We Have Moved to Cornwall

Well, I don't seem to have mentioned this rather important piece of information, so here it is. We have now moved from Warwickshire to Cornwall. Some four and a half hours' distance by motor vehicle. Nice place, plenty of space, an old farmhouse on the edge of moorland. Bit damp, mind.

A Lonesome Place on Bodmin Moor

Some of my readers will know that we have been living in the English Midlands since 2003, having moved there from Cornwall when my husband changed his job.

Our latest news is that we are moving back to Cornwall next month. We've found a lovely and very ancient farmhouse to rent, whose earliest recorded incarnation seems to date back to the early sixteenth century, and intend to live there for the foreseeable future. It's on the desolate fringes of Bodmin Moor, with moor ponies and hardy-looking sheep grazing all around us, but not too far from village life if we get lonely. The children went to see it over the weekend, and have fallen in love with the place.

We move late next month. Raw Light will continue as usual - with sporadic but hopefully interesting posts on writing and the writer's life - as soon as we have some kind of broadband connection going.

And in the midst of packing cases and general chaos, I have a major book launch still to come this week. Watch this space for details!

Into the Fast Lane?

Now that I'm more settled in my new home and my dear step-daughter is leaving today - such a loss - my brain is slowly beginning to clear. I have many things to do over the next few months. First on the agenda is something a bit scary. Scary but not, I'm sure, all that complicated except to someone like myself. For I'm entirely self-taught on computers and only know what I can already do.

I'm talking about the apparently 'simple' step of upgrading my internet access to broadband. Which is what I'm poised to do this afternoon, armed with a wireless hub and a flimsy instruction booklet in several languages. It should be easy enough, I know. But of course I'm using a Mac rather than a PC, and we've been having problems with the phone line ever since moving in, and according to Murphy's Law 'what can go wrong will go wrong' etc.

So if you never hear from me again, you'll know what happened.

Away, Being Coarse

I'm off on a writing course next week so I'm afraid there will be a short interruption to normal service. I've moved house now - still utter chaos here though, including problems with the phone line which is stopping me from getting online as frequently as usual - and on Monday I shall be braving the floods to head up north.

Back by the end of the month, fingers crossed!

Jx

Farewell, dear Study!

Since discovering, about two years ago, that the kids' box room upstairs had a dreadful damp problem, I started using that room as my study and turned a downstairs room into a bedroom for them. This is one explanation for my current chest problems - recurring bouts of chronic bronchitis which occasionally shift into difficulties with breathing, as is the case at the moment. Another is that I smoked for too many years and ought to have given up sooner. But any study, even a very damp one, is better than no study at all.

As we prepare to move house this Thursday, I'm aware that I'll be moving into a much smaller house with no spare room where I can work.

Instead, I'll be forced to set up camp in a corner of my bedroom again - something I've only done once before, whilst living in a commune in the Isle of Man. Even when we were in Boscastle, in a tiny windswept house high above the harbour, I managed to convert the front porch into a study. But now - and for some years to come, perhaps - I will be working in a refugee-style situation, possibly without even space for a desk.

It's possible that such cramped conditions may concentrate my mind. It's also possible that they will drive me crazy and leave me unable to work. The likeliest scenario is that I will have to become a 'mobile' poet, moving from the bedroom to the living room when my husband turns in for the night - he nearly always goes to bed earlier than me, since he has to get up earlier - so that I don't disturb his sleep with my typing or scribbling.

Some writers always work like this, of course. Some actively prefer a smaller and less formal space. But although I wouldn't feel comfortable with a large study, the prospect of not having one at all is a little disturbing.

Still, if my corner of the bedroom isn't too damp, I shall be grateful for that at least.

*

Spot the familiar poet leering down at me from the wall behind my computer? Maybe one day I too will sport eyebrows of that calibre ...

And yes, that is an old pasting table I'm using as a desk. What you can't see is the tower of books underneath, supporting the table where it sags in the middle.

Out of Control?

These days my time seems to be out of control. This is probably because I'm in the throes of moving house, which eats time more assiduously than any other activity in my life. Even now I'm surrounded by freshly written labels for binbags - sheets, washing basket clothes, tea towels, spare duvets - and stacks of book boxes as far as the eye can see (which is admittedly not very far, due to said stacks) ...

The worst thing emerging from all this organised chaos is that I'm finding less time and energy is available each day for updating my many blogs and websites, or for posting on my favourite forums.

