Before I go to sleep

When I first realised that I wasn’t going to get any rent and was facing about ten rent free months before any sign of the bailiffs would appear, I went into a kind of spin. I made my way to Chelsea for my portrait class and when I got off the overland train at Imperial Wharf I didn’t know where I was. I cautiously followed the other passengers up the street quite unable to recognise anything around me or be sure I was going the right way. This was a very scary experience, rather like being a small child walking alone to a new school, feeling totally disorientated. It was as if shock and distress had knocked everything out of my head. When I got to the class I couldn’t recognise the teacher. I told one of the other students and she laughed. I made a joke of it too but wasn’t sure of what was going on just hoping that whatever was going on in my brain would settle down soon. This week on my way to the class, having heard that I was being accused of racial harassment etc I got on the wrong train, going entirely in the wrong direction. I decided not to get hot and bothered, just to go with it. Since then various other landlords have spoken to me, including this tenants previous landlord who had the temerity to give them a reference. After telling me how bad they’d been he said, “try not to worry, this will pass.” My friend June said, “Just think to yourself, all this will pass.” Well yes, quoting George Harrison or someone is all very well, but I seem to have entered a new world of landlords’ karma, where we all wander around soothing each other because no one can actually afford to get the gloves off and go to law.

Scones and arrows of annoying fortune

Oh God, if I could have my health back. Oh God, if I could have my peace of mind back! I was feeling much better after my recent drive to the Isle of Wight and back, I actually felt happy, yes happy, it was there almost palpable and rather a new thing. Now I have just had another bolt of bad luck and joy has evaporated. New tenants moved in upstairs before Easter and they are refusing to pay any rent. First they made incessant demands, which were all met and really promptly. Then came the silent refusal to put anything into my bank account, then an illegal changing of the locks. I now face the long process of getting them evicted and losing about six months rent in the process. Disaster. My system of getting by; small pension and rented flat works OK but only if I get tenants who pay up. Now I realise that these two are not going to pay anything, and to make matters worse he has launched some kind of campaign against me, getting legal advice to see if he can prosecute me for entering the property unlawfully to fix a sash window before Easter as we were all rushing to go away and I couldn’t get hold of them. I also left a note at that time telling them when to put the bins out and he said this was evidence he could use against me, of illegal entry. He has reported me to the council, demands to see all documents relating to the flat, and has, he says, reported me to the police for “racially harassing” his wife who is Portuguese. He also accuses me of harassing his parents. His father guaranteed the rent but has no intention of paying either. I went to the police station myself to check it all out and a rather borned WPC said, “harassment is a series of consecutive acts.” I have only sent the father one polite e mail so that doesn’t amount to much. As for the race business, after she sent me a text accusing me yet again of going into the flat unlawfully, I sent her a text saying, “I know your English is not good but can you understand these words: “pay your rent.” The policewoman said it might be fact that her English is not good, and not to worry. Maybe the English is worse than I thought, she certainly didn’t get the message anyway. As they live upstairs from me the situation is particularly unpleasant an uneasy. They keep all the curtains drawn front and back but seem to know my movements. I lobbed a very small snail over the fence last night into a garden where they do not gardening. I wonder if he noted that one down? All that aside, I have just had my 56th birthday – it sounds auspicious somehow that number, but I realise I am living precariously, relying on one rent. It is not what I imagined for myself when I was twenty five. I think I thought I would have a big house in Hampstead by now and a successful career at something. Wonder if I should sell the flat and live on the proceeds. If I got £240k for it that would last about seven years. No point in investing it, it would just go in the bank. But then the banks might default too. All over the country there are people making these useless calculations about the future. In the meantime it is a matter of getting the evil little shit and his ghastly wife off my premises! Despite all that I managed to have a lovely birthday. I had a big lunch on the Sunday and on Monday. My friend June and I went to the Picasso exhib at the Tate and then she took me for afternoon tea at the Lanesborough Hotel. It was a sumptuous tea, although we had to ask for the scones to be brought out and the tea-cake was the size of a fifty pence. The sandwiches and small, warm quiche were best, and they came with gold and silver leaf on top, so you can enjoy a genteel afternoon treat and cure yourself of clap at the same time. In the evening my friend Brian took me to see Sweeny Todd, and he even paid for a box. I have some wonderful friends.

