Croome

A few thrilling moments (2019)

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I need you to work with me on this. There’s a huge part of me that wants to tell you what I did last year. A huge part of that huge part is because I’ll dismiss everything, forget everything, and concentrate instead on what I failed to do if I don’t write it down somewhere like this. If I don’t tell you, basically.

I have written “A few thrilling moments” before – the title is a quote from Grosse Pointe Blank – but I haven’t for a long time and I wasn’t going to show you this year either. But I got a lot of response over Christmas from a tweet and a Facebook status where I recommended that you write this stuff down, specifically if you find New Year’s Eve hard.

Because, man, it’s hard sometimes. I can be having a fine old time and then midnight strikes like a hammer. All I can think of then is what I have failed to do all year and there’s of course so much of it that this thinking takes up the entire next day and multiple aspirin.

Plus, a friend, Heddwen Creaney, wrote her version on Facebook and it was so good that it lifted me, it emboldened me.

So may I tell you about my 2019? If that doesn’t already seem a very long time ago.

For a start, it included the best thing I’ve ever written, so far anyway, which was an incredibly short but deeply intense series of lines of dialogue for the National Trust’s What Is Home project, currently on display at Croome. That was more than a year’s work on what must’ve ended up at around 300 words. Worth every minute.

Also in 2019, I took a week-long research trip to Hull and that is the first time in my career that I’ve ever spent a continuous week on a single drama project. And I produced and directed a Cucumber night of theatre at the Birmingham Rep. That included a brief off-stage spot of acting from me because I was too cheap to hire another actor. And that may have led me to performing short stories of mine at Mouth Pieces or anywhere else that would have me.

I wrote something like 30,000 words in a month by month review of the year for AppleInsider.com, for where I also wrote many hundreds of features and news articles across the whole of 2019.

BBC Radio Wales got me on the phone once as a TV expert, and then BBC Radio Stoke immediately did the same, followed by my first time speaking down an ISDN line to BBC Five Live. I’ve done down the line before, representing Radio Times, but this was a first as myself. And it threw me a little: untold years ago, I used to earn a nice fiver during a BBC Radio WM early morning shift by showing people how to use the NCA Studio (News and Current Affairs) when they were guests on the Today programme. And now someone had to show me how to do it too.

That was in the BBC Mailbox, but Rosie Boulton came to my office to record me for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about writers in Birmingham. She followed one day across the city and I was first up in the documentary because I was first up in the day.

I ran the Room 204 buddying programme for my fifth year and started my first online mailing list for writing projects in 2020. That feels like the next thing I should do: in 2019 I did 90 workshops or other public speaking engagements for various firms and it’s a bit scattershot, I can’t tell you much in advance when or what they’re going to be, and I want to sort that out. Please consider this your personal invitation to join that list of mine: it’d be weird not having you on there.

Mind you, that 90 for other people and organisations did include working on some tremendous projects which were a true privilege to be involved in. I ran or assisted running Writing West Midlands’s Spark Young Writers’ workshops in Walsall and Wolverhampton, for instance. Through that same organisation’s National Writers’ Conference, I finally got to work with friends like Tom Wentworth, Stephanie Ridings, Lisa Blower and Casey Bailey, whose writing I deeply admire, plus spoke on a panel where I learned far more from fellow panelists than I contributed.

Speaking of speaking, I also spoke a couple of times at the National Youth Film Academy. I got to be a part of the Solihull BookFest where it turns out that an attendee had come there in part to check me out.

I didn’t know which person it was, or that they were there for that, but I seemed to do okay because I consequently got hired for a day working with USA teenagers. That was amazing, actually, there’s this decades-old education organisation called Experiment in International Living and I got to be part of the tour they gave these American teens.

