Progress Report
Let’s start with fitness. Having finally shaken off the worst of the cold, I started using my 1kg Dumbbells on February 1. To be honest I felt a bit silly using such light weights, but I thought I’d see if they made any measurable difference. After the first couple of sessions I realised that my balance was awful when I tried one exercise that required standing on one leg! To try to combat this, I introduced yoga sessions with just seven exercises to try to reset a body that had stiffened up and lost its flexibility as well as its balance over seven or eight years of relative neglect. I have ended up doing 14 sessions of dumbbells, 12 sessions of yoga and taking two rest days in the 28 days of February.
The results have been quite amazing. The tone of my arms and the strengthening of my neck muscles have shown that even 1kg of resistance can work wonders. At 60 I expected it to take ages to show any results, but it’s a month and I can actually see the effect in all areas. For me, the most pleasing of all is the improvement of my stomach muscles which have started to tone up very nicely. I do not have a six pack yet (!) but I do have a 90s rapper!! I have only recently realised that the exercise instructions were to do two reps of the 9 exercises and I have been doing ten! Perhaps that is why the improvement has been so rapid, but as I have got used to it I have just continued with my 9 exercises & 10 reps.
The yoga has also passed expectations in terms of its effects on my body. I have increased my balance to the extent that I can now balance easily on one leg for a count of 5. Over the last couple of mornings I have been very pleased to see that I can once again touch my toes whilst keeping my legs straight and I can now move towards being able to put my hands and wrists flat on the floor in front of me. I have incorporated good breathing practices into both yoga and weights as well. In all areas my February fitness regime has been a resounding success. The walking still needs to be more regular, but I have a plan for that. More details in my March progress report.
My discretionary spending on myself hit the heights of £13.50 this month as I went to the theatre and bought a programme and an ice cream and then went to Arsenal Women v Man City Women and also bought a programme! I know, profligate in the extreme, but they were my first trips out of Medway this year so I allowed it to go to my head 🤣 In all seriousness, I think it’s still pretty good.
The project work took a back seat to my volunteering preparation. I am nearly through the initial process of becoming a volunteer for Coram Beanstalk, a UK based charity who send volunteers into schools to help children with their reading. It’s in the form of regular one to one sessions and I hope to get started either late March or, perhaps more likely, at the start of the Summer Term. I have also got to the same stage for Write the World, a US based website that helps teenagers to enter competitions, receive feedback and continually improve their writing. I will be initially working with them as a shortlister, reading up to 75 entries and sending maybe half a dozen through to the next stage. When I have been there a few months I am looking to branch out into giving writers feedback on what they are doing well and what they can improve. It is going to be interesting to see how all my teaching experience transfers across to these tasks. In terms of paid work, it looks like RCA will be summer only, as I expected, and fingers crossed I will get one of the 10 week classes to maximise my earning.
Social media use is definitely dipping and I really feel that, at the moment, I have it well under control. I am aware how easy it is for that to change, so I have tightened up my Screen Zen app, asking it to stop me from accessing all websites between 10.30 pm and 7.30 am and blocking social media and browsers completely between 12 and 6 every afternoon/evening. My most time consuming phone apps are Jetpack for blogging and Happy Color for relaxation. Alongside these I also use Duolingo to study German and Calm every evening. It’s made me far less reliant on the phone overall, and long may that continue.
By taking away my opportunity to scroll rather than read I have continued my daily habit of reading in the morning after I get up. So, this month I have read the following books
Listening to the Music the Machines Make
Cassandra in Reverse
All Wrapped Up
The Doll Factory
Ring the Hill
Help the Witch
The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan
Think Like a Monk
I will be reviewing some of my books each month and, in a new blogging category, I will be introducing you to some of my favourite authors and explaining why I like them so much. My blogging continues to be daily and occasionally twice a day.
Finally, my creativity. I wrote two poems this month, both reflecting the situation I am facing. Are they any good? Well, that’s up to you to decide I suppose. Even if they aren’t, my creative muscles, along with my physical muscles will only get stronger through regular use, so I aim to write at least another two poems in March.
