Author: Fiona

Why I enjoy being useless at the clarinet

I love music. When I was nine-years-old my grandfather, a very gifted musician, gave me a piano and I started taking lessons. However, the next year, my parents moved to South Africa and the piano was left behind. My family’s years in South Africa were very strained financially, and there was no extra money for music lessons or buying instruments.

When I was 16 I got a part-time job and earned enough money to buy a second-hand guitar. I started teaching myself. I never progressed to any great level with it as the steel strings hurt my fingers and the family cats knocked it over and broke its neck (they were flippin’ lucky I didn’t break their necks!) However, I could and still do play enough to accompany myself singing – whether that’s a blessing for anyone else is still to be determined.

When I was 18 I took a full time job as a waitress. I could then afford to pay for piano lessons again and arranged to practice on the church piano. But a year later, I was off to university and living on my own so all my spare cash went on the basics. Once again, piano lessons had to stop.

At uni I studied writing for the media and drama (oh, and history, but let’s not confuse the issue). And I hope you don’t mind me confessing that I was pretty good at both. I still am. So much so that I now lecture in writing for the media and for stage and screen.  And if you check out my books, stageplays and screenplays you’ll see that I also write my own material which has been published and performed. Some people would think that was enough: I am more than blessed to have a career doing something creative.

And yet, there is still my music. Since ‘giving up’ my never-quite-started piano lessons at 19 I have continued to dabble. We have many instruments at home, including a piano and a guitar. And I married a professional musician (although he’s now a computer programmer, he still plays music as a hobby).

I tried picking up piano lessons again when I was 34 and finally had some spare cash. But then I got pregnant and after vomiting one too many times on the bus journey to my lessons, I again put them on hold.  After that there was the baby and as all parents know having a small child leaves you with very little time for yourself. But I’ve carried on playing and although I never took exams, I can play Grade 3 pieces and still enjoy having a doodle.

Then when I was 40 (yes I know darlings, I hardly look it 😉 ) I took it upon myself to ask Santa for a clarinet – an instrument I’d always loved but never tried.  Santa must have mislaid my letter so I went ahead and bought one myself. Now, a year later, I’m about to embark on my Grade 1 Clarinet exam!

Looking back on my failed musical experiments I wonder why I have continued to pursue it. Quite clearly it is far too late for me to have a serious career in music (despite the  few years I spent in musical theatre as a singer and actress – but that’s another story!) and I already work professionally in the creative arts. So why do I keep on yearning for it?

The answer is that I simply enjoy it.  When I want to calm my mind, my heart and my spirit, I play. Whether it calms anyone else’s, I’m not so sure, but it’s a real gift to be able to spend some time alone and simply express myself through music. And the fact that it is too late for me to have a career in it allows me to just enjoy it. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing very much, but there’s the pressure of meeting deadlines and maintaining a professional standard that can drain my soul rather than feed it.

So that is why I enjoy being useless at the clarinet. And the piano. And the guitar. And watercolour painting … oh, didn’t I mention that?

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Peace Garden sales going up!

As a lover of real paper books I still find it hard to believe that people are eager to download my novel The Peace Garden. But they are! Sales this month in the US are already double what they were last month (UK and rest of world about the same). May the trend continue! Thanks to everyone who has downloaded it – hope you enjoy it. And if you have read it (and enjoyed it), please consider leaving a review. Thanks 🙂

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Airing my dirty underwear

I’ve just been on a wonderful beach holiday in South Africa. The day I was packing to go my husband found a stash of my dirty underwear in one of the suitcases. The last time we travelled was to London in August, so they must have been in there since then! Nice.

Well I thought this was the funniest thing and hoped all my Facebook friends would think so too. So I mentioned it in my status. As expected, loads of people ‘liked’ it and gave various LOLs and thumbs’ up. But what I didn’t expect was the number of people, while thinking it was funny, were shocked that I had confessed to it on a public forum like Facebook.  Then when I came back from holiday, someone at church told me they had laughed for three days after reading the post, but not because of what happened, but the fact that I’d ‘gone public’ about it.

Now I think that’s very strange. What is there to be ashamed of? I would be deeply ashamed, for instance, to share some moral failing on a public forum, like the time I … no, better stop there … But some dirty underwear? That’s not naughty or bad it’s simply funny.

But it got me thinking that we all deal differently with our shame. For some people admitting they’ve done something wrong or silly is beyond mortifying, for others, like me, it’s just an excuse to have a good laugh. We’re all different. And thank God for that!

There are some parallels between my own take on life and that of my fictional heroine Natalie Porter in The Peace Garden. Like the time she got caught on a string of barbed wire while hiding in a hedge and spying on a good looking boy. And if you look close enough, I’ve still got the scar to prove it 😉

If you would like more news of my dirty underwear and other exploits, you can follow me on Facebook.

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Paper allergies and hoolahooping

I’m privileged to have recently featured on the prolific Morgen Bailey’s blog. Morgen interviews the good and the great (and in my case the not-so-great) of the literary world. It’s a privilege to be with such illustrious company. I talk about my writing life, what makes a literary thriller like my latest book The Peace Garden, the horrors of having an allergy to book paper and the joys of hoolahooping. Drop by and join in the chat.

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The Long Song

andrea-levy-the-long-songAs planned, I read The Long Song by Andrea Levy on my beach holiday in South Africa. And yes, there’s sand in the pages to prove it! What a brilliant book. I have never read any of Levy before, although I was aware of her as a Booker Prize nominee. But after reading this incredible novel I will certainly be looking out for her other books, including the critically acclaimed Small Island.

The Long Song is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the last years of slavery. Although it deals with some horrific events, it does so with a great deal of humour. This is in no small part due to Levy’s characterisation of her main character, the sassy slave girl July. The reader is saved from being consumed by misery by the device of running a dual narrative of July as a witty old woman looking back on her life. She will not allow her readers to dwell on the sadness of her past.

Levy also balances some of the crasser observations made by her earthy heroine (her opening line is about a black woman being ‘rear-ended’ by a white man) with the tut-tutting of her more cultured son, Thomas. As a reader we secretly delight in the graphic descriptions but are given the opportunity to save face behind Thomas’ admonitions.

The language is vibrant and lyrical and Levy deftly handles different voices and points of view. I also enjoyed the way July and ultimately Levy played with her readers by declaring every so often that what she had written was completely made up then presenting us with a revised, purportedly more truthful, version of the same events. This underlines the view that stories from the past are simply a collection of remembrances which are tainted in varying degrees by the way the teller wants to be remembered.

Although this is certainly a clever, literary book (as it would have to be to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) it should also find an appreciative readership with fans of popular fiction as Levy is such a fine storyteller.

I would highly recommend you add The Long Song to your ‘must read’ list. And if you like that, you should also like my historical literary thriller, The Peace Garden, which deals with the aftermath of the Soweto Riots and its repercussions in the lives of two young lovers.

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