When I moved into this flat, my friends and family asked me if I was sure I wanted to move next to a Christadelphian meeting hall, would it not be triggering. I loved the property too much to let it put me off so in I moved with nothing more than my clothes and a haul of essentials from John Lewis. I’ve been here eight years.

The congregation is elderly, white and middle class like a good portion of my regency spa town. At about nine thirty every Sunday morning, just as I am coming to, I hear them shuffle in, greeting one another by name and after half an hour or so there is a hymn. As there are only thirty of them at most, I think they use a recording of a choir and they sing along, sometimes a hymn of their own that I don’t know but very often an old English hymn that melts me completely. What is this melting? I have no idea.

I was never allowed to sing hymns as a child, they were pagan and the Devil’s work (He still gets a capital letter) and at school assemblies me and my sister were excused the religious portion and had to sit outside the hall. I never knew the names of the hymns they sang, but I loved them. I only ever knew the first line; ‘There is a green hill far away’, ‘He who would valiant be,’ ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ and even though I knew it was bad I yearned to sing along and be part of the choir. I was responding to and recognising in that music and those words a yearning for spiritual connection. Even then I knew there is a wide gulf between being spiritual and being religious.

This morning, I heard ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive our foolish ways,’ and kept my eyes closed to listen to the rest. It was beautiful and, after it had finished, since I don’t believe in a Lord and Father of Mankind I wondered what connection I could make between that beautiful sentiment and my own spiritual beliefs. Can I ask all the people I know that have to put up with me to forgive my foolish ways? Can I forgive the foolish ways of people that annoy me, politicians included because they get it SO wrong? Can I ask the planet to forgive us collectively for making such a goddam mess of it and while I’m at it, ask the young people who will reap our bitter harvest in years to come to forgive us for dumping it all on them? Can I forgive myself, so often foolish, so often repeating that foolishness, over and over?

I’m writing this as the second hymn is finishing, one I do not know. Soon they will file out, some of them with walking sticks and zimmer frames, white haired, smiling people, good people I think. I might get dressed one day and go out and thank them for such a lovely start to a Sunday morning but then I’m worried about the inevitable invitation to join in. If it ain’t broke …..

Go well,

Kit

I once tried to recreate one of my favourite childhood dishes, Souse aka pig’s feet pickled in lemon and garlic. I was working off a combination of You Tube videos, my sister’s memory and what my tongue could recollect; the slippery give of thick, soft skin, the unctuous jelly, the bounce of sinuous tendons that slid between the teeth. I didn’t fancy asking for trotters at the hip, artisan butcher in my spa town that sells organic burgers at the price of an MOT. I didn’t fancy trying to claim they were for the dog, (I don’t possess one and couldn’t withstand even the smallest degree of interrogation on that point), I couldn’t imagine Sainsbury’s slaughtering their own pigs out back, but I knew I’d find the trotters where immigrants live, still making food from back home, one of the last connections to the past when dress and language have all but gone.

My father celebrated every Christmas by making West Indian fruitcake. Heavy with plump, rum-soaked fruit, blackened with treacle and burnt sugar, the smell permeated the very fabric of the house, you could smell it on the sheets and cushions, taste it on your skin. He actually started baking mid December, hours he’d be at it, but not a slice was cut until Christmas Eve after it had had time to mature or ‘cook again’, as my father called it.

When he was at home, my father made what he’d been brought up on; stewed chicken, soup with dumplings, curried lamb, cornmeal porridge that dropped like a stone in your belly, Johnnie cakes fried in lard, broiled pork steaks with oily rice, a strange sweet coconut pudding wrapped in banana leaves called ‘kanki’, the type of slow-cooked humble fare appropriated by millionaire celebrity chefs who call it, without a trace of irony, ‘peasant food.’

Real ‘peasant’ food is something quite different to the ‘cuisine bourgeoise’ of cassoulets and casseroles with hunks of meat, polenta with truffle oil, pies of salmon and oysters, buttery tarts of summer fruits, puddings with jam and cream. Until the potato, European peasant food consisted overwhelmingly of bread, and terrible bread at that often containing chaff, grass, bark and sawdust, and in times of famine, people ate lichens, moss, dirt, dogs, cats, frogs and in extreme cases (The Ukraine Genocide for one), each other.

