BISAN

Bisan,

your cat came to me in my dream.

White, yet not entirely - she was real -
not as a cloud, she was eating lime.
Yes, I was holding a round green lime 
in my hand and she stole it to play.
Cats love to play, don’t they?
I say this as one who has never owned a cat 
or even, I confess, known or loved a cat.
But this cat, your cat, I presume -

although she was perhaps any 

of the lost cats doomed this Nakba - 
this cat, I say, knew me well enough 

to drape herself, Queen like, across 

my throat, as I was lying down in my bed - 
not the bed of my English home, 

in the country that questions me on home,
but the home of my dreams, 

the bed in my dreams, 

where I grew from baby to girl, 

to on the verge of something between 

girl and woman to be.
Protecting my throat, but also 

preventing me from moving, rising, 

perhaps even speaking - 

she was everything, 

commanding the wholeness of me. 
I feel her now - a heavy white scarf, 

a sacred promise, bound to me, 

as I to her - a symbol 

beyond my understanding. 

Ya Rahman. Ya Raheem. 

Ameen. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2023

Is anyone able to write much, if anything, at this time? This poem came, as my poems come, fast, as if in dictation, from a place of necessity, to tell someone something in the only way available to me. Part of me feels as if there has never been a genocide experienced this way - in the palms of our hands, in real time. And yet, the power of reading the testimonies of Primo Levi and Victor E. Frankl, not to ever forget Anne Frank, many years after the facts, did not render my heart any less broken. I say broken, but it is not yet so. Just chipped, cracked, rust filled, despairing of being human. This poem is dedicated to one of several young Gaza journalists I follow, like millions do, on Instagram, hoping, willing her to survive. She is Bisan Owda @wizard_bisan1, and the others are Motaz Azaiza @motaz_azaiza, Plestia Alaqad @byplestia, Yara Eid @eid_yara. Others have been killed already. I inch forward in this mural, baring my teeth through tears. 

(First image via Bisan's instagram page @wizard_bisan1

Second is a mural I am working on at home

Poem participating in DVerse Poems Open Link night)

ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY, GRIEF AND JOY OBSERVED

I am surrounded by churches in the village where I live. Samwise and I turned right today, and walked down to the church past the railway line. It's a quick decision, and the sun seemed to be calling us thataway. We made a nifty getaway from his nemesis, a tiny dachshund with war on his mind, and made it to the church. Sitting outside on a bench with two crutches propped beside him, was a man eager for a chin wag. He was John, ex police officer, 57 years in England and still in possession of his County Kerry accent. "I'm Catholic,' he said, 'but I believe there's only one God and I come to this church for the peace.' His mobile phone was lying beside him - he'd been trying to get a hold of his sister to wish her a happy St. Patrick's Day. I asked him to explain the origins of the day, and we both commiserated over the tragedy befalling Ukraine.

Two days ago, I was approaching the other church (Sammy and I had turned left this time), and I saw a man praying his namaz on a prayer mat on the tiny triangle of green outside the church. He had stopped his car, and was observing the evening prayer. I couldn't believe it! At this very church, twenty-nine years ago, my father had been pointedly informed by the choice of words in the sermon that he would only be welcome if he converted from his unwelcome religion. And now, the namaz. I wanted to applaud the man for his... courage? Defiance? Simple observation of prayer? I wasn't sure. So I dawdled with Sammy until the man rolled up his mat, and I waved in a friendly fashion at the companion in his car. They waved back. And onwards we all went. If only it could always be this way.  

Grief, Observed

 

‘The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.’

 

I settle into the graveyard with C.S. Lewis,

observing grief together.

 

All my childhood I was accused

of being too sensitive. 

And make no mistake, 

it is an accusation.

 

No one ever declares it worthy of praise. 

Not in a girl.

For how will she cook and clean and submit easily,

if her mind dissects and discerns?

 

When they say too sensitive,

they mean too knowing. 

 

It’s a Sunday and the church doors are open. 

I walk into the incense. 

Mary greets me, I like to think, 

and Jesus invites me closer. 

 

I approach. And see the candle tree, 

electric lighter awaiting me.

 

Every night we light a divo, my mother and I, 

keeping going the Zoroastrian fire. 

Here, the lights are blood red, not white. 

I place one like a star atop the pyramid wire.

 

I recite, out loud, a gatha and a surah,

binding myself to as many of the prophets 

as will have me. Come now rain! 

