The Obsessive Diary

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“Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” said my friend on the phone last night. We’re in the era of 18 - 25 when they’re not kids anymore that can be reined in and put to bed, when they have the reins themselves and are learning to use them. You wouldn’t hand a new driver the keys to a Ferrari, would you? They have to start on a moped at best, “a Reliant Robin” as Margaret commented when I had the same conversation with her later. But these young people in our lives are off driving the ro...

Dear Everyone,

These last three months have been hail stones, this diary an entry of sorrows and however much I’ve wanted to turn up with ta dah! a break in the clouds it wasn’t possible. (Isn’t the urge to please crazy?) But I can turn up with thanks. I know what I’ve been going through is the same as everyone else. I know my hurts have matched yours. I’ve been expressing it all here and people have said it’s helped them to see it articulated, which is gratifying and a relief because god...

And so it goes. I seem to have drawn to a halt. It’s winter. Hibernation is obvious.

Christmas was incredibly loving in the arms of my Somerset family. They filled me with the good stuff. I’m grateful for them. I love them so much. Me and Margaret cooked up a storm, everything was delicious. We talked and walked and opened presents. We put on glad rags and toasted our fortune and love for one another. I missed J&B but there it is.

I stayed at The Chapel which was luxury and white cott...

Throughout the funeral I saw her swooping over fields, laughing, arms outstretched, doing double backflips; that was the Jeanetta I knew. Elegant and social. In jeans, outside, hair tousled. It was supposed to be a private gathering, just her family and her closest friends but then it grew and I got the call and my Friday which was supposed to be have been in London with Beth, and lunch at my brother’s changed shape. As did theirs, also by death. Beth flew to New Orleans for two funerals and my brother stayed in Scotland for a third.

...

I’m not sure when my dislike of Christmas set in. Was it as a child? I don’t think so. I remember the excitement and routine, the stockings and tinsel on my parent’s bed, the marble run set up in the upstairs hall, the chairs we were allocated, the annual argument over whether to eat lunch before or after presents. I have happy memories of Christmas. And yet. Everyone in my family is the same. We view it as a chore, a bore, an inescapable thing to get through. It depresses us and makes us want to run fo...

I have the sensation of roots being pulled from my heart, dead roots that have been cut off from their source, no longer alive roots but tangled entanglements that no longer pump the drug. It’s visceral, the sensation of withdrawal. I’ve been putting out fires for decades; crystal meth, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, needles, anger but this is the smouldering heart of the matter. If I were a twelve step person, SLAA is the group I’d go to.

I’ve often wondered what it is I’m really addicted to. Giving up all those...

When I was a very small child I witnessed a terrible violence. Its flashback was the domino which set off all the others, it was the key waiting to be fitted in the lock, and when that happened, when the black box opened in my head, all that had been crazy-making made sense. This week I’ve been drawn again to that moment, it’s been present, and it’s helped me make sense of something else.

In the vast space that’s opened up since the end of one relationship and the repositioning of others...

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I’ve been thinking about necessary family estrangement and what happens when relationships breakdown. I’ve been thinking about last chapters and what they look like. I’ve been thinking about endings.

Yesterday I heard the news that a friend’s sister had died. It was completely unexpected and very sudden; they’d had dinner the week before, she was on a jolly visiting friends, her heart gave way, no one saw it coming. I knew her, too. We’d holiday with her when the children were small, Easters in Polzeath, she would collect mussels at low tide...

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First off, thank you all for showing up with such incredible kindness, generosity and love since I published “Shattered”. I was conscious of the delicate line between asking for witness and flinging a dead cat on the table, and I hovered over the need to speak for sometime before pressing publish. The threat of indulgence is a constant in my British mind, as are the dysfunctions of story as identity and pretending there’s no hole in my bucket; I recognise the latter particularly, that however much public attention I get, it’s not enough, and to deny this while ho...

It’s been useful having the memoir to republish over the last month because in that time two relationships have shattered. That makes three this year, if death can be called a shattering, although my relationship to my mother now, six months on since she left, feels more whole than it ever did. So I don’t count it, except if the frame is a fundamental repositioning of foundational connections, in which case I very much do. So that makes three.

My mother died. Fine. It was always going to happen and when it did she...