Historically, the working poor would eat only one meal each day after a long spell in the field or factory, meals made with cheap, seasonal, easily accessible ingredients, off-cuts and tough meat, offal, stale bread, old vegetables, wild herbs, meals that had to nourish, sustain, appease, and on special occasions celebrate, excite and delight. The cook, often a woman on a ridiculous budget had to be clever and inventive, cooking everything from scratch with skills passed down over generations, stretching one dish across multiple days refashioned by adding vegetables, pastry, beans, oats, stock or bread. My Irish grandmother was mistress of the stretch. I often eavesdropped on her version of a heart to heart with my mother which was no more than a lecture on the virtues and secrets of food rejuvenation.

The man that sold the pigs trotters to me on Soho Road in Birmingham was blacker than black, a deep and beautiful black we called ‘navy’ when we were children. As he folded them in newspaper he looked at me hard. ‘Six is a lot,’ he said. I realized that my children, raised by Waitrose, wouldn’t be joining me at the table that night but I brassed it out. Six it was.

At home, unwrapped, the trotters looked sad and obscene, long, cold and pink. Only a few days before, a pig-and-a-half walked around on those feet. I examined them closer. A dollop of something (shit?) clung to one toe, a sprinkle of fine hairs on another. I felt like throwing them away, deep into the green recycling bin and becoming vegetarian there and then. Once upon a time, my ancestors, slaves on a sugar plantation enjoying what the big house couldn’t use, would have considered these feet a luxury. But things felt very different in Leamington Spa.

I lit a gas ring and burnt the hairs off the hirsute trotter. I nestled them together in my biggest saucepan and boiled them in salted water, changing it twice. How to describe the smell? It smelt foreign, earthy, primitive; it smelt of our house in 1965.

Meals from home are one of the first things immigrants will try to recreate when they arrive in a foreign country but back then this was no easy thing. There was nowhere that sold the green bananas, plaintain, yam, cassava or sweet potatoes that would have been the staple diet of my father in St. Kitts. Even the rice he first ate was the pudding variety, not the long grained stuff he was used to. Garlic, chilli, spices only appeared in our neck of the woods in the early 70’s when the first Asian corner shop opened.

This yearning for original meals isn’t just down to palate and nostalgia. When everything else is far away – or taken away – food represents culture, history, identity, pride, status. Preparing food together and sharing is an opportunity to remind, remember, reinforce and helps immigrants cope with dislocation and disorientation. Both of my grandmother’s, White Nana and Black Nana complained bitterly about the quality of the food they found in England, bad butter, unripe fruit, fatty bacon, dry herbs. Although their complaints were probably justified, by making comparisons they were also remembering home, stretching a hand back across the water to the things they missed, the kitchen they left behind.

(My father in 1956 shortly after he arrived in England)

When the trotters were cooked (it smelt like hours), I squeezed fresh lemons and limes over smashed garlic with thyme, finely sliced onions and a fresh chilli in half of the stock. The water had begun to jellify (if that’s even a verb) and where the skin had come away from the bone, there were shards of meat and fat begging to be picked at. I resisted. In more delicate households, the flesh would have been stripped from the trotter and served cold with cucumber and anonymity. Not in ours. The whole thing, or as much as you could get at, was dumped in your bowl and you sucked the marrow from the bones. There was no shame in it then and I feel none now although there have been times in my life when I wouldn’t have felt so bold.

There’s considerable snobbery and moral judgement about food, what we eat and where we shop. I’ve heard well-heeled friends talk in hushed tones about their brave visits to Lidl or Aldi ‘for the excellent wine’ and the Milleniums’ avocado and coffee obsession continues to fill column inches in newspapers.

Food, how much we spend on it and whether we spend it judiciously is also used as a barometer of good parenting with the most savage accusations reserved for the working class or those on benefits. In 2018 a tweet from Bath Conservatives said that parents who can’t feed their children on £10 a week were ‘indolent or dysfunctional’ and ‘don’t feed their children well.’ The answer came from the outspoken activist, Jack Munroe in the article, ‘My Ready Meal is None Of Your Fucking Business’, in which she says ‘Some people are working two or three zero hour contracts and barely have time to change from their supermarket checkout uniform to their cleaning tabard, let alone knock up a vegetable gratin from scratch and make their own granola.’

It’s not easy to eat well on benefits or minimum wage as researchers from the Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research proved in 2012 when they found that 1,000 calories made up from healthy items, such as lean salmon, yoghurts and tomatoes, cost an average of £7.49. The same calorie intake from less healthy items, such as pizza, beef burgers, and doughnuts, could be purchased for an average of £2.50. And things have become significantly worse since then. That same year food banks gave three-day emergency food supplies to £128,000 people. In 2017 it was well over a million, last year it was 2.6 million according to House of Commons Library Data.