Down in the non-dumps

23/4/2012 Something has happened to my system. For most of my adult life I only went to the loo, as we say politely, once a week. This was normal for me and I wouldn’t be worrying about it now if it weren’t for the – the thing that happened, the cancer. When I changed my diet and began consuming large amounts of foliage, plants and olive oil it changed and I became very regular. That felt good; at least I could control whether the cancer came back in my bowels, and as things were going so smoothly I felt reassured. Since Easter that has changed. I feel rather empty, not bloated or heavy, but my insides seems to have decided to seal themselves. I remember sitting on the lav at my mother’s praying for a bowel movement, the way I once prayed for a period to appear to show I wasn’t pregnant. There was an unusual level of stress about it building up and once it starts building you can’t stop it. Last week I was walking in the street praying, “Please let it happen, but not at any inappropriate moment of course.” This weekend nothing. Considering the amount of vegetables and fruit, about ten pieces a day, this could only mean that there was a tumour in there. All these months when I have felt so free and optimistic it was building itself, accruing cells, taking on weight. I began stuffing in crinkled old packets of “Movicol,” left over from the hospital in 2010. I gave back a full box as I didn’t think I’d need them, thinking I could control things. By last night I felt that slide into despair. I did try phoning the oncology dept at Hammersmith as they have someone on call, but no one answered the phone. There was no where to get reassurance anyway. I saw the future – recurrence. What do you say to people, do you say when they say, "You are looking well, how are you? Perhaps nothing at all? I was now a new person, the one who lives with the knowledge that it had come back for a second go. That it is the end, five years of life at most and more chemo to get even that. Why did I ever think I would be one of the lucky ones, one of the saved? Other things flitted through my mind; I was no longer going to worry about money at all. I’ve always had a fear of overdrafts and spending capital, just like my Victorian grandparents and parents. Now I would spend without worrying. Lately I have been on a low carb, low olive oil diet, but that small cookery book which came with the Saturday paper, “Carluccio’s Perfect Italian Cooking,” I would follow it, make every oozing, cheesy, oily recipe. This morning things were better, not much but enough to make me feel hopeful again. So I am now back to the other persona, the survivor, in remission, someone hanging on to the edge of the rock with enough of a foothold left to climb back up if they can only hold on a bit longer.

Essential danger and fright

15/4/12 Reading The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal, come upon a quote from the radical German poet Rilke, which seems to apply to my life right now, and probably to the lives of any one else “in remission” from some catastrophe. It offers a great deal of consolation: “all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.” You have to live like a bird before an “anxious launching of himself on the floods where he is gently caught.” Rilke also says flatly: “You must change your life.” One must never get too cosy. Well cancer, divorce, bankruptcy, childlessness changes it for you, a slow creep of despair and what feels like inevitable decline. But I remember when I had a very good job, lots of money coming in. I lived in a kind of bubble and that was terrible. I fretted endlessly that there must be more too it, longed to change my life somehow, endlessly postponing doing anything about it. Then I was sued by Diana Rigg and sacked, so that did it for me. Of course once you’ve changed your life you are destroyed in different ways.

Titanic Day

15/4/12 Titanic Day. In church today I suddenly started thinking about Lord Astor and his Airedale terrier, Kitty. I heard Jeanette Winterson's pieces about the Titanic on R4 last week, and towards the end she mentioned that Astor's pregnant teenage wife, confined to the lifeboat out on the freezing sea, saw her husband standing alone on the deck, and their terrier Kitty running up and down. It really upset me to hear this and I cried a lot. I never thought about the kennels on board. How ghastly! Apparently there were 12 dogs, but no cats, thank God. Two Pomeranians survived because their owners were first class passengers and were allowed to stuff them into their Astrakan coats and slip them unseen into the life boats. I have spent this afternoon trying to make some drawings, exactly as it appears in my mind, but it’s difficult as you have all the complications of the ship’s railing etc. I want something abstract but powerful, to convey the horrid comedy of the whole thing.