Come now thunder!

 

Why do I fear? The fire 

tree protects me. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2022 (linked to this evening's dVerse Poetry)

To end in hope then, with news of another mother and daughter, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her daughter Gabriella, finally united in freedom, back in England, thanks to the determined, relentless efforts of her husband Richard. A long road ahead, of course, but a little corner of peace begun.

 

BEING A SPORT

See that gap between the dappled leaves? Over where the sun is blazing? Some dudes in crisp starched whites are playing a game called cricket. 

This game has been the soundtrack to my life; I have been swimming in the sonorous commentary of cricketers since I was a wee young thing. Ask me to tell you the rules. I can tell you how a cricket bat feels held between my two hands. Wrong. I can tell you how it sounds to hear a cricket ball hit that bat, or the stump or the trunk of a tree. It sounds like it feels. A crack. A thunk. A not very pleasant meeting of two hard objects colliding ‘just for fun’. Sign me up never. I did my time, in the garden, to please Dad (whose delicate stomach can’t withstand the tension between India/Pakistan and England to this day) but I steered clear of any pleasure and volunteered myself for nothing. I value my skull and orbital cups. The curves of my cheekbones and teeth. 

And yet. How I wish it could have been otherwise. How I wish I could have been a games person, a ‘wait for me, I’m coming’ desperate to keep up with her brothers kind of competitive sister. A tennis playing sister-in-law borrowing visors, and a golf playing aunt, keeping accurate score. Not the one who forgot to press ‘record’ when he made his birdie. Not this hapless mess of poetic whims. Not this barefoot on the grass walking, Pokémon catching, longing to know the stories of trees kind of not quite grown, ancient person. 

I dream of making it big, not making it up as I go along. Who would I be if I were a big wig? Justice Tayabali or the CEO of ... even my imagination can’t conjure up a business to run. My immunology consultant tells me to shake a leg and get on with my novel - can you park a novel for almost ten years and expect it to hold the faith? Meanwhile I am editing my nephew’s first novel. Or rather co-writing ... ‘Can you make the goblin king a gnome instead?’ he asks, plaintively, hoping I’ll fill the holes and weed the plot, and tidy the stragglers while he sleeps... and I do, of course I do. There has been a war between the goblins and the gnomes - but beyond implying there was a war, and there are wounds, the thought of further backstory is painstaking work for a ten year old. Or, frankly, an any-year old. 

But we make our choices. Don the whites and play for the team... or squirrel into the solitary union of a pen, an imaginary world and a galaxy of hope.

Photo : Smriti Mandhana, first Indian cricketer to represent India in 50 consecutive T20s... 

A GLIMPSE OF ETERNAL SNOWS

On a cold November evening, eleven years ago, Mum and I entered what used to be the Olde Post Office down the road (now our friend Sue's cosy, charming cottage), to attend a reading by Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth. The Book Club had invited Jane, GP and travel writer, to share her memoir, A Glimpse of Eternal Snows: A Journey of Love and Loss in the Himalayas, and when the reading and Q&A were over and we were chin wagging over snacks, I asked Jane if there was an audiobook version Dad could read. 

A decade later, Jane writes in her blog: 

It was an idea I’d been incubating for yonks, ever since Shaista Tayabali (@lupusinflight) suggested it when I spoke to her reading group. Initially I was too busy and distracted to get down to it, but eventually I began, having no idea how long it would take. My experience of reading out loud in writing groups meant I knew that I could narrate 1000 words easily in ten minutes, so although my memoir is quite a tome at 374 pages and a little under 130,000 words, it was doable. It couldn’t take much more than 22 hours, so recording it wouldn’t take much longer than a week or so.

Spoiler. It takes longer!!

Recording consumed all of March, April (when we evacuated to the UK), May and some of June and July. I had already decided to add various bird calls to begin and end each chapter. Some are Nepali birds, some are English, depending upon where the action takes place.

The whole project took longer than I expected but it has been a labour of love. A Glimpse of Eternal Snows is a book that is written from my heart so I’m sure listeners will enjoy it, as long as no-one is too appalled by my attempts at Celtic accents. Here's the link to Audible audiobook. 

