Making It Up as I Go Along Read online

  mariankeyes.com, July 2015.

  THINGS I LOVE

  * * *

  Autumn

  As the poet so eloquently put it, autumn: season of new boots and jackets. At least the poet would have so eloquently put it, if the poet had been a woman.

  I love autumn. It might be because my birthday is in September (oh, poor maligned Virgo) and I associate it with presents and cake and lots of attention. But the shameful truth of the matter is that I’m not really a summer person. All right, all right, go easy! I know this won’t go down well. I know saying you don’t like summer is like saying you don’t like dolphins, or Michael Palin, or Crunchies.

  My ‘issue’ (I’m not at all sure I like that word) with summer is that everything’s too bright and glare-y and exposed and hot. My clothes are all wrong and summer brings me into a head-on collision with my lumpy upper arms. I’m tormented by them. What should I do? Reveal them, looking like sausage skins stuffed with cauliflower florets, and endure the mortification and sniggers of others? Or keep them under wraps and swelter? And if I elect to swelter, then I have to deal with skinny, smooth-armed types, who’ve never known a day’s lumpiness in their life, goading me. ‘Why are you wearing your fleece? You look so hot! Look at her, everyone! She’s melting. Stupid woman.’ While I’ll have to insist – even though my face is the colour of raw steak and sweat is sluicing down my back – that I’m ‘fine, a little chilly even’.

  Then, of course, there’s the personal hairiness question, something that requires constant and meticulous vigilance. Almost as much as the sunblock situation – skin and hair. Not to mention keeping on top of my fake tan. The bodily running repairs demanded by summer mean there’s always something that needs doing – I can never relax! (I’m not the only one who feels like this, just in case you’re interested. There is a small but dedicated band; we call ourselves No TO Summer! NOTS! (With risible lack of imagination, our enemies call us NUTS!) There is also a breakaway schism group who are a little more extreme, called People Happy Entering Winter! PHEW!

  Autumn is far nicer than summer: moss-green cardigans; copper-coloured knee boots; jeans. Everything pleasingly covered up. I feel safer in autumn, I can breathe properly. I can straighten up and look the world right in the eye without having to recoil from the sun bouncing off too-bright pavements and blinding me.

  While I’m at it, I might as well go for broke and add that I like the back-to-school feel of autumn. All that lounging around the whole summer long, in Cornwall or the Hamptons or wherever it is people go, is well and good, but it’s not real life, is it?

  The start of autumn feels like a mini New Year – Christ! Calm down! Obviously nothing like as terrible! We’re not so poor or fat or cold or guilt-ridden. Nevertheless, autumn feels like it’s about change and fresh starts and commitment to self-improvement. And yes, I admit this appeals to me.

  Older readers will remember when autumn was about more than good new series starting on telly, when autumn used to be about evening classes. But – I’m not wrong, am I? – evening classes are over. A thing of the past, like nosy neighbours and Vesta curries and political agitation. It makes sense: the only reason anyone ever went was to meet a man – the cliché was that the Car Maintenance classes were always jammers with ladies on the prowl – but now if you want to meet a man, you simply go online. (If you were particularly lonely and had no friends at all – male or female – magazine agony aunts encouraged you to try an evening class; nowadays if you have no friends, you simply go on SSRIs. You still have no friends, but you don’t mind as much.)

  A long time ago – alarmingly so: it feels like only ten months have elapsed, when in fact it’s over twenty years – I shared a flat with two other girls and whenever we were dumped by a man, there was a definite ‘recovery arc’. The craziness, the weight loss, the drunken one-night stands with unsuitable types … and then – the nadir – the talk of evening classes. Tearful, drunken defiance, ‘I’ll get over this, and next time he meets me I’ll be strong and … and … interesting. I’ll do an evening class! I’ll learn to speak Italian and the class will be full of ridey Italian sex-gods.’ (And obviously no one was unkind enough to point out that the thing about ridey Italian sex-gods was that they could already speak Italian and had no need to attend basic introductions to it.)

