Catherine’s Blog – day two

Sunday 31st July 2011

And these really are the dog days of summer aren’t they?  All that promise of those few sunny days in April and May, when you were so delightfully surprised at the warmth of the sun on your pale-pale skin has evaporated into a boring ‘cloudy with occasional showers’ summer again.  And yet it is still quite clammy and hot in a really quite unpleasant way, and yet not really sunny either.  I do miss Tuscany now that Edward has gone.  Oh, I still get invites every year, but we sort of got out of the habit of going with a crowd and settled into our own little routine of just the two of us, and now I cannot shake myself awake enough to go with other people.  Best to close that book altogether I think.

Maybe I should have closed the whole book too I am beginning to think.  I am as usual beginning to lose my nerve about the whole thing.  It was one thing writing it, and though it is posited as fiction, and as you know I put another’s name to it altogether, there are enough people who know me, and will know that it is far too factual for comfort.   I suppose my biggest fear is of those closest to me being amazed at my brazen-ness, my open-ness about myself, and my possible embarrassment when they say, as they will “Oh Catherine, how could you write that sort of thing about yourself?”   Well the truth is simply that it was all too easy.  The book practically wrote itself.  I remember as a child listening to the Radio and Uncle Mac playing Sparky and his magic piano.  Sparky only had to place his fingers on the keys for the piano to take over and play so beautifully, and nobody knew it wasn’t the boy but the magic piano, that was playing.

And it was just like that for me, especially as I wrote Adrian and Grandma’s parts’, I became them and they simply wrote it for me.   I just had to let my fingers drift over the keys and the words spilled out.