Wednesday and everything is speeding up to the Silent Night. Down in the country, in Gasper, just next to Stourhead, where I lived for 15 years, a new neighbour was moving in up the road. She had bought the beautiful cottage with a summer house in the garden. We chatted and then suddenly she had to go because someone was coming round for lunch. She said “the secret of happiness is a full diary”. Keep busy, the old claustrobia-agoraphobia oscillations of my 20s. Nowadays my diary is largely empty. I like to say, when anyone asks, that I am free for the rest of my life. Largely true. And I get panicked when there are too many things going on and I don’t have my space. Christmas is like that. Like a storm that thankfully will pass.
I went on a couple of acting courses at the City Lit in the early 2000s. It was all to do with my interest in making films. I really enjoyed the first Introduction to Acting course and read loads about Stanislavsky and Brecht. However the second course was about improvisation and much too advanced for me. Most of the students were already actors and I just couldn’t keep up. But I read the course book called Impro Games by … from which I learnt that the main aim of improvisation was to create opportunities for others to improvise. Like a chain reaction nuclear explosion, one idea triggers a thousand others. I have that problem in writing anyway, but in correspondence the chain reaction is amplified. Where do I start. How do I stop. Do I want to stop.
I’ve been watching Mrs Wilson, currently only one and a half episodes. It’s fascination but quite disturbing. Not just the social settings of the 1940s and 1960s, particularly the pebble dashed semi-detached houses, in bright sunlight. Like Hillingdon where I grew up. But then the growing entanglements, the skeletons in the cupboard, the fighting over the body. A double or triple life. Or was it that he had a series of relationships, and divorce was not as easy as it is today, particularly for women. My father was a captain during the war, but there any similarity with Alexander Wilson ends. He was not a man of the world. I never really understood him, what made him tick, or perhaps he just didn’t tick. A sad unfulfilled life. He was so dutiful but emotionally absent. I can’t believe that he might have had affairs or a secret life.
I sometimes think that people will fight over my body when I die, that is if anyone turns up for the funeral. When Don died, the church was packed full of people who had never met one another. Entanglements. Analytically it’s all to do with 3-person relationships, with jealousy and rivalry. Freud rather clumsily called it the Oedipus complex but it’s really all about who is excluded when the bedroom door is shut. Who is the favourite, the preferred. Maybe the door is not shut firmly, maybe there is some ambiguity about who is inside and who is outside. With Mrs Wilson I’m wondering where the story arc is going, if it is going anywhere. In real life we usually get stuck in Act II, there is rarely a resolution. The poor actress is always having to play the same indignant emotion in every scene. Does she get stuck. What does she do with her anger.
Getting late. I do like writing in the evening, when the clock is not ticking, when time stops, when it is quiet. I’ve been reading the Travel section of the NYT, which today was “Books that roam far away and deep inside”.