And yet Jacob Rees-Mogg, the aristocrat and MP for North East Somerset managed to find a silver lining in those statistics. He said that the rise in food bank use was ‘rather uplifting’, allowing us the opportunity to demonstrate British generosity and compassion. This from a man who clearly identifies with the giver not the receiver, (though I doubt that he became one of the wealthiest men in Britain by giving much of it away), a man who has never queued in the cold, worried for the nutritional health of his children or felt the lurch of shame as a bag of unearned food is handed over.

Anyway, I was making souse. I had my trotters, all six in a thick but transparent, lemony sauce, I had my napkin on my lap and I had absolutely no appetite. My father, long dead, stood at my shoulder saying ‘Go on! It taste good! Nothing wrong with it!’ But, I hadn’t the stomach for gnawing at the poor animals’ feet. Over the years, I had acquired the unrealistic, clean-hands and blind-eye of the supermarket shopper who wants their meat blood and fur free, prime cuts chopped quietly, cleanly elsewhere, wrapped in cling film on a polystyrene tray, labeled ‘Free Range’ and urging me to ‘Taste The Difference.’

I apologized to the pigs and made beans on toast.

Go well,

Kit

A few things surprised me about this group. First of all, everyone showed up committed, hardworking, curious, dedicated, kind and honest. It made the teaching a joy and it enabled the group to bond and the sessions to land.

Secondly, I hadn’t expected to be sad when we finished on Saturday. These are writers who want more and need more (we all need more) and for me at least, this felt like a bittersweet goodbye. I mean, I will be seeing them for a final check-in in October but still…. I’m hoping some of them sign up for the Advanced Three Month Course late next year maybe.

And lastly, I think of my own learning from the Six Month Course. Mostly, I’ve learned how and why different people come to writing - a lesson I learn every time I step in front of a class. There were people on this course who have battled - are battling - deeply unsettling and difficult issues, things they had to overcome just to sit in the room, just to put pen to paper and show up. There were people dealing with harsh truths and rejection and acknowledging their ambitions - rightly so - and others unsure of what they wanted to do next. And everyone, including me, finding solace through words and creativity, nourishing ourselves on the feeling of rightness that comes from doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

So, what next? The same Six Month Creative Writing Course but this time, all delivered entirely online that will start this autumn. And the Advanced Course following that. And a Memoir Masterclass and a Screenwriting Masterclass. All dates to be announced soon. And keeping in touch with the group and wishing them all the fluffy stuff, peace, health, success.

It’s 5 a.m. now. Just going to bed. It’s been good.

Go well,

Kit

I’d been writing for about twelve years at this point and I was 55 years old. My two previous novels had never seen the light of day. I’d been sacked by my first agent and had numerous other rejections so it’s fair to say my ambitions were modest. I hoped for a small readership of social workers and foster carers, my family and friends and possibly people from my neck of the woods who might recognise the family set up I had created. Despite a really big advance and lots of noise in the publishing press (who reads the publishing press….), I had no idea what was in store but I did everything Penguin told me to do, turned up at festivals, wrote articles, met people, said yes and yes and yes some more and somehow my career took off. My Name is Leon won a big award, it was shortlisted for numerous prizes, it was made into a BBC film, it is on the GCSE curriculum and it’s now being turned into a musical. I’ve been longlisted twice for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, won other stuff and became a professor of creative writing at two universities. What a ride.

(above with the young actor Cole Martin who played Leon in the 2022 BBC film)

In 2016, I hoped, but didn’t really believe, that a decade later I would still be writing and loving it and teaching it and immersed in it. And I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I have good friends, really talented writers, who had their first novel published and then that was it. Nothing else happened. Their second didn’t do well and then the offers dried up. Either they are no longer writing or they have to work really, really hard to get noticed and get their agent to return their calls and get their books into their local shop. Success isn’t always down to talent.

But to return to my Decade of Joy. I have a number of people to thank. My assistant then who witnesses the madness first hand. To my assistant over the last few years, who has been instrumental in making sure I don’t burn out, that I turn up at the right place and the right time for literary festivals, that I turn in copy on time, that I get paid for the work I do and filter out the people who want me to work for nothing.

