and hard-as-nuts mother of five, count-'em, five kids)... It was great to get out in the world, & I had some lovely chats with people, including someone who was at the last thing I went to, the night before I got sick. I was shaking when I got home.

Met another delightful poet and editor, Raul Peschiera, chez my friend Clare. Raul's international poetry magazine, The Review, is currently being revamped: watch this space. I borrowed an old issue containing an early interview with my friend Michael Donaghy, interesting because it predated his 2000 collection Conjure: he was just talking as a poet who'd had an amazingly successful first book, and had published a second, and to whom the next collection was always moot. And Conjure was going to be definitively great. He sounded a bit stressed about it at the time but of course he needn't have been. Oh, dear me... Incidentally, Michael was the last person I knew who had gallstones. He was dead six months later, though it is not connected.

I ascertained that Baroque was not quoted in this week's Guardian Review.

Got a couple of rejections. Am waiting for others.

Didn't work on any articles. I read a bit of poetry by one subject. I talked a little about another.

Had a dream about a large blue china jug I have - from a Victorian commode set - in which it had been given to me by my dad, and through him by MacNeice. This is because Jonathan Wonham had written on his blog about a crystal vase which is the only extant "personal" effect of the 12th century queen and overachiever Eleanor of Aquitaine, who acquired it through her grandfather William IX of France, who had got it in the Crusades. (Wm IX was, incidentally, the first troubadour poet, and the court of Eleanor was the first flowering of the cult of Courtly Love, until Henry II arrived and put a stop to all that nonsense. I think he didn't quite get the measure of what he was marrying. And you can't even say it was because he was English.) The crystal vase is in the Louvre, saved by the fact that Eleanor's first husband, Louis, presented it to the powerful and visionary Abbe Suger. In my dream the blue jug was floating in the air, very prominently, and an indistinct voiceover suddenly became very clear and loud when it said: MacNeice.

It's a message.

But interesting as that is, I didn't work on my articles.

I drafted, one evening, for a little while, a bad poem, which will need a lot more work (preferably at a time of day when my brain works) to be any good at all. It's about listening to the recordings of Ezra Pound, which are now available on the web.

Just the one, mind.

And I spent what very little time I could just - about two hours, I think - being a bit of a vegetable - which reminds me, I am so sick of chicken I could scream, and I've gone off fish completely. I don't care if I never see another mussel.

Yesterday, exhausted to the point of emotional desperation by my few little social sojourns (all copiously backed up by minicab support, and involving little alcohol and even less food),* I had no choice but to take Mlle B into the West End, so great is her need for school clothes. I know: at this time of year! But shoes give out, shirts go grey, and they always clamp down on uniform in the summer. It was awful, hours and hours of it, and when we finally staggered into the flat Mamma was good for nothing except the bunging of a chicken (organic, M&S, which we were fortunate to have at all - I had grabbed it one day just because M&S is right in Victoria Station; and lo, the supermarket itself proved beyond me this weekend) into the oven, in between lying on the sofa.

And now it's Monday. I could weep. I've done nothing and I haven't even had a chance to rest.

Maybe Molly Parkin's had times like this too. Maybe this is what "energy and commitment" are really about.

So much for easing myself back in, eh. Now I have to finish this, have a bath, do some "working from home," wake up the Tall Blond Rock God and go to the doctor. No, not that Doctor. I wish. And then to work.

* And I thought I better had: you never know, you might meet someone. Otherwise I really will spend the rest of my baroque life sitting here all alone in an empty flat. But no: only one cute guy and he was married.

I went to a friend's birthday party on Saturday night, in Stoke Newington - this was where the whole thing fell down. I was delirious before I even arrived. And there was no one there I'd never met before, all couples from years back & school parents. Everyone was telling me how extraordinarily well I look! This despite my eyes spinning round in opposite directions like those psychedelic toys I had when I was a kid. I think they meant, variously: "You're not dead," "you've lost weight," or "I like your earrings."