WOLF HALL, SLOW LIVING and a FAIRYTALE ILLUSTRATION.

 Going round the local charity shops with my daughter recently, I picked up a copy of Donna Tartt's "THE GOLDFINCH". I'd read the reviews when it first came out, but never got round to buying it. My daughter, grand-daughter, and their close friend Jon Welch, the playwright, all loved it, so I bought it (couldn't get a higher recommendation that). It is dauntingly long, and physically cumbersome, so I'll probably replace it with the ebook version. I'm also finding it, initially slow, which is my fault as a reader - certainly not hers as a writer.

'Slow' has been the main criticism of the BBC's production of "WOLF HALL", too. I think we're all being conditioned to respond to fast action, and the first episode of "WOLF HALL" was complex, especially for viewers not familiar with the book, and yes, slow. Since then, I've become more and more impressed by it, and will be sad when it reaches its final episode (only temporarily, I hope - there are two more books, one of which we are still waiting for). Slowness is a quality the media actively dislikes - it would prefer us to spend little or no time in the contemplation of what we have seen or read, so that, even if we've just finished watching an amazing and thought-provoking programme, it has to butt in to tell us what's coming next. Sometime I wonder if fast/junk food and fast reading/viewing aren't directly related.

    Recently I've been going through old work, some of it dating back to the time when there were no computers. Reading one's own work again feels odd - like coming across it for the first time, as a critical reader. Much of what I discarded were, inevitably, multiple hard copies - I find that, however much I write online, it still has to run through that final (and often not so final) print to paper test. Among the very old and irreplaceable stuff, I found a short story I'd had published in a magazine, with a photocopy of the accompanying, and quite stunning, line illustration by Barbara Anne Taylor. It was quite hard to photograph, as the paper had browned and was curled, but here it is.

The actual story grew out of my experience of working in a Rudolf Steiner school, and involves a very odd, intense friendship between two adolescents with learning difficulties - a boy and a girl. I'm now playing with the idea of re-writing it as a one-off drama. It's a Romeo and Juliet story, so not a happy ending, and set in a rather grim 50s mental hospital.