My editor Mary Ann Harrington at Tinder Press and all of her team who spend so much time and energy making sure that my books are the best that they can be. And to the wonderful team that bought Leon all those years ago, Viking at and especially Venetia Butterfield.

My proofreader and copy editor, Karen Bryden, the same one I have had for every book I’ve ever published who knows my style and what I’m trying to say who finds all my mistakes and undoubtedly makes my writing better.

Low quality screenshot From The Guardian March 2016 announcing the New Faces of Fiction

To the many, many lovely people who write messages of thanks and appreciation for my writing, the people who buy my books, the people who come to literary festivals and online classes, all the students in the Six Month Writing Kit Course and masterclass series, everyone who bothers to ‘like’ a post and ever single person who has inspired me to read and write and read and read some more. And my friends. I have the very best friends.

Finally and always, (and always) my children, Beth and Luke, the inspiration for the love and kindness I write about. What a privilege it is to know them.

And to you for reading.

Go well.

Kit

Me in 2016. Less grey but properly bewildered.

Every morning at 7.25 a.m. I used to have to leave the house, with two children dressed, breakfasted, teeth brushed, hair brushed, school bag packed, £1 each for whatever bloody collection was going round, each child with a cardboard box or the special book or special kit or photo of Nana or whatever.

I had to also be dressed, teeth brushed, hair brushed, purse, phone, even tempered, jolly even and bustle them into the back seat and encourage them not to argue, to be kind, to ‘have a nice day’, not to mind about the bully that called my daughter fat or the teacher who insisted that my son learn Latin even though he couldn’t read English. Yes, it was all lovely. Every day. Just lovely.

I dropped the kids off at their school that started at 8 a.m. and then had to drive all the way home in much busier traffic because I hit the commuters driving into town all along the country lanes where you couldn’t overtake and you couldn’t cruise or lose concentration less you find yourself in a ditch or up someone’s backside.

One morning, almost as soon as I hit the long road home I found myself behind a little car, quite old doing 30 miles per hour. This is a 50 mph route and it takes a good twenty minutes to get from one end to the other. I got up close. I was tired and irritable, I was in a hurry. I knew the road like the back of my hand and I knew I could not get past the car so as the minutes ticked by so did my patience. By the time, we reached the outskirts of town it’s fair to say I was fucking furious, yelling and gesticulating although I couldn’t see the driver.

At last! We came to a junction where you could turn left or right and praise be to God, the car indicated to go the other way. Hoorah. I looked over at the driver ready to mouth a few choice words about respect for other road users and why the fuck are you going so slow, dude?

It wasn’t a dude. It was an old woman, maybe 80, maybe older. She had her hair done up in a neat bun. She had red lipstick on. She had a little fur collar on her coat and she could barely see over the steering wheel. She smiled at me and gave a little wave as if to say ‘Good morning, that was a nice drive!’

This woman had got up that morning, probably alone, got herself dressed in some nice clothes and put her face on. She’s still driving and out and about in the world, places to go, people to see. She’s got an appointment somewhere with someone and is fully able to drive and navigate the world, living her best life. And she still has time to smile at a stranger as she goes about her business. Who was she? Who had she been? What had she seen? What had she done? Who was she now? What wisdom did she have? What could she tell me about life, things I would never know?

Shame on me, on wanting to get home a maximum of 4 minutes quicker, on not considering who was driving the car and where they were going and what they had been through or what was going on in their life. And then I remembered a few years previously when I came out of hospital after a serious operation and the first time I got in the car after six months rest. I was slow. I was hesitant. I was worried about braking and pulling a muscle. I was holding people up. I annoyed people, that’s for sure.

The phrase, ‘everyone is fighting a battle you cannot see’ came to mind except this happy, elderly woman was celebrating her life and the battle that should have been fought was me fighting my horrible attitude.

Such a lesson. I waved back and

I’ve never forgotten her.

Go well.

Kit

When I was beginning to write I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I left school at 15 and although I had read hundreds of books, mostly the classics, I had never heard of most literary terms, or knew what ‘Modernism’ was or what an ‘act’ was or a protagonist and so forth. So there was a lot of trial and a lot of error, a lot of writing courses and books on writing and going to talks (mostly in London, an hour and a half away), and getting annoyed with myself for so often getting it wrong. Why was there this massive gap between what I wanted to say and what appeared on the page?

Eventually, I got there. Or mostly there. I am still, of course, learning how to write, still going to talks, still the trials, still the errors but there are less of them or maybe they are just less of the important ones now.

