I don’t usually do new year’s resolutions, but as 2022 came to an end I decided that 2023 would be the year for me to have a proper go at tackling social media. How else was I going to raise my profile? The plan was to be up and running before I set off with my partner for our annual midwinter retreat.
When I say retreat, don’t imagine some fancy cottage with all that Sunday supplement paraphernalia: the four-poster bed, the granite worktops, the jacuzzi, the resident tutor. No, this is ‘retreat’ in the sense of ‘withdrawal from earthly luxuries’. Think Thoreau. Think Simeon Stylites. Think Jesus doing His forty days in the desert. Think accommodation so basic that its winter rates are affordable even for a writer.
My partner and I have been doing this for five years now. (She paints, I write. We meet up for meals.) For the first three we went to a remote cottage in the Scottish Highlands. It had no electricity, and the only source of comfort was a coal fire. Mercifully, that heated the water – always presuming that the stream from which it came wasn’t frozen, which it was from time to time. But even at our age, clambering over the rocks and up the mountainside in order to replenish the supplies comes under the heading of ‘fun’. Along with the axe and the buckets we took a camera in order to record the adventure.
However, after four weeks up there in 2020, during which it rained on 27 days and snowed on the 28th, we thought we might look around for somewhere a little more hospitable. Our coastguard cottage, way down in western Cornwall, was certainly a step up, having an electricity supply, some antiquated storage heaters and an open fire (logs £8 a bag). Against this lavish self-indulgence, let me point to the outside privy and shower, which persuaded us that we were still adventurous, hardy and young at heart. It also persuaded us that, rather as we did in the old days, you can go two or three days without a shower and live to tell the tale.
So there we were, installed in our new retreat with the waves crashing on the rocks at the bottom of the garden, the rooks in the pine trees battling the gales, and me at my laptop trying to bang out the daily thousand words – all the while mindful of the need to send out posts to my Instagram account. It was on Day 2, while grappling with the different requirements of posts and reels, that I let the phone slip from my grasp.
It crashed onto the stone window-sill, the screen shattered into a myriad fragments, and it was soon apparent that it was a goner.
Full marks to EE, however. They had a replacement to me within twenty-four hours. However, I was soon docking them a full grade point for insisting that I could download my data from the old phone to the new. I couldn’t. It was comprehensively knackered. They offered various solutions, most of which involved me accessing Google accounts for which my passwords were stored on my p.c. at home. Then they suggested I get the bus into Penzance and call at the EE shop, which I did, only to be told that they didn’t fix phones; they just sold them.
All very frustrating, but I won’t burden you with the full story. Thee best way to deal with such memories is to bury them and and hope they will decompose. (I have in mind here an extended metaphor about the composted waste providing fertile grounds for future stories, but we can skip that.)
Anyway, all of that accounts for the long silence on my social media accounts. And now, guess what? I have forgotten most of what I learned in my first few lessons.
As to the retreat, that was just great. In nineteen working days I got 25,000 words into my new book. At one level – and this is surely the easy part – it’s an account of my autumn trip across the States, from Boston Massachusetts to Monterey, California. Within that journey, which was in essence a pilgrimage to the homeplaces or graves of half a dozen of the writers who most influenced me as a young man, I am telling the much longer story of how I decided in my teens to be a writer and just about contrived a thirty-year career as a pro. A third strand, and this is both the most challenging and the most exciting, is to what extent I feel I have failed or succeeded. Which begs the corollary question, what is the nature of success? Surely all writers and artists who take what they do seriously ask themselves that at some stage. If any of my readers have your own thoughts on the subject I’d be interested to hear them.
