Banbury Cross

Superb day out in Banbury. This charming market town was made famous in an old English nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock horse
To Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady
Upon a white horse.
Rings on her fingers
And bells on her toes
She shall have music
Wherever she goes

The cock horse was a strong horse, perhaps a bit like one of these beautiful fellows. He would have been harnessed to one's carriage when it needed extra help to pull it up a steep hill, and then unharnessed at the top, to return to his bag of hay until the next carriage came along.

After staring up at the decorated stone cross which soars above the town, I descended to the water's edge for the canal boat festival.

The canal was packed out with local people and visitors, all enjoying the hottest October day since records began, hotter than Barcelona and New York.

I really want to keep the creative well stocked because I'm working so hard on two novels at different stages and I'm in desperate danger of disappearing somewhere in the swamp of their unresolved plots. Decided to try daily Haiku. I got this idea when I was studying for my degree with the Open University. The point of the haiki is to get daily practice at focussing on a single creative thought.

Banbury Canal Day
Barges festooned with flowers
Floating in the sun

Craft One Ceremony

I've got to admit, I love to work through a self-development book.  Maybe it's the Virgo in me, but writers like Julia Cameron and Eric Maisel have been my creative friends, available at the flick of a page, ever since I realised that I wanted to write.  So, today, Eric Maisel says 'Craft One Ceremony'. A creative soul needs a moment's safety at the dawn and the close of the day; just reflecting, just being. So anyway I went to Neal's Yard in London's West End, in search of an exotic tea, Japanese perhaps, to drink for my tea ceremony each morning. My journey past the docks took me past the Port of London, once the busiest in the world for tea clippers. I thought of the hundreds of masts and spars that would have been there, barely less than a few generations past. 'Who needs anything different,' I thought. Back home as I pour my very British cuppa, I think of my hero and his struggle to make a living in the docks, like his ancestors and mine. I raise my mug to their tenacity, their laughter, their courage in times of war and peace. That's ceremony enough.

Creative Integrity - Last Stand or Last Breath?

Good grief, what a week we've had here in London.  On the one hand, the final section of the last ever Harry Potter film premiered to riotous but peaceful success in theatre land. Fans young and not so young swarmed into the 'West End' of the city. They dressed up, they sat on the lions in Trafalgar Square and generally made no trouble at all.

On the other, Wapping Station stands deserted in the wake of the 'News of the World' phone hacking scandal which grew daily. The senior staff were declared to be the 'No. 1 Priority', while 200 or so clerical  and portering staff in the paper's offices in Wapping lost their employment. Wapping's not a rich part of London - at one time it was the site of the great London shipping trade. Fortunes were made from trade and export then, but not by the local people. They're not likely to prosper out of the demise of a newspaper empire either.

That's before we even start to consider the victims of this alleged atrocity - the families of murdered children, bereaved parents of serving soldiers, the Royal family - how the list grows and grows. Well, the truth pf it all will come out sooner or later.

It is, of course, easy to be sanctimonious after the event, and perhaps this is the moment to take stock, and ask if there's anything I am currently doing, or paying lip service to, 'because everyone else does.'

One thing I do remember is that J. K. Rowling, a decade or so ago, was ridiculed by some of the very journalists who now have time on their hands.  Rowling's crime? She stuck to her guns about what she would, and would not, put in her books. She was choosy about sponsors, about merchandising, caring more about the content of young minds than about money.  Yet what riches it brought her, in the end.

Jennifer Pittam is a winner of Coast to Coast Writing Competition and is working on her second novel.

Decided to Write a Novel

Decided to start writing my first novel after years of thinking that 'I would, if I had time.' I want to write the story of my great-grandfather, reputedly a gypsy barenuckle boxer. I've got a new computer of my own - a little laptop from Currys. Couldn't even work the computer, never mind produce any writing on it. I use a mouse on the computer at work but on this laptop you have to get used to a weird little square that shoots the mouse all over the screen. Anyway, I did get a page done. It was awful prose. Just like something one did at school, when Mr. Jacobs wrote 'good effort, Jennifer, but you need to research the early nineteenth century more thoroughly.' Went to bed, rather depressed. No wonder so many people say 'I would, if I had time.'

The Lost Art Graveyard

'I'd like you to write a 2,500 word autobiography,' says Eric Maisel. The wind howls outside and the rain lashes down. 'I can't,' I think. 'I won't,' my mind shouts. I can't penetrate that whirling bundle of protective noise - the one that every artist uses to hide the creative centre of the soul. Tentatively, I put down a note about my first creative experiences, with my wax crayons in the back garden at Woodford Green. I remember a picture on the wall of our little Victorian School, and my astonishment when I noticed it was mine. I remember a week in the Scottish Highlands, painting for dear life. I remember sadness, the years when my art seemed like a love lost forever. I remember when I caught a glimpse of it again, a brief flash in the graveyard. I stand in the graveyard. It's not so scary. People picnic here in the summer. They bring their babies, their weddings and their loved ones at the last.The rain has stopped, the wind pauses. I beckon to Lost Art. I have plenty of time.

Jennifer Pittam is a winner of Coast-to-Coast Writing competition and is currently working on her first novel, 'Face The Champion'.

With Anne in the Lucas Arms

Today I attended a writing class with Anne Aylor in the Lucas Arms, an old pub not far from Kings Cross Station. The class was a precious 'time in' with the artist soul. We wrote upstairs, lulled by the creaking pub sign and the smell of burning sage. Anne, a gifted novelist, has a talent for nurturing the embryo writer in others. For a precious day I found myself once more with Thomas Tarling, his charming and courageous woman Mary and the enigmatic leader of the fair, Zackariah Scarrott. 'One's religion,' said J.M. Barrie, is 'whatever one is most interested in'. Today, the religion of the practising writer was extended by a few more hours, in a London pub with the rain beating down on the streets outside.

Out on the Common with Wild Mind

Remembrance Sunday has gone and now we are deep into Autumn. The trees in London’s forests and parks have turned red and the air is crisp as I trot across the Common to the gym. I am deep in thought as I struggle across frost-encrusted grass and prickly gorse, for I am struggling with my novel at present. Everything in me wants to stay at home and sit by the laptop, battling. Yet, this is the worst thing I could do. Sometimes you have to walk away from your writing to walk deep into the heart of what you’re trying to say. As I come out from behind a tree I startle a deer – a magnificent stag. Because I am thinking about my hero Thomas and his battle to find himself, I’m not really looking where I’m going. I just blundered into his territory, a great, flat-footed human, not looking, not thinking. I must have come between the stag and his ladies, for he stands his ground and barks at me. This is dangerous stuff, potentially, but I don’t even notice because I am deep in the untamed, the wild mind. We look at each other. I see something in him, something that can never be broken. He bounds away. I run the last ten minutes to the gym.

Jennifer Pittam is a guest blogger on Eric Maisel's 'Living Creatively'website. Follow her column, 'London Calling': http://ericmaisel.blogspot.com/