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It’s funny to think that within days of the black box opening I headed off to the Venice Biennale, that most surreal and picturesque of places which on a normal day is like walking into a dream, but which during the festival is beyond Alice in Wonderland. The missing pieces of the jigsaw had come tumbling out, I had a seen a picture awful but whole, ugly but a thousand times better than the jumbled nonsense I had lived with; memories that made no sense, feelings that had no grounding, behaviour at odds with a childhood apparently so bl...

Bad things happened in the basement of that house. It’s taken a long time for me to say that. The pictures of my childhood never made sense, why I was so frightened and unhappy, why I built an armour and ran away and kept running. We had such plenty, enormous wealth, a revolving door of parties, artists, cocktails in the drawing room; These spoilt children, our mother would say, Don’t you know how lucky you are? Yet at its heart was something dark that left us splintered. The woman who escaped the Czech revolution who was given the...

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I’m going to tell you a fairy story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who saw something. She happened upon a woman in a bath who was drinking a glass of wine and the woman’s expression said she saw it too but she carried on drinking her wine. The little girl knew she was going to die so she took what was most precious inside her and gave it to the Gremlins who lived in the hollow of roots beneath the trees that grew on steep cliffs behind her father’s house. And then the ba...

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At the heart of addiction lies trauma. It’s an answer to the question, How can I live with such pain? My love affair with needles was a problem-solver and like all dysfunctional relationships it began with the explosive belief that I’d found the one, and ended with my world reduced to a pinprick. For three years I travelled back and forth to Australia using crystal meth and cocaine to make life feel better and for a while it worked. I was stick thin and unapproachable but to a degree I was happy. My friends and I partied in r...

It’s now that the shaman overplays his hand. You’d think cutting the brakes on my car and locking me out of my house would have done it. Or throwing a party while I was away called Going Ape that he’d advertised with fliers all over the local town. Or his misogyny. Or megalomania but don’t forget context; I’d come out of India, Israel, commune, cult, and Centro Maya was just another chapter in an already overloaded book. And he’d got inside my head because even the most poundshop shaman knows enough tricks to make it look...

The same word, written over and over, all over the hotel bedroom wall. And he was gone. In another version of this story I apologised to the hotel staff, paid for the paintwork, got in my red car, drove to Jo’burg and flew home alone and none of the terrible happened and neither of the brilliant either. There was nothing to stop me. He’d likely be dead but what did I care. I’d tried. He and his toy guns and broken foot and magic marker could meet their fate and I’d be safely on a plane ou...

I’m not sure what happened except we’d been up for a week under an eclipse and instead of going to bed about a hundred of us decided to carry on. The island was a narrow strip of land in the Zambezi River, the only way to it by canoe. We left our vehicles on the banks, I don’t remember what gear we had, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a tent but someone must have lent us one because you spent a lot of time in it. There was a bar, and a dance floor pick...

That was the kind of party it was. A thousand people on a plot of land in Zambia, gathered for an eclipse. We’d flown to Jo’burg with hand luggage of toy guns because scaring the s**t out of people at parties was what you were into. We’d hired a car, ripped out the seats and turned the back into a bed and driven from South Africa through Botswana to Livingstone. God knows how we found the site; these were the days before mobile phones and satnav, we probably had a piece of paper and a map. I...

There is a version of this story where you stayed in the jungle, and I came back to England and our relationship remained three addictive magical months in a house in Possum Creek and none of the terrible happened and none of the beautiful either. But that isn’t this version because when my visa ran out and I had to leave I returned to a boy from Kent who was still trying to take over my home – remember? The shaman is still there, still cracking eggs, some other poor mug hauling sweat lodge blankets from the dome to stri...

We left the party and moved in together. It was that simple. There was a house which two beautiful Japanese boys had found; I had been staying there with the Israelis before I came to the party on the lake. I told you about it and we drove out, found a window open, climbed in. It was wooden floors in a jungle, brightly coloured rugs under eaves, dripping leaves in an Australian storm, tree frogs and kookaburras calling. It was clean and bright and beautiful and furnished and empty and we took it without asking, it appeared to be...

Do you remember? A party out the back of Mullum, a lake, an Australian night. I was high and you were wild or was it the other way round. I’d dumped my willowy friend with the ankles she was ashamed of soon after arriving in Sydney and jumped in with a bunch of Israelis who had a camper van going north. She was furious, she said she’d offered me her friendship on a silver platter, a phrase I found funny not sobering. It didn’t make me sorry. The Israelis called me hefty or some such word which...

