Gwyneth's personal blog

Friday 26th June, very warm and hazy. It's Ginger's birthday, she's eight.

Up to London yesterday evening, too hot, crowded train, me having failed to complete my draft of the Long Price essay, for my brother's birthday dinner at The Star, Belgrave Mews. We ate, we drank, we talked about many things up and down the long table. . . On the train home again, suddenly somebody called out, Michael Jackson's dead!

Seemed like it was true, because the same call went up from other seats in the carriage, the news conveyed to a moving train by our futuristic world's telecoms, and then passed around in the simplest way, mouth to mouth. . . As we walked along the Upper Lewes Road someone came out of a house and called to us, with the same absence of emotion, yet the same conviction that something important had happened, hey, man, Michael Jackson's dead!

Strange accolade.

He was a very good dancer, a phenomenal entertainer, a rock and roll casualty who died painfully, shamefully, publicly; over decades. Poor kid.

Wednesday 24th June, another clear warm day, strong breeze.

Midsummer's Eve, eight in the evening, I stand on our ledge (sort of balcony with rickety-railed steps down to the garden, outside the kitchen door), watching the swifts, scimitar wings, flashing when they catch the sun, one, two, four... Maybe a dozen, that's twelve oh children of the C21. Reflected sun, evening gold, making all the roofs and walls across the blue gulf between me and Racehill glow. The trouble with moments like this is that one can't shift them out of context. They come with all the grief and losses and impending doom of the present day drawn up after them. Making it difficult, briefly, to wish the world otherwise.

Just finished Soldiers of Salamis, and found it very good. Falange, it means Phalanx, a greek squad, a noble little band of heroes is the image, only that's not what happened, Franco's dismal exhausted Spain happened. In theory it wouldn't be worth saying over again, but if you loved Pan's Labyrinth you'll love this. Salamis? Ah yes, one of those "turning points of European history", and I don't suppose Javier Cercas knows the Browning poem, but Name not the clown with these is exactly what he means, I think, by his "Miralles"

I praise masculine deconstructed heroics, male-ordered romance about lost causes and the courage it takes to go on living, and live well, because these aren't the Seventies.

Working on the Long Price review now, and just got the ARC of Grazing The Long Acre from PS. Good heavens. Wonders will never cease. The cover work by Mark Garlick was my choice, it's an sf version of Magritte's La Reponse Imprevue, which means "The unexpected answer". For the record, my favourites are "Destroyer of Worlds" and "In The Forest Of The Queen". There had to be a frog story!

PS, I decided not to do a Spirit encyclopedia, enough of that with Bold As Love, but I always search my characters' names, just in case, and this is what I turned up, long ago, for "Yelaixaing", night comes fragrance, which means tuberose (I suppose the Mexican flower? But maybe there's a Chinese tuberose). Isn't that nice.

Weather same as it was 10 minutes ago, except the quilt has lost definition and I can't see any swifts.

Did I mention we have a second invasion, this time those handsome Swedish tiger moths, first outlier spotted in our kitchen a couple of years ago at this time. This year, I see them darting and fluttering at treetop level, all across the Crescent gardens.


The Marine and Coastal Access Bill has a consultation document up online, it's a little difficult to find but this should get you to the pdf: http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/marine-conservation-zones/MPA-draft-strategy-consultation.pdf
Please respond, before July 13th, if you're interested in conservation, fish (including eating them), diving, seabirds, or anything of that kind. As you must have heard, recently, it's scary what's happening to global fish stocks, and shocking that there is a solution (No Take Zones) that's proven, swiftly successful and speedily profitable, but NTZs aren't being included in the Bill as it stands, for fear of reprisals from the fishing industry. The same "fishing industry" that soon won't exist unless dramatic action is taken, but no, they'd rather chew their own paws off and bleed to death than let anyone help them out of the trap.

What is a No Take Zone? What it sounds like. It's an area, usually quite small, inshore or in the open sea, from which nobody's allowed to take any fish, shellfish, crustaceans. No commercial fishing, with any kind of gear; no angling. Leisure diving, boating, swimming regulated but allowed. Ideally, they're areas identified as spawning or nursery grounds for important commercial or conservation-worthy species. In the open ocean (cf the Plaice Box) they work but not terrifically well, because the fishing crews just put more pressure on the adjoining areas. Inshore, which is the area the Bill covers, they've been found to work swiftly and spectacularly, restoring populations of young fish, lobsters, scallops, cockles, whatever, and when they grow up & wander out of the zone they put the local fishing industry back in business in a sustainable way. It's simply game-keeping for the wild harvest of the ocean, and about bloody time. (excuse my Australian, the pioneers of this kind of conservation are Australian and NZ). See this site

Monday 22nd June, warm. A bright, downy layered overcast, the kind of sky that promises rain or sun, but fails to deliver either.

