Making It Up As I Go Along (28 page)

As the poet so eloquently put it, autumn: season
of new boots and jackets. At least the poet
would
have so eloquently put it, if the
poet had been a woman.

I love autumn. It might be because my birthday is
in September (oh, poor maligned Virgo) and I associate it with presents and cake and lots of
attention. But the shameful truth of the matter is that I’m not really a summer person.
All right, all right, go easy! I know this won’t go down well. I know saying you
don’t like summer is like saying you don’t like dolphins, or Michael Palin, or
Crunchies.

My ‘issue’ (I’m not at all sure
I like that word) with summer is that everything’s too bright and glare-y and exposed and
hot. My clothes are all wrong and summer brings me into a head-on collision with my lumpy upper
arms. I’m
tormented
by them. What should I do? Reveal them, looking like sausage
skins stuffed with cauliflower florets, and endure the mortification and sniggers of others? Or
keep them under wraps and swelter? And if I elect to swelter, then I have to deal with skinny,
smooth-armed types, who’ve never known a day’s lumpiness in their life, goading me.
‘Why are you wearing your fleece? You look so hot! Look at her, everyone! She’s
melting
. Stupid woman.’ While I’ll have to insist – even though my
face is the colour of raw steak and sweat is sluicing down my back – that I’m
‘fine, a little chilly even’.

Then, of course, there’s the personal
hairiness question, some
thing that requires constant and meticulous
vigilance. Almost as much as the sunblock situation – skin
and
hair. Not to
mention keeping on top of my fake tan. The bodily running repairs demanded by summer mean
there’s always something that needs doing – I can never relax! (I’m not the
only one who feels like this, just in case you’re interested. There is a small but
dedicated band; we call ourselves No TO Summer! NOTS! (With risible lack of imagination, our
enemies call us NUTS!) There is also a breakaway schism group who are a little more extreme,
called People Happy Entering Winter! PHEW!

Autumn is
far
nicer than summer:
moss-green cardigans; copper-coloured knee boots; jeans. Everything pleasingly covered up. I
feel safer in autumn, I can breathe properly. I can straighten up and look the world right in
the eye without having to recoil from the sun bouncing off too-bright pavements and blinding me.

While I’m at it, I might as well go for
broke and add that I like the back-to-school feel of autumn. All that lounging around the whole
summer long, in Cornwall or the Hamptons or wherever it is people go, is well and good, but
it’s not
real life
, is it?

The start of autumn feels like a mini New Year
– Christ! Calm down! Obviously nothing like as terrible! We’re not so poor or fat or
cold or guilt-ridden. Nevertheless, autumn feels like it’s about change and fresh starts
and commitment to self-improvement. And yes, I admit this appeals to me.

Older readers will remember when autumn was about
more than good new series starting on telly, when autumn used to be about evening classes. But
– I’m not wrong, am I? – evening classes are over. A thing of the past, like
nosy neighbours and Vesta curries and political agitation. It makes sense: the only reason
anyone ever went was to meet a man – the cliché was that the
Car
Maintenance classes were always jammers with ladies on the prowl – but now if you want to
meet a man, you simply go online. (If you were particularly lonely and had no friends
at
all
– male or female – magazine agony aunts encouraged you to try an evening
class; nowadays if you have no friends, you simply go on SSRIs. You still have no friends, but
you don’t mind as much.)

A long time ago – alarmingly so: it feels
like only ten months have elapsed, when in fact it’s over twenty years – I shared a
flat with two other girls and whenever we were dumped by a man, there was a definite
‘recovery arc’. The craziness, the weight loss, the drunken one-night stands with
unsuitable types … and then – the nadir – the talk of evening classes.
Tearful, drunken defiance, ‘I’ll get over this, and next time he meets me I’ll
be strong and … and … interesting. I’ll do an evening class! I’ll learn
to speak Italian and the class will be full of ridey Italian sex-gods.’ (And obviously no
one was unkind enough to point out that the thing about ridey Italian sex-gods was that they
could already speak Italian and had no need to attend basic introductions to it.)

Sometimes we’d even ring the man
who’d dumped us, to advise him we were about to do an evening class (usually during one of
those ‘I’m just calling you to tell you I won’t be calling you any more’
calls) and to expect us to be dazzling and fabulous the next time he met us.

Good times, good times … Well, actually
they weren’t in the slightest. But all this talk of autumn has really fired (autumnal pun)
me up. It should be along any day now. Unless we get a NOTS! worst nightmare, an Indian summer
…

First published in
Marie Claire
, August
2007.