Lets not play it too safe

15/4/12 (Titanic Day) There is something hubricious and unpleasant about this constant quest for public safety, something conformist and controlling – not really for our good at all. This Easter I took a friend to see some of the Civil War sites near my mother’s home in Staffordshire. Chief among them is of course Boscobel House and the oak tree where Charles Stuart hid from the Cromwellians in 1651. I have been visiting this tree since I was very young. You take a long path through fields up to the old tree, a daughter of the original, stands behind narrow iron railings close to the trunk. Behind is a spectacular view of Wenlock Edge and the Clee Hills. Not any more – some worthy soul from English Heritage has decided to put a white picket fence all round the site so you can no longer get up close to the Royal Oak. After Charles got his throne back and he told the story of his uncomfortable night up the tree, eager tourists visited Boscobel and tore lumps off it for souvenirs. At that time a low brick wall was placed around it to protect the tree – but this new fence, all the away up to the farm fence, so you can’t get under it, has been erected to protect us, in case one of the two remaining branches should fall on anyone’s head.

Talk of the devil

Sat 31st March 2012

A church outing from St. Martin’s, Ealing, to Coventry Cathedral. It was wonderful to see this monument to modernism again. 1960s architecture never got any better than this; in fact it seemed to go from this height of creativity straight to the depth of tat. The canopy connecting the old church with the new looks astonishingly inept, but apart from that the place is full of grace and majesty.
I love the face of Christ in the great tapestry by Graham Sutherland. Never have eyes been so well lit. That highlight seems to make the whole face shimmer with light.
I first saw this work when I was six years old, not long after the cathedral opened to the public. I remember waiting with my parents in a long queue in the cold. When we got inside we were some way back from the tapestry and my mother asked me if I could see the tiny man standing between Christ’s feet. I just couldn’t see it, or recognise it at all.
On this visit, a woman on the front desk, dressed in the rather unpleasant puce coloured surpluses they seem to wear there, presumably to match the pink stone walls, said the little man is five foot tall. This was surprising. She said it several times, as if she was trying to say that it was put there to show the scale of the work, which is still the biggest tapestry in the world. Not sure what she meant. Perhaps the word “scale” was deemed too hard for the public.
Someone mentioned the sculpture on the outside wall, by Jacob Epstein, showing St. Michael casting a skinny and obscene looking Satan down into hell. I was not too short sighted or dim to notice that as a small child. It was impossible to miss its dramatic message.
The lady in the surplus said, “In the old days they used to say it was the Archangel Michael casting the devil down into hell, but these days we prefer to say that Michael is saying to him, “You can come back, once you’ve got your life sorted out.”

Most of Epstein’s work looks terribly dated now, but it was nice to see his door knobs on the outside of the cathedral, shaped like the heads of scowling cherubs. The only time you will be able to hold one of his works. Apparently his widow didn’t like them, and gave them to the cathedral in the 1970s.

I sat for awhile in the Chapel of Christ in Gethsemane, the most lush and literally sparkling of the modernist chapels, with Michael appearing again holding out a chalice. I suppose what makes the place so special, and so cohesive, is its theme of suffering and redemption. There are thorns and nails everywhere, a drawing done by a soldier at Stalingrad, and some of the art work seems to me to have been influenced by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which caused a sensation in 1945.

