Kathleen Jowitt

Permission to wish. Permission to really, really want something. I find this difficult. I have a superstitious conviction that letting myself really, really want something will alert some contrary-minded force to my desire, and I won't get it.

It's a defensive little monster in my mind, promising me that if I manage not to want something then I won't be disappointed when I don't get it. It's first cousin to the Angel in the House (who has been quieter of late, but is still in there somewhere) who sits in my head telling me that whatever it is that I want cannot possibly be as important as whatever it is the other person wants, and that if I get it instead of the other person, it will all go wrong and will all be my fault.

Of course it doesn't stop me wanting it. I catch myself thinking, 'well, if I get it, I'll...' - or, more dangerously, 'well, when I get it, I'll...' Wear this. Say that. Be able to do the other.

There's nothing that I can do at this point to make it more or less likely to happen. These little mental tricks will make no difference to the outcome. All I can do is wait.

I tried forgetting about it, but it hasn't worked. I'm still watching my emails, listening for the letterbox. (There's a lot to hear from the letterbox at the moment, but it's mostly Labour and the Lib Dems fighting for this marginal seat.)

Let's try an experiment. There are ten days left of uncertainty. Let's try really, really wanting it for those ten days, and risk the disappointment. Truth is, monster, I'll be disappointed anyway.

Very well, then. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I wish...

Just for a second, I manage to really, really want it.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever... shh. Don't wonder too hard. You'll wake it, and it needs a rest. So do I. It's asleep, curled up in a cave somewhere in the Mariana Trench. Don't worry. It'll come back when it's ready.

We're not talking about this today. We can talk in generalities.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever make my living by writing - and then I realise very swiftly that I don't want to.

Oh, I dream. I wander along the banks of the Cam and wonder which house would be the best to live and write in. I think of having a studio with a balcony and looking out at the swans and ducks and rowers. I imagine how my books will change people's lives. I daydream about being interviewed in my beautiful home, and all that guff.

In the mean time, I write on the train to work.

Here's a confession. Even in that dream life, I still go to work.

I was talking about other people's expectations early in this round. I think there are just as many levied on artists, of whatever ilk, as there are on everyone else. Just as everybody assumes that the temp can't be happy until they've found a real job, everybody assumes that the artist must really want to chuck in the real world and devote themself to art.

It's the dream, isn't it? Chucking in the [soulless bullshit job] and giving the whole to [one's vocation]. But is it really the dream?

I have a friend who, in his forties, left the air conditioning trade and went to university (which is where I met him) to study French, with the ultimate aim of becoming a teacher. He tried teaching, hated it, and is now back in air conditioning, although with a life much improved (or so I believe) in other ways. Meanwhile, my uncle has left teaching to become a lorry driver. (He's also an extremely accomplished musician and photographer.) Life is, as ever, more complicated than that. And people vary.

Personally (and I know I was ranting about the conflation of these concepts earlier in the round, as well) I would no more like to be a full time artist than I would a full time mother. I like my day job. I like getting out of the house and going to the big city. I like interacting with amusing, knowledgeable people. I like my forty-five minutes of writing time on the train. (Hush. Hush. It's all right. Not you. I didn't mean you. Nobody's writing anything more on you at the moment.)

Even if there were a way to earn a living by writing without the nicotine and/or alcohol dependence and chronic financial insecurity that characterised the only household I knew where anyone tried it, would I want to? I don't think so. I am learning to take better care of myself than that.

I am trying not to talk about ( content note: diet culture )

I immediately feel my body tense up whenever I hear the sound of the telephone.

Who is phoning me? What do they want? Are they going to ask me questions to which I don't know the answer? Are they trying to sell me something? Ask me for a charity donation? Scam me? Is it family? Bad news? Hassling me for a decision that I haven't yet made? Wanting to know my plans for August when I haven't thought beyond May?

Even if it is somebody I want to hear from, the chances are I'm in the middle of cooking my dinner, or eating it. Sometimes, when I'm alone in the house, I let it ring and ring off, and then dial 1471 to find out who it was and whether I want to call them back - in my time, on my terms.

I am glad that I was born into the age of the internet, when communication is moving back towards writing. It's not so much the fact that it's written, as that a delay is built in. On email, even over instant messenger (though I have that turned off most of the time, as well), there's space to breathe between sentences, time to assimilate what I've just been told, and room to come up with an appropriate answer. There's a moral panic that the internet encourages a demand for instant gratification; so far as I'm concerned, it's got nothing on the telephone.

I like to think that, in centuries to come, our descendants will view the telephone as a quaint artefact of the uncivilised twentieth century. One summoned one's friends with a bell, and expected them to drop everything and speak to one? How unutterably rude! Now, if you'll excuse me, I must just answer Xanthe's mind-telegram while I remember. No hurry, though. She knows I'm well; she'll have seen my neutron update.

Sleep.

It's the first thing that comes to mind when I wake in the morning and the last thing I think of before I go to sleep.

