The Daily Novel

This morning at 10.19 AM someone called Terence posted a comment on a blog I wrote on 24 November 2006, entitled ‘Journeys in the mind….’. The comment was:

Hey This is pretty cool. I think it’s a decent blog.
Thanks a lot and have fun!

At the time I read it I was not feeling like having any fun. My stomach was queszy. I was acutely aware that though I had decided to sell my house in early February, and have long since found a bungalow in Dorset and a small flat in the next street, I was still stuck here in the house I have lived in for the last thirty-one years. Unable to get on with the next phase of my life.

The present prospective buyer is a bloke I like and we had hoped to exchange contracts this week. But it was not to be. And as I learnt last night from a text from him, this was nothing to do with my house. The delay which prolongs the uncertainty arose because his lenders, from whom he expects to get his mortgage, were away for most of the week, on what he described as a corporate jolly. The kind of thing that Rupert Murdoch does. Takes all his key executives off to some exotic island (inviting people like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Henry Kissinger to address them). In recent years the university sector has imitated this behaviour. It is called ‘Away days’. When the office is shut. All the staff goes off-site. Not to the Bahamas because university budgets cannot afford this. But out of the office.

But although this age in which we live believes that ‘the customer is always right’ the behaviour of the lender was certainly not in the interests of the lender’s client, my prospective buyer, nor me, nor the other people in the chain, the vendor of the Dorset bungalow and the couple whose house she is buying.

So while the lender’s key executives were swanning off on a combined junket/training programme/exercise in staff bonding, the needs of the customers were put on hold. We had to stomach the delay in dealing with some of the many things that need to be settled when you are buying and selling houses in UK. Houses are much more than bricks and mortar. And if you are an owner occupier, selling and buying a house, involves many important changes and risks that go well beyond the financial imperatives.

When I wrote the ‘Journeys in the mind’ blog my thoughts were far away from house buying. I was on a visit to friends in Paris and my mind was occupied with the notion of the journey and the effect it had on me, from the many journeys I have taken in my life. I began it with two lines:

………not so much a stream of consciousness more an exploration of the earth.

In fact this blog (which you can read by following this link) reflected my own inner conflict in writing, between an attempt do a stream of consciousness and my more practical inclinations. It led me to think about the writer’s search for an authentic voice. This applies to the blogger, the journalist and the fiction writer. These are vastly different ways of writing, but serious practioners of all three, want to write in their own authentic voice. To bear witness to what they have seen in life, rather than slavishly follow the dominant fashions of the times.

I have not written a blog like ‘Journeys in the mind…’ since I began my house move project in early February. This project reflects my practical side. The house in which we live is far too big for us. We would like to spend more time in the country, but to keep a pad in town. Since I have retired (at last) from teaching, we can come and go at times of our choosing, so do not have to travel in the rush hour.

But the sale of our house has unleashed an ocean of emotion in my wife and in my children. And as I found on the night that I accepted the highest offer for the house in early March from a woman who was buying and selling houses as an investment, also in me. I have loved this house and would prefer to sell it to someone who also loved it.

Despite its many imperfections. Which I notice every day. And in the last few weeks I have sunk to lower and lower level of incompetence. The doorbell has stopped working, so prospective buyers (and other visitors) have to use the knocker, rather than my favourite chimes. And I have not managed to fix it.

But quite how far away I had got from the original imperative which prompted me to start this blog on 12 August 2006 I did not realise until just now. It was intended to be a dialogue between the demands of reality and the inner imperatives that drive writers and other human beings.

So when I re-read what I wrote on 24 November 2006 I immediately noticed that the date was my eldest daughter’s birthday. Which I was certainly aware of although I did not mention it in my blog.

Furthermore, I can see now, that this birth was also concerned with house moving.

Holly, my eldest daughter, was conceived on the first night we moved into our first house in the Gospel Oak neighbourhood, in Elaine Grove, part of Oak Village which is two hundred yards from where we live now, in March 1968. At that time we were living in my old bachelor flat in Dorset Square near Baker Street. We had decided that we wanted to have a child so we looked for a small house, near enough to Blackfriars, where I was working full-time on The Times, to make for an easy commute.

Because we were eager to support research we agreed when a learned Professor at University College Hospital asked us to participate in an experiment to induce Holly’s birth a little bit early. In fact, the experiment failed, and Holly arrived two weeks after the forecast date.

So we are now leaving Gospel Oak after living here 39 years. We are not totally leaving in that we are keeping a two bedroom flat in the next street.

To which I repaired at tea-time where we sat on the balcony and drank a cup of tea, and enjoyed the tranquillity of this urban neighbourhood. It was totally quiet, apart from the quiet rumble of the trains on the North London line which pass every fifteen minutes. Although hundreds of people live here they were not on their roof terraces and balconies. No-one was there but us. Until two young women on the second floor in the next house but one came out to drink their cup of tea.

And then our new next door neighbour came out with a pole. I could not make out what he was doing. Until he pushed it up against the canopy on his terrace and the accumulated rain water of this afternoon’s storm, cascaded to the ground.

But tranquillity is what I seek in Dorset. For most of the year this is not unrealistic. But by now our projected moving date is back to 1^st August. By which time the school holidays will be in full swing and the Dorset coast around Lyme Regis will be choc a bloc with summer holiday makers and the owners of second homes with all their fifteen children savouring the seaside.

So I am not going to find Nirvana in Dorset.

But I still want to go. To get on with the next stage of my life.

It is going to be something different.

For the first time in my life I will not be living in a large town or capital city. For the first time in my life I will see, and hear the sea, when I wake up in the morning. And that for a boy from Wolverhampton is something. I first saw the sea in September 1939. I did not see it again until 1948. And at the same place, Rhyl, a rather boring and cold and rainy place in North Wales.

I went into the sea, supposedly to enjoy it, shivering. Because I felt the cold then. I still feel it now more than the average.

But at least I know from my geography that Dorset is warm enough for palm trees. So although I might not find Nirvana I might be warm enough to write my blog without wearing gloves.

So I might enjoy it.

But tonight I am plunged in melancholy.

And quite incapable of writing a blog which will move other human beings to write the kind of comments they wrote about ‘Journeys in the mind….’