The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

When I’m coping with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) I need a few things:
A study to work in (see yesterday)
Lots of light (this can be lightbox or, better still, nice bright days in which I can sit next to a window or go for a walk)
Chocolate (I try to ignore this need for the benefit of my arteries)
Not to be bothered with lots of people. I’m not exactly Ms Party Person at the best of times but I become positively (should that be negatively?) anti-social during the long, dark days of winter.
Approximately half as much sleep again as I need in the summer.
Funny books.

There aren’t a million funny books out there and I often find I’m re-reading old favourities – any of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, the Provincial Lady books of EM Dellafield and, more recently Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones.
And then there’s Bill Bryson.
BB needs a league all of his own when it comes to funnyness and I need to read his works with some care; tucking into a Bryson over breakfast and the lightbox can be a life-threatening endeavour as laugh coming up meets mouthful of tea going down resulting in tea where tea didn’t outghta be.

Currently, I’m reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid which is providing much anti-SAD therapy. On the back is a question quoted from The Evening Standard: ‘Is this the most cheerful book I’ve ever read?’ Well, if I’ve ever read a more cheerful, positive and self-deprecating account of growing up anywhere, ever, then I’m clearly losing my marbles because I have no recollection of it. The highest praise I can give TLATOTTK is that it is even funnier than Notes from a Small Island from which I swear I nearly died laughing at one point.

It’s not that the events Bill Bryson writes about are particularly funny – most are extremely mundane – as he points out growing up in 1950s Iowa meant a lot of time waiting for something – anything – to happen. No, it’s BB’s language which provides the amusement factor. Taking the page I’ve just put my bookmark in where he’s talking about toys of the 50s; Mr Potato Head is described as ‘majestically unamusing’, Slinky as ‘notable for its negative ecstasy’. Hyperbole is BB's literary device of choice and it is his love of overexaggeration which, for some reason, I find amusing in a way which everybody else in the family finds pitiably incomprehensible. It’s not that they don’t find the bits I read out (or attempt to read out, through face-crippling, breath-stealing mirth) amusing they just don’t find them that amusing. ‘Heh heh’ they snigger worriedly as I collapse in hysterics at the lastest sentence full of bons mots ‘Mmm, yes, quite funny.’
There is, clearly, no hope for them and I should just stop trying to turn them into heaps of Bryson-appreciating laugh-jelly. When I tell you that, for the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and The Bassist, there is nothing funnier than The Mighty Boosh, you may begin to understand. It’s not that I don’t think the lads who are TMB are clever and amusing, I just ‘heh heh’ to their surreality in much the same way as the UFF and the B react to Monsieur Bryson. Our senses of humour are generationally incompatible.

I’m only about a third of the way through TLATOTTK but already it’s provided me with more laughs than pretty much all the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months put together. Including one of Christmas 2007’s hits – 1001 ‘A Man Walked Into a Bar’ Jokes.

If you’re struggling with the season and the weather and are generally of the disposition to have your ribs tickled by verbal humour, I can’t recommend a dose of the underpants-over-trousers stuff from young Billy Bryson too highly.

Writing again

When the four walls of the kitchen - my usual writing space - begin to close in on me and I feel stale and uninspired, I often take my laptop into town and sit in my favourite Canterbury coffee shop to write.
I always work upstairs where it’s light and bright and where, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the table by the window from which I can watch people scurrying about on the crossroads below.

I really had to get into town today and get some work done. I’ve done nothing serious on the work in progress for nearly a fortnight and I’m beginning to be very wound up by that. Add to that the fact that it’s mid-winter and, as I blogged about before, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder which is aproximately the opposite of a life-enhancing experience. Keep adding things like the fact that Christmas is over and paid work kicked in again yesterday; like the fact that the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and the Bass Player are not yet back at school and - though they don’t deliberately disturb me - their simple presence in the house makes me unable to shut the real world out and enter the world of my book (where it’s blazing summer) and I have not been a happy bunny at all. The Other Half described me as 'floppy'. She was being kind; what I was was unresponsive and morose. I had stopped making eye-contact (always a bad sign) and had begun to form an automatically negative response to any suggestions made to me.
Aliya Whiteley (of whom more below) also has these non-writing difficulties, as she admitted on the MNW blog here.

Why can I work in a coffee shop full of people when I can’t work in my own home? Don’t ask me. Clearly it’s not an absence of other people which I need, but an absence of people who have a right to expect something from me; I can’t switch off properly if somebody might want me for something at any moment. Not that they usually do, you understand, they’re pretty self-sufficient at their age, but they might. I suppose it’s just hard to switch off being Mum.

And, I’m happy to tell you, the coffee shop produced the goods. A nice spider-planned page of pencilled notes and 1,346 words produced on screen. Result. Two mugs of tea consumed and only two other people upstairs whose conversations I had to ignore. Sometimes, when I’m mulling things over, ignoring conversations is far from what I'm doing as I convince myself that listening in to snippets of other people’s chat is ‘research’...

Writerly fact - a laptop is a fantastic thing to hide behind when you’re eavesdropping.