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Here are three other memories I carried unbroken and unquestioned. Every night I would slide down the banister of the tall, cold house, curving polished wood beside stone, and when I reached the dark ground floor, I’d slide all the way up again. But one night I didn’t. I waited, my legs dangling, waiting as I had outside for him, and realising slowly that with him the magic had gone. I remember dismounting, my pyjamas and bare feet, and having to walk the stairs instead, up and up in the pitch-quiet of a sleeping house knowing it was...

When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees who knew her and that is their best guess. Our home, the tall, cold house in London, was a place of many rooms and many lives; bohemian, socialist, crowded, wealthy, artistic, noisy and lonely and tr...

He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the candles turned black. He said it was an attack, he was always in battle with dark forces. I wrote my first novel over those six weeks, a story of a girl who goes to India and loses her mind. When he returned, I put it in a drawer. We went to Italy to run a sweat lodge on the shores of a lake near Rome. We went to...

There’s a blank wall of silence in my mind when I try and think back, to capture the essence of what it was like to live and work with a boy from Kent who called himself a shaman, who’s still out there, working. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t know where to start. Is it enough to say that we ran sweat lodges every three weeks, hordes of naked crying people crawling in and out of a pitch-dark dome in the mud while he intoned and chanted and spat water, hot rocks hissing? How we stood ab...

It’s going to be all right. This story that has been going from frying pan to fire has a happy outcome in the end. I feel the need to tell you that because from here on in it gets darker and the oh no what’s next can be exhausting. So remember as we dive and the air becomes stifled and the pressure builds that there is a lowest point, and when we get there, we’ll turn around and start coming up for air. We will survive. On his website he says he ran a clinic at the ad...

A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious. Of all of them he was the worst, not because his delusion was any greater but for his intent. The others – the people who had crossed my path and abused their power – were convinced, if they thought about it at all, that they were doing me good as well as themselves. But he knew he wasn’t. He was shooting fish in a barrel. That night by the fire, paint on my feet...

I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted into this thing we’d started, a commune in Surrey, everyone else getting on with it but I was lost. I’d set about my bedroom floor with white gloss, a fresh start, and forgotten to leave a way out. Barefoot, dripping paintbrush, my back against the wall, he appeared in the doorway and introduced himself. He didn’t say, I am the egg man, but we came to know him as that. Many y...

I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have to remind myself that these are not a fluke, these daily posts that I get up and write every day. These episodes have been churning for decades. But here’s the thing, it’s only now when I string them together that they tell a story that I didn’t know. They’re no longer isolated fragments, they give context to each other. I didn’t know quite how lost I was, how rud...

That motherfucker. He smashed my brain. I’d moved to a flat in Tottenham with other students, a place we could watch our thoughts, police each other and go limp together. I would wake at five and make my packed lunch and drive to the freezing outdoor pool in Hampstead where I’d dive in and swim thirty lengths. At school by six, within a term the third years had given me the keys to open up the building, realising quickly they could get away with a lie-in. School began at seven with meditation, yoga, face exercises, eye exercises foll...

It didn’t say cult in the brochure. It said, We will make you the best actor ever, or some such s**t because he was full of grand claims, the man who ran it. He’s dead now, of a cancer that had any student brought to the table, he would have ridiculed and shamed. He was like that. He believed in breaking you down. He’d been trained through Est, a psychotherapy system that was watered down into The Landmark Forum but he knew it in its purest form. He had not an inch of kindness to him. L...

There was a song we used to play, the words had her name in them, Lordy don’t leave me, the Carpenter listened to it over and over. Her name was Lourdes, she’d arrived in our lives when the sun shone and everything was new, our first May Queen, she had black ringlet hair and the way she would say his name I can still hear now, the slant of a Portuguese accent, she seemed so knowledgeable. It was gradual, this eating less and less, small additions of things cut out, a concoction every morning that we called gret...

And all this time we’d been building a stone circle. Inch by inch over slow grass from pile to track to hole in the ground, the rise and fall of the moon marked in rock. A year and a bit, from Beltane to Summer Solstice, the last weekend of every month. In sunny weather crowds came, through winter hardly anyone at all. One wet and miserable December with only twelve of us up there we’d put in three stones because we’d got that good at it, because we’d learnt it was less about strength than coordina...

We’d gutted a rabbit on the central stone the day Father Juniper came to exorcise the children. Blood and entrails smeared a rock. It didn’t look great. We saw him lumbering up the field towards us, an enormous wooden crucifix over his shoulder. The hem of his brown robe was dampened by grass, his sandals snagged dandelions, his string of beads swung with every step. A squat woman followed dressed for weekend hiking; determined boots, no-nonsense shorts, furious hair. I want to give her a whistle and a map around her neck, though I’m not sure my mem...

