The rebooting of this blog in 2022 has been a very useful thing for my mental health. It has given me back a sense of creative momentum that had shrivelled to all but nothing in the slow-motion breakdown of the past couple of years.

I really want to succeed in my aim of establishing it as an inviolate part of my practice: a post every Friday, regular as a conscientiously wound clock.

I’m not there yet. (Sneakily, I am shovelling in backdated posts to catch up, and relying on the fact that nobody is reading, as far as I know, to evade opprobrium.)

Thing is, I have a problem.

You’ll laugh and roll your eyes, probably.

Here’s the problem: I only want to publish posts I’m proud to have written. And I can’t get to the point where I consistently produce posts that meet my (yes, all right, delusionally perfectionist) standards without going through the middle bit, where I’m sometimes hitting the mark and sometimes … just not.

It’s like when I studied violin (for three years starting when I was about eight). I never got very far with it, because I couldn’t bear to practise out of tune, and I couldn’t play consistently in tune without practising. I could hear the horrible racket I was making, and I didn’t have the stamina to work through the pain of that to get to the other side.

I’m fully on board with the middle bit as a valid and necessary part of the process, mind you. When my kids studied music, and I went to their beginner recitals and heard all the small children parping their flutes and yowling their violins, all I felt was a fierce, pterodactyl-mama need to defend their right to perform really really badly.

But for me? Nah. Not the same.

Wait. It is the same.

I’m not better or worse than anybody else, and in order to get to the clear, sun-kissed mountaintop of sustainably prolific creative output, I have to be willing to squelch through the swamps and cowpats of intermittently mediocre or even poor work.

That’s the principle, at least.

The practice is … well, publishing this stonkingly sub-par post. Which I do, mindfully, as an exercise in self-something-or-other. Bah.

Here’s something I wrote in 2014 as part of the publicity for my novel. (If you’re following along at home, this was before the bad review and its long-running fallout.) It was on my publisher’s website for a while, but it’s no longer available there.

The piece is now nearly eight years old, a little self-consciously written, and obviously contextual to the publication of my book. Also, my comment about the Dublin choral scene being rooted in the Anglican church music tradition is excitingly out of date. The last decade or so has seen a great burgeoning and flourishing of Irish choirs — and if the bloody pandemic hadn’t put the kibosh on singing in groups we’d still be enjoying our harmonious renaissance.

Despite all that, there’s something here about choral singing (as distinct from solo singing, which I will also admit to loving a lot) that I’m glad to have articulated. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.

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You know how a really good choir produces a smooth carpet of sound — a continuous texture, blended but not bland, at once compelling and relaxing, flexible and surprising and sweet?

Now imagine what that’s like from the inside.

Singing with such a choir is like discovering a gateway into a new universe, a blazing world, where you take your place, firm as a standing stone in a circle of standing stones, and your instrument is your body and the bodies of those around you, and there’s nothing between you and the music. When it all goes right, when everything coalesces and the individual singers fling down their boundaries and work together towards a unified expression of beauty, the sensation — I mean the palpable physical rush — is astonishing. It softens the muscles, rinses out the brain, and leaves you feeling airily, racingly alive.

Or at least it does me.

The character of Cate Houlihan in my novel The Living sings with a really good choir, as do I. Cate’s choir is called Carmina Urbana (geddit?), and it’s loosely inspired by mine, a Dublin-based chamber choir called Mornington Singers. (I should say that Mornington is a better choir than its fictional offspring, because we’ve improved since I started writing the book. Check us out — we’ve won awards and everything.)

Music and I go way back. My earliest memory is of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (I was born in the seventies, so don’t judge), which I remember from somewhere deep down at the base of my spine, well beneath any understanding of the lyrics. Circumstances suggest that this memory dates from before I was one.

Aged three, I’d lisp “Adeste, Fideles” — two verses, in the original Latin — for the amusement of my parents’ arts-graduate friends. Later, in primary-school music class, we mostly droned simple, boring songs in unison, but occasionally an enlightened teacher would break out the sean nós — traditional Irish solo songs with gnarled, intricate melodies and texts featuring pain, death, oppression, emigration, loneliness and broken dreams. Ideal fodder for small, earnest me.

I clearly remember the school music festival where I first noticed a choir sing in harmony. I must have been seven or eight, and these were slightly older children from another school. They were performing one of those simple songs, but when the chorus arrived they split without warning into two parts. The melody, when embellished with a descant, became unaccountably beautiful. I was transfixed. A vista of possibility opened up, and I spent the next several years honing my abilities as a compulsive harmoniser. I can stop any time I like, though.