You know the way sometimes a fabulous famous woman
tells us about her average day? Well, this is what I wish I could write …

Every day I wake at 6 a.m. on the dot.
I’ve no need of an alarm clock or any of that nonsense, my body knows when it’s had
all the sleep it needs, and simply wakes of its own accord. I’m lucky enough to have
several homes – an eighteen-roomed apartment on the Upper West Side, a four-storey house
in Primrose Hill, a charming cottage in the Stockholm archipelago and a light-filled,
over-water modernist glass cube in Sydney.

There was a time when I had a tendency to
bite people until I’d had eight capsules of Kazaar Nespresso, but these days after three
glasses of the special sulphur water I have imported specially from Pompeii, I’m raring
to go – straight on to my deck, which juts far out into the ocean, for my morning
BarreConcept. A Russian dance master used to coach me, but it got a little embarrassing when I
became better than him,
and
he was charging me £375 an hour and calling me
‘veak end lazy’, so we said our farewells …

After fifty minutes of
pli
é
s
, I step into my outdoor, rainforest shower, then a gentle knock
on my bedroom door tells me my breakfast tray has been left outside. My staff are amazing
– so thorough – I never have a moment when I look at the remote control and think,
‘Christ ALIVE, when was the last time this thing was cleaned?’ They’re also
discreet enough that I never see
them scrubbing my kitchen floor so
I’m spared chronic, gnawing guilt.

Breakfast might be miso broth or an
egg-white omelette, and yes, I used to think egg-white omelettes constituted cruel and unusual
punishment but now I understand it’s all about simply
deciding
that egg-white
omelettes are delicious. I have mine with 35g of plain kale and perhaps an avocado smoothie.
The days when my ideal breakfast involved me lying on the floor and pouring Sugar Puffs
straight at my face are long in the past. Especially because I keep my daily net carb intake
under 15g.

Of course, I love sweet things, but find
them so filling – I think mini-Magnums should be rebranded because actually,
they’re
huge.
And when I look at pick’n’mix stations, I don’t
see pretty, irresistible jellies that I want to cram, handful after handful, into my mouth
until I feel pleasantly queasy – no, I see toxic little balls of death. A fizzy cola
bottle? Why not just give me a cyanide capsule?

Before I start work, it’s time for
the DHL man. I once met Miuccia Prada and she thought I was ‘delightful’ and as a
result I get deliveries of next season’s Prada or Miu Miu a few times a month.
They’re always gorgeous – I mean, it’s Miuccia! – but sometimes even
the sample sizes are too big for me. And if it’s not stuff from Miuccia, it could be
cripplingly expensive skincare like Natura Bissé or the Tom Ford make-up range. (Tom loves
me too. You know he’s started doing womenswear now? Well, he sent me the entire
collection. I said, ‘Tom, you bad man! There was no need to send the handbag in
every
colour!’ But he said, ‘Marian, the thought of you wearing my
clothes makes me happy.’ And who am I to deny Tom Ford his happiness?)

I have a husband and we have huge amounts
of astonishingly inventive sex; after all these years, we still can’t keep our hands off
each other. Like teenagers, we are.

Then it’s time
for work! I write novels that are huge bestsellers
and
get critical acclaim, so not
once have I been insulted at a party by people asking, ‘Just how many of your bonkbusters
do you churn out a year?’

I sit at my keyboard and instantly the
words start to flow. I never stare in despair at an empty screen or slam my head off my
keyboard and shout, ‘This is a load of sh*t,’ or delete an entire day’s work
because it’s rubbish, or announce to the four empty walls, ‘That’s it!
I’m retraining as a nail technician!’

I don’t stop to eat for the simple
reason that I don’t get hungry, and under no circumstances do I look at the clock at 9.35
a.m. and wonder if it’s too early for lunch. But at 3.30 I force myself away from my
desk, then I go for a run. I don’t jog – I
run
. I haven’t an
addictive bone in my body, except maybe when it comes to exercise.

When I return I meditate for thirty
minutes, managing to still my mind into blissful silence, and no way do I think, ‘Oh
Christ, I’d better make that dentist’s appointment, I can’t keep putting it
off for ever.’ Or ‘Why the hell did I invite those people over tonight? I just want
to slump on the couch and watch eight hours of telly.’

