ON MY DESK: EAGLE WING

From the age of six I was brought up in Queen’s College, Oxford with this building at the end of our garden.

The Queen’s college library with a summer storm coming in

The library is an exquisite Queen Anne edifice with an imposing stone eagle on the top. The eagle’s presence is explained by the college’s coat of arms, which is a shield with three red eagles on it. This is the coat of arms of the founder of the college Robert de Eglesfield (1341) and I assume the eagles were a pun on his name.

My bedroom was in the roof of the Provost’s Lodging’s and looked straight out at the eagle. It was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep each night.

Top right was my bedroom window

Not long after we moved into the Lodgings, the eagle was struck by lightning in the middle of a spectacular thunderstorm. I was looking out of the window when it happened. It shattered and crashed down into our garden. It was odd that it was struck because we were surrounded by much higher spires: St Mary’s, the University church was not far away and that is the highest spire in the city centre and then there were the turrets of All Souls college and indeed the Queen’s chapel. But it was the eagle that attracted the lightning.

Perhaps it saw the opportunity to take flight and seized it.

What is it like to live in this city of birds and shadows? It is like being the offspring of a ghost and a hooligan

PHILIP PULLMAN ON OXFORD

It is an event from my childhood that is fixed firmly in my memory because I was upset and frightened by it. The following day I remember looking at all the pieces of it smashed on the paving stones and trying to hide the fact that I was crying.  Some of it disappeared into my mother’s rockery, other bits were swept away.

In time another eagle was carved and hoisted aloft, this time with the precaution of a lightning conductor running down its back. I remember how big the new one seemed, almost as tall as me, and I remember touching it before it was hoisted aloft. I thought no one was going to touch it for a long time once it was up there.

However, I never felt quite the same way about the new one.

On my desk I have part of the stone eagle that I saw being struck by lightning; a hand-sized piece of its wing that my mother kept. It reminds me of her and my father and of that old eagle that shattered.

Eagle wing

Sometimes I imagine the old eagle is out there, surfing the currents above the Oxford spires, sometimes I imagine he might land on my window sill one night to reclaim this from me.

I have it here to remind me to retain a little bit of that magic from my childhood in my writing. After all, what are our imaginations for, if not for taking flight from time to time?

Do you have an object or touchstone that has a particular significance for you? What is it?

 

ON MY DESK – or, why growing a Morning Glory on your desk is not a good idea…

Some of you will remember that a while back I wrote about the morning glory growing on my desk, or at any rate in a pot on my desk. At that time it looked like this…

A tiger with the odd elegant leaf hanging from his paws.

 

It was all very manageable. But then time passed and this happened …

A tiger in the jungle

And further up it looks like this …

Up and up it goes …

It has nipped its way up all the hanging doodahs (technical expression that) in my window and a rather hungry looking tendril is now hanging speculatively about a foot over my head. I feel like Charles Dance in Alien 3. I’m not going to put the You Tube link in here because it completely terrified me watching it just now but if you want that pleasure type in Alien 3 and Dr Clemens/Charles Dance dies/killed and you’ll get the general idea. However all you really need to know is that it doesn’t end well for him.

And there is not a flower in sight. Not a single one.

The only good part of this is that instead of my partner walking into the room I work in and being aghast at the number of books and general mayhem there is now a completely new cause of aghast-ness. And our conversation goes something like this: ‘What are you going to do when it reaches your head?’ Me, à la Violet Elizabeth Bott (she had a lisp) : ‘I’ll thcream and thcream ’till I’m thick.’

If you don’t hear from me again you’ll know that Sigourney didn’t hear my thcreams either.

Tell me your bad growing experiences. All of them. In technicolour. It’ll make me feel so much better about things. And if you have any tips about how to get my morning glory to flower tell me that as well.

ON MY DESK: LIFE AND DEATH STONE

I picked this up on St Columba’s bay on Iona in 1995. Iona is a tiny island off the coast of Mull, one of the largest islands in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland. It’s an extraordinary place and this particular beach is where St Columba is supposed to have landed from Ireland. It’s the point from which Christianity spread throughout Britain. It’s renowned for its green stones and I have a few of those about the place as well.

I can’t remember now which side up it was lying when I first saw it. I think it was this side which made me think of a skull …

I picked it up and turned it round and then I saw this which I interpreted as a lopsided  smiling face…

At the time I had come to the island to make some decisions. I wanted to take time out to write but I was very frightened about taking that step. My mother had died at the beginning of the year and I had been reading all these books on grief that stated you shouldn’t make any major decisions in the immediate aftermath of a death but at the same time I felt this reckless energy to tear up my life and move on. Her death had come as a shock. She was only 69 and, in the way death can, it acted as a wake up call. But along with the reckless energy there was colossal fear. I felt as if I was in a pressure cooker.