Then the 90 speaking things doesn’t include something like 45 podcasts. Nor 7 YouTube videos I’ve produced for a series going live later in January. Nor an evening working with the Royal Television Society at their Big Telly quiz. And through the RTS, I had a great time working with a producer on a radio series proposal that went through some serious consideration at CBBC. It ultimately failed, but what a time.

For a writer, I did seem to spend a lot of time talking, but I did also get to edit Spark Young Writers’ magazine, and write a fair few pieces for The Space, an excellent arts organisation co-funded by the BBC and the Arts Council. I wrote a short story for a friend’s dad, wrote and rewrote many Time stories for a collection of mine now due out in 2020, and toward the end of the year cracked some seemingly impossible drama problems with the Hull project.

I can’t tell you what that project is yet, or even what the problems were, but, grief, they were gigantic. So much so that simply to prove to myself, and a producer, that it was physically possible to write this play, I wrote her the opening and closing scenes as a proof-of-concept. And I tell you this just because it’s you, those closing lines make me cry every time.

I can’t summarise the year without saying that I also cried a lot at my friend the writer Lindsey Bailey’s funeral. Can’t stop thinking of her, either.

Because of that, because of her, I did write my first half poem in some years. As much as poetry now gets to me as a reader, it’s one type of writing I can’t do and that I have never before been compelled to really try. This time, I had to, and poet friends tell me it’s half a poem. I just can’t ever complete it and just can’t stop myself showing you.

Liar

She’s not dead and I don’t know why she keeps saying she is.
She’s waiting to pop back in and it isn’t funny.
She’s in half the people I pass and I don’t want her there.
She’s not dead and I’m never talking to her again.

I don’t know. Nearly a year later, that burns me but I don’t know if it can even warm anyone else.

I also cannot measure where this next thing comes on the scale of good to bad. I’m again Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild, which is great; I represented the Guild at an event, which is great; but that event was Terrance Dicks’s wake.

He was a writer whose Doctor Who work was so influential to me that when I heard of his death, I could feel myself back in 1978 reading one of his books. And I mean feel: the sun of the summer holiday, the weight and the texture of the paperback in my hands.

I wrote an obit for him in the Writers’ Guild and I’ll be presenting another obit for him at the Guild’s awards in January. In 2019 I had a blast attending the Writers’ Guild Awards, for 2020 I’ve worked on them in my capacity as Deputy Chair. Now I just need to write something worth winning one.

I mean it when I say I’m telling you all of this because I will sink if I don’t make myself remember it. And I’m never going to diminish how bad we can all feel if we concentrate on failures.

But there’s also no earthly way that I pretend I haven’t just boasted at you. It’s only a boast if you’re impressed and I don’t know whether any of it seemed more than a shrug to you, but it meant a lot to me. Plus, I was there, I saw it all as it happened.

I’m a writer, a British writer, an ex-Catholic British writer, my stomach is in knots discussing all of this, even with you. But on the one hand, it’s better my stomach than my head.

And on the other, you know I’ll get over myself.

Now, it’s January the 3rd and I have completely failed to do anything at all ever.

Visibly invisible

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For sixteen months, I’ve been working as hard as I know to be completely invisible in a project but now it’s done, I want to shout that I did it. I’ve realised that I don’t often talk to you about specific things I’m working on but this was one that I have itched to and now that it’s been officially launched, I can.

It’s the National Trust’s What is Home exhibition at Croome.

Croome in Worcestershire is a Georgian stately home and the Trust is preserving it, but the National Trust always also wants to preserve the memories of the people who lived and worked in a place. It isn’t about buildings, it’s about the people who have called these places home. And Croome has been a different type of home to many different types of people from its original days with the rich and on through its time as a boys’ school.

The thinking about this led the National Trust to explore the whole idea of What is Home? It is all about Croome, but the idea is that it is really all about us. We create our homes and then, I think, our homes rather create us back.

And as I’ve written in the notes for the What is Home exhibition, if you want to know what home really means, ask someone who’s had theirs taken away from them.