It’s impossible not to be moved by the work. I thought I’d also have a look at the Blitz museum in a corner of the nave of the old burnt out cathedral. I was a bit anxious about doing this as I feel rather emotional these days. My eyes well up at the slightest thing, and certain memories and music can bring on an attack of humiliating tears. Since the cancer arrived I avoid any TV, film or radio involving crying children, lost pets, the Titanic, and that photo of the three queens mourning the death of George VI. One of the doctors said that this was highly advisable. The museum was closed and I felt rather relieved not to see it.
The lady in the surplus said it was definitely open, so I hovered about for half an hour, looking more closely at the old cathedral remains and the buildings round about. Eventually I knocked again and the door opened. A startled looking man with his sleeves rolled up opened the door. He looked harassed and rather wild, the sort you used to see in garages up to their elbows in grease. “We can’t open today,” he said. “I’ve got trouble with my volunteers.”
Then he said I couldn’t come in because “they were expecting a tour.”
I peered in. The museum was the size of a small front parlour. There was no one else about so he reluctantly agreed to let me have a very quick look around.
His assistant, a plummy voiced young boy with thick wavy hair accompanied me as I walked past school desks, just like the ones I once used, and a kitchen interior rather like my mother’s and grandmother’s. There were a few uniforms on scorched looking old dummies that looked as if they’d met with a terrible decanting petrol into a jar disaster, ration books and gas masks.
At the end was a small dark room with a film showing bombers from the air, no idea which side we were looking at, cities from above, but the boy recognised Coventry. We saw more of the blitz, then Coventry after the attack, VIPs arriving. The King looking blank, Churchill furious and upset.
I might have been OK if not for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata playing in the background. The boy beside me knew what it was, I didn’t I am ashamed to say. My eyes kept filling up, and every time I gasped with suppressed emotion, and dabbed at my nose with a tissue, he ran out of the room as if I was giving off toxic rays, or perhaps he just thought I was bonkers beyond the point of no return.
That all took about five minutes and the frantic looking man was soon seeing me out with an irritated grunt, to get on with what ever you get on with in an empty museum.
I hope they didn’t think I was a mad old bat. I am miles away from feeling it’s OK to show emotion in public, and when a woman gets to a certain age there is that creeping suspicion that she might easily be written off as doolally.
I have had these fears at least since early middle-age, not comfortable with how I appear. For years I felt uneasily that I was wearing the wrong make-up for my age, and my anxieties were as visible as too much rouge.
This got worse after I encountered George Galloway for the Standard, after he had appeared in the Big Brother house in orange tights lapping milk like a cat.
He decided we should meet in a Nando’s on the Whitechapel Road, the periphery of what became his Muslim fiefdom. I made my way up the street knee deep in fast food wrappers with an ominous feeling. When I arrived I was greeted by a strange assortment of people, some Irishmen who seemed to be guarding him, and some of the Galloway family.
He’d brought along his very Cockney working class daughter, her husband and their children. They sat next to us, staring ahead, not saying much, like chavs in a sit-com. He did not look at me much and I could tell he was not interested in doing the interview. I asked him why he’d brought his close relations along, no answer, just a tightlipped look.
“Well I promise not to ask you anything about your sex life,” I said, attempting to be jocular.
“I think you’re a nutter,” he said, levelly, sliding the words into me like a knife.
I instantly blamed my make up as he rose up from the table, slammed some cash down on the table in front of me plus a £5 note, and careered off into the litter strewn night. Was it too much eye-liner, too much foundation?
“It takes one to know one,” I suppose I should have said to his disappearing back, but I was frozen in horror. His family went on sitting there like the frog footman in Alice, not saying a word. One of the Irishmen appeared and said he’d sort it. I waited, still numb as he returned, sat quietly and did the interview as if nothing was wrong. He spoke to me about his life for over an hour.
I’ve never really got over that though, the way he was so astute and slashed me, straight in to the shank. Later one of the Irishmen took me for a drink. He seemed to like me, which I found astonishing, and pressed on me an old CD he said belonged to George. A small act of rebellion against his master perhaps. It was Joan Baez singing, Love Minus Zero, No Limit, which reminded me of my student days in Scotland in the 70s, when the whole world seemed to be full of men just like George.
I am of course since then his mortal enemy. I believe there are quite a few of us. When I remember that meeting I could kill him, but then again I don’t want to go to the devil, cast down into hell for someone like that.