  Sometimes we’d even ring the man who’d dumped us, to advise him we were about to do an evening class (usually during one of those ‘I’m just calling you to tell you I won’t be calling you any more’ calls) and to expect us to be dazzling and fabulous the next time he met us.

  Good times, good times … Well, actually they weren’t in the slightest. But all this talk of autumn has really fired (autumnal pun) me up. It should be along any day now. Unless we get a NOTS! worst nightmare, an Indian summer …

  First published in Marie Claire, August 2007.

  My Perfect Life

  You know the way sometimes a fabulous famous woman tells us about her average day? Well, this is what I wish I could write …

  Every day I wake at 6 a.m. on the dot. I’ve no need of an alarm clock or any of that nonsense, my body knows when it’s had all the sleep it needs, and simply wakes of its own accord. I’m lucky enough to have several homes – an eighteen-roomed apartment on the Upper West Side, a four-storey house in Primrose Hill, a charming cottage in the Stockholm archipelago and a light-filled, over-water modernist glass cube in Sydney.

  There was a time when I had a tendency to bite people until I’d had eight capsules of Kazaar Nespresso, but these days after three glasses of the special sulphur water I have imported specially from Pompeii, I’m raring to go – straight on to my deck, which juts far out into the ocean, for my morning BarreConcept. A Russian dance master used to coach me, but it got a little embarrassing when I became better than him, and he was charging me £375 an hour and calling me ‘veak end lazy’, so we said our farewells …

  After fifty minutes of pliés, I step into my outdoor, rainforest shower, then a gentle knock on my bedroom door tells me my breakfast tray has been left outside. My staff are amazing – so thorough – I never have a moment when I look at the remote control and think, ‘Christ ALIVE, when was the last time this thing was cleaned?’ They’re also discreet enough that I never see them scrubbing my kitchen floor so I’m spared chronic, gnawing guilt.

  Breakfast might be miso broth or an egg-white omelette, and yes, I used to think egg-white omelettes constituted cruel and unusual punishment but now I understand it’s all about simply deciding that egg-white omelettes are delicious. I have mine with 35g of plain kale and perhaps an avocado smoothie. The days when my ideal breakfast involved me lying on the floor and pouring Sugar Puffs straight at my face are long in the past. Especially because I keep my daily net carb intake under 15g.

  Of course, I love sweet things, but find them so filling – I think mini-Magnums should be rebranded because actually, they’re huge. And when I look at pick’n’mix stations, I don’t see pretty, irresistible jellies that I want to cram, handful after handful, into my mouth until I feel pleasantly queasy – no, I see toxic little balls of death. A fizzy cola bottle? Why not just give me a cyanide capsule?

  Before I start work, it’s time for the DHL man. I once met Miuccia Prada and she thought I was ‘delightful’ and as a result I get deliveries of next season’s Prada or Miu Miu a few times a month. They’re always gorgeous – I mean, it’s Miuccia! – but sometimes even the sample sizes are too big for me. And if it’s not stuff from Miuccia, it could be cripplingly expensive skincare like Nat
ura Bissé or the Tom Ford make-up range. (Tom loves me too. You know he’s started doing womenswear now? Well, he sent me the entire collection. I said, ‘Tom, you bad man! There was no need to send the handbag in every colour!’ But he said, ‘Marian, the thought of you wearing my clothes makes me happy.’ And who am I to deny Tom Ford his happiness?)

  I have a husband and we have huge amounts of astonishingly inventive sex; after all these years, we still can’t keep our hands off each other. Like teenagers, we are.

  Then it’s time for work! I write novels that are huge bestsellers and get critical acclaim, so not once have I been insulted at a party by people asking, ‘Just how many of your bonkbusters do you churn out a year?’