Actually, I can’t, which is why I sing alto.

(That sound you hear is of choristers emitting knowing chuckles.)

I proceeded through secondary school, getting my harmony fix where I could. There wasn’t much available until I discovered the vast entity known as the Dublin Secondary Schoolgirls’ Choir, which in retrospect was maybe a tiny bit terrifying. (Six hundred Irish teenage girls singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair”. Just picture it.) I learned there that I don’t always have to love what we’re singing: I still love making a good sound with my voice to add to the texture of good sound.

While studying literature in Trinity College Dublin I immersed myself in the delights of the mixed-voice choir. I joined the Choral Society, the College Singers, the Chapel Choir, and whatever ad-hoc madrigal ensembles, backing vocal groups and project choirs would have me. I wasn’t choosy: I’d sing anything — alto, tenor, soprano, even bass if sufficiently rat-arsed. Sean nós too, at the end of the night. On leaving university I moved on to the harder stuff, spending a heady few weeks over two summers with the Irish, European, and World Youth Choirs. Along the way, I joined Mornington Singers, which was originally set up as a TCD graduate choir.

I know choirs, is what I’m saying. And almost as soon as I began to think about Cate and how she would change, I knew she had to be in one.

For a character of Cate’s background — Irish, Catholic, nationalist — joining a choir is already a cultural transition. The serious end of the Dublin choral scene is, with few exceptions, firmly rooted in Anglican church music. (It’s fair to say that choirs like Mornington Singers are waggling those roots now more than somewhat, but that’s a fairly recent development.) Even on the secular side, there’s no indigenous Irish choral tradition to speak of: what we have is imported, adapted, fused.

When Cate joins Carmina Urbana (and earlier, the explicitly Anglican TCD Chapel Choir), she is stepping out from the circle of her family into a more complex world, one where cross-rhythms and counterpoints make the simple, lonely melodies of her childhood harder to discern. She relishes the new richness, while not wishing to sever her connection to the structures of the past. She is literally finding her voice, learning how she can contribute, exploring her place in the tapestry.

Members of a well-functioning choir should be neither dependent nor independent, but instead should occupy that more mature space in the middle, interdependence. That’s where the strength of a choir lies, in the balance between personal responsibility and the willing relinquishment of autonomy, all in service of the harmonious whole.

You know what I’m going to say, but hey, I’ll spell it out anyway: isn’t that a fine metaphor for a modern, grown-up society?

I’m back knitting again, after several years of mainly sewing (with a side order of crochet).

This feels lovely!

Let me tell you about what I’ve been making.

It started with a hat I made as a Christmas present for my mother. I based it on one I bought for her in New Zealand in 2019, which in turn is the cousin of one the hozz got me on the same trip.

This is a great hat. Some other time, I may hold you with my glittering eye and tell you even more than you expect about the New Zealand merino/possum yarn it’s made from, and about how the construction is quite interesting actually — for instance, it’s double-layered throughout, which, combined with the singular properties of possum fur, makes it very snug indeed.

For today, however, I’ll spare you.

Anyway, my mother went to Scotland last October. When she came home she looked for her hat, and there it was, gone. So I made her a new one (in Malabrigo Rios (Hollyhock), for anyone keeping track). It’s not precisely the same, but it does share the double-layered construction, so it’s a pretty solid winter hat.

I’d forgotten how incredibly thirst-quenching it feels to have a knitting project on the go. So once that first hat was finished, I wound up a skein of fancy yarn, went on Ravelry, and cast on a little lace shawl.

Excuse the late-night indoor photo. The one below is much closer to the real colour.

Actually it’s billed as a shawlette, which always makes me sing the Everly Brothers, “pretty little pet, shawlette” … considerably less queasy than the real lyrics of the song, if you ask me.

Pattern is Liliiflora Shawlette by Lily Go; yarn is Apple Oak Fibreworks Turin in the colour Fire Song. Despite the design featuring nupps — a technique that in my view merits both an argh and a gah — making that shawlette really brought the knitting mojo surging back. I therefore immediately knocked out another one.

(Pattern is Thalia by Kirsten Kapur; yarn is Apple Oak Fibreworks Yeti in a colour called Blood Moon that doesn’t seem to be on the website any more.)