Because every good story needs a sacrifice and something lost. Jesus – devilish handsome, funny and sweet, an electricity coming off him like fire – god we’d had fun that summer; the sparks of something forbidden, an escape from a commune that had taken over and a marriage I hadn’t meant to make. In the normality of the Director’s house I laughed and ate ham and felt like just a girl. Jesus was my escape hatch and now he was missing. My husband at home – generous, majestic, kind, who loved me, who’d waited saying not a word while I’d gadd...

Not the real Jesus, obviously. The actor playing Jesus, and the effect he had was unholy. It was instant, that thing I didn’t know I’d been missing. With the Director, who still makes me laugh to this day, I found a real friend and with Jesus I found something biblical. It fizzed. It was alive. From the moment we locked eyes. I remember walking into the Director’s kitchen and thinking, S**t. These shows were no amateur productions, a cast of hundreds, an audience of thousands, the actors trail the story over a park dedicated to the sp...

Remember the girl we sprang from Hackney Marsh psychiatric unit where we danced to the broken strip light in the lift? We returned from Scotland to a chaos expressed by her – pyramids of used teabags all over the fields, and in the house, wedged into corners, teddy bears facing mirrors. She’d broken down. My man disappeared into Vispassana, meditating twice a day but I had no faith. And the stones went in, one by one, heaving their way toward completion through winter into spring. As the circle came together the commune fell apart, dividing into factions which fought and...

I was on the phone to Suzy. She mentioned Joe Dispenza, who I’d never heard of. It’s my last day in NYC, I woke crazy early and after the call I pottered about for a bit, packing, then came down to the salon at 4am, as has been my habit this past week, with my bag of mushroom coffee where the night porter sorts me a pot of hot water. As the lift doors opened I heard the voice of a man talking about intention, and the importance of sending clear messages to the fabric of this univ...

Shall we take a breath? Because it’s hard, this memoir business, and what happened yesterday and twenty-six years ago, was painful. A man died on my wedding day and we never talked about it, Angel man and me, at least I don’t remember we did, not how I would now when something scarring like that happens. I know we were in shock but we were also young and without the tools and wherewithal to understand that taking a breath is vital. Without it, it’s impossible to know where to go next, without it one just stumbles on whi...

It’s true, I rode side-saddle, barefoot, silk butterflies tied to my toes, glass jewels about my eyes, a white slip hemmed with pearls and roses, a Victorian veil, a crown of flowers, nine maidens. Our guests divided, the women with me, the men with you to the wedding circle high on the hill. Flautists in the trees, drummers on the path, gongs hanging from branches made echo in the wind, a late-summer, warm September day in Surrey, a stone circle half built. My father and mother waiting for me in an archway, he, eccentric, loving it, she, moved an...

Yesterday a package arrived from my brother’s office, a file of things my father had kept, the notice of my birth, letters from me to him, addresses of all the places I have lived from Zimbabwe to Australia, and among it all was the newspaper article about my wedding in the woods. That’s what happens when you open cupboards, all this stuff flies out, brothers, without warning, send you packages they meant to send you years ago but forgot. That’s when you know you’re onto something. We announced the wedding at the Bonnington Café and pandemoni...

On the way up 7th from the west village, a man whose jaw stuck way out said, “I like being abused.” His lower teeth prominent like tombstones on a shelf, the opposite of buck. His friend nodded. On the way back, at the same spot, a woman behind me said, “Where do you even keep a horse in New York?” And in between these golden nuggets, hundreds of thousands of people, banners held high, marched in protest of a pretender, while across the pond a Duke was beheaded of title. This is today. I have landed in New York.

I l...

We used to hang out at the Bonnington Café in Vauxhall, but he didn’t propose to me there. He chose a farm trailer parked by the metal barn, straw bales against my back. He’d written a song and I didn’t see it coming. He was always singing something, devoted to his band, they wanted to make it big. My six-foot-seven Angel man; when we’d moved into the farm, I’d gone out to an architectural salvage to find a bath long enough. The piano player had painted clouds in a blue sky on the ceiling of our bath...