So, I am fitter, more relaxed and I have more patience. I am still a work in progress but that progress is definitely in the right direction. Have a great March!
Do you believe in fate/destiny?
I used to believe in destiny, but then life happened and I realised that it was all random. As human beings we are desperate to find patterns and reasons for what happens to us. Fate and destiny is an easy way to try to pretend that we are on a path. The fact is that the sheer amount of evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, and people who believe in fate or its more self important version, destiny, focus in on one situation where it ‘worked’ and ignore the 99 situations where it didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to believe in destiny but I have had to accept that there is no plan, divine or otherwise. We are cosmic accidents and so are our lives. If it brings you comfort to believe the opposite I am genuinely glad for you, but I can’t ignore the overwhelming evidence against that proposition.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
In March 2005 I left Australia with my family after 15 life changing months. After escaping Hong Kong we decided to visit my cousin and intended to stay there for a couple of months to see in Christmas and the New year of 2004. Things started to snowball when Janet decided that she wanted to see her cousin in New Zealand. We went over there for a couple of weeks and travelled around the country, visiting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. When we got back I decided to look for a job, because I had seen that English was a shortage subject and one that attracted the easiest route into permanent residence. I was shortlisted, interviewed and offered an EAP job in a school in the Sydney area. I went excitedly to the Immigration Department and showed them the job offer and inquired as to the next step. An extremely officious and rude woman behind the counter looked at my job offer and said that teaching English to foreigners didn’t count! It was a very interesting insight into the incredibly narrow view of what was acceptable to them and what wasn’t. Mind you, I have dealt with immigration all over the world and pretty much the only personal quality needed is to hate anyone trying to enter the country! After making sure that she didn’t have it wrong I had to ring up the school to turn down the job. That wasn’t the end of it though. I found out that the University of Wollongong had an MEd TESOL course starting in March, which I knew would secure my long term future in the sector, because I still had nothing other than experience. Even that was tricky because I had a family. We had to get our three school age children admitted to the local school and we had to follow strict rules on working hours. Then I had to go over to New Zealand again to get our tourist visa changed to a student visa. I won’t recount the story this time but suffice to say that it was stressful and very poorly organised from a Department of Immigration standpoint.
Once that was done I settled down to getting my Masters which I did with an overall distinction. Once that had finished the university sent the Department of Immigration a notification that I was no longer a student and the countdown to leaving began. When the day finally arrived I knew that I was saying goodbye to my dreams of settling down in Australia as a family. It was one of the worst experiences I have had outside of the obvious stress points of loss because I knew we could have made an amazing life there. We came back to the UK and two weeks later I turned 40. There was no celebration that year. Janet intended to mark it with a trip on the London Eye but it was foggy that day and it was a non starter, so I sat in St James’s Park freezing cold and feeling like things wouldn’t get better! Obviously they did, but the knowledge that a multiverse version of myself was allowed to stay in Australia made me very unhappy for a long time!
Often, when you read a book written by someone who has become famous in another area of sport or culture, you are left feeling, at best, underwhelmed. Your abiding impression is one of a person stretching their abilities just a little too far. This is emphatically not the case with film director Neil Jordan, famous for films like The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire and my personal favourite of his, Michael Collins. The Library of Traumatic Memory, which I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy of, is released on March 6, and deserves to be a critical and popular hit.
The Plot
The book starts in 2084 where Christian Cartwright works for the Huxley Institute. He is a librarian in the titular Library of Traumatic Memory, where memories have been stored since the technology advanced far enough for it to happen. His job allows him the time and the technology to ‘resurrect’ his lover, Isolde, who died in a car crash, as a form of digital avatar. Isolde was married to Jan, but the two are drawn together after Christian creates an ‘eardrop’ for Jan to try to cure his deafness, but which the husband is unable to use. However, Christian discovers that the invention allows him and Isolde to have conversations with each other when they are each wearing the devices. He finds that he can put in his eardrop, speak to her, and have her reply. He realises that she has no independent consciousness but he feels comforted being able to hear her voice and have those conversations once again. His ancestor, Montagu Cartwright was an architect who, 200 years earlier, designed two churches, one for Castletown, Ireland and one for Carlsbad, Bohemia. The former was a church with Gaelic decorations, whilst the latter was a Gothic church, each designed with the local culture and architecture in mind. However, due to an administrative mix up the plans for the two churches were sent to the wrong locations and they were built according to those plans. He too is carrying on an affair, with Camilla Huxley, the wife of Admiral John Huxley who has commissioned a mansion for himself and his wife, to be designed by Montagu Cartwright. He creates it using a mirror and a copper model and is left wondering how the process works, knowing only that it is in some sense magical. As the reader learns more about each of their lives it becomes clear that there is a strong, and perhaps deliberate, link between the Huxley Mansion and the Huxley Institute. What it is will completely change Christian’s understanding of the world and his place in it.
