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Just winding down my brain after the Graceland quiz last night... Set by the pulchritudinous Liza Campbell, it was an opportunity for formalised humiliation unequalled since school. My only hope was that because she and I share the delectable Studio 69 at Great Western Studios, some of my mumblings would have come through and some of her questions might have been lying about in our mess as we moved studios and so I would have known a few answers. Huh.

Why were there no questions about ponies? I think it is no idle boast for me to say that I know almost everything there is to know about equines, and I learned it all before I was fourteen. Weirdly I never seen to forget the difference between a hackamoor and a half moon snaffle or the definition of a blue roan. I know the names of the Four Horsemen of the Apoclypse ( and I will send a toffee crisp to the first clever blog reader who can tell me their names, and a Dime bar to anyone who can name the horses) and of the three Arab stallions who are the forebears of our beautiful thoroughbreds. I don’t think there is a pony book I have not read, or a horse ailment I could not treat, from strangles to colic. I am almost as good on the novels of Georgette Heyer, but beyond that the world is a mystery. Long division, sporting personalities, Rasputin’s killer – all things that others people carry lightly in their brains as they go about their daily business.

The good thing about not retaining information is that I can endlessly re-watch films and reread books without remembering what happens in them. I have experienced this recently with Rosamund Lehmann’s “The Weather in the Streets” and with a Terence Mallick film “Days of Heaven” Both are wonderful, and worth visiting and then revisiting. “Days of Heaven” has the most beautiful, dumb striking cinematography, reminding me of when I was very young and used to mainly watch and read things I didn’t understand such as Tarkovsky movies and Samuel Beckett novels. Not that Mallick’s film is hard to understand, but the poetry of the big pioneer landscape he has set it in speaks more lucidly than the sparse dialogue between heart throbs Richard Gere and Sam Shephard.

Of landscape – more as I went to listen to a talk at the new Burnham Market book festival at the eekend and Jeremy Page, J ames Buchan and Katie Hickmann talked about a sense of place in their novels. Going and listening in the Hoste Arms exotic Moroccan rooms, I was fascinated and entertained and more than both of these took great solace from the camaraderie of being among other writers. It is an immense privelege to write, and sometimes I forget it in the dreary daily grind of getting words on the pafge. To sit and listen to other writers talking about what ignites them and what they hope they meay have got away with is so humanising of the business, and helpful. I think I am somewhat ingrained in paralysing thought patterns by having grown up with a poet as my father.

I remember sitting outside my father’s study aged about 5, waiting for him to finish work at lunch time to take me somewhere fun. I experienced his working behind the closed door as something utterly solitary and impenetrable. We were not allowed to interrupt, I just had to wait until he came out. Sometimes I knocked and wished I hadn’t as his voice would come through the door from somewhere far away and not especially friendly. The menthol smoke of his Consulate cigarettes would trickle towards my nose, and the odd creak of him in his chair or sound of a cough (those Consulate again – they killed him when he was 78). He was in another world, a world I would sometimes hear as he played back what he wrote in a tape recorder in order to hear the resonance. I never understood this world though, and he did not talk about it to us when he came out of the room. It all seemed like a terrifying big deal, and that is what I can easily recreate for myself if I am not careful to put myself into the world of other writers.

Some days I need to make it a terrifying big deal to get down to work, some day it’s a walk in the park. Who knows what today will be? The only way to find out is to start.

One Two Three... stepping off now and into the abyss...