Hawkesbury Life - Debbie Young's Writing Life

Taking To My Bed

Posted on October 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Marcel Proust, 44 rue Hamelin — Image by photopictus via Flickr

It’s a hangover from childhood that I find it so difficult to sleep in the daytime. The youngest of three children, I had the earliest bedtime in the family. Lying in bed on a summer’s evening with sunlight streaming in through the curtains, I felt about as likely to fly as to go to sleep.

Even now, I don’t like going to bed in the summer – though every time my soft memory-foam pillow yields beneath my head, I wonder why I still resist. But as the evenings draw in, I change my tune. As darkness falls earlier in the evening, I begin to feel a primeval urge to hibernate. And as I light the woodburning stove in the sitting room this evening, it occurs to me that bed would be a much better alternative to winter heating. We could just bundle up in the blankets and sleep till Spring. The accompanying lengthy fast would also ensure that our summer clothes would fit the following year. However, with a small daughter’s busy social calendar to accommodate, I’m hardly likely to pull this plan off. It’s hard enough getting her to school on time on winter mornings as it is.

However, all is not lost: I’m now onto a new excuse for winter lethargy. I’ve discovered that some of the world’s finest writers do (or did) their best work in bed. Former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo has even built a special bed specifically for his writing. (Ink stains on the sheets led to his day-time eviction from the marital bed.) His literary hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island (as if anyone who’s ever been in the Beaufort needs to be told that), wrote books in his tropical bed in Samoa. Marcel Proust never left his bedroom when writing one of the last century’s most celebrated (and longest) novels (though as his was a sick-bed, this is an example I’m less keen to emulate). A cheerier role model can be found in Mark Twain. No wonder he always seemed so chirpy. Edith Wharton, Collette, James Joyce – the list goes on.

So this winter, I think I’ll be saving on my heating bills – and who knows, my new alternative approach might just fuel a masterpiece.

(This post was originally published in Hawkesbury Parish News, October 2010.)

Family, Reading

Write On

Posted on September 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

What new-fangled technology most irked the ancient Greek philosopher Plato? Apparently it was the written word. He feared that the spread of literacy would make people less reliant on their memory, causing their brains to atrophy.

Now that just about all of us can read and write, any discussion of memory is more likely to relate to computers rather than brains. IT is certainly making us less reliant than our forefathers on the information we carry in our heads.

I’m old enough to remember the advent of the pocket calculator. In 1973, my father bought, at vast expense, the revolutionary Sinclair Cambridge. It was a very basic calculator by modern standards, but how we marvelled at it.

: Image via Wikipedia

We preferred not to believe that it would dull our powers of mental arithmetic, but now that such things are commonplace, there must be few modern accountants capable of what my grandfather, working in the 1960s, could do: add a whole page of figures in his head.

To my mind, dimming the ability to memorise facts and add figures is not the main problem caused by our dependence on computers. What worries me most is that future generations will lose out on archive material. Paper may biodegrade in time, but it outlasts most computer chips and disks and is a lot more solid than ether. Whose computer can still access the 5¼” floppy disks that were industry standard just 30 years ago? Even the fact that we measured them in inches must seem laughably old-fashioned to the latest entrants to the workplace. We set aside paper and pen at our peril.

So in your understandable enthusiasm to fill your recycling box every other Tuesday for our commendable village kerbside collection, think twice about throwing away every bit of paper. At least hang on the 125^th Hawkesbury Show Schedule for posterity; guard safely this issue of the parish mag, especially if it mentions you by name. In time, your grandchildren will thank you for it.

(Oh no, Debbie Young’s blog can only be accessed online!)

This post was originally published in the September 2010 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News.

Personal life, Travel

Our Global Village

Posted on August 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

You’d think that the novelty of the internet would have worn off by now. But every so often, tapping away at my laptop, I’m bowled over at this power we have to be in touch with the rest of the world.

A glance up from my desk reminds me that I’m still in Hawkesbury Upton. Familiar horses trot past my window; neighbours flit up France Lane to the shop. Exotic, it ain’t.

star trek — Image by Combined Media via Flickr

But, look back at my screen, and I can be anywhere in the world. It’s like having my own personal teleporter: beam me up, Scottie, I think I’ll take a trip to Seattle.

