9/11/11
Just sold a piece to the Daily Telegraph about Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, comparing her experiences to mine. She discovered details about her real mother recently, then met her supported of course by her new lover, super shrink Susie Orbach. You couldn’t do much better than that. I met mine when I was 19 just after I left home to become a student and hadn’t a clue what I was doing. In both cases it didn’t end well.
That money, £350, plus fee for doing some on-line work for Private Banking Magazine, will pay the £500 for the short portrait painting course I’ve just signed up for at Heatherley’s
Of course I still believe that fame and fortune follows. I hope I’ve still got enough time left for it!
A friend of mine says that in the photograph of me, on the front of my book, Inside, about teaching in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, I don’t look at all well. Not surprising as I was at the time, unknowingly, fizzing with cancer. Remember myself at that time, all the symptoms boiling and bloating away, and how I just ignored them.
Take a painting, a self-portrait where my head is replaced by a Victoria Sponge, to the vicarage in Ealing as a present for Fr. Bill. He insists on giving me £10 for it. This is my lucky day. He is my Dr. Gachet.
Also take him a quince and apple tart. Try to explain that the quince seemed a bit tough, much more so than the apple so he will need to re-heat the pie slowly so it cooks a bit more. As usual he wasn’t listening.
He was mumbling on about the C of E – and the shenanigans at
Some lucky vicar will soon be getting more pay and a nice cosy, 17th century vicarage. Fr. Bill won’t be applying.
“The ambition of clerics is terrible in
“But the important thing is being a good vicar of a demanding parish. What ambition is better than that, and my ambition is achievable.”
I wondered if Ealing, once the golden suburb of the west, is really that demanding.
He says it’s now very big and full of “all sorts,” later he referred to that fact that the parish is now barely Anglican or even Christian.
“You are running hard to keep still,” he said. “There is no money. But in the end the C of E in the diocese of
Apparently the fabric of the buildings, churches and vicarages is all rotting away, returning to the damp earth, helped along of course by the new voracious breed of metal thieves.
A wise man that Fr. Bill.
ReplyDeletePS Surely, that painting is worth more than £10.00?
ReplyDeletePerhaps it is - how can I tell?
ReplyDelete