I feel I should tell you, somewhat sheepishly, that these two pieces are still waiting to be blocked, because blocking is boring (a fact that is much more comprehensible to me now that I know about my ADHD).

All of the dyes used in my last three projects have been surprisingly stainy, and made my right hand look like the shot in the medical drama that comes right before the poignant amputation scene.

Two lace projects in a row feels like enough lace for a while, though, so I’m now knitting myself a second version of the Kiwi hat. I couldn’t resist adding a twist to the ribbing this time round.

This is more Malabrigo Rios, in Purple Mystery this time. Should be finished just in time for no-hat season…

PS: In January, my mother went swimming for the first time in a few months. And when she unzipped the side pocket of her swimming bag, what do you think she found? Was it her lost New Zealand merino/possum hat? Why yes, it was! The prodigal hat, returned! Time to kill the fatted scarf.

So now she has two. Happy ending.

I was at a child’s birthday party. It must have been around 1978, because it feels like I was about three or four. I remember almost nothing about the context — who the party was for, how I knew them (not well, I feel), what age they were: all those details are unavailable to me.

But I do remember this

As the party wound up, all the guests were herded into a queue — maybe this happened, or maybe it was just that several grown-ups arrived to retrieve their progeny at the same time. Either way, I queued with at least a handful of other small children, while a group of parents looked on.

At the head of the queue stood the hosting mother. As each child reached her she bent at the hip to loom over them, locked her eyebrows into high double arches, and said creamily, “Blue or pink?” And when the child answered, she gave them a small, bulging, bluish or pinkish plastic bag.

Reactions on receiving this bag made it very clear that it was an exciting and desirable item.

Ergo, I was excited; I desired the bag.

At last, it was my turn

I approached the looming mother and stood looking up at her.

“Blue or pink?”

“Blue,” I said, with my customary confidence. I quite liked blue.

There was a pause. A look of consternation flitted across her face. She turned away, maybe gesturing to her mate for assistance — there was a swift rummage, something covertly removed from one bag and dropped into another, possibly — and then she turned back to me with a bright smile and handed me the bluish bag I had asked for.

I took it and stepped aside to let the next supplicant approach. This was a younger, smaller, and ineluctably tidier child than me, with shining blonde hair neatly clipped back at the temples, an adorable little nose, and huge blue eyes.

Young though I was, I already understood that this kid was parent-friendly material. I felt the sigh of adoration move through the phalanx of grown-ups waiting at the borders of the ceremonial space, like a summer breeze ruffling a wheat field.

The hosting mother didn’t presume to loom over this tiny vision of loveliness: she hunkered down instead.

Gently, so as not to startle the little one, she posed the ritual question: “Blue or pink?”

In a voice made of strawberries and daisies and little yellow ducklings, on a breath scented with violets and freshly baked fairy cakes, the small child lisped, “bink.”

(Yes, this was indeed an infant so skilled as to be able to lisp a word containing no sibilants.)

All the grown-ups melted into a squeaking puddle of goo.

And that’s when I learned…

No, stop, of course it wasn’t.

That experience was just one in a long, long line of social lessons about how to be in the world, same as any small child gets (except that being autistic, I have an atypical slant on things, so for me these lessons were harder and more bewildering than average, as a rule).

What I mean to say is, it wasn’t any kind of epiphany, at the time.

But it stayed with me. It’s been almost forty-five years, and I can still recall the vague feeling of somehow, unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, being in the wrong. When I said “blue”, that was the wrong answer to the question, and when the other small child said “bink”, that was correct – even though she actually said it wrong! Nobody seemed to pick up on that!

I had been offered what looked like a CHOICE but was actually a TEST

Not only had I failed the test, but the only way to have passed it would have been to pretend that my spontaneous colour preference — at that time, on that day — was other than it was.

In turn, to do that I would first have needed to have absorbed the ridiculous gender–colour correlation our dominant discourse has invented — which, mind you, nobody in my life had ever attempted to propose to me, a child of 70s academics, before this moment — and then to have brazenly pretended that I wanted the pink bag.

Even that might not work, because I might not pretend plausibly enough.

The extent to which this bullshit can die in a fire is hard to overstate

Gender is hard enough to navigate without adults going around setting up petty little obstacle courses to entrap unsuspecting three-year-olds. (If that seems to you a harsh way of describing what they were doing … congratulations on your gender conformity?)

That’s really all I have to say today.

I have absolutely zero memory of what was in my bag, by the way. It’s apparently not germane to the experience at all, as far as my brain is concerned.