Evenings vary. If it’s not my night
to volunteer at the soup kitchen or my Movie Club (we’re currently exploring Yugoslavian
cinema under Tito) we have an eclectic group of talented, beautiful friends round for dinner.
I’m a calm, skilled cook and don’t find having to have the stuffed pheasant ready
at the same time as the kohlrabi at the same time as the quinoa stressful enough to warrant a
Xanax. We sit at our twenty-foot-long limed-oak dining table and chat and laugh late into the
night and no one gets messy drunk and follows someone else’s boyfriend into the
downstairs loo.

When I get into bed, I don’t lie
awake for several hours, my
head whirling like a washing machine,
wondering how I can con my doctor into giving me some delicious
verboten
Stilnoct. I
fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and
never
wake at 4 a.m., feeling like
an imposter and a failure and that all my teeth are going to fall out. My life is in perfect
balance.

Yes, well … I no longer eat the Sugar
Puffs. It’s a start.

First published in the
Sunday Times Style
,
August 2015.

Right, here we go – my name is Marian and I
have a hobby. And I feel
really
weird saying it, because I think the whole notion of
hobbies belongs to the olden days, before we had box sets and Twitter and online shopping. Back
then (I’m picturing the 1950s) people had to have hobbies because – well –
there was nothing else to do.

Until recently, if someone told me they had a
hobby I’d automatically think, ‘Trainspotter! Who has difficulty making
friends!’ And start backing away.

But for years Himself was ‘at’ me to
get an interest, because as he often said, ‘All you do is work, sleep and watch
telly.’

‘And buy shoes,’ I’d always
remind him. ‘Buying shoes is an “interest”. I watch telly, I eat chocolate and
I buy shoes. This is the modern way. I have a full and rounded life.’

Eventually, to shut him up, I gave something a go
and even now, several years later, Anne Marie will occasionally say, ‘Do you remember that
time you tried to get a hobby and you made a clock?’ Then she’ll start weeping with
laughing. ‘A clock,’ she’ll say, wiping tears of mirth from her face. ‘A
… a …
clock
!’

And yes, all credit to me, I
did
make a
clock. Which sounds far more impressive than it actually was – basically I went down the
town to the art-and-hobby shop and bought a kit, where the clock-mechanism bit was already
assembled and all I had to do was make the clock face and numbers out of Play-Doh. I
didn’t
get much enjoyment out of it and decided I wouldn’t be
repeating the exercise.

But Himself kept at me because he was convinced I
needed something to help me to relax. However, the thing is you can’t just go out and
‘get an interest’. You have to be – well
– interested
in the
thing, and that’s something you’ve no control over.

However, there
was
something …
I’d long nurtured a secret little kernel deep in my heart that, given the right
circumstances, I might be an UTTERLY FABLISS artist. This was something I’d kept to myself
because I am EXTREMELY bad at drawing things. I remember being mocked in art class at school for
a drawing I did of a running dog – the teacher thought it was a tractor.

Nevertheless, I thought I’d be a good
painter – but it would have to be abstract stuff. No dogs. Or tractors. Or anything that
had to look like a ‘thing’. I’d decided I wanted to work in oils – no
namby-pamby watercolours for me – and I’d use GINORMOUS canvases. I had visions of
myself in a paint-streaked smock, wearing a fake moustache and flinging pots of paint around a
canvas the size of a wall, then borrowing someone’s bicycle and cycling it over and back a
few times, and when I had enough ‘pieces’ created (I thought a week should cover it)
an exhibition would be held of my work and I would be LAUDED with praise.

In fact, I decided I’d paint under a
pseudonym, so that the art critics would have no preconceived notions about my work. Then, when
they’d given me tons of praise, I’d whip off my false moustache and shout,
‘Surprise! ’Tis me! Chick-lit scribbler! And now ground-breaking
artist-person!’

Fired up with zeal, I went back down to the
art-and-hobby shop, but things didn’t work out as planned. The canvas was the first
problem: the art-and-hobby shop only had titchy ones, and words began to be bandied about, about
‘stretching’ canvases and
nailing them to ‘frames’,
and I knew I was in over my head. I wasn’t a DIY person, I hated hardware stores –
too cold, too strange, too full of ugly-looking things that I didn’t understand –
and there was no way I could get involved with nails and hammers and stretching. Suddenly I got
why artists needed to go to artists’ college.

Next thing to disappoint was the paint: it only
came in tiny little tubes and I’d be needing gallons of the stuff to bring my unique
artistic vision to fruition.

However, the man in the shop mentioned they did
evening art classes and when – all agog – I pressed him for details he said,
‘It’s just the basics, really.’

