43. A letter to Terry ✒️ #5
Art envy, and a stratagem for dealing with the piles of denial on my desk.
Dear Terry,
Thank you for your lovely letter last week. It provided me with the perfect distraction in what I’ve always found to be the most annoying week of the year: the first one without a bank holiday in it, in which we’re all expected to be at the coalface again, have our chilly noses pressed back to the grindstone, or whatever backbreaking or pressure-related metaphor we choose to use in relation to getting back to work after the festive break.
Actually, the pressure isn’t only to do with work: I find the rash of resolutions afflicting society at this time of year to be downright scary. The resolutions themselves aren’t scary – well, of course they might be, depending on what you’ve chosen to take on or give up in this fresh new year – but I find any expectation that I place on myself at the start of the year to nail a massive goal sometime in that year far too much to handle. There are plenty of resolutions I could think about making, not least to deal with all the piles of paper on my untidy desk – but I’m not subscribing to the resolution habit. Nope.
It's nice to hear that you’ve dug out your fountain pen! I enjoy using mine – it’s nothing flash, but I love the smooth feel of putting ink on paper.
From our second year at school we had to write with fountain pen: when I started in Form B the boys suddenly got to wear trousers rather than shorts, and we all arrived on that first day of the autumn term with brand-new fountain pens to show off to each other. I remember the fun of making ink blots, and less responsible classmates accidentally-on-purpose spattering ink at high velocity to make blue clouds of mess over everything. And when I was about twelve we came across the magic that was the ‘ink eraser’, the ownership and use of which our school immediately prohibited. Ink erasers pretty soon became highly-valued contraband, kept hidden up shirt sleeves and passed between us in secret.
I’m grateful for the update on your local scandal that I’m calling ‘Puddlegate’. I have pothole progress to report from these parts, having found this gem of an eyeful on a walk last week:
The pothole just ahead of the cyclist in blue was deep enough for the water to come halfway up my walking boots, and I know this because I had a little paddle in it to wash some of the mud off. And this is a public road!
I really enjoy the drawings you include in your letters. I wish I could capture such snippets of the day in just a few strokes of the pen: your ‘Terry after Christmas shopping’ cartoon was a particular favourite! I’m always getting stuck in with various creative pursuits, but I’d love to better be able to draw.
I’ve done tonnes of art courses over the years: basic drawing, botanical drawing, watercolour painting… but in all my years I have managed neither a breakthrough nor a thunderbolt moment. I used to joke with Mum about how books that claim to be able to teach you how to draw don’t actually work if you just leave them on the shelf: I think we both expected to learn by osmosis or something. In fact I had similar expectations during my English A-level, but sadly there was no way that ‘Bleak House’ was ever going to read itself. I don’t blame it, frankly.
Despite my frustrations with art I’ve been known to take a book off that shelf from time to time. ‘My Year in Small Drawings’ by Matilda Tristram (affiliate link) encouraged me to make a thumbnail sketch every day, and its double-page spread pictured above called for me to draw shoes. I picked my slippers – the simplest footwear I own – and drew them two dozen times. I like to think that I improved as I worked my way through the squares, and yes, I’ll admit that there are at least nine or ten very good reasons for my not showing you the left-hand page!
At the start of 2020 – and the timing of this was extraordinary, given that from late March we were in lockdown and needed things to entertain us – I signed up for an online mixed media art journalling course. Video lessons would be published every Thursday, and I’d look forward to Fridays, when I’d clear my desk of trivial work-related items and replace them with tubes of acrylic paint, containers of gesso, pots of ink, paintbrushes and a whole load of other stuff – Terry, they weren’t joking when they called it ‘mixed media’! There seemed to be no holds barred in terms of materials course participants could use – across the various projects I used everything from feathers collected from the garden to embroidery thread, bottle tops, bubble wrap, old book pages and adverts torn out of magazines.
And it seems I like to complain about comment on the weather not just in my writing but also in my art!
I’m looking forward to your review of ‘On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft’ by Stephen King. I’m enjoying it immensely, and a scene I read on page 56 at the weekend really hit me. When the author was a sophomore at high school – Google tells me that this means he would have been fifteen or sixteen – he started writing sports reports for the local newspaper. The editor told him this:
‘When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.’
What I absolutely love about this line is that I recognise exactly what is being said! It’s not at all way off not even close not really true of these letters of mine, I fear, but in my other writing I feel as if I’m becoming more practised at the ‘taking out all the things’ bit. Well, at least I hope so – I’ve no doubt that you’ll correct me if I’m off the mark. You know your rights, eh, Terry? 😉
If those editing skills were to ever come naturally to me in the context of conversation – I am notoriously difficult to shut up – my friends and family would, I know, be deeply grateful.
Your cutting from ‘Revenge of the Librarians’ by Tom Gauld, depicting ‘a survey of the layers in the teetering pile of unread books next to my bed’, has reminded me of a far-fetched story my disorganised A-level German teacher told me. German lessons would take place in Mr N’s untidy office, presumably because I was the only student fool enough to be taking the subject and it would have been a waste of a whole classroom otherwise, and every time we met he would apologise for the state of his desk.
Careful to always do my due diligence for these posts, I’ve Googled ‘urban myth re chaotic desk’ and found no reference to the tale that follows. I therefore conclude that Mr N’s account was original.
#pinchofsalt
Back when ‘The Times’ was still a broadsheet newspaper, an academic kept track of his steadily-increasing piles of books and papers by spreading a page of it across his desk every day to create a simple, dated data-management system. When the man’s desk was finally being cleared, they found his open umbrella in one of the layers.
I’m not going to employ the same technique to organise the piles of denial here in my home office, Terry – and not just because I’m a Telegraph reader. But heck, I’ve got to do something about them.
Any suggestions?
All the very best,
Rebecca
If you enjoyed this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published as usual on Saturday, when I’ll be exploring different ways to carry my notebook. See you then!
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That's so kind, Matt - thank you!
The Stephen King book is absolutely brilliant - I haven't read any of his fiction, nor seen any (or perhaps just one or two, maybe?) of the film adaptations of this books - but gosh, reading this memoir is SUCH an education, and it's a book that's really easy to dip in and out of, which suits me perfectly.
"Puddlegate": 🙂😂 Those potholes look menacing. Your feet drawings are very nice, but in my letter in response I'll include my own drawings of feet, both with and without shoes. I think you'll like them. 🙃