Holding this stone in my hand on that beach released some of that pressure and made me smile – one side is so sweet and one side is so sinister. By July of that year I had handed in my notice at work and moved into a housing association house in Finsbury Park. I was living with an actor, a musician, a Tai Chi teacher, and someone who was training as a Cranio-sacral therapist: a fluid group of people who needed cheap rent to pursue their creative dreams. And I began pursuing mine by writing my first novel. God, it was hard and I struggled! But it was a start and finally I was taking myself and my ambition seriously.

Maybe one day I’ll travel back to Iona and return the stone to the beach where I found it. After all it’s a long way from home. Maybe I’ll make that journey one day but for the moment it’s on my desk and I hold it in my hand and turn it back and forth, between the skull and the smile, most days.

ON MY DESK: TIGER AND MORNING GLORY

What can I say? Every desk should have a tiger. He isn’t strictly on my desk. He hovers over it in a benign sort of way. I bought him from a wonderful shop, sadly no longer in existence, that was called Neal Street East, in Covent Garden. Oh, how I loved it! It has now been replaced by an Italian shoe shop. I like the way the tiger moves around in the breeze. I like the way he watches over my writing. He has a small sticker on his back that says he was made in Thailand. I have him there to remind me to have courage. I mean a tiger isn’t frightened of anything much, is it? I particularly like the fact he has articulated paws and jaw. When I’m feeling particularly stressed I open his jaws wide. Andy Murray used to do that during his matches and I presume it reduces tension.

I’m not quite sure how this morning glory thing is going to pan out though. I should have started these seeds off much earlier. I found an old packet and was feeling a little stuck and threw them in a pot and thought nothing would happen. But then it did!  They all germinated which was exciting but they like to climb and we have no outside space so I thought I’d see if they’ll climb up my tiger. I’m not sure how he feels about it though. When I was a very small child my mother grew morning glories one summer and each morning there’d be a competition between me and my sisters to guess the number of flowers that had bloomed. The winner got a sixpence. It was very hard to guess accurately.

I work by a window which looks out onto the street. When I want to concentrate I have the blind down but when I don’t I have it up and then I look out onto geraniums, motorbikes, cars and I get to listen to people’s conversations – neighbours bumping into each other, a man explaining how he goes all the way to Kingston for his shopping because it has an Aldi, the number bus he gets, the fact that he had fallen down and everyone had rushed to pick him up. People are very kind, he says. In a city like London where there are so many people and they are often under a great deal of pressure, it is good to hear things like that. We all want to hear that if we fall down we will be picked up.

Basically, it’s all about growth and courage, isn’t it? I’ll let you know how the morning glories pan out.

ON MY DESK: BEARS

The first book I ever wrote was titled FLYING BEARS. This was a Ronseal-title. There were bears in it and they flew. Not only bears were in the book, there were also twins and magical circuses. I imagined it as the love child of the John Irving book, The World According to Garp,  and the Jeanette Winterson book, The Passion. It was never published you won’t be surprised to hear but I loved it because it was the first book I ever completed and as such it had taught me that I could write 100,000 words with a beginning a middle and an end. And then when I couldn’t get an agent or a publisher it taught me about rejection which is useful in its own way albeit bloody horrible. Since then I’ve had eight books published.

I have always loved bears. It has something to do with the fact they spend a great deal of each year sleeping and then when they wake up they (well, some of them) stand in streams while salmon jump into their mouths. Not being much of a cook that way of feeding myself has always struck me as having a great deal to recommend it.

So over the years the people close to me have given me bears of various kinds. Currently on my desk I have the five below.

The two furry ones in the middle I have had since I was a very small child. I’ve no idea where they came from or who gave them to me. They may not even be mine. Perhaps I hoovered them up when my parents moved and when we sold my father’s house.

The brown one on the right is one given to me by my partner a couple of years ago and has a distinctly Germanic look to it. I feel it should be holding something between its paws but have not yet found what that thing might be. My mother had one a bit like this, but smaller, which held a thimble.

The one on the left is the glitziest. It’s really a Christmas decoration but I loved him so much I kept him out of the decorations box which is a bit daft. So here he is on my desk and whenever I pick him up and admire him I transfer glitter to the end of my nose which improves my appearance no end. Sometimes I hang him from the money plant for good luck.

Finally, the little fellow in the middle is on a green stone. I bought him from Watkins, a mind, body, spirit bookshop in Cecil Court in London many years ago. If I’m feeling anxious about doing something I’ll slip it into my pocket. Oh, did I mention I’m superstitious?

Incidentally, bears have staying power. They appeared in my most recent book THE RETURN OF THE COURTESAN (aka TITIAN’S BOATMAN). In fact I think one of the  main reasons I decided that my Shakespearean actor, Terry, is acting in The Winter’s Tale was so I could have a lovely time with bears. ‘Exit pursued by a bear,’ being one of the most famous of all stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays. There’s another bear in the book, a small silver one, which is one I own, but have now lost, temporarily. Maybe once it had muscled its way into a published book, it decided to fly away.

The moral of this particular tale is that you can’t keep bears out of anything. Or at any rate it seems you certainly can’t keep them out of my imagination or off my desk.