I spent a month in the desert of Sedona training to be a yoga teacher. I hung out with a man and his guitar singing songs that sounded like Paris, Texas. I hitched a ride in a camper and drove down through Utah and New Mexico where the rocks are piled like coins. I met an old friend and got hit by a truck on the highway, nearly turning us over. I flew home with yoga fitness to a commune thriving with musicians and healers, my Angel man waiting, a recording studio built in a cabin in the garden...

I’ve reached the end of my retreat. Today is my last day. Tomorrow I fly to NYC. It’s been enriching, deepening, hard work and holy. All that I asked it to be. Thanks to Deirdre I’ve been meditating for longer, thanks to this house I’ve been held in Divine abeyance of normal life, and thanks to the teeming life inside and out I’ve had company. I’ve learnt that trees sleep and giant cicadas have a sense of humour. I’ve seen a fox, huge and grand; she paused as I drew back the curtains one m...

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Let me expand because we were a village of misfits and outcasts, a tribe of off-grid outer-reaches travellers with an open-door policy that attracted the lost and the lonely as much as the brilliant and brave. We were unruly, anarchic, we somehow governed each other and ourselves. Healers, musicians, mystics, those who made sure the s**t pits were dug, others who prayed and cried. Bodgers and woofers got stuck in with fences and fires, party people decorated trees, foragers taught us what to eat. The traumatised and frail, turned out by psychiatric care, they came too and spoke...

This is how we did it. Telegraph poles and railway sleepers, an engineer taught us how to use a windlass; a rope looped around a stone and a tree, and tightened with a stick turned clockwise, a coordination of hands to keep it winding and stop it snapping out of control and spinning anticlockwise; an arm was broken once, and once the rope broke and whipped me. But first we had to lever each stone from the pile. We used wooden poles to inch our way under, another pole, bigger and so on, inch by inch we lifted those...

This post is dedicated to Lourdes, who we loved. I can name her because of what happened, but it doesn’t happen yet. I have a photograph of her in her finery, dancing round the maypole in a blue satin dress, her arm raised in song moments before she met her king, the carpenter who dances behind her. She was Portuguese, Wiccan, dark curls, silk voice. She appeared in the commune that Beltane as the village rose on the hill and the stones were delivered; I don’t remember whose friend she was, who brought her, how she found us...

They came in droves, the druids, led by ex-trucker turned megalithic giant, Ivan McBeth. He was the friend from Longleat who’d opened my eyes to the fuckery of the man with pigtails. Next time you’re at Glastonbury Festival, go to the Swan Circle. He built it. His ghost roams those stones amongst the people off their heads, his ashes are scattered there. When I’d arrived at the farm, I’d looked from the kitchen window at a flat jut of land on the hillside and rung him. I’d said, Let’s build a stone circle by hand, kno...

I finished a shitty first draft the day before yesterday and hey presto, like clockwork, yesterday I fell off an emotional cliff, caught somewhat by two Sams. It always happens; not the being caught by two Sams but the falling off. I’m locked in. I get to the end. I have a small cry. I wake up the next morning and am hit by a gust of such existential angst and, What’s the f*****g point that it knocks me right off my pins.

I should be used to it by now. I should have lear...

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Let me set the scene. Me and Angel man. A carpenter who looked like Jesus. A pianist, blonde, many rings, she played the Michael Nyman tune from The Piano almost constantly. A man of the woods and his Wiccan wife and her daughter. An ex-trucker turned megalithic giant. A soft-spoken road protester who’d lived up a tree. A long, thin, angular beanpole with glasses. An old man and white-haired woman, both of them rounded like the bender they built in the wood. These were the first members of the commune. God did people go on about how great co...

But first I jumped naked off a viaduct in Normandy. Almost naked. We’d driven in convoy, Angel man and me, to a festival in northern France where there were more crew than punters and we lay about in the sunshine smoking pot and he said, Let’s go bungee jumping. It was appropriate, that leap into nothing, trusting a rope I couldn’t see and trusting the calculations of others who said if I reached out my hand, I would touch the water in that microsecond halt between going down and bouncing up. A leap of faith echoed in the...

The queue snaked round the block hidden by traveller’s vans. It was fifty pence on the door, up stairs so narrow you had to pass sideways. At the top, a bar fashioned out of a plank of wood across a doorway, behind us coats were thrown onto a mattress on the floor. We sold cheese and gave away booze to get around the licensing laws. The mushroom tea was free, ladled into plastic cups from a vast, hot vat; harvested ourselves from the fields we hadn’t bothered to pick out the grass and mud, England floated and sank...