I wrote about Jane on my own blog as soon as I got home, in a post titled The Good Doctor, wishing she were my doctor but glad, soon enough, that she became my friend, and recommended me to the BBC Radio Cambridgeshire presenters as an interesting guest! I helped edit Jane's memoir for the American edition, which gave me a chance to fully immerse myself in Jane's life in Nepal, where she and her husband decided to take their two sons, including baby David, whose medical frailty had been dealt with in the least compassionate manner by doctors from my own Cambridge hospital. Nepali life gave David three years of burbling happiness...

The one sympathetic hospital doctor in Cambridge had advised us to treat David normally and we took this as a licence to take him on his first trek; at the age of four months, we packed up David’s heart medicines and tubes and headed up over precipitous drops and wobbly rope bridges to explore drippy forests and medieval hill-forts. The mountains were spectacular and healing. Strangely David’s heart disease protected him from the effects of high altitude. Our arrival in each mountain village was heralded by choruses of, ‘Children have come!’ We’d be surrounded and David taken from his carrying basket to be handed around for all to cuddle. He glowed in all this attention. He smiled and burbled appreciatively at all his admirers. Nepalis helped us see David’s qualities and talent for laughter...

June will be here tomorrow and Dad will sit out in the sun, eating mangoes and listening to Nepali birdsong and enjoying a glimpse of those eternal snows I read about eleven years ago... thank you, Jane!

THE SOUND GLASS MAKES WHEN IT BREAKS

A tiny bowl slipped out of my hands this evening

as I stopped to gaze at a bird in flight,

light streaming from her wings, the curve 

unimaginable to me, heavy on the floor of the world.

It was a dessert bowl, crystal, part of a set.

They are always part of a set, these cups 

and saucers that fall and smash around my feet.

A pool of diamonds glinting in concrete cracks,

so beautiful, so dangerous. My heart missed 

not a beat, as though inured now 

to my unintentional, careless ways. 

Sweep after sweep is not enough; 

my faithful eyes find more shards, jewel bright, 

shining still, for my faithless eyes. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2020

A few days ago I heard the news that my friend and MA tutor, the Cambridge poet and novelist Caron Freeborn, had left this world, suddenly, and almost without notice. I didn’t know she had been recently diagnosed with cancer; I only knew I had been thinking of her and missing her. I wrote to her, but only silence came. When I heard the news, the silence was even more numbing. In the wake of a poet leaving, the air sounds a little different. 

Into the companion of my shattered glass bowl, I floated something green, and every day she grows, reminding me of something... something I forget when the light is bleak.

(a poem shared with Dverse Poets, on Open Link Night)

Caron Freeborn: An Essay on Poetry and Autism

BANAZ: A LOVE STORY

They disappear the girls,
But it's the men who blur, for me.

Whose father, did what, when,
With whose aid, why - I care less

About them. And only about you.
You remain. You and your name

Haunt me, but not as ghostly mystery.
There was nothing insubstantial

About you. In fact, there was so much
That it has spilled over, across time,

Crossed the bridges of your world
And mine, so you live with me now,

Swimming in the river of my thoughts.
I hope you don't mind.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2018

They wanted us to forget her. They tried to erase her, in a suitcase, strangled and abandoned, buried. No, evil, you did not succeed. We honour her, still. Her name is on our lips, in our poems, crossing borders on the wind. Banaz Mahmod. In 2012, Deeyah Khan and Andrew Smith documented her story in a film they titled Banaz: A Love Story. She was born 16 December 1985, and killed 24 January, 2006. She was Iraqi Kurdish. She lived in Wimbledon, London. And she fought to save her own life.  
(poem shared via dverse poets)

THE MYSTERY OF MAUDIE

Most of my friends know by now that I am the sort of movie watcher who almost attends a film school of her own, so dedicated am I to catching films at the Arts Picturehouse Cinema in Cambridge. It is a cosy little three screen cineplex, each screen snuggled up to the next, and all tucked into the smallest edge of a building. I visit it as you would a library - while returning one lot of books, your eyes spy a new possibility. In my case, Maudie, directed by Irish director Aisling Walsh. 

The tender biopic reveals the unamorous coupling of Maud Lewis, the Nova Scotia painter and her fish smuggling peasant Everett Lewis. Maud's life would move anyone to tears - born with juvenile arthritis that eventually crippled her, she was also betrayed by dishonourable members of her family who sold her precious newborn for money, telling Maud that her baby had been born deformed like her mother and buried immediately.

Years later Maud learns the truth. Everett takes her to see her baby, now a grown woman, happy, tending to roses outside the white and blue shutters of her home. Maud cowers in the shadow of her husband's truck, broken and healed, simultaneously.

