Aug 10
29
To ladder or not to ladder?
An authorly one, this one. You know how when you’re writing and it doesn’t feel right? Our characters are hard at it, steeped in poverty, hunger, degradation and unemployment. Yet something’s wrong. The foundation of our business is conflict; dig a deep deep hole and climb out of it somehow. But how easy it is, to slide down a ladder ! My mum, 91, still lives in poverty in her mind, though she is a smart, sassy lady, more comfortable now, with none of the money worries she had when she and Dad left the Isle of Dogs to seek a new life. The other day we visited NEXT, as opposed to ASDA. It was like I was taking us into Hades. But Mum was seduced by a shiny black belt strapped to the waist of a slender window mannequin. A closer inspection of the price tag, said £9.99p. I turned heaven and earth to persuade her to buy it, or allow me to buy it, but I might as well have suggested robbing the cash machine outside. Old habits die hard and she explained to the very sweet and mystified assistant that on reflection, it would cost her nothing to cover her old, tired belt with petticoat material and elastic from her thermal knickers. Yet again I was inspired and wrote exactly what I’d forgotten to write that makes the prose come alive.