So, when I stopped teaching at the University of Leicester this year, I decided to put together the kind of course I wish I had taken, one that gave you the essentials so you could see the wood for the trees, that demystified things like ‘voice’ and ‘conflict’ and helped you with self-doubt and losing your way. Writing Kit is that course.

There are sixteen brilliant, committed and fascinating writers on the Six Month Writing Kit Course and we are at the halfway point. Along with in-person teaching, we have monthly two-hour masterclasses and a weekly email on some aspect of writing or publishing and a prompt. It’s an amazing privilege to be part of the group and see how people respond to good information and we have another three months left to go. We will be tackling editing, voice, place and time and most important of all, how to keep going.

I will be running the course again later this year but this time, entirely online as there were many people from outside of the UK who were interested in coming and people who simply couldn’t get away for a whole day. I heard you all.

If you are interested in being put on the mailing list, let me know below.

And in the meantime, if you are a writer who needs some encouragement, I do post here little snippets of writing advice from time to time and can recommend other brilliant accounts posting advice and courses and help. You’re not alone.

Go well,

Kit

One of the questions many people ask me when I’m teaching memoir is how much of the truth do I tell.

It’s important not to get writing memoir confused with giving evidence in court. You are not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth because that would be impossible. Who of us could tell the whole truth about our life, every interaction and event and thought? Who of us could describe something in our lives that was wholly true in the legal sense in terms of date and time and weather and age and who was there and who wasn’t and what was said - in detail - and what was thought.

I worked in criminal law for over 15 years and I have been in police interviews when people are giving their statements and then seen them months later in the witness box giving evidence and there is always a difference between what they said in interview and what they remembered later on. There is, in fact, a difference between their evidence even thirty minutes after the offence they witnessed or committed - even ten minutes.

Many things come into play in memory recall - time, weather, age, health, desire, fear, trauma, new/old information, stress, sleep, drugs, alcohol, context, prompting and so forth. When witnesses give evidence in Court it is tested under cross-examination and it often changes or at least doubt is cast on whether or not their evidence means what it first implied. Having been cross-examined twice in my life when I was definitely telling the truth, I know what it is like to question your own memory, your own recall and have to admit that there is, after all, an alternative explanation.

And what about telling ‘nothing but the truth’ when writing memoir? Our opinions are not ‘the truth’ because there are many truths. My sister has a different truth about our parents because she was nine years younger than me and experienced a different childhood. I might say my father was always angry but by the time she came to know him she would say he was mild. Both opinion. Both true. And all of our memoir is our opinion and we bring into it the context of our truth - poverty, immigration, politics, social structures, racism, isolation or whatever to give a rounded out picture about why things happened the way they did.

And then there is the question of the whole truth. You have a choice when you tell your story about what you include and what you leave out. You do not owe anyone the whole truth. There are some things that happened to you that can remain private, that do not go into the memoir, that you keep close to your heart and do not divulge. Ask yourself what you have to gain by writing about that traumatic, shaming, ugly, scarring, private, upsetting, still-raw event in your life? Can it be summarised? Can it be left out without unbalancing or misleading? Can it be glossed over? Should it be glossed over? How do I feel about that memory of mine being out in the world? What will I feel when people pick up the paperback of my life and read it there, strangers and lovers and sisters and brothers? I often say to my students, some things are worth more than £10.99.

There is a place for your deepest private things and it might be with your partner or your family or your therapist or your doctor or simply with yourself. As the saying goes, everyone has a chapter they don’t read out loud.

Go well.

Kit

Will you start writing?

I would if I won the lottery. If I didn’t have so much to do. If I thought I’d write a bestseller. If I knew how the industry worked. If I could do an MA in Creative Writing. If I knew I would be as good as Margaret Atwood. If I knew I wouldn’t fail. If I knew more. If I cared less. If you help me. If the kids were easier. If he gave me more encouragement. If I had finished that other thing, then I would.

When will you start writing?

When the kids have grown up a bit. When I retire. When that big project finishes. When my son leaves home. When I won’t feel like a fraud. When I’ve done that next course. When I really understand the three act structure. When I can afford to go down to 3 days per week. When I feel more confident. When I’ve read enough books. When the world isn’t such a mad place. When I’ve finished decorating the kitchen. When I can touch type. When he lets me. When she encourages me. When no-one will laugh. When I won’t laugh. When I’m better. When my ship comes in, then I’ll start.