The shadows of Maud's life are painted over by her extraordinary capacity for wielding joy into simple brushwork. Deceptively simple. Her work began to sell, began to be loved - passers by to her tiny, wildly decorated house, were enchanted. She was commissioned by the likes of Richard Nixon, then President of the United States. 

In my own little cabin in the garden, I have been wielding my brushes and paint. Every dark or gloomy corner now has a fresh white or blue coat, reassuring my eyes of light. The past week has been a complex one to navigate - I had a slender catheter surgically inserted into my vein, one end hanging outside for me to self administer liquid antibiotics, and the other end resting atop my heart. Self administration makes me respect my nurses even more than usual - so many little details to concentrate on; air bubbles and contamination to be careful of. Twenty eight injected infusions done, two to go. Unless the doctors decide otherwise.

By the end of her life, Maud was crippled with arthritis, unable to walk, but still able to hook her brush into the curled claw of her hand, and do the thing that made her utterly content with her life. Paint pictures. The whole world framed in a tiny square of happiness. To be an artist is to know suffering, but to know beauty and joy more. 

JEONG KWAN

There is a nun in South Korea
who walked up the side of a mountain
to Baekyangsa temple, when she was
seventeen, and her mother had just died.

You have come here to live,
said the nun who opened the door,
not asking a question, just telling
a truth that had yet to manifest.

Jeong Kwan unpins her freshly
laundered robes and whispers them
around her shoulders. How old is she?
Only the mountain knows.

But the taengja tree outside her window
is 500 years old. Hardy orange, it still
bears fruit, and Kwan uses the sour juice
in her cooking.

She pickles lotus root three different ways,
then checks on jars of kimchi. She never
uses garlic, onions, scallions, chives, leeks.
Too distracting for a monk.

But soy?
Soy excites her.

Sometimes I agree with the world
that to be a mother is everything. Is the key
and the lock. Jeong Kwan vowed at seventeen
to not burden children with the pain of her death.

There is something in that,
for me.

We can't all choose to opt out
or the world would stop spinning
around humans. Bees might take over. Or
rats. Or better still, dust motes of light. Or dark.

Jeong Kwan unfurls petal after petal
of the lotus flower, soaking the skirt
in water. Later, she will pour the water
into a pot and you will want to gulp the tea

as though you are parched. You are parched
and this is the tea of enlightenment. The tea
that rings the bell of truth. Life can be this
way. An art. A craft. A discipline. A dance.

Three slices of lotus root, pickled
in an heirloom of soy sauce.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2017

Jeong Kwan is considered one of the finest chefs of this world by the finest chefs of this world, who are almost exclusively male. Life can be this way. Women can be this way. Happy Women's Day today and every day to all my friends and sisters, my mentors and teachers and heroes. We can be anything. We can do everything. Certainly, we can.

(Poem linked to Dverse Poets for Open Link Night) 

GIRLS ON A BUS TO GEORGIA (O'KEEFFE) - PART II

My favourite piece by Georgia O'Keeffe turned out to be one of the first works I saw in the exhibition. Upon entering the exhibition, Mum immediately said, 'I think this is it.' She meant, dolefully, that we had scurried across London, reliving the same bus journey twice, hopped up and down the Tate Modern's escalators twice (we forgot to pick up our tickets at the booth the first time), only to find the O'Keeffe retrospective was contained in a single room. Happily, Mum couldn't have been more wrong. We were rabbits in a warren, the two of us, along with the hundreds of other Londoners who had also decided that the last days of O'Keeffe were not to be missed.

O'Keeffe began in 1916 with charcoal and wash on paper, determined not to 'use any other colour until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white'. But while she was painting lines, curves, shells, abstraction, her husband Alfred Stieglitz was busy photographing her hands, breasts, limbs, so that when colour finally exploded onto her canvas, he was ready to have it labelled erotica.

This painting, titled 'Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow' is a perfect example of O'Keeffe naming her painting abstract, but the viewer being directed to think otherwise. With her flower series, this labelling became more pronounced. There is something voluptuous, sensual and anatomically vivid about certain flowers, the tongues of canna lilies, blowsy skirts of opening petals, but the painter faithfully representing them may be doing just that. These 'Oriental Poppies', I think, look just as they should.