I don’t think I’d told my friends I was the kind of girl who got keys through the post from law firms in Westminster about houses that were empty and mine, but they took it in their stride. As we piled into my camper - my tall and pretty as an angel boyfriend, his dog, some of the band, a few friends who’d been passing by - I remembered the last time I’d been there. It had been a day like that one, sunny and bright, summer coming. I was eleven years old; I’d been...

I was living in a squat in Ealing when the key came through the door. Hang on. Let’s roll back a bit. The sea of bodies parted, he was six foot seven and had the face of an angel, we hugged hello and maybe we hung out a bit on that pulsing psychedelic dance floor and then we went our separate ways. The next time we met was by firelight in the woods near Newbury where a camp was set up to protest the building of a bypass. People were living up trees and refusing to come down, I’...

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Retrieving my van from the dripping wood where I’d left it to go to Czechoslovakia, I returned to Latimer Road in West London, the house in which I’d lived before my detour to Glastonbury and snare in a ménage à trois. It was a time of parties and protests, MDMA and Reclaim The Streets, me and my split-screen camper with its twenty-one windows and a roof that slid back, a miniature sink and tiny plug under the bed, I named her Hera. In Hera I drove to derelict buildings behind King’s Cross taken over by techno, to squat...

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Home to the tall, cold house in London, my ruptured disc and I, this place of my childhood where Hollywood stars lit cigarettes with survivors of Russian oppression, where refugees and royalty passed each other on the stairs. Or used to. As a child, my father’s friends and my mother’s politics built a world of artists and argument. My father was Scottish aristocracy, a Tory-voting, Maggie-loving, patron of the arts. My mother was a member of the Labour Party who liked to pretend to be in touch with the real world while keeping a horse in the coun...

The house in France was a haven and still is. It sits on a crystal mountain on the edge of a national park, its walls hold a peace and a sanctuary. It’s where my parents spent time together without one of them disappearing off to his studio and the other packing her car on a Sunday night. There were guests, but they were nice, the rooms were broad and warm, the garden messy and secret, at night wild boars came snouting about the roses. As a child I’d play on the drive with my busybody men mending poth...

I don’t remember much because my disc was slipping. Because I was out of my mind in pain. Rainbow Gatherings are surreal places at the best of times, an army of people who believe in walking, they collect around the world in barefoot harmony, moved by a prophesy that the People of the Rainbow will make war go away. Everything is shared, there’s a sense of life simplified, a medieval camping trip without the toothache. There are no nations or nationalities, only feathered hippies, their children on their hips, scant possessions fashioned onto homemade toolbelts, a tin cup...

There was a connection with Czechoslovakia that I didn’t think of as I set off in that coach, a shaved head, a disc slipping. In the tall, cold house in London where I’d grown up, we’d had a nanny, a refugee from the revolution, the Prague Spring that was crushed by the Russians. My mother had taken many people in and this nanny was one of them, she was given the flat in the basement and the job of looking after us. She had curly red hair, and she was traumatised though I knew her as fright...

I was caught off guard by the heat; 31 degrees in September, balmy t shirt weather and I’d forgotten how much further south I was from Paris. The house greeted me with a hug and a sudden bird flying fast through the sitting room and cannoning head first into the window. I gently laid a tea towel over it as it panted half bruised and awkward caught sideways in the radiator. Outside I expected it to fly off as soon as I revealed its freedom, but it didn’t.

I sat on the swing chair, Yves Klein blue...

“Relationship? What relationship? You were just renting a room.” Gaslighting hadn’t reached Somerset in 1995 but even if it had I’m not sure I’d have named it, I was that shocked. In his kitchen, the uneven floor and books falling over, the dog looking up at me, I’d made the mistake of naming that other thing, heartbreak, betrayal, cruelty. He looked at me and I looked at him and only one of us was brazening it out. I went to stay with my friend at Longleat, a yurt dry and mossy hidden from the tourists where I slept to t...

They moved me out in inches. It began with a mushroom trip. Pigtails and the girl, two peas in a pod went out under the stars arm in arm. I saw them seated on a log in the herb garden that he and I had built. I left them to it. I told myself I was being mature. They stayed up, or at least out, all night. I know this because he didn’t come to bed. And the next morning when I saw them in the kitchen, leaves in their hair, ruffled as if they’d slept on gras...

