The Playroom

I was in Cambridge this weekend for a friend's 40th, having a super-nostalgic time. We had dinner in the same room as Milton's death mask and there was a lot of reminiscing and some reading-out of The Night Climbers of Cambridge which is coming back into print at last and which is an honest-to-goodness guide to climbing, for sport, the rooftops of Cambridge (essentially, it's parkour, 1930s style). I especially like the bit about pausing in a saintless niche, above King's, to imagine a stone halo on your head. And the warning against night climbing drunk, quickly followed by the admission that one famed night climber climbs best when he (the climbers are all men—this is 1937) is two-thirds drunk. Not having stopped at, quite, two-thirds, I woke the next morning to chapel bells and a roaring hangover, which I set out to defeat by stomping around the silent early-morning streets. And in fact the most achingly nostalgic bit of the whole weekend was that hour or so, ambling about, slightly vague and groggy, and coming upon The Playroom where I did my first play. Unbelievably long ago. As I took this picture, I could hear rehearsals going on inside and it was all I could do to stop myself knocking on the door and asking to join in.

Kohl trees, kohl peacock

My mother brought these kohl pots over from Baghdad with her. I especially like the peacock, but I've never used them because the kohl is long-since dried out, and anyway it was leaded. But my inner goth adores them, as does my (less inner) Iraqi Jewish glamour girl.

The Box

This is a picture of me (blurred, dripping in furs and in an outrageous hat) with Death (John Fitzpatrick). I've been trying to write about The Box for ages, but recently I've been thinking about death and mortality a lot for one reason and another, so I decided to have another go. The brilliant Kate Sagovsky invited me to write a fifty-word message from death. My mini-monologue was one of eight—the other writers included Dominic Leggett, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Effie Woods and each appears on the back of one of these gorgeous playing cards, designed by Helena Maratheftis.  

The show begins in the bar. You report to Death's Secretary (Jennifer Jackson) and answer a series of yet-more-surreal questions. Then you are ushered into a booth to meet Death and his Lady (Danielle Meehan). I won't spoil it for you, and in fact it's almost impossible to write about the experience, but to me it felt like a genuine encounter. I danced, I dressed up, I posed for photographs, I interrogated my life and choices, and I found myself propositioning Death. (I was improvising! I was in the moment!) I could never have predicted a ten-minute play about death would be so life-enhancing, nor that it would send me out so determined to make the most of life.

The Box is coming back (for Bush Bounce), and there should be more dates too; details via Moving Dust and there's a very engaging trailer here.

Happy Pesach!

Here's to freedom.

What do you do when you finish the first draft of a book about heroines?

Drink prom queens and watch, in their entirety, in pajamas, both seasons of Lena Dunham's Girls.

Love, Laura Ingalls Wilder style

Absolutely my favourite line from re-reading the Little House books (my review of the brand new, gorgeous Library of America edition, edited by Caroline Fraser, is in this week's TLS) was when Laura Ingalls Wilder's husband proposed, he said he'd build them a house but "It will have to be a little house. Do you mind?" She replied, "I have always lived in little houses. I like them." Oh my. Happy Valentine's, all.

Emily Brontë's hawk

This is Emily Brontë's watercolour of her pet merlin hawk, Hero. As wild and strange as she was. She rescued him from an abandoned nest on the moors and in her poem, "The Caged Bird" she identifies with him "like myself alone, wholly alone", wishing to return to "Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea": 

Could my hands unlock the chain
How gladly would I watch it soar
And never regret, and never complain
To see its shining eyes no more.

Back from Brussels in November 1842, she noted in her diary, "lost the hawk Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtless dead...I inquired on all hands and could hear nothing of him."

Hero also appears in Anne Carson's dazzling “The Glass Essay”. Visiting her mother in Yorkshire,

Her tiny sharp shoulder hunched in the blue bathrobe
made me think of Emily Brontë's little merlin hawk Hero
that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte wasn't around.

I don't know if it's true. And he may have been called Nero; no one can read Emily’s handwriting. But this watercolour fell out of my copy of Wuthering Heights this morning and I can't stop looking at it.