O'Keeffe addressed her viewers: 'you hung all your associations with flowers on my flowers and you write about my flowers as if I think and see what you think and see of the flowers - and I don't.' Meanwhile, Salvador Dali painted a rose and was dubbed king of surrealism. When O'Keeffe painted bones and skulls, and meant bones and skulls, they called it surrealism. 'The bones do not symbolise death to me,' O'Keeffe made clear. 'They are very lively.'

Pretty too, I think...

The biggest surprise for most people with the range displayed at the Tate Modern was probably O'Keeffe's architectural paintings. 

She was homey, and settled into her places and spaces with the kind of certainty bones have when they settle into earth. She painted doorways over and over again, and explored the adobe dwellings of Taos Pueblo - here Mum found her favourite painting among the longest continually inhabited dwellings on earth.

On the bus to Georgia, I mentioned to Mum that someday I wanted to paint my own version of reality  as I see it through my highly compromised vision. It would look something like an impressionist's painting, I told her, with bits missing or smudged out. A few hours later, I stood in front of Cottonwoods, 1952.

There was nothing O'Keeffe did not attempt - from my own myopic world to worlds of synaesthesia and chromothesia - translating sounds such as cattle lowing and music, into something for the eye. In the last years of her life, there were clouds, vast expanses of blue, calling to mind Joni Mitchell's lyrics, 'It's clouds illusions I recall'...

AMAL, NADIA, HANYA AND MICHELLE

For some years I stopped actively seeking out music. I'm not sure why. Music is memory, and not all memory is happy or sad; some memories are layered with depression, anxiety, fear, loneliness. Lately though, thanks to Desert Island Discs, I have found myself returning to music. I love the unexpected choices. I find myself delving deeper into the archives, particularly glad when I discover philanthropists like Sigrid Rausing and humanitarian activists like David Nott, vascular war surgeon. My favourite episode is with Aung San Suu Kyi - I think it is the only occasion when the interview takes place not in the BBC studio, but in Burma, in Daw Suu's home.

These days I am inspired by Amal Clooney, international human rights lawyer, currently attorney to a young 23 year old Yazidi girl, Nadia Murad, who managed to escape her captors and be smuggled out of Mosul to Stuttgart. She has recently been named a UN Goodwill Ambassador, but of course this involves her telling and retelling the tales of crime that were committed upon her person, and the bodies of thousands of women still remaining in the camps.

A friend of mine asked if I wanted to be part of a new book club; the first book we read was Hanya Yanigahara's A Little Life - a book that divided readers last year. Some thought it relentless in its portrayal of the suffering of its central character, Jude. And others, like myself, though no less fatigued by such a detailed rendition of a broken life, found truth in a narrative that does not see its way to an easy resolution. Nadia Murad may have escaped ISIS, but she will never be able to forget. We, in our lives of comfort, safety and daily entertainment, may find it a little too easy to imagine that suffering can be papered over. Especially the suffering of girls, of women.

And so to remind us to shore each other up, and stay alert and conscious to the ever present denigration of girls and women, we have our big sister Michelle Obama, a truly admirable mentor, to speak for us. She reminds us we are right to hold our boys and men to a higher standard than those among them who enslave, assault and abuse with impunity. Some of us, Michelle and myself included, and hopefully you too, reader, know men with integrity, refined intelligence, kindness and a strong sense of justice. To them we turn and hold out our hands. In the fight for human rights, we need each other. We have always needed each other.

RAIN, RAIN, I WISH WE HAD REMAINED

Yesterday it poured all day, and long into the night. June's roses have taken quite a beating. Will they recover?

At the hospital my stats were not promising: temperature - 37.7 and pulse - 113. The immunology team decided against my receiving intravenous immunoglobulins. Two weeks of antibiotics were prescribed and I was sent home. Unfortunately, a nurse had already hooked up one of my Ig bottles, which would sadly have to be discarded. I regret the waste of such valuable, life saving medicine. But deeply appreciate the nursing staff's concern in making sure I was the priority. I feel so loved by my team of nurses at the hospital; I am seen. Really seen.

As a patient I have to trust many others with my life. I have to trust that when they say they know more than I do, they really do know more. I have to trust that I matter. As a citizen of a country, we have to trust our lives do matter in the hands of those elected.

The vote to leave Europe was not my choice, but democracy is. I value my right to vote and the right of others to vote as they see fit. But sadly, as google analysts are proving by the discovery that many in the UK don't know what the EU is, let alone what leaving it will constitute, what has come to be has come to be as much out of fear and ignorance as anything else.