  I sit at my keyboard and instantly the words start to flow. I never stare in despair at an empty screen or slam my head off my keyboard and shout, ‘This is a load of sh*t,’ or delete an entire day’s work because it’s rubbish, or announce to the four empty walls, ‘That’s it! I’m retraining as a nail technician!’

  I don’t stop to eat for the simple reason that I don’t get hungry, and under no circumstances do I look at the clock at 9.35 a.m. and wonder if it’s too early for lunch. But at 3.30 I force myself away from my desk, then I go for a run. I don’t jog – I run. I haven’t an addictive bone in my body, except maybe when it comes to exercise.

  When I return I meditate for thirty minutes, managing to still my mind into blissful silence, and no way do I think, ‘Oh Christ, I’d better make that dentist’s appointment, I can’t keep putting it off for ever.’ Or ‘Why the hell did I invite those people over tonight? I just want to slump on the couch and watch eight hours of telly.’

  Evenings vary. If it’s not my night to volunteer at the soup kitchen or my Movie Club (we’re currently exploring Yugoslavian cinema under Tito) we have an eclectic group of talented, beautiful friends round for dinner. I’m a calm, skilled cook and don’t find having to have the stuffed pheasant ready at the same time as the kohlrabi at the same time as the quinoa stressful enough to warrant a Xanax. We sit at our twenty-foot-long limed-oak dining table and chat and laugh late into the night and no one gets messy drunk and follows someone else’s boyfriend into the downstairs loo.

  When I get into bed, I don’t lie awake for several hours, my head whirling like a washing machine, wondering how I can con my doctor into giving me some delicious verboten Stilnoct. I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and never wake at 4 a.m., feeling like an imposter and a failure and that all my teeth are going to fall out. My life is in perfect balance.

  Yes, well … I no longer eat the Sugar Puffs. It’s a start.

  First published in the Sunday Times Style, August 2015.

  Beachhouse Banjo

  Right, here we go – my name is Marian and I have a hobby. And I feel really weird saying it, because I think the whole notion of hobbies belongs to the olden days, before we had box sets and Twitter and online shopping. Back then (I’m picturing the 1950s) people had to have hobbies because – well – there was nothing else to do.

  Until recently, if someone told me they had a hobby I’d automatically think, ‘Trainspotter! Who has difficulty making friends!’ And start backing away.

  But for years Himself was ‘at’ me to get an interest, because as he often said, ‘All you do is work, sleep and watch telly.’

  ‘And buy shoes,’ I’d always remind him. ‘Buying shoes is an “interest”. I watch telly, I eat chocolate and I buy shoes. This is the modern way. I have a full and rounded life.’

  Eventually, to shut him up, I gave something a go and even now, several years later, Anne Marie will occasionally say, ‘Do you remember that time you tried to get a hobby and you made a clock?’ Then she’ll start weeping with laughing. ‘A clock,’ she’ll say, wiping tears of mirth from her face. ‘A … a … clock!’

  And yes, all credit to me, I did make a clock. Which sounds far more impressive than it actually was – basically I went down the town to the art-and-hobby shop and bought a kit, where the clock-mechanism bit was already assembled and all I had to do was make the clock face and numbers out of Play-Doh. I didn’t get much enjoyment out of it and decided I wouldn’t be repeating the exercise.

  But Himself kept at me because he was convinced I needed something to help me to relax. However, the thing is you can’t just go out and ‘get an interest’. You have to be – well – interested in the thing, and that’s something you’ve no control over.

  However, there was something … I’d long nurtured a secret little kernel deep in my heart that, given the right circumstances, I might be an UTTERLY FABLISS artist. This was something I’d kept to myself because I am EXTREMELY bad at drawing things. I remember being mocked in art class at school for a drawing I did of a running dog – the teacher thought it was a tractor.

