Waiting

I drove over to Todmorden this morning, past achingly beautiful trees, glowing out of the dimness from the valley sides. I don't remember when the colours have been so beautiful, the deep yellows and oranges making my heart lurch into song. Perhaps I'm coming back to life, as the year turns, as the first year since the complaint draws to a close. I drove to Tod to sign up for self-employment credits (£50 a week for the next 4 months), having registered yesterday as self-employed. I feel freed at last to go full steam ahead with publicising my work. I feel a weight lifting. The best birthday present. And time to say goodbye to a year that began the day after I turned 47 - a year full of woe, whichever way I look at it. And so I'm full of a sense of new beginnings as the year so gloriously dies.

Yesterday I finished 'Housekeeping' by Marilynne Robinson, whose cover proclaims it is 'one of the Observer's 100 Greatest Novels of all time'. The Observer may be right. It is a beautiful and difficult book about loss and growing up. Dream-like in its closeness to the unconscious, it is full of watery imagery, of strangeness and loneliness, and the ineffable sadness of children who have lost parents. I don't know what more to say except - read it. I offer an extract that moved me especially. The narrator Ruthie, is one of two sisters, whose mother left them as small girls at their grandmother's, and then went and drowned herself :

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.