Sunday 14th June

The Café, as well as showing Art which can be bought also has soap my wife has made and jewellery made by a friend and a book, a sort of early travelogue, written by another local Eymet friend.  My book, ‘Catherine’s Story’ is also for sale, and incredibly I have sold a few copies.

I hadn’t read it for a couple of years and have just decided to re-read it.  It really is a strange experience re-reading something you wrote a few years ago.  Almost every word is so familiar, practically leaping off the page at you, or you anticipate a phrase or a metaphor a few lines before it appears like an old familiar friend.

So, what do I think of it now a couple of years down the line?  Surprisingly I think it is quite good, certainly as good as anything I have written since and much better than some books I have read.  I cannot help seeing the flaws, the slightly stilted conversation, the poor punctuation and the repetitions.  But despite that the story itself it a good one, and I think quite cleverly told.  I am most proud of managing to create Catherine herself, a quite remarkable heroine, who is the antithesis of most modern heroines.  She is reticent and quiet and uncertain and hesitant and vulnerable despite her obvious intelligence.  At times, when writing as her, I quite believed I was this young woman Catherine myself.  My own few chapters now seem the worst parts of the book, as if I had let a different reality into the book.  I did this on purpose of course, and made myself a bit nastier to contrast the more with the wonderful Catherine I had created.

And here is a confession for you.  There are certain passages in the book which still make me cry.  Even though I wrote the blessed thing they make me cry.  I am crying for my poor Catherine, who I have rather mistreated in the book – but also even when she eventually finds happiness in one of my best written episodes I was blubbing like a baby for her.  I wonder if Jane Austen cried when re-reading her books too, or if this is indeed a common phenomenon.  A book, like a painting you may have completed, especially if you consider it as anything like good, is a precious part of yourself.  In some ways sharing it with the world is like standing naked for inspection.  And maybe I was crying because I know I will possibly never write anything quite so moving again.  We will see.