Sleep.

Sleep.

The sheets so smooth; the duvet so warm; the alarm so very far away.

Sleep.

Complete and total exhaustion is, to be fair, a well-known phenomenon of the week after Easter, and I had a concert on Tuesday on top of that. All the same, I think there's more to it than that.

I intend to run a thorough, relaxed, luxurious investigation into this concept of looking after myself.

Beginning with sleep.

Night, all.

One of my greatest sources of inspiration has always been books.

A conventional answer, but none the less true. I've always had more books than I could ever possibly read, and I like it that way. When I was a child, I was blessed with a superabundance of books. A school in the area closed down when I was four, and my parents, looking ahead, bought up half the library. Fiction, history, geography, biology - I learned as much out of books marked 'Westdowns - DISCARDED' as I did at school. I remember with particular fondness one called 'Blood', which talked about black pudding and blood brothers, and had a family tree illustrating the progress of haemophilia through the royal families of Europe. There was one about weightlessness and gravity populated by zany cartoon characters ahead of their time. And a whole swarm of Ladybirds.

Then there were the Blue Peter annuals. My first one came from a church fete at Elton. Book Fifteen, with a blue, trapezey cover. My mother bought it for me: 'You'll like these: they have things to make in them.' Didn't they just. I'm not sure I ever made very many of them - I remember covering a spice pot in halved clothes pegs to make a pencil holder - but the idea was there. Books contained things to make, and I liked making things.

The funny thing about the Blue Peters was that we never had a television. Or perhaps that wasn't so funny. I never joined the Brownies, either, and yet I had a dozen Brownie annuals at one point. And again, when things got a bit much in the house, I went round to our traveller friends' bus and read their copy of 'Mary Berry's Step by Step Desserts'.

The thing about all these books was that I read them and thought 'I could do that'. Sometimes I went on and did it. Sometimes I didn't. It didn't matter.

Fiction, too, suggested that anything was possible. I have been thinking a lot of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes recently. That was a book about determined women earning a living by doing something that they thought was worth doing, and it has modelled, consciously or otherwise, my ideal of an integrated artistic life. It talked sense about the importance of hard work and luck as well as that of talent.

Poetry, most of all, drew me in, dancing on the page, persuading me that I could do that, too. (I couldn't - not at first. But books also tell you to keep going, to keep trying, that not everything is perfect first time round.)

Books, whether they be fiction or not, contain stories. The best ones invite you in to join them, and then send you out equipped with new tools, new ideas, to try it for yourself.

My great-grandmother, having introduced her former beau to a suitable young lady, was wont to say of the resulting offspring, 'I feel I brought those children into the world'.

History does not record what the suitable young lady said about that.

Which is to say that birth as a metaphor for anything that is not birth has never worked very well for me. It somehow manages to diminish both birth and work, and I am really uncomfortable with using it of my own projects.

I am not entirely sure why that might be. It's not as if I am particularly squicked by the concept of birth - I spent my teenage years as unofficial chief proofreader for Midwifery Matters, and as a result I probably know as much as anyone who hasn't actually been there and done it about the physiological, practical and political aspects of birth. I can tell you what 'O. P.' stands for both in the Latin and the vulgar. I can explain why a common party balloon makes a reasonable model for the uterus. I can talk about the importance of continuous one-to-one midwifery care. What I absolutely cannot do is apply this to my own work.

Possibly I'm too much of a literalist. Take my long-going novel, for example. I resist applying the birth metaphor to that, because I am irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that the pregnancy has lasted seven years but nobody actually knows whether the conception was successful. I end up wandering through the animal kingdom ('Well, horses and deer and things are born and then stand up within a few hours, while human infants need intensive nurturing for years before one can safely leave them to their own devices. Birds lay eggs - which is the nearest thing to birth - but then have to incubate them for weeks...') and end up concluding that the current project is actually a marsupial.

And, jumping back behind the metaphor to what I think is the intention behind the prompt, my most recent project, into which I put a huge amount of work and of which I am extremely proud, has the unedifying title 'Private Contractors Database'. One can't talk about 'birthing' a 'private contractors database' without falling about laughing. At least, I can't. The metaphors that do spring to mind are building (largely, of recent weeks, in the context of Rudyard Kipling's If: 'If you can see the things you gave your life to, broken/And stoop and build them up with Sharepoint 2013...') and transformation.

The Private Contractors Database wasn't my idea. It already existed, in an embryo (ha!) form. My role in bringing it to where it is now was more like this:

My manager: Well, we have six white mice and a pumpkin. We need a coach. I want you to look into coach-building possibilities.
Me: No problem; let me think about it.

Six months later, after a lot of hard work (important point! 'hard work' is often a translation of 'magic') we have a coach.

This is all very interesting, because I had thought that the part of me that was a fairy godmother had packed up and flown off when I stopped temping. I'd been looking after other people too much; it was time for me to look after myself. (I have a feeling I'll be writing more about this soon...) But I look at the projects that I'm working on at the moment, and I see: one is a quilt for a baby. One is a necklace to surprise a friend.