Now that I’m home I’m catching up with emails and suddenly there’s a whole rash of publication-related ones to deal with. This is novel and therefore pleasurable. I’m sure that – like others who have gone through the being-published thing ahead of me – I will soon find it an irritating interruption to work.
I’m doing an event with Faye (L.Booth) and Aliya (Whiteley), two of my fellow-MNW authors in Cambridge on the 25th January. We’re meeting the Heffers’ reading group and doing a bit of book-signing. The three of us are getting together for coffee beforehand so that instead of trying to get to know each other and be interested in other people at the same time, we can introduce ourselves to one another and then speak sensibly to the kind readers who've come to meet us. It should be cool, I’ve been getting to know Faye and Aliya a little bit from their respective blogs and am pleased that I’m going to be able to do it for real, too.

Then there was an email from Sophie, the lovely publicist at MNW, wanting to know if I was planning to go to Oxford any time soon as the Oxford Mail are keen to do an interview and would prefer ‘in person’ to ‘on the phone’. As a) I’m always game for a trip to Oxford which I love and where I have great friends and b) I hate speaking to people I don’t know on the telephone as I’m prone to say rash things because I’m getting no facial-expression feedback, I’m inclined to foist myself on the said friends for the day and go up. But what fun, anyway, that the Oxford Mail is interested in me and Testament!

Then there was an email to be written to Steve who designed my website as we try, yet again, to sort out the non-existent email feed from the site. Apologies to anybody out there who has tried to send me an email from http://www.alishawkins.com/ – for reasons Steve can’t fathom things just don’t seem to be making it through. Hopefully the situation will be resolved soon.

Meanwhile, you can always leave a comment here.

Winter, season of mulled wine.

It’s winter. Generally I’m not in favour of it as a season due to the SAD mentioned last week but there are compensations and mulled wine is a major one. We did the first batch today and, sad to relate, it was only a qualified success. We had bought cheap plonk in a box but had neglected to read the fine print – made from grape juice concentrate, 8% alcohol. Hmmm. Not really enough to get you zinging, especially when you consider (as I tell people all the time) that most of the alcohol boils off in the mulling…

But sitting reading the paper and catching up with the blogs I haven’t read over the weekend because we’ve been busy erasing all trace of the builders from house and garden has been pleasant. The house is now springcleaned, shined, beeswaxed and vacuumed to within an inch of its life. You know how, in a certain kind of book, well-looked after houses always smell of beeswax? Well ours does now after the dresser has had its annual going over. The rest of the year it has to survive on the odd cursory wipe and whatever dust is disturbed when we remove things we want to use. From this you can deduce that it’s not a decorative dresser, it’s a functional one and jolly fine it is too. I’m not going to include a picture here because it’ll look like I’m trying to sell it on ebay but suffice it to say that it is about ten feet long and crammed with all of the stuff which there isn’t room for in the kitchen due to my obsessive insistence that we have a table and armchairs in there, thus limiting the number of cupboards we can have.

It’s worth it. working less than ten feet from kettle and tea is a luxury beyond imagining. And it’s not just me who appreciates a comfy chair in the kitchen. Our old ginger cat, Fingal, loves the chair next to the radiator and will sit and stare up at me accusingly if, by mistake, I’ve sat on that one instead of my more ususal one on the other side of the table. She’s on it now, lying all neatly curled up, only opening an eye, if one of us goes past, to make sure we haven’t come to turf her off.

She doesn’t like the winters either, too cold for her old bones, but radiators, like mulled wine, are a definite compensation.

Seeing the light...

One of the building/decorating team put her head round the door of the sitting room (where I was working today) and said ‘Oh, is that a lightbox?’

What she had meant to say was ‘Do you have a spare one of these green scratchy things because mine’s been knackered by all the grout the tiler’s left on the tiles?’ but we got diverted into talking about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder – neat and non-forced acronym) and the relative merits of various lightboxes.

‘What’s a lightbox?’ I hear you cry. Well, unsurprisingly it’s a nice sleek-looking box with a light in it. Mine looks like the specimen on the left:

But this is not just *any* light – this is full spectrum light (no, telly-watchers, it’s NOT M&S light) ie like sunlight. In this case bright summer-type sunlight.

I don’t know enough about the psychology/physiology of the thing to give you a cogent explanation of why lightboxes work but I do know that, without mine, from about the beginning of October to the end of February, my need to sleep amounts to a hibernation urge, I want to eat industrial quantities of carbohydrates and avoid people lest I bite lumps out of them. If I have months without the light I develop the need for a corner in which to moan and weep. Seriously. It’s horrible.

But with my lightbox I’m almost as much fun to live with as in the summer…

Son No 2, the Bassist, has SAD too, so winter breakfast times see the two of us huddling at the kitchen table, our books pushed up next to the light, trying to find room on the table for our tea (me), toast (The Bassist) and Innocent Mango and Passionfruit smoothies (both of us).

I would show you a photo of this domestic scene, but no camera without fancy filters will cope with both our kitchen in the morning and immensely bright lightbox – you’d just be presented with a picture of something very over-exposed.

Be glad, this saves you from a photo of me approximately three hours before I’m anything less than frightening.

I leave you today with a weird SAD fact. The next best way to take in full spectrum light after looking at it (kind of the way most people would initially go for, I suspect) is via the backs of your knees... something to do with the time when we wandered around on all fours, apparently.

It's as I always suspected, I am a primitive throwback...