Why don’t you start writing?

Because it’s too hard. Because I’m not good enough. Because I don’t know enough. Because everyone else is better than me. Because it’s all been said already. Because no one will help me. Because the world is too dangerous. Because I don’t have the time. Because I’m disorganised. Because people like me don’t write. Because no-one will take me seriously. Because I have a bad back. Because I’m remodelling the bathroom. Because they never publish books by people like me. Because I want it so badly and I’m scared I’ll fail. Because my parents will disapprove. Because someone stole my story. Because it takes years. Because it will take forever.

Let Emily be your guide.

Go well.

Kit de Waal

There are many ways to be a mother and yours counts.

Photo credit Darina Berunagova

I had a nasty run in with someone a few weeks ago. Well, not so much a run in as a snarky series of emails about a misunderstanding. The tone was accusatory, high handed and superior, as though they were talking to an underling (not that underlings deserve to be spoken to like that either).

It got right under my skin. I thought it about for days, composed long emails detailing my bona fides, qualifications and publications with quotes from newspapers and literary journals. I included honorary titles, fellowships and doctorates, referred to my previous life in criminal law and threw in a couple of legal references just in case. High on righteousness, I sent it one of my sisters and said ‘What do you think?’, pretty sure she’d say ‘Yeah, fuck them, send it now with bells on!’ But instead she quoted the above.

Oh, sometimes it’s not nice to have a wiser, older sister who knows you too well. You have to listen and then you have to take it on board. So, what I had done is participated in this person’s behaviour, I had let them in and, in some way, colluded or at least participated in their making me feel bad. The very fact that I thought about it for such a long time was evidence, the stupid emails was evidence, the replaying and replaying of conversations was evidence and also, I had to admit there was some truth in what they said and I had, at least, played a part in the misunderstanding and had to shoulder some of the blame. There’s no excuse for the tone, the intention and the aggression but still…..

Anyway, the lesson for me is - I mean, there’s always a fucking lesson, isn’t there? - you don’t have to give anyone a CV about your worth. But you do have to embed your worth so deep inside that it goes beyond certainty, it becomes your unshakeable foundation so that when someone speaks down to you, their words will bounce off the golden wall of your beautiful selfhood.

Still learning ….

Go well,

Kit

I remember watching a documentary about the beauty industry and how much it’s worth. There were medical people and PR people and sales executives, CEO’s, women on the shop floor and influencers and they all said more or less the same thing. The only way the beauty industry works (and for beauty include ‘wellness’) is to say to people ‘You have a problem. And here’s the solution. It’s only £10.99’. No problem, no purchase, no purchase, no profit.

If you like what you see in the mirror, if wrinkles and ageing doesn’t bother you, if you don’t feel the need to be thinner than you are, if your hair is just your hair and if you’ve found that your old lipstick and usual mascara works perfectly well, then you aren’t getting with the programme. The programme being ‘buy more shit’.

But it really doesn’t stop or start with the beauty and wellness corner of the world because there are so many other ways we are told we aren’t doing it right. What we eat, wear, sit on, where we go on holiday, what we drive, watch or read, all of it, somewhere along the line, is scrutinised and judged. We all fall foul of it somewhere along the line, even if it’s just buying those Vitamin C tablets because we think we might not eat enough broccoli.

It takes real courage to unplug, to be not influenced and to walk our own path, happy in our own skin, resisting the adverts and the how-to-be-red-carpet-ready articles online and in magazines. And even more courage to look inwards and like what we see there too, all our fears and vulnerabilities, the bits of our personality we struggle with, that trip us up, the insecurities and flaws that might make us short-tempered and difficult to be around.

I’m getting better at it. I think I’m basically nice, a good sister and friend and parent, trying to be kinder than yesterday and grateful for the life I have. Yep, there’s a good way to go. I’m a million miles from enlightenment, and mindfulness remains an ambition rather than a reality but I discovered a decade ago that I like myself more as the years go on and as for ageing, well, what’s the alternative?

As the quote says ‘In a world that profits from self-doubt, liking yourself is rebellious act.’

Let’s start a revolution.

Go well,

Kit

It’s no exaggeration to say that the older you get the more you start counting the summers. How many have I got left? How will I spend them? What do I want to do with my time?