‘Basics?’ I was a little worried.
‘Would I have to draw a dog?’

‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘Or
perhaps a still life.’

‘Like an apple?’

‘Or maybe a tomato.’

‘But I want to do abstracts.’

‘Abstracts aren’t on the
curriculum.’

‘I see,’ I said. And that was the end
of that.

Then life changed and I went totally bananas and
suddenly I started baking like a demon, which came as a massive surprise because I’d never
been domesticated or ‘crafty’. But it had become fashionable for modern women, many
of them proud feminists, to knit or embroider or make cupcakes. So I was very zeitgeisty. Also
stone mad.

For eighteen months, I baked like a maniac. It
was an absolute compulsion and I simply couldn’t stop. Nor could I stop eating the cakes
I’d made, and I tripled in size. Then, almost as suddenly as it began, the baking urge
vanished and I needed another hobby to fill the void, preferably one where I couldn’t eat
the end product.

But there was nothing I was interested in –
until I realized that
I had to do some reconnaissance. (If only there had
been a magazine called
What Hobby?
) It was like the quest for true love or the perfect
job – it doesn’t just appear on your doorstep, saying, ‘Hello there. I’m
the answer to all your prayers.’ Effort has to be put into finding it. This seemed
counter-intuitive to me – I thought that if I loved something, surely I’d know it?
But what if I hadn’t ‘met’ the right thing yet?

So I gave various activities a go and learnt
that, just as with true love, you’ve to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your
prince.

I did evening classes in pottery – that
sounds like a total cliché, but yes,
I actually did evening classes in pottery
.
Sadly, it didn’t ‘take’: I couldn’t work the wheel-thing and I
couldn’t bear the feel of the clay on my hands, and you should have seen the state of the
little bowl I made – lopsided, bokety and awful in every way.

Next I gave jewellery-making a go and found it
too fiddly. And card-making – too sticky.

Then Rita-Anne made a passing comment about
‘chalk paint’, and even though I wasn’t aware I knew the first thing about it,
some whisper of something must have reached me on the breeze, because I had an immediate sense
of YES! I googled it and found there was a place nearby doing a course
that very weekend
–
it was a sign! Even though I don’t believe in signs!

So along I went with Ljiljana and it was love at
first sight. Chalk painting is
perfect
for the likes of me – lazy, slapdash and
all about instant gratification. Nothing needs to be sanded or ‘stripped back’ or
anything else dull and responsible. You’re just straight in, slapping colour on, making
everything look lovely.

The day before I even did the course, I’d
visited a second-hand furniture shop and bought a crappy little brown cabinet for thirty euro.
Then, the very moment the course ended, I bought paint and brushes and wax and spent the rest of
the weekend
transforming the crappy little cabinet into a charming blue
thing that was fit to grace even the most high-end of homes. It was FECKEN lovely!

I know it’s unseemly to boast – good
manners dictate that when we’re praised we should say, ‘Ah no, no, God no,
it’s
awful.
Look at how streaky it is and see all the bits I missed here.’
But when it comes to my upcycled furniture, I actually egg people on, drawing their attention to
features they might have missed. ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ I say.

I’m excellent at getting obsessed with
things – I’ve always got some fixation on the go – and overnight, my obsession
shifted to chalk paint. I was perpetually online, purchasing the stuff, and every time I thought
I’d accumulated enough colours, I suddenly needed more. Barely a day passed without a new
delivery of paint arriving – blues, turquoises, pinks, more blues, a white because
you’d always need a white, a green, although that was a mistake (gank), and another
turquoise. I couldn’t find any lilacs for sale in Ireland or the UK, but I found a US
company doing it – at a very reasonable price. Well, it
was
reasonable, until the
day it was delivered and I discovered I had to pay about an extra £8,000 on import duty,
but shur, we live and learn!

One of the techniques I’d learnt on the
course was ‘distressing’ – by going over certain areas of the painted surface
with sandpaper, you make your piece of furniture look wrecked, but ‘good’ wrecked.
Not just cheap, crappy
bad
wrecked, but charming wrecked, like it had spent the last
forty years being bleached by the sun, in a delightful beach house in New England, three doors
down from Martha Stewart.

Now, a little aside here: the Keyes siblings
co-own a holiday home in Lahinch, County Clare (west coast of Ireland, on the Atlantic, lovely
spot, salty air, full of surfers), which had been furnished
on the
extreme cheap –
brown melamine left, right and centre. I decided I would go
there with a carload of blue paints and utterly transform the place into a
billowing-white-muslin-curtains, lime-bleached-floorboards, shell-strewn, dreamy seaside home
that might appear in an interiors magazine. (Apart from being prone to obsession, I am also
prone to delusion.)

