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.

Friday 29th July 2011

Well, how to begin?  And how to begin to explain all of this.  Why this Blog?  Oh, that’s easy, this was the publisher’s idea, not mine at all.  What an ugly word it is too; almost obscene – surely they could have come up with something nicer, something a bit more explanatory, a bit more expressive.  But I am afraid that this is the wretched world we live in now, where the first acronym or quick and easy shortening of a few words becomes the accepted one.   Like App, or Mobile, or as the Americans say Cell.  It is all so quick and easy and yet really tells you nothing – it is almost a secret language, where if you aren’t “in the know”, “on the inside track”, “in the loop”, and other such nonsense then you have no idea what they mean.  Which is, of course, maybe the object in the first place.

So here you find me, a complete novice, a blogging virgin one could say, attempting to put a bit of explanation behind the book.   The idea, or so I am told, is that by writing this daily blog, somehow by internet wizardry of some sort people will get interested and start to read it, and maybe even comment.  So go ahead.  Feel free – as they say nowadays – comment away.

As you probably already know my name is Catherine, Catherine L.  No, I shall not divulge my surname.  I know that in my book (Catherine’s Story) I let slip that my surname was Latimer, but that’s not my name really.  I mean, I had to call myself something, but for Edward’s sake (and of course that is not his real name either) I did retain a secret or two.  Actually a lot more than that – even when one has a plan to be totally honest, at the last minute one tends to clam up and obfuscate, blur a few details, so as to retain, not only a bit of modesty, but also there is an inevitable loss of nerve too, so truth, as usual, becomes the first victim.  Besides if one retains some details, then one can almost believe it is about someone else. It was anyway, of course.  The Catherine you read about in 1972 no longer exists.   She has become a different woman altogether.  Maybe she was only a fleeting facet of my personality that I once, only once, let out of the box.  Or out of the cupboard, as the Catherine of then would have said.

Anyway, enough for now.  My publisher says I should keep these “blogs”, these little epercu’s short, so as not to bore one’s potential audience.