Protests in Paris, over half a million people on the streets, the taxi driver cursed blocked roads and sirens, la gendarmerie waved us from trouble into bottle necks of horns blaring, Parisians throwing up their hands. Avoid the Bastille he said as I got out at Citizen M, à côté de la Gare de Lyon.

I love how the French strike at the drop of a hat, they are socialist to their core, it is written into their constitution and it pleases my anarchist heart. Power to the people.

So I avoided the Bastille and ins...

It’s been a busy few days. On Tuesday we held the memorial dinner for my mum, a London affair for her London life, Susan Walker, architect and school governor. My brother hosted, the room was nicely filled, I knew a few people but not all, many of her students turned up, those who’d come to her practice as part of the study for theirs. My brother spoke, her practice colleague gave a speech and the former head of Marlboro School described how much my mum had meant to her. It’s funny hearing of these other versions of her...

I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and him; in my mind I was in bliss. For six months I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, made candles for the candle shop, labelled bottles for the incense shop, fired chai pots in the pottery, struck up friendships in the high street, fetched water from the Chalice Well. I watched his mind at work and thought it brilliant, watched his hands describe the mathematics of b...

It seems these are a litany of relationships gone wrong, choices made to do with men and not to do with me. That’s what happens when you write a memoir. A thirty-thousand-foot view, you get to see the pattern of the streets. That summer of 1994 I was supposed to be starting an artist’s collective with the girl I’d met at the Chelsea Town Hall. We’d had it all mapped out. There was a building off Portobello that we were about to sign the lease on, we’d had meetings with financial advisors, we were going to be the...

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I always found, “Empty nest?” a supremely irritating phrase, yet it happened yesterday. Though they’ve both been away from home since they were sixteen, when I got back on Saturday from the two hour round trip to east London delivering Blake to university, Jacobi already a week into his new life at the opposite end of town, this home felt exactly like that. A nest that was empty.

It’s never felt like a nest before; that aspect was hidden from me until this moment. As I crawled across the finish line, shut the front door, put on s...

A photograph was sent to me last week by a Dakini goddess. She didn’t know I was writing this memoir, could not have known that the photo would arrive precisely at the point where the story and image coincide. Isn’t that beautiful? This process brushes with magic. Such is the way of digging and time travel. On the day it was taken I’m drifting arm in arm with my friend through the Harvest Fair, it’s Lamas 1994, already I divide the year into pagan eighths. I’m returned from India and losing my mind. I’m back from tw...

Who knew that a bursting fallopian tube would burst the sense of what’s the point? I woke up with the gloves off, a nineteen-year-old in a raver's paradise, Manchester at the height of her powers. The hospital ward of pink fluffy slippers and women with no wombs held me for a week of painful recovery. My mother came to see me. So did the boy. And then I put on my brown corduroy hotpants and Minnie Mouse platforms and went out to Flesh at the Haçienda. I think this was the first time my heart touched rave. I t...

Let’s roll forward. It’s 1990, Manchester. I am in my first year at university, not yet living in the house where I would meet the boy who’d been kidnapped by his father from his mother’s arms. I am in Fallowfield halls of residence, three flights up from the smooth walkways of campus. The Haçienda is open but I haven’t been there yet. I’m trying to fit in and forget about the boy who is no longer my boyfriend, who said when we got back from Zimbabwe, I think we should split up now. I’ve written...

Did you catch the LIVE I did with Alisa Kennedy Jones yesterday? If not, here it is:

It was a blast. Alisa has become a friend and colleague, but way before I knew her I fell in love with her memoir, Gotham Girl Interrupted: My Misadventures in Motherhood, Romance, and Epilepsy

Alisa writes like she’s talking right at you, her brilliant brain firing on all cylinders and then some. I knew nothing about epilepsy before I picked up this book, and her electric prose changed my world. Take this, for example…

What I sa...

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We had our toenails painted, but that was at the end. In the beginning we met in the restaurant and were on rapid fire catch up before she’d made it to her seat. My dear friend who I go way back when with who only lives down the road but due to our packed lives it takes quarterly meetings at South Lodge to make sure we’re nurtured. We dragged ourselves upright to change and begin in the sauna; a whole privileged day of spa treatments, the timing could not have been better. Around the swimming lake a clus...