Because the term ‘Shabby Beach Chic’
already existed, I decided to invent my own name and settled on ‘Beachhouse Banjo’.
(‘Banjo’ being Irish slang, meaning wrecked, broken, in smithereens, hungover, in
rag order, etc., etc. I thought the two words together were euphonious and ‘catchy’
– it would be sure to lodge in the minds of the editors of the interiors magazines. I had
vague plans that I could take this thing ‘global’.)

Then, looking for dust sheets, sugar soap, white
spirits and other exotic items, I –
voluntarily
– went to a hardware store,
which was like visiting a foreign country: they spoke a different language and the men were very
flirty. (Honestly, if you’re looking for love and you’re not too choosy, hang around
a hardware store, fingering the screws.)

At this stage, I’d spent about a million
pounds on brushes and waxes and paint and more paint and knobs (a whole other subsection of
obsession), yet I was still feeling delightfully thrifty and ‘make-do-and-mend’.

I had the most wonderful few days in Lahinch,
Beachhouse Banjoing™ every stick of furniture in the place. As it transpired, I was on my
own for a lot of the time because Himself was away up a mountain or something, and although the
Redzer family were there at the start, they went off to Cork, visiting friends of Jimmy. I had
no telly, no phone, no internet connection and no one to talk to, yet I couldn’t have been
happier. I was totally at peace, immersed in a world of blue upon blue.

The way I’m
constructed is that I’m never fully at peace. Down in my depths, something’s in
perpetual uneasy motion and I’ve spent fifteen years trying and failing to calm myself
with meditation. Mindfulness is another thing that baffles and tyrannizes me. But when I’m
painting furniture, I lose myself entirely and I’m fully in the moment. Hours can pass by
without me noticing and mostly I’m utterly at peace. All I’m focused on is the paint
and the colour and the brush and the wood.

Stuff unravels in my head and if I find myself
remembering painful patches of my life, instead of my usual knee-jerk attempts to escape (like
jumping on Instagram or eating something sugary) I do what any expert would advise: I stay with
the feelings.

The soothing back-and-forth of the paintbrush
enables me to examine whatever it is until eventually the discomfort subsides. I can honestly
say, I’ve (dread phrase) ‘worked through’ more of my issues while painting
lopsided drawers bright pink than during any other of the (many, many) therapies and fixes
I’ve tried over the years.

For me, painting is like meditation except that
at the end I have a colourful piece of furniture.

When I ran out of stuff to paint in Lahinch, I
left. And although I understood that the house wouldn’t be featuring in any interiors
magazines (the silk purse/sow’s ear thing), I’d made my peace with it.

Home I went to Dublin, where I continued to
Beachhouse Banjo™ anything I could lay my hands on, and suddenly there was nothing left to
paint and I started to get EXTREMELY twitchy. I was all set to go to the second-hand shop but I
had to go over to Mam and Dad’s (a mahogany wonderland, crammed to the gills with mahogany
cabinets and nests of tables and console tables and telephone tables and hall tables and all
kinds of other
furniture), to spend time with Dad while Mam went to bridge.
Before she left, I insisted on getting out my phone and showing her pictures of all my
Beachhouse Banjoed™ handiwork and she oohed and aahed and made suitably impressed noises.
‘That’s lovely, Marian. Good girl, Marian. Great girl, Marian.’

Buoyed up by her encouragement I said,
‘Well, while you’re out, I could paint your hall table pink.’

‘No!’ she all-but-shrieked at me.
‘No! Stay away from my good furniture with your horrible paints!’

I drew myself up to my full height (not very
high). ‘I see,’ I said stiffly. ‘Well. The truth will out.’

So I started haunting the second-hand furniture
shops in my local area and kept buying dressing tables and painting them pink, then gifting them
to people even though they didn’t want them and they had no room for them. And I literally
couldn’t look at anything without wanting to paint it – at a funeral, I was jolted
from my grief when I found myself eyeing the carved pew-ends and thinking, ‘Heliotrope.
With a dry-brushing of Silver Pearl.’

Visiting my parents became exquisite torture but
Mam refused to surrender anything so, in three separate instalments, I stole a small nest of
tables from her sitting room. (In fairness to me, when I’d made them far more beautiful, I
offered them back. However, she declined. What can I say? Her loss.)