'The Year of Magical Thinking' by Joan Didion

I've wanted to read this book ever since it was published. It's about the writer's experience of her husband's death and the year that follows. Death is a fascinating subject. I think about it a lot and I don't believe that's at all maudlin. I was thrilled as a teenager to discover that Tess of the D'urbervilles wonders about her own death, just as I did - when, where, how? I'd never mentioned it to anyone else at that point.

Anyway, last week I discovered a copy of the book for sale on greenmetropolis.com, one of my favourite websites. It's not very long and I read it almost at one sitting.

I found the title misleading. The 'magical thinking' seems to be Didion's reluctance to get rid of her husband's possessions, in the subconscious belief that he'll be coming back and will need them. Reviews I have read say that her clear, unsentimental writing makes the subject even more heartbreaking, but that wasn't my experience at all. The only part of the book I found touching was her quotation of another woman's grief, a woman whose son was serving in Iraq and who opens her door to a uniformed serviceman. She knows immediately what has happened, 'But I thought that if, as long as I didn't let him in, he couldn't tell me. And then it - none of that would've happened. So he kept saying, "Ma'am, I need to come in." And I kept telling him, "I'm sorry, but you can't come in."'

Those words, the words of an 'ordinary' woman, not a writer, move me to tears. I find them far more moving than anything else in the book. I don't want to belittle Didion's suffering - when her husband dies, her only child is in intensive care and goes in and out of hospital throughout the year. What a horrible, horrible situation to be in and yet somehow I can't feel much sympathy for her predicament, especially as after pages of details on her daughter's condition and treatment, she simply disappears towards the end, suddenly materialising without explanation at a Christmas dinner. (She actually died too, some time later, an awful second blow).

There may not be much of the magical in this book, but there are certainly plenty of facts, quotes and extracts from medical records and journals. A more appropriate title might be 'The Year of Medical Thinking'.

A bed and a toothbrush - what's all that about?

My readers have been asking about the title of this blog and since I am loath to let either of them down, I shall explain:

All the clever names I came up with were already taken and eventually I realised I'd have to think of something more specific to me. That started me thinking what people have said about my writing and about me - the good things, anyway. As I've already explained, I dismissed 'One of the nosiest people I know' and then one day I remembered something A said a while back.

I am a committed minimalist. One of my favourite activities is clearing out, recycling, putting together a bag for the charity shop, giving stuff away etc. Creating clear space where stuff once was is one of the best feelings ever. A is not quite as keen on this as me. I think sometimes it makes him nervous. Although I do try to keep my enthusiasm confined to my own belongings and my own space, there are times when I just can't help asking questions like 'When did you last wear that T-shirt?' or 'Do you really still need those books?'

It was on one of these occasions that he remarked 'If you carry on like this, in a few years all you'll have left will be a bed and a toothbrush.' And of course I laughed at such a ridiculous idea, although I find it a compelling mixture of the chilling and the appealing.

Phrases I hate

I've already mentioned that I care about words and how they're used, which after all is only to be expected in a writer. Occasionally I hear a phrase that makes me cringe; in fact, lately I've been hearing one far too often - 'going forward'. People say it in all kinds of contexts and it's always entirely superfluous. It seems to be the latest meaningless twaddle that's used by people who subconsciously feel they have nothing useful to say and try to fluff up their speech with something they hope will add weight.

Oh, and since we're on the subject and I'm building up nicely to a rant, what about 'fell pregnant'? To me that suggests an element of genteel surprise - 'Whoops! Oh dear, I wonder how that could possibly have happened?' Beats me.

Yes, I know, there are far worse things to worry about, but it's good to have a moan sometimes.

It's so easy being green

'It's not easy being green' - it makes my blood boil every time I hear that. A misguided person at the BBC must have decided it was a catchy title for a TV programme and now I keep seeing and hearing it. Well, maybe it's not that easy to rig up your own electricity and water systems, as the moustachioed one did on the telly, but we're not being asked to do that, are we? (Yet). What exactly is so difficult about stuff like switching off electrical appliances rather than leaving them on stand-by, and cutting down on the amount of water you use? All it takes is a little thought and hopefully a realisation that the earth's resources are finite and could probably be put to better use than heating your house to the point where you can comfortably wear a Tshirt on a January day.

I attended a seminar about waste management and recycling last week. Apparently in the UK we throw away the equivalent of 600 cows every day by chucking out beef that is superflous to requirements or past its use-by date. Not to mention the obscene amount of other foodstuffs piled into landfill. This is going to have to stop, if only because we are rapidly running out of holes in the ground to pile it all in.

James Lovelock, the scientist responsible for the well-known Gaia theory, believes mankind is too late and whatever we do now with our recycling and environmental programmes, which he regards as worse than re-aranging deckchairs on the Titanic, cannot avoid catastrophe in about 20 years time.

He might be right, how do I know? But I can't help thinking that taking what you need from the earth and making sure there is plenty left for future generations is a much more emlightened way of living than the ugly consumerism that has become the norm.

I keep looking for some words of wisdom from someone who can advise me how to prepare for the future, as I'm sure it's going to be very different from what we experience day-to-day now, but so far I've found nothing, apart from some survivalist Americans who recommend stocking up on rifles and retreating to the backwoods. Are we really all marching cluelessly into the dark?