Last Wednesday, on a chill June evening, we took the train to Shoreham for an event in the Adur Festival Art of Science programme, a multi-media science lecture presented by Philip Harris from Sussex Uni, devised by Harris, Richard Durrant, and Malcolm Buchanan-Dick. Truly awesome and far-reaching it says here, and no word of a lie. A short history of the alphabet soup (or "particle zoo") that presently pertains, quarks and all, with abstract music and visuals generated from the EDM experiment at Grenoble. Thoroughly good and gripping exposition of what "we" currently think is going on,and why. Supposing it isn't turtles all the way down, that is. We always have to take this kind of thing on faith of course, how could it be otherwise, but it was excellent fun, how refreshing to see a full house for the most abstruse of natural philosophy, and a welcome alternative to Richard Dawkins feeble "The God Delusion"

read recently, in response to a challenge on this blog from Marc Jacobs, "what have you got against Dawkins??"

. . . Dawkin's whole argument seeming to be "Don't worship that silly opinionated old bloke on a cloud over there, worship THIS silly, opinionated middle-aged bloke over here! To be fair, someone pointed out it's really a fractious response to the drubbing he got from Bible Belt creationists, but even so! He ought to be ashamed.

I wanted to ask exactly how the "measurements of asymmetries within a neutron" related to the whale-song style sound and Acid Test light show, but there were too many other people with much better prepared questions, & I wouldn't have understood much of the answer, so I just paid attention instead.

Thursday 11th June, clouds gathering after a warm sunny morning.

Thunderstorm at breakfast and then heavy rain on and off all day yesterday, & today looks like slipping back into more of the same. If that dry summer doesn't materialise, I'm finally going to give up on that stupid Oak and Ash thing, and this time I mean it.

Going through the copy-edited files of a book of essays & such, probably coming out next year from Aqueduct Press:how difficult it is to revisit recent non-fiction and resist the temptation to change everything. (I can usually distance myself from my own fiction, of whatever vintage. It's all make believe, maybe it made sense at the time, maybe someone else wrote it!). Time is no healer, ideas and emotions slip into the past and discontinuity blurs. I can remember feeling entitled to be angry about the invasion of Iraq, about the brutal lurch to the right engineered by the terrible marriage between the "good guys" and "those occult lunatics in the desert", but I seem to have lost that right, and even that feeling. Was there ever a world without the War on Terrorism? Was there ever an England where Parliament didn't need to be housed in concrete defences, where secret evidence was anathema, the police didn't shoot to kill; and where the rule of law prevailed? Were there vampire stories before Twilight?

My time at my desk has been so fragmented, not to say shattered, all this year, I'm amazed to find I've finished Grasshopper and turned it over to my agent. Usually, since I follow Peter's calendar, I'm racing madly to get something finished before the holidays. This'll be better. I'll make a new start in a leisurely fashion, ready to get serious in the autumn.

No I won't. If the sun refuses to shine I'll slack around, obsessively playing vintage Zelda and watching daytime movies.

Tuesday 9th June, cold, grey and drizzly

It's that time of year. The weather has closed in, the skies are low and wet, the slugs, held at bay for a while by the cold winter, are rampant and the greenhouse, so full of hopeful beginnings in April, is now the home of gangling green tomatoes and refugees from the battlefield. One of my Japanese lantern plants seems to have decided to kill the other, so I've separated them, and the invalid isn't dead yet. On the little pear tree eight pears are still swelling, the grass under the laden plum tree is littered with small green lawn-mower killing pellets.

"People power sees off Supermarket Giant," says the Brighton Evening Argus, but if it's true Tescos have given up their plan to build a superstore in my neighbourhood I don't feel very victorious. I've read the Council's "Masterplan" for the regeneration of the London Road, and there's a hole the size of a departing elephant. Why on earth produce such a big fancy document, which must have cost a fortune full of warnings about pollution and reminders about all the sensible, vital restrictions on new developments, if the whole scheme was conditional on the covert pay off from mega-developers who were never going to get planning permission. Oh well. I'm sure it was fun putting all the pictures and flowcharts and all together.

I think there's still one frog alive in the pond, but its skin is red, and one eye white-blind. I can't think of anything to do, except one old trick; which I plan to try.

On a brighter note, here's a test of the new Midnight Lamp (soon to be officially posted on the Bold As Love pages)

Monday June 1st, another beautiful warm day.

Sunday, warm and breezy, we didn't have time for a long day walking so we took the train to Berwick and walked around the little reservoir to Arlington, the Yew Tree, where they serve a nice pint of Sussex; and where the Norman Church of St Pancras, with its Saxon long and short work (featured in Rainbow Bridge) can be admired. Around and back through the lanes & beside the Cuckmere, pleasantly surprised by a lizard, sleek olive brown little creature, caught crossing road. There used to be a colony of Common (not in Sussex nowadays, of course) Lizards in King Death's Garden, on a neglected sunny path, but that was years ago. A viewing path has been created, more graves have been opened, the old upper cemetery has lost its summer aura of benign, dreamy neglect. Still, a lizard in the sunshine! And a cuckoo's song, from Abbot's Wood, that followed us, insistently, seeming to get clearer in the distance, as we headed down the river.

THIS IS A KNIFE late at night, Sky Artsworld, came across Bloc Party ("Banquet" and English National Ballet collaboration Ballet Rocks. Fantastic, compelling, power and glory: knocks MTV R&B excuses of song and dance routines I'm subjected to at the gym out of the ring. Reminded me of that Crocodile Dundee scene when some NY kid attempts to mug the leathery Paul Hogan. 'This is a knife, man!'. . .'Nah, mate THIS is a knife'