Some people might think this a blissful state of affairs. Down with the internet! Abolish the forum! But cruising online is an activity I find both relaxing and exciting, so I'm really missing my daily 1 - 3 hour fix of blogging and interneting. Instead I'm having to make do with this miserly thirty minute stretch of updating every day. Pitiful! Pathetic!

How do I manage even this, though? Well, a few years ago I learnt that time management depends on one simple thing above all others, which is only touching a piece of paper (real or cyber-sent) once. When I get an email or letter which requires me to take some sort of action, I either immmediately act on it or, if I can't act on it straightaway (because it's connected to an event a few months ahead, for instance), I make a note in my calendar to act on it at the appropriate time. Then I promptly forget all about it.

That frees up my time to concentrate on what I actually want to do. Which is writing ...

And this is where my great time management skills begin to break down and fall apart, because there simply isn't any way round the business of moving house.

I'm going to take a break from blogging after next week, right across the board on all my blogs, but will be back in operation around the start of August. Some advance warning there, so you'll know I haven't died but am just 'resting'. Between blog posts.

Mmm. I'm looking forward to that.

Packing Dust

Some of you may know that I'm being evicted next month. Those of you who didn't, learn it now. In a few bare weeks, we must leave our isolated little house on the prairie after three years of strange smells, damp stains and bliss. No neighbours, no traffic, no noise except the endless guttural moaning of sheep all around us. A large sprawling garden. We've adored living here - it's a dream house for a writer, especially one with noisy children - but the landlord wishes to sell, so that's the end of that.

I've been skirting round the dreaded act of packing for the past few weeks, buying boxes and packaging tape, chucking away non-essentials and drawing up To Do lists, but not actually rolling my sleeves up and starting to pack.

But today, all that changed.

I have now emptied two five shelf bookcases of their books - no mean feat, we're talking double rows on each shelf - and their spiders, spider corpses or skins, acres and acres of sticky cobwebs, and little scurrying creatures moving too fast to be identified.

Clearly, 'normal' people keep their bookcases dusted and in pristine condition, not to mention alphabetical order. But we're not normal. Most of our bigger bookcases lurk in dark corners and tend to be used by the kids - and the occasional adult - as a useful place for hiding toys, sweet wrappers, odd bits of paper, coils of wire, old telephone books, coins, Anglo-Saxon rune cards, empty crisp packets, plastic necklaces, spent batteries, rolls of cellotape, discarded teeth ... all of which are crammed between, behind, or on top of the books.

Then there are the 'forgotten' books on the top of the bookcase, the ones too bulky, heavy or tall to fit onto the shelves. The ones that spiders and their pale spindly-legged progeny really adore.

Ugh. Theatrical shiver.

Even now, hours later, I'm still itching. By methodically cleaning each book as I took it down and packed it away, I managed to get covered in a thin layer of dust and cobwebs myself. I was wearing a sleeveless top, so you can imagine the state my arms were in after two bookcases' worth. I had dust in my hair and mouth, and crooked spidery things clinging to my cleavage. I could even taste dust on the rim of my tea mug.

And though I started off promising to throw out or donate to charity shops at least 40% of these books, because we simply can't take all of them with us, I've ended up barely able to part with 10%.

It's all utterly ridiculous, of course. What on earth do I want with an ancient tome of recipes inspired by and illustrated with Toulouse-Lautrec paintings? Yet I can't bear to part with it. Endless tedious books on Kipling; I have no interest in Kipling, but they belonged to my mother, so what can I do? Ditto foreign editions of her novels, or half a dozen copies of each of her most popular paperback romances, all needing to be housed safely for future generations to ogle and admire. And until tonight I had no idea that we owned five different editions of Keats' poetry, in varying conditions of decrepitude.

But you never know. Books are fragile things. Fire, flood, divorce, will do for most of them. Better hold onto these different editions, just in case the worst occurs. Similar duplications of Donne, Milton, Pound, Yeats, Coleridge, Byron ... though no sign of Shelley or Wordsworth anywhere. Good taste prevails, thankfully.

Tomorrow I will tackle the least-used books in my study. No need for dusting here. But still the hideous dilemma of which books must go into storage - we'll be moving somewhere smaller - and which will make it to the new house. And to put my misery into grim perspective, this will be my seventh house move in seven years.