  Nevertheless, I thought I’d be a good painter – but it would have to be abstract stuff. No dogs. Or tractors. Or anything that had to look like a ‘thing’. I’d decided I wanted to work in oils – no namby-pamby watercolours for me – and I’d use GINORMOUS canvases. I had visions of myself in a paint-streaked smock, wearing a fake moustache and flinging pots of paint around a canvas the size of a wall, then borrowing someone’s bicycle and cycling it over and back a few times, and when I had enough ‘pieces’ created (I thought a week should cover it) an exhibition would be held of my work and I would be LAUDED with praise.

  In fact, I decided I’d paint under a pseudonym, so that the art critics would have no preconceived notions about my work. Then, when they’d given me tons of praise, I’d whip off my false moustache and shout, ‘Surprise! ’Tis me! Chick-lit scribbler! And now ground-breaking artist-person!’

  Fired up with zeal, I went back down to the art-and-hobby shop, but things didn’t work out as planned. The canvas was the first problem: the art-and-hobby shop only had titchy ones, and words began to be bandied about, about ‘stretching’ canvases and nailing them to ‘frames’, and I knew I was in over my head. I wasn’t a DIY person, I hated hardware stores – too cold, too strange, too full of ugly-looking things that I didn’t understand – and there was no way I could get involved with nails and hammers and stretching. Suddenly I got why artists needed to go to artists’ college.

  Next thing to disappoint was the paint: it only came in tiny little tubes and I’d be needing gallons of the stuff to bring my unique artistic vision to fruition.

  However, the man in the shop mentioned they did evening art classes and when – all agog – I pressed him for details he said, ‘It’s just the basics, really.’

  ‘Basics?’ I was a little worried. ‘Would I have to draw a dog?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘Or perhaps a still life.’

  ‘Like an apple?’

  ‘Or maybe a tomato.’

  ‘But I want to do abstracts.’

  ‘Abstracts aren’t on the curriculum.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. And that was the end of that.

  Then life changed and I went totally bananas and suddenly I started baking like a demon, which came as a massive surprise because I’d never been domesticated or ‘crafty’. But it had become fashionable for modern women, many of them proud feminists, to knit or embroider or make cupcakes. So I was very zeitgeisty. Also stone mad.

  For eighteen months, I baked like a maniac. It was an absolute compulsion and I simply couldn’t stop. Nor could I stop eating the cakes I’d made, and I tripled in size. Then, almost as suddenly as it began, the baking urge vanished and I needed another hobby to fill the void, p
referably one where I couldn’t eat the end product.

  But there was nothing I was interested in – until I realized that I had to do some reconnaissance. (If only there had been a magazine called What Hobby?) It was like the quest for true love or the perfect job – it doesn’t just appear on your doorstep, saying, ‘Hello there. I’m the answer to all your prayers.’ Effort has to be put into finding it. This seemed counter-intuitive to me – I thought that if I loved something, surely I’d know it? But what if I hadn’t ‘met’ the right thing yet?

  So I gave various activities a go and learnt that, just as with true love, you’ve to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.

  I did evening classes in pottery – that sounds like a total cliché, but yes, I actually did evening classes in pottery. Sadly, it didn’t ‘take’: I couldn’t work the wheel-thing and I couldn’t bear the feel of the clay on my hands, and you should have seen the state of the little bowl I made – lopsided, bokety and awful in every way.

  Next I gave jewellery-making a go and found it too fiddly. And card-making – too sticky.

  Then Rita-Anne made a passing comment about ‘chalk paint’, and even though I wasn’t aware I knew the first thing about it, some whisper of something must have reached me on the breeze, because I had an immediate sense of YES! I googled it and found there was a place nearby doing a course that very weekend – it was a sign! Even though I don’t believe in signs!

  So along I went with Ljiljana and it was love at first sight. Chalk painting is perfect for the likes of me – lazy, slapdash and all about instant gratification. Nothing needs to be sanded or ‘stripped back’ or anything else dull and responsible. You’re just straight in, slapping colour on, making everything look lovely.