Do what you love or love what you do

"All children are artists. The trick is remaining one when you grow up."

I've just had my gap year friends to stay. Everyone arrived and said, 'Is Si still a vegetarian?' rolling their eyes, and then in the same breath, 'Ooh, those bean-burgers look nice, can I have one of them too?' I dyed my lips with a little too much red wine and was a little too frank about my job.

One of the side-effects of having gone through quite an intense experience together is that you don't grow apart in the same way. There's never any of the awkwardness as when you meet people from school that you haven't missed in the three years you haven't seen them. To some, crucial extent our friendship is based on experience, rather than character, and experience doesn't change as you get older. So even though we have changed and are doing very different things, it somehow doesn't matter, because it never mattered. In the nicest possible way, we were lumped together and made the best of it.

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A girl whose blog I read has just had an article published in a magazine. Her writing was among the best in it, and I don't think I'll be buying the magazine again, but I had two simultaneous and contradicting emotions: 'oh, she's so lucky, that will never happen to me' and 'huh, I could do that'. There was nothing in the magazine that struck me as shockingly bad (like, for instance, this series of House) but some of it was distinctly mediocre (if that isn't an oxymoron). Bad writing irks me; I feel that if other people are making a living from bad writing, I should be able to make a living from the half-finished scribblings on my hard drive.

The difference between this girl and me, though, is not that she can do it and I can't, but that she has done it and I haven't.

I get incredibly envious, but, as my dad repeatedly told me (probably so I wouldn't accuse him of passing on bad genes) genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration or, to update it for the computer age, 1% inspiration, 99% not being distracted by the internet. I could, of course, write an article about my experiences container gardening, pitch it to a similar magazine and possibly earn a modest sum for it. I had to attend an extremely dull AGM the other week, and I was too much in view of everybody to knit or get my book out, so I read through some of the things I used to write and smugly thought some of them were quite decent. There is nothing stopping me finishing them or starting something else and finishing that, except the fact that I have made certain choices that mean after a day of translating corporate guff into proper English (I changed 'cascaded' to 'disseminated' the other day - descriptive linguist my arse) I no longer feel like thinking about words.

I used to say the same about my degree, I'd write in the holidays but not during term. During fourth year, I didn't even do that. I did my dissertation in the Christmas holidays, then I sent myself slightly mad and baked cakes in the Easter holidays, occasionally punctuated by half-hearted revision, and wrote a poem over the summer and a couple of paragraphs of my novel and that was it. When I think of how obsessively I wrote that screenplay in second year or how intricately I wove that plot-that-never-came-alive in first year, the contrast is obvious - one was a refuge, a passion and one was a poor attempt to fulfil some self-imposed obligation and prove I wasn't a hypocrite for berating Nik about giving up on becoming a film producer.

But now, since I came back from Africa, since the world fell into place and I've started to carve out a place in it (it involves baking cakes and growing tomatoes), something seems to have snapped. I feel a strange sense of contentment I never felt as a troubled teenager or an anxious Oxford second-year. I once talked to Nik about it, asking him to name me a published, respected, successful female writer who had children and was happy. He thought for a long time and I threw around names of extremely talented and extremely miserable people (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen, the Brontes) and (in what I assume was a bid to stop me leaving him and going to starve in a garret turning my shocking cruelty and self-imposed broken heart into wonderful poetry) he feebly tried J.K. Rowling. I scoffed, muttering about 'unimaginative prose' and 'selling out'. (Any other suggestions?) I don't even think it's being happy in a relationship that's done it, it's the sense of purpose I felt since my food/environment obsession came on. They say the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall; I used to think this was because babies were noisy and time-consuming and cried a lot and stopped you concentrating on what you were writing. I said I wanted to write and publish a novel before having children. I now realise that Western feminism has been 'had', and that (to paraphrase four years of studying 20th century literature) we need a new pie, not a bigger piece of the old one, that I should stop trying to be a man, and decided that actually it's because being a parent is generally engaging, absorbing and purposeful,* not that I'm comparing gardening to motherhood (though both are messy and never-ending, you can read four books by experts and get five different opinions and it's terribly difficult to allow your babies to go out into the world and fend for themselves).**

So I keep making excuses: no-one can be creative in suburbia, didn't you read The Hours; I don't want to write after a day churning out words for the corporate world; my brain needs to recover after my degree; I'm blogging, and the internet has really changed how we see and use language, don'cha know... And yet, I feel horribly close to becoming one of those boring people who's always knocking where they live and doesn't move, or always complaining about their job and doesn't look for a new one, or listens to Choral Evensong and tuts at the poorly enunciated psalms but can't rub along with any of the choirs they could actually sing with, or says, 'I always wanted to be a writer... I was quite good, you know...' and hasn't actually done anything to make it happen. In short, one of those people who was at Oxford and once upon a time felt terribly clever and terribly special and nothing since has quite lived up to it, for the world feels full of identikit houses and identikit jobs and education seems like a ruse to turn you into a good little capitalist (starting out with £13,000 of debt'll do that to you).

I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself and take responsibility for the fact that I'm not writing.

Or write.

I need to accept this might be called 'growing out of it' and that I don't have to be a troubled artist in order not to be boring and ordinary, that I might be channelling my revolt into something I can eat instead of into words, and that that's fine, I just need to stop whinging about it. Or, I need to just sit down and bash out, say, 500 words a day, every day and see what happens. In first year, my incredibly tall General Linguistics tutor told me he wrote 500 words a day of his DPhil Monday to Thursday and edited it on Fridays, which seemed terribly calculated and soulless to my 19-year-old mind, but now, as the kind of person who can no longer stay up all night to meet a deadline, I can admire the sheer discipline it must take. Maybe I should do the same, stop expecting it to absorb me and try and absorb myself in it and hope it will rub off, like pretending not to be shy.

In short I should do what I love, either in the evenings or by finding a job that doesn't involve sitting at a laptop herding words around the page so I free up the mental space I need; or, I should grow old with dignity and start being more positive about my boring job and this suburban hellhole. After all, you don't want to be the boring old sod who's always banging on about what might have been; one way or the other, you needs to be.

Anyway, as Voltaire said, Il faut cultiver notre jardin. No, il really faut. There is weeding to do, and planting out, and turning the greenhouse back into the sitting room, and when I'm indoors I feel the constant need for music, Radio 4 or conversation, but outdoors there is a strimmer, a sander, the occasional train and the horrid realisation I no longer notice the constant murmur of the London Road.

I wonder if you can be a writer and live in the moment.


*Take note, all you teenagers who think you are stronger than your biological instincts. One day you will turn 23 and you'll be horribly broody. You think it won't happen to you, but it will. Survival and reproduction, that's all we're here for, you'll all turn into broody gardeners one day, you mark my words....

** If, after all, gardening is like motherhood, I sincerely hope children are more like tomatoes, lettuces and pumpkins, which are sturdy and resilient to all my incompetent attempts at nurture, and less like peppers, which have a death wish, and pak choi, which got eaten by slugs.