When a girl like Malala Yousafzai speaks out about the importance of education for the millions of girls who are unfortunate enough to be kept out of school, she is also speaking up for education itself. So often we, the educated privileged, don't know about our own governments, let alone global policies. Worst of all, how many of us can recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?  It should be the most important piece of literature any student learns. Imprinted on our minds once we leave school and go beyond into the world of Others. That word that scares so many of us.

Shall we begin to recite together? Here we go... 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.' And sisterhood.

It is still raining. But we are together, reading and remembering some of the most beautiful words of our human language. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the commission that drew up the text of the Universal Declaration, was considered the driving force behind its adoption in Paris in December 1948.

WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? MISS WINEHOUSE?

Sometimes I am compelled to watch a movie. I will make a concerted effort to trek to the arts picture house, buy a ticket and immerse. Last week, I witnessed Amy - a documentary by Asif Kapadia on the singer Amy Winehouse, whose music ought to have made her an enduring legend, but whose descent into drugs and alcohol annihilated body and soul. After an hour and a half, I wondered when the movie would end. When the credits rolled, I realised I hadn't once been moved. I walked out of the theatre and into crowds, into shops. Twice I was asked about my day and I shared my thoughts on the film. I think Amy would have hated the film. She would be humiliated by this remembrance of the very worst of her laid bare for our delectation. It was ghostly voyeurism. 

Later that night, still unable to shake the fog of depression, I began another documentary, this time on Netflix, one that has had no fanfare or billboard trumpeting. Amy has been advertised everywhere, has 97% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, will no doubt earn nominations and awards - this quiet little film streaming only on Netflix was about a gifted black woman. Nina Simone. Critical and public interest in the story of a black woman vs the story of a white woman in the music industry, then and now, is virtually unchanged. Evidence: the recent Taylor Swift/ Nicki Minaj twitter debacle.

Within the first five minutes of Liz Garbus' What Happened, Miss Simone I was in tears. Nina responds to the question: 'What is free to you?' 'What does freedom mean to me? I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. If I could have that for half of my life. I mean, really. No fear. Like a new way of seeing.' When I was in N2 all those many months of 2009, imprisoned in my hospital cell on feeding tubes, cannulas in my jugular, I came across this quote and wrote about it on my blog. Nina's music and lyrics have formed a constant thread in my life from the first year of this disease taking hold of me, because Nina writes about freedom.

She wasn't free. She was young, gifted and black during the most violent times. She wrote about the horror of the bombing of four black children in a church in Birmingham, Alabama in Mississippi Goddam, the lynchings of black men in Strange Fruit, and had a mental breakdown eventually because how could she dissociate from feeling anger for her people, and yet making the kind of music white people would buy? Nobody loves an angry black woman even if her anger is poetic justice. Everybody loves a damaged white woman: Marilyn Monroe, Vivian Leigh, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse. Simone was damaged too, of course. A manic depressive with a violence in her that was ultimately contained by a prescription drug that slurred her speech and chemically altered her personality. The price of fame for a dream that wasn't hers. Her dream? To be a classical pianist. First black female classical pianist. 

Meanwhile the chemo dripped into me yesterday. In the last hour, a woman on my right had a fit of bone bruising coughing. I hadn't heard anything like it in a while. So of course I turned to her. The cause of her severe lung destroying bronchial trouble? The same drug sliding into my veins. Be careful, she warned me. Stay vigilant. Pass me some of that No Fear, Nina. I need it, as I've always done. 

THE ART OF ASKING (Book Review)

I have just returned from a week in the Algarve, Portugal - I am slightly woozy with exhaustion and the particular effects of intense sun on a lupus body. I feel parched and floaty at the same time; also satisfied and enriched with love and learning. It was a family holiday. Our first grown-up sibling holiday, with four children. It was hectic. And as with all the best holidays, I had a book to retire with, to curl inside, every night.

The Art of Asking is relevant to all of us, artists and non-artists (if any of us are non-artists, which I suspect we aren't - everyone makes art and beauty somehow, in some way) because we are all afraid of rejection, of being turned down, or most poignantly, because we simply don't know or can't imagine what we can ask for. We want, but we don't know how to ask for it, whom to ask, where to look for help. In my life, dependent as I am on so many people for love and support, worrying about how I will finance myself in some future universe where I am alone and hoping The Books will manifest themselves, I am learning to ask. To be unafraid. To Take The Donuts. Palmer tells us of the recent literary anecdote that has 'rocked' the lovers of Henry David Thoreau - the magic of Walden has been dimmed for some because of the discovery that Thoreau was not quite as alone and self-sufficient as his book implies. On Sundays, his mother and sister brought him a  basket of freshly baked goods, including doughnuts. He took the donuts (American word, American spelling).