My Thoughts
I was absolutely enthralled by this novel from the first page and I read its 300 pages in two days. The appeal, first and foremost, is that it is a novel unlike any I have read before. The dual timeline approach is so familiar now that it has almost become a writing trope of its own. Neil Jordan breathes new life into it by refusing to make things easy for the reader. You know there’s a connection there, but it is an opaque one, which requires the building of scattered clues into a piece of coherent guesswork. As I went through the book I was constantly rethinking my hypothesis and it turned out I was completely wrong all along! The way I engaged with the novel reminded me of the way I read an Agatha Christie mystery, with the clues being there and the misdirection being wholly the responsibility of the reader. The connection of old beliefs and new technology is fascinating and the world that is created by the connection and conflict between the two is fully realised in the reader’s mind’s eye.
Characters initially seem quite indistinct, but this is another aspect of the way that memories and relationships interact. Some people in your life remain unknowable and even though some of them may have a large effect on you, the process by which that happens is occasionally beyond your understanding. The links between some characters remain hazy throughout, but in that haze the reader’s imagination can go to work. It is the sign of a really good novel that since I finished it, I have continued to think about it and I have made a connection between two characters that may be wide of the mark, but which makes total sense to me! The technology is a character in and of itself, and here you get more clues in terms of appearance, but once again it is little details, from which your mind can construct the whole picture.
My final observation is that, because it is Neil Jordan, readers may be expecting a kind of screenplay inside a novel. That definitely isn’t how it came across to me, because so much was left up to the imagination. There are few descriptions of the main protagonists that give the full picture of what the character looks like, and I created versions of Christian, Isolde, Montagu and Camilla that would probably bear little resemblance to those that you see when reading the book. This isn’t to say that The Library of Traumatic Memory would not make a great film, because it certainly has that potential, but whoever films it, whether it is Jordan himself or another director, would use the book as a rough guide to the look of the characters, the technology and even the landscape and create something wholly unique in the same way a reader does.
The Library of Traumatic Memory is a novel that will reward rereading, but even if you only read it once, I would be extremely surprised if you do not spend the days and weeks afterwards thinking about it.
If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?
My initial thoughts when reading this prompt was to be someone with power who could influence whole systems. Then I considered the fact that I would run the risk of being as bad as those in power. Next I thought of being a singer or an actor but that was too much like wish fulfilment. Then the answer hit me. Whether I chose politics or popular culture I would be most interested in finding out how things work.
For that reason I would choose to be an adviser or a member of a think tank in politics, a roadie in the music business or an assistant director on a set. In all three cases you would be on the periphery of the action with a ringside seat to how things are done. I may have some minor input but that input would be within my area of knowledge and it would be useful. For that day I would be making notes, either handwritten or mental and when I returned to myself I would then reflect upon the experience to enable me to either get involved in the field as myself or simply to write about it with more knowledge.
A couple of thoughts though. First of all, would this be a Freaky Friday type of swap? If so, what might be the effect of that other person stepping into my life? Second, what would the self imposed rules be in terms of what I could do? When stepping into a new experience or a new job, you keep a watching brief for a little while, but it’s possible that I could end up making an impact in a way I wouldn’t anticipate. Maybe an off the cuff and seemingly minor comment could end up setting things into a different direction. It might be fun to see how it works out, but I am happy on balance to leave it to the realms of fantasy!
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 