A message has pinged in to my email box from an old school friend who lives there. As our village heads towards bedtime, she’s just settling down for her lunch. By the power of Facebook, we bounce one-liners off each other as easily as if we were in the same room. We’re as closely in touch as when we were children, talking to each other in the garden through tin cans linked together with string. Except, on the internet, the message comes through more clearly.

Clicking on my website traffic report, I find visitors from three different continents. From Korea to Kansas, from Dubai to Dubrovnik, people have been checking me out, even though I don’t know a soul in Seoul.

The news I pick up through this route is not the stuff that national headlines are made of. Food, drink, weather, hatches and matches are the most frequent topics of the posts by my Facebook friends.

But the sense of a unified, peaceable community, reaching way beyond our own Hawkesbury Upton, is overwhelming and enormously heartening.

There’s still nowhere else I’d rather live, of course. But it still feels good to extend the village boundaries across the ether now and again.

(This post was originally published in the August edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News.)

Personal life

Top Tip on Time Management

Posted on July 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

In ironing, a fabric is heated through the gla... — Image via Wikipedia

When I gave up my full-time job in January, I had a rosy vision of future domestic bliss. Dust would be permanently banished from the top of my piano and I’d have a regular acquaintance with the bottom of my ironing basket. Every meal would be cooked from scratch, using veg home grown by me in between dashing off brilliant freelance articles.

So I was startled the other day to realise that my house is now messier than ever. Yet with my life no longer dominated by the day job, how could I be too short of time to do housework?

Then I had a revelation. Just because I no longer work full time doesn’t mean my daytime hours are idle. I’m busier than ever, with three regular monthly columns to write, my online blog, private PR clients knocking on my door and a new part-time job helping to run a charity. These all take up a lot of time. And, in ex-politician’s tradition, I’m spending much more time with my family.

In my previous incarnation, “I haven’t had time” was a frequent excuse. But now I realise that’s not the issue at all. Rather, my priorities have changed.

So now, if looking to explain why I haven’t done the ironing (or the dusting, or the hovering) my standard response is: “I’ve been giving priority to other things.” And boy, has it been fun!

A friend’s late mother lived by a simple maxim: “B***** the ironing”. That sums it all up, really. In fact, I’m thinking of having it made into a lapel badge – that is, when I’m not too busy giving priority to other things.

This post was originally published in the July 2010 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News.

Personal life

How Green Was My Pot Plant

Posted on June 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

BIG Aspidistra — Image by gadgetgirl2007 via Flickr

Keeping a pot plant on your desk is meant to make you more creative, happier and healthier. But if your desk is in an old cottage with small windows and not much natural light, that’s easier said than done.

Especially if you’re not very good with pot plants. I tried hard in my first flat, (light and airy with floor-to-ceiling windows), but I still couldn’t get much more than tradescantia to survive. I once overheard my father saying to a visitor “And this is the area where Debbie tortures plants”.

Not long after that, I had the opportunity to learn from a master of the art of desktop gardening. I went to work in an open-plan office where my desk adjoined that of Gloria. Gloria loved houseplants so much that her desk resembled a small rainforest. She certainly had green fingers: some of the plants were almost as big as she was. Her massive money-plant seemed particularly auspicious, given that this was a sales office. We were a happy and successful team until one day management asked her to cut back a bit on the undergrowth. She took umbrage at this and felled the lot. Things were never quite the same in our office again.

But now I don’t need green fingers because I’ve discovered some fabulously realistic plastic pot plants in Ikea. They are pleasingly tidy, don’t need watering and have a restful, refreshing effect on any room. I’ve just installed a pair of them on the windowsill above my desk. Whenever I glance up from my work, they almost seem to smile back at me. I’m so taken with them that I think I’ll invest in a few more. One for the bathroom, two for the kitchen, then maybe I’ll move onto the bedroom.

But not yet. This weekend my gardening efforts will have to be redirected out of doors. I’ve a conservatory full of vegetable plants, thanks to the Gardening Club’s recent sale, and they all need to be transferred to the garden. I wonder if Ikea makes convincing plastic vegetables? They’d be so much easier to maintain. But hang on, with the barbecue summer the weather forecasters have got lined up for us, they might melt. And in any case, I’d never get them past the judges on Show Day.

This post was first published in the June 2010 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News.