Take the Donuts, Palmer pleads with her readers. Take the help. Ask for the help. And then watch the dots connect themselves in your life. Watch the net of loyalty, trust, compassion, understanding, love, tighten. We need each other. Especially when we think we don't. Especially when we are writers, and the expectation of our imaginary audience is that The Book will simply write itself while we are on an island, locked away in a shed or disconnected from the pulse of human chaos. Artists need help: food, shelter, money, hugs, perspective, inspiration, friends. Asking for help is part of the art. Offering the help is part of the art. One cannot exist without the other.

I love this book, but if it's not your thing, here is the book condensed into a thirteen minute TED talk that rightfully went viral...

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Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

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VANESSA AND HER SISTER (AND ME)

Yellow bunting hangs from trees, and since there is only one (stalwart) lady heading up the queue outside the Cambridge Union Chamber, my friend Sylvia, my mother and I decide to lounge in deck chairs, have tea and elderflower, and discuss literature: the perennially delightful question and answer of 'What are you reading?' and 'What did you think?' When we are satiated, we turn lazily to the lady in the queue, only to discover there is now a snaking river of women and we must forfeit our front row seats. We are here for Vanessa Bell; Vanessa first, and then her sister - today Virginia Woolf is the one in the shadows. Never far, or hardly done by, but the conversation this afternoon between the doyenne of historical fiction, Philippa Gregory, and the darling of the Bloomsbury world, Priya Parmar, intends to focus on the painter, the portrait artist, the one who held the centre so others could come apart - Vanessa Bell.

Priya used to be a blogger (although she promised me at the book signing she would restart her blog) so I already knew she had been friends with Philippa Gregory for a while - ten years I discover. Philippa (I can call them by their first names, can't I?) began by determining that the tenor of the interview would be intimate, they would talk as though they were at breakfast or tea, interrupting as friends of longstanding do, and interspersing memory and anecdote. It was utterly perfect. It doesn't get better for faithful readers than to have writerly friends, genuine friends, chat, confide, illuminate. Witness: Neil Gaiman with Terry Pratchett, Junot Diaz with Toni Morrison, Lena Dunham with Jennifer Saunders...

It began with the chicken story - they both had chickens at the first moment of email encounter - and meandered through the personal responsibilities of holding history in your hand and then braiding it with imagination into fiction. At various points, I focused on Philippa's shoes - they were deep electric blue, heeled and seemed to have a life of their own. My view was slightly squinty, between heads but I had been too shy or diffident to ask the volunteers whether I could snag the empty front row seats for the sake of my woebegone eyes. They were reserved for the hearing impaired, not the visually impaired. Maybe next time, I'll ask. I refrained from audience questions too - although I wanted to know if Priya came from the harmonious duality of an art/writing family as I do. She captures that particular tension of roles once defined in families, being rearranged. But art in any family transmogrifies its inhabitants. It is never enough to be painter or writer or poet or scientist. We must be all, if so inspired.

Today marks a week after the last Rituximab cycle. I have since seen my consultant and although she agrees the disease is active, she is hopeful the chemotherapy will help. I used to have a doctor who concluded every conversation with the words, 'Let us wait and see.' So it is with my consultant (a Virginia Woolf lookalike if ever there was one). We are waiting, and seeing. I am trying my best to brave the daily fevers with as little anxiety as possible. And only those who know, know. 

When I presented my book for Priya to sign, and mentioned I was a little in love with her blog The Plum Bean Project, she was surprised. But her sweetness radiates and she graciously accepted my fangirling homage. The moment was, unbeknownst to me, captured by the official photographer of the Cambridge Literary Festival, Chris Boland, who being a friend, sent me these pictures...

What he didn't capture was Mum, who is an avid fan of Philippa Gregory, introducing herself and fangirling in a much more sophisticated, respectable way. Author and appreciative fan shook hands, because Mum had brought none of her many Gregory books. All in all, it seems only right to start the nieces young on the wonders of historical fiction…

You can find more of Chris Boland's photography at his website Distant Cloud Photography.