The National Trust commissioned artist Kashif Nadim Chaudry to work with the ex-pupils from when Croome was a school and also with school-age children who are currently in foster care. He ran workshops with groups and together with the National Trust team, he worked individually with the ex-pupils. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t cosy – but I was there and I can tell you it was also fun.

He asked each person to loan us an object or two that signifies home to them. Anything. Rachel Sharpe, who created the project, told every participant that their object would be treated the same way that the National Trust treats million-pound oil paintings. I was there for that too and she wasn’t kidding. There was painstaking cataloguing and there is precision tracking of every single object as it came in from the participants and ultimately ended up in Nadim’s art installation.

Nadim has done this utterly gorgeous artwork that shows all the items together. It’s plain in the sense that it’s not adorned or over dramatised, but it’s also beautiful. The objects are on plinths that gently rise and fall as you’re looking at them. It’s as if the art installation itself knows which part you’re focusing on and it offers you a better look. Then the whole piece, all of the artwork, is housed in a lattice-work frame that seems to float in the room. Just beautiful.

Photo: Jack Nelson


And so far you’ve only gathered that I wrote some notes. There’s a second room which contains a couple of panels explaining the project and the history of Croome. I wrote those and you’ll see my byline on them.

You won’t see my name on the more important writing.

And if you were anyone else, I would even deny that I did the writing at all.

For behind Nadim’s artwork, there is a wall full of quotes from the participants. They’re all very short, never more than two or three sentences, and they are as plainly written as they are plainly displayed. I mean, the typography is exquisite but it’s presented entirely for clarity, it’s meant to be read, it isn’t trying to be pretty.

I wrote it all.

I worked with the participants, I worked with National Trust people who know the ex-pupils very well, I worked to capture what home meant to the participants. Some of the sentences are simple, direct quotes. But all of the time it was a question of conveying feeling as much as anything, of connecting you to that person. My aim was that you read this wall and you do not ever think that it was written at all, you just take in the words and it is as if those people were standing there in front of you.

I’ve told the National Trust this next bit. I said to them that if we’d known at the start exactly how many words I’d be writing, I’d have told them I’d need about an hour to write it. Compared to books and articles and scripts, it is a tiny amount of writing. And yet it has occupied me for sixteen months and I ain’t kidding when I say it’s occupied me. I have lain awake at nights thinking about it.

This What Is Home idea cuts so very deep that it was exposing some remarkably personal thoughts and feelings. I was being trusted to communicate that from these participants to you and, God in heaven, the responsibility. Also, frankly, the work was beyond me. It required fewer words than I have ever written for anything else, but it necessitated reaching deeper into myself than I ever have before.

And I have not told the National Trust this next bit.

I didn’t think I’d succeeded.

Because the text goes along with the objects that the participants loaned, and because those objects are being tracked in a database, I had to deliver my writing in an Excel spreadsheet. I’d read the latest draft of it and I’d know that I’d technically accomplished certain things, but the stories of these participants have often upset me and text in that spreadsheet didn’t.

I don’t want to knock Excel, but clearly it’s rubbish.

Because last Saturday, I read all the text again on the wall and it made me cry.

I think I’ve managed to be invisible. You do stand there and know that you have the participants and you have Nadim’s artwork. You don’t stand there and think this wall is written or composed or studied or drafted or contrived. It is plain and it is plainly the participants talking to you.

Do go have a look yourself if you possibly can. And whether you can or not, do have a read of that official website as it includes photographs of Nadim’s work plus interviews with both he and I.

Oh! Wait, one more thing. This tickles me and at the same time I think it fits everything I wanted to do. I said that there’s a second room away from Nadim’s artwork. Amongst items from Croome’s days as a school, there is also a video about the project. Last Saturday afternoon, I was standing behind a group of visitors as we watched it. And not one of them twigged that the fella on the screen talking about the writing was also the guy standing there with them and wiping his eyes.