Let's do the timewarp again

Time has been looping the loop and tying me in knots over the long Easter weekend. I spent it in Lincolnshire with my parents, and I'm guessing it must be the required adjustment to an elderly routine which has made yesterday morning feel like last week and all the days run into a blur.

And then one afternoon I was catapulted back almost 30 years, an experience that left me feeling oddly shaken. My first boyfriend's mum has kept in intermittent touch with my parents over the years and we've often spoken of going to see his parents during one of my visits, but for one reason or another it never happened. And then last autumn his dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack, one of those events that shocks you out of the comfortable assumption that there will always be time, one day.

Quite clearly there won't, so I arranged to visit M on Easter Monday. She lives a few miles away from my parents and you'd hardly think it possible that in nearly 30 years I wouldn't have gone down that road a few times. If I have, I don't recall it, so there was that weird process of overlaying the remembered landscape with the contemporary one, knowing that I shall probably revert to my memory regardless.

M herself looks just the same, maybe a few more lines on her face. The house was just as I remembered it too, except the kitchen has been extended and faces in another direction, which was disorientating. As we chatted, all those years just seemed to peel away, like re-entering the past but with all my accumulated knowledge and experience. A real Life on Mars moment.

It was only later that evening that I realised that during the time I was a regular visitor, M, a no-nonsense mother of three, was actually younger than I am now. (Not that I ever called her by her Christian name, I'm sure, it was always Mrs T).

And the boyfriend? No, I didn't see him, except in some family photos, and judging by those, he looks much the same too. But then M said I hadn't changed a bit, apart from the grey hair, and hadn't put on any weight either. Nice that she thinks that, even nicer if it were true.

Money makes the world go round? Maybe not anymore

I remember blogging last year (February, The end of the world as we know it?) about my belief that within my lifetime the way the world revolves around money would come to an end. I just didn't expect it to start happening so soon.

Whenever I read a newspaper or watch television these days, it seems there's an article about how poor people are feeling and how to save money. The middle classes are embattled, we are told, struggling with mortgages, council tax, utility bills and school fees. They have been christened 'the coping classes' and it's apparently respectable now to shop at Aldi and Lidl. The aptly-named Jane Shilling lists in The Times all the things she can't afford - to fix the leaking roof, get the car serviced, take the cat to the vet - and Christina Odone talks about her 'genteel poverty' in The Telegraph, although it's hard to feel much sympathy for someone whose idea of poverty is admitting that 'unless Freddy gets a scholarship, the family tradition of sending every son to Eton is beyond our means'.

The other day we had Quentin Wilson on ITV1 telling us how to squeeze more miles out of the petrol tank. We watched with interest but unfortunately learnt nothing new. I'd like to know how to squeeze more heating out of the oil tank. Nobody would believe how little we've had the heating on this winter. At least it's spring, I was thinking, but then we had an oil delivery and it cost almost 25% more than in the autumn. As Jane Shilling says, when you cut back and back and are still strapped for cash, it's a very insecure feeling.

As I said last year, I do think we will all be much better off not striving constantly to earn and spend money, but what is going to happen in the interim is unimaginable.

Words, words, words

Words are important. It matters to me how they're strung together, how they are punctuated, how they are spoken. Has anyone else noticed how some TV journalists randomly break up. their sentences into.blocks regardless of meaning as.though there are multiple. full stops in the sentence? Why have they started to do this? Is it because of autocues? And how come reporters out on location do it, when presumably they have just written their copy and know what's coming next? It makes my brain jolt around and struggle to find the sense in what should be a perfectly simple sentence.

And sometimes words are important because you don't know them. What's the name for those thin, stringy bits on bananas that cling so revoltingly to your lip and chin if you don't carefully peel them off before starting to eat? And still on the breakfast theme, what do you call that property that bran has which makes it leap about like jumping beans when you spoon it out of the packet?

Words have many shades of meaning too. I was going to call this blog One of the Nosiest People I Know, because that's what one of my friends called me once and I don't regard it as by any means a fault, but A felt it was too negative, and replacing 'nosiest' with 'most curious' or 'inquisitive' just didn't have the same ring.

'Just something about his hair'

I read the other day that the actor, Billy Bob Thornton, has had phobias of many things over the years, including cutlery, antique furniture and … Disraeli’s hair: ‘I was watching some old movie once, and Benjamin Disraeli was a character in it. There was just something about his hair. There was something about the way it swept out to the side of his head – I couldn’t breathe too well.’

I find that both totally hilarious and utterly understandable. I may even have had my own Billy Bob moment, a few years ago on one of our day trips to London. We were walking down Kensington High Street at local election time when we suddenly noticed Michael Portillo bearing down on us with his entourage, political smile in place and gladhanding arm out ready to shake. My reaction surprised me then and I still wonder about it now – my instinctive response was to just get away, no consideration for appearances at all, and I literally ran away.

What was that all about? Those were the days when the press loved to vilify Portillo, before he made great PR efforts to appear a caring, sharing sort of chap. Maybe it was a kneejerk reaction to my indoctrination by the media. Maybe my mistrust of a politician out to win over the voters. Or maybe it was the shiny black quiff, still greasily serrated by the teeth of his comb.

Whatever the reason, I feel rather fond of Billy Bob for revealing his aversions. Unlike Hollywood stars, I’m far too greedy to feel any antipathy towards an instrument which helps me move food to my mouth, but I have sympathy with his feelings about antique furniture too. For me, it’s antique furniture in