It was a lunar eclipse and a blood moon and the weekend delivered. Margaret’s daughter’s 30th; Jacobi and Blake swept in from Holland and Stoke, we coalesced at the farm on Thursday night and set off on Friday morning. A long drive, it always feels like that as we queued past Stone Henge, masses of tourists and a 1960’s citröen that recalled journeys with my mother. Longleat signalled only another hour and finally, itchy feet and aching bones we rolled into Bruton. Tinnitus and Andy’s need for silence arranged me At The Chapel and J&B with hi...

My friends got me out. Realising I was missing from the weekends in Harare they came to see me. I remember Eddy, who wanted to be a policeman one day, sat on the floor in the hall while I faced the priest in his kitchen. He heard me tell the priest that I would report him, and he heard the priest reply no one would believe me, which turned out to be right. But my friends got me out and we went to a Bhundu Boys concert in a stadium outside the city that was too small for the...

My mum, who hates planes, who has a fear of flying, who at this very moment is lying in a hospital bed in the endgame of life, did something reckless and caring and got on a plane and landed in Harare and found me at the priest’s house up to my neck in painkillers, sleeping pills and whisky. The priest, large and fat, who liked to make out his pillar-ness in the community, had a wife who was small and nice with bobbed hair but who turned a blind eye, she must have, how else could she stay wi...

Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood before thirty children and tried to teach them things I thought I knew; the alphabet, how to spell “definitely”. In my hut I learnt to make dinner with one pot, a relentless vegetable stew that Willy eschewed for beer at the pub with the friends he’d made and I hadn’t. I marked workbooks with the pen that never had to write upside down. I listened to Simon...

At this age, their age, being together is a rare thing, not a given; a precious Here we are! that I catch in my hands and hold up to the light to remember. They are grown and I am grown and we swoop in at moments of worlds colliding, the end of summer, the beginning of work, just such this happened yesterday in London.

I had meetings, two of them, both long and twice yearly. The morning for someone else’s business, the afternoon for me and mine which is theirs which Jacobi came to. There’s a mo...

Oxford. Took the train. Read The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal all the way there (it’s great). As I changed at Reading, the skies filled with a ready downpour and the carriage with students, or so I imagined the young people around me, too early for Oxford first years, but there were plenty of faces that described second and third years in that place fought for and won. Sophie begins in October. I will visit her there.

Stopped at the lights waiting to cross the road, a child grabbed his parents to hi...

A week in Scotland and I’m back, to southern England with her crowded roads and weather. We had the sudden torrential downpours of the far east yesterday, monsoon like, loaded skies. The bricklayer finishing the terrace outside the new garage cottage had to find frequent shelter.

I went for a walk after speaking with Kemi Nekvapil, my live with her on Australian time of 7am in the UK suited me just fine. Here’s the recording in case you missed it :

There were so many tangents I wanted to go off on - Pr...

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A bunch of White, English, public-school kids off to teach in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong. We gathered at Heathrow, I said goodbye to my mother, we flew to Harare via a skidding touchdown in snowy Sofia. At a farmstead we put up our brand-new tents and drank beer and tried out our thin camping mattresses on each other as if we were still in Chelsea. We met the priest in whose care we were placed. Also White, but large and old, he’d been a master at Sherborne. He read out the list of our pairings, strangers to...

His footsteps on the stairs, not the boy (I’d got him) but my father whose ferry had not left for France because of the hurricane that had ripped through England, ripping it apart. He’d turned his Porsche around and returned to London, parked it in the garage below my sister’s flat and seen the door kicked open. I was on my knees when I saw his feet, his shoes, looked up, saw him. I was scrubbing carpets in the wreckage, graffiti on the kitchen walls, the cooker pulled out, the fridge on its knees, a window smashe...

Home was a tall, cold house in London; intellectual, artistic, my father a writer, my mother an architect, guests, lodgers, friends and strangers, the bedrooms full of us and them, paintings on the walls, politics at the table. I moved amongst it all being pretty and clever, a seventies childhood of lentils and greens and feeling unseen, the house too full, my mother too busy, my father rarely there. I went to the local ILEA, The Marlborough, my mother was a governor. I was the only pupil in my year who lived in a private house. Everyone else came...

I rang him from a payphone in the arrivals hall. I hadn’t told him I was coming. I saw him weaving through the crowds of families reunited, suitcases, children, the sunshine of Israel glinting through the glass walls. He wore a yellow T-shirt. Sensible trousers. His tendrils of black hair were gone. For the first time I noticed his eyes were a little too close together. He took me by the arm and took me to his mother’s house where I sat at the table not able to understand the rapid conversation, his mother shelling beans and smil...