I have a friend I greatly admire who is her own-self. She’s always marched to the beat of her inner drum, owned up and celebrated her weirdness - her uniqueness - and even when her choices haven’t turned out well, she’s never watered down her version of living and compromised or tried to become like anyone else. I feel like she’s turning the pages of her book very slowly, making sure she’s milked what’s written there.

It’s so easy to skip the boring days and the meh days, rushing to the weekend, to the holiday, to the end of the job. But each day, each summer, has something to notice and something to capture our attention. I know this is just mindfulness in different words and the wellness industry is awash with advice on how to live in the moment but the idea of reading our lives like we would read a book captures my imagination. No going back to remind ourselves of a great passage or check a character, just onwards, ever onwards to the great finale.

So I’m going to try and read my book slowly, with maximum attention, take notes, make note. Savour every word.

Hope you do too.

Go well.

Writing Kit - Memoir (Beginner)

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In this interactive, beginner-friendly workshop, you will have the opportunity to learn how to craft your story into a compelling narrative. With practical exercises, discussion, and lots of opportunity to write, we will cover self-care, legal pitfalls, how to bring others on board, and the secrets of shaping scenes into chapters, whatever your skill level and ambition.

Bring your notebook or laptop, your curiosity and your way of seeing the world. Go home with a Memoir Writing Pack, new techniques, fresh ideas and the energy to keep writing.

Spaces are limited, so reserve your place early! I would love to see you there.

Go well

Memoir (Beginner)

When I was asked in the first class of my creative writing MA, what I wanted from the course, I said that I wanted to see my book on the 3 for 2 table in Waterstones. Everyone else said something like ‘I want to learn how to write dialogue’ or ‘I want to finish my novel.’ I assumed I had mastered dialogue, written the novel, found an agent, been accepted at a publishers, been published already and now was on special offer by the biggest book retailer in the country. I put my naked ambition out there. It sounded a bit arrogant and more than a little out of touch with reality.

Five years later, I saw my book on the 3 for 2 table in Waterstones after having seen a whole window dedicated to it, after the launch party, after the agent and blah blah blah.

I always tell my students to be honest about what they want. If you want to write your grandmother’s memoir, self-publish twelve copies and circulate them to your family, then own it. That’s success. If you would like to be a short story writer and win a competition, own it. Become a master short story writer, enter every competition and celebrate your wins. If you honestly want to win The Booker Prize, own that too. There is nothing wrong with aiming high, nothing wrong ambition and the self-belief that comes from many hours of study, learning the craft, taking your writing seriously. The journey to The Booker might be long and might never happen but if that’s what you want, say it, own it and go for it.

We shouldn’t measure yourself against anyone else, or try to wear someone else’s version of success. We won’t be comfortable, it won’t feel true and we will lose our way. The self-published memoirist and the would-be Booker winner are both writers and both deserve success. One will be harder to achieve but nothing is impossible.

As Bette said, I want it all and I want it delivered. Why not?

Go well.

Kit

Go well.

Kit de Waal

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.

It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness.

It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Photo credit In the Flesh · Bagrad Badalian

I spent the first twenty years of my life waiting to die. Armageddon, I was reliably told, would come, wicked people (aka me) would be killed by a vengeful God and the earth would become a paradise for the remaining good Christians. It coloured everything I did, every thought I had, my education, my dreams, my prospects, my expectations.

When I stopped believing, and for many years afterwards, it made me very ill-equipped - still - to expect a happy ending, to believe I would ever get old, that I could have what I wanted from life. Long term planning for me meant the end of the month.

So, forty odd years later, it amazes me to find myself an old woman - joyfully old - with a long life behind me and I hope some good years left to live. If someone would have told me that I would one day draw a pension, that I would have a daughter of 31 and a son of 25 and that I might die of old age rather than God’s wrath, I would laughed. Actually, not laughed at all but not believed.

So many of our beliefs limit the things we do and the things we hope or plan for. We may have grown up in a family where we were the unattractive one, the not clever one, the clumsy one, the unloved one and we might, in the secret recesses of our heart, believe that still to be true. Or we might think that people like me don’t write or paint pictures or make music. Or where I come from, we don’t ……..

It was almost impossible for me to imagine a future other than the one I was indoctrinated into and when I did allow myself to think of a brighter future, there was always the lingering thought ‘what if Armageddon does come? What if they’re right?’

Well, if it does, what’s the worst that could happen? Armageddon would find me doing something I love, writing books and loving my children, getting older and being happy with my non-believing friends. Living.

As Paul Belmonte says, ‘If Armageddon does come, it’s not the end of the world.’

So if some fear or belief is holding you back, my hope for you is that you dare to dream, dare to act on your dream and if the bad thing happens, let it find you doing something you love.

Go well,

Memoir for beginners with Writing Kit

My oldest friend is Cressida whom I sat next to at school when I was five. Over 60 years our friendship has waxed and waned through inattention and life events but from time to time, she will send me a message or a card out of the blue and we pick up, in two minutes, the threads of our life, dispensing with small talk in favour of excavation and laughter, picking over the bones of things we did forty years ago, (there’s still a little meat here and there) and mining the stuff of men, kids, sex, jobs, health, parents and politics.

Quite apart from three brilliant sisters, I have maybe seven or eight other friends like this, maybe more and I count myself extremely lucky that they have stuck the course, seen me through dubious mental health, miscarriage, adoption, divorces, relentless busyness and me-being-me-isms. Many of them live far away so it’s zoom or phone, some of them l can visit in the flesh and sad to say some of them I do not see or hear from for two years at time. Not that it seems to matter, they are still ‘friends of the bosom’, as Charles Lamb said.

So I don’t need any new friends. The ones I have accumulated over a long life are more than enough and sometimes I despair that I can’t get to see them as much as I’d like. And yet.

And yet you keep meeting people. And yet some of them just chime differently. They resonate at the same frequency or their vibe is your vibe or there’s something unmistakably right when you’re in their company. I’ve met two people in the last year who could be, perhaps already are, friends of the bosom. It’s too soon to tell, but what a lovely thing it is to still have the possibility of a new friend - like the first day of school all over again when I sat next to Cressida and never really got up again.

If I could wish anything for you at the end of the year, it would be kindness and friendship, both to you and from you. And keep your heart open to possibilities, you can never have too much of either.

Go well.

(Picture credit - Ima Media on Instagram)

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Remind me what happens?

Having not ever had Christmas a child, I have no traditions, memories or motherly advice to call on when it comes to this time of year and every time it comes around I find myself asking ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’

It wasn’t until I adopted my children in my late thirties and early forties that I got into the tree business and the tinsel thing. I sort of knew that there were baubles and presents underneath. I’d never made Christmas dinner or cooked a massive turkey and although I had heard, vaguely about ‘bread sauce’ I thought it looked and sounded utterly disgusting. When I actually came to buy, dress and decorate a tree, I couldn’t quite believe the palaver, the cost and the pointlessness. It sort of looked alright but the whole room had to be reorganised around it. I didn’t know where to dispose of it afterwards and it seemed like such a lot of fuss for a few weeks. But after a few years of pinching and copying and reading Good Housekeeping, I found a sort of system and it wasn’t so bad. Then the kids left home and I realised my traditions were only skin deep and I slipped unconsciously back to my celebration free childhood and a sitting room that looked exactly the same all year.

I have sisters who had the same childhood as me who love the whole thing, who are making up for lost time and making sure their children and grandchildren have memories and traditions to pass on down the line but I can’t quite swallow the fakery and forced present buying, I can’t bear the adverts and supermarkets full of party food and stuff no one will eat. Will they?

Having worked in adoption and fostering for many years, I know that this time of year is purgatory for a lot of people - for mothers without their children and children who are separated from everyone they know, grandparents and siblings, aunts and uncles and all the Christmas’s they remember. They’ll wake up in someone else’s house and sit at an unfamiliar table unwrapping every present except the one they really want. And there are people who grew up in care and never went home again or are not welcome at home and they will be alone on Christmas Day, making the best of it but feeling the worst.

Every year an organisation called Gold From The Stone provides somewhere to go, a good time and a Christmas dinner for any care leaver who can’t be with their family. These Christmas Dinners offer a warm welcome in hundreds of town around the country, where each person finds a beautifully prepared meal, gifts, hairdressing, creative activities, entertainment, and above all a sense of belonging, to those who may otherwise be alone on Christmas Day.

Of course, it’s run by volunteers, of course there is a massive need for more towns to have their own Christmas Dinner and of course, they always, always need money.

So, if like me, you’re not particularly wedded to your own Christmas Dinner, you could volunteer at one of those run by Gold From The Stone, or if you’re looking for a new charity to support you could offer whatever you can spare.

Details are here

Go well :)

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A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

Alice Munro, ‘Selected Stories’ 1966

Go well

No credits available for photograph taken in 1940 in London after an air raid.

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