Even the novel is a coming-of-age present for some imaginary godchild, to tell them that, whoever they are, they are turning out exactly as they should be.

'Well, you've all got it.'

Half the office, it seemed, had hung around to see whether we would get it. Four of us, employed on temporary contracts for going on for two years in some cases. I was the youngest, and the newest, having been there only since mid-January. Now it was August, interviews had taken place over the past two days, and I was beginning to dare to hope.

When I came in, I was as low as I ever had been. My previous temp placement had been three months at the local hospital, handing out hearing aid batteries and making appointments. The job I was covering came up, and I was interviewed, and I didn't get it.

The annoying thing was, I would have liked temping, if I'd felt that I was allowed to. It appealed to my fairy-godmother persona: I was the person who flew in, swept up the mess, and flew off again. I had no particular desire to stay in any workplace long-term; most of them had been horrible. But one couldn't admit to that. I'd bought in to other people's ideas about stability and permanence and planning for the future.

And yes, I would quite have liked more of those things in my life as well, but I could have done without the corollary, that any job with an end date wasn't worth having. I could have done without writing myself off as a failure even as I had a job, even as I was supporting myself, even as I was learning how to operate as an adult in the workplace.

Temping for temping's sake would have been fun. Temping as a stepping stone to a permanent job was depressing. I was always wondering if this was the one, and feeling that if it were I'd have to be grateful. I was very lucky that the one turned out to be the one it was. I'm still there, five years, four job titles and two offices later.

When I think of the others - the hospital library (lovely people, but a boring job); the exam script-checking (awful - we were treated as if we were back at school); the hospital medical records library (eight months with no natural light, no wonder I got depressed that year) - I am very glad that this was the one that stuck.

I remember how we all clustered at the end of that day, knowing that the interviews were done, knowing that the decisions were being made. I remember the glinting silver blinds, the slight August stuffiness.

I remember the waiting.

Well, you've all got it.

That's how I knew that this chapter of my life had ended.

And now I was free to...

get on with the job. Devise and put in place systems that would make things run far more efficiently than I'd dared before. Finish all these projects I had started. Ask to be moved to other tasks. Get more experience.

Finish other projects, outside the workplace.

There is, after all, something to be said for security. It quiets everything that tells you, 'don't rock the boat', and some boats need rocking.

I'm never quite free, though; even five years on, I have those phantom chains around my ankles, and I have to consciously kick them off. 'You can't finish this,' my past self whispers to me. 'What if they decide they don't need you any more?' And I tell her things about redundancy law and experience, but she still isn't quite convinced.

And of course, they might decide they don't want me any more. Nothing is certain, and in a job that is as dependent as mine is upon the political climate, I can't be sure that 'they' won't decide they don't need me any more. All the same, I know this:

- that I was a decent temp
- that I'm doing a better job now that I'm not constantly worrying about where the next month's work is going to come from
- that my worth is not defined by how much someone is paying me
- that I would manage. Because I did before, and this time I know it.

Curious

What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?

This word forks, and at first I am more drawn to the more active sense. One can be curious about a thing that is curious. I am immediately reminded of Alex in Leeds, who has a tattoo that reads Curiosity > Enthusiasm > Action - a fantastic motto. Curiosity gets a bad press - it famously killed the cat, and 'satiable curtiosity is the reason for the trunk on the Elephant's Child. This seems unfair. To know things for the sheer pleasure of knowing, not out of malice, but because there is a space in one's mind where a fact ought to go, that seems very wholesome to me.

In fact, this seems to be a very literary word. Down the other fork, where it is things that are curious, there is the Old Curiosity Shop (I have never read it) and Alice again. Curiouser and curiouser. Oddness, interestingness, something-not-quite-right-about-thisness. Something that is curious makes one curious even if one isn't naturally curious.

Are curious people curious? They are usually good fun to talk to; they don't mind admitting what they don't know, and they share what they do.

Curious.

Reflection

What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?

Mirrors. Oh, I spent a long time thinking about mirrors. I came across an early proposal for the mermaid project the other day; it included a list of all sorts of things that contain mirrors. Kaleidoscopes (have you ever come across the sort that have glitter and beads and sequins suspended in a tube of some sort of clear viscous liquid? They drift from one end to the other and when they are reflected in the mirror the effect is one of such opulence that one might be in a jewel casket). Periscopes. Pepper's Ghost.

Blue skies in still puddles. A streak of moonlight on the sea. The moon itself. And Alice.

Now we see in a glass darkly. Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror... There are various metaphors in the New Testament; that's one of the best of them, I think.

I'm aware that this is only the surface of the concept, with no more substance than a reflection. That feels appropriate. I can see myself, double-reflected in the double-glazing of the patio doors. You won't find even one of me behind them, and if you reach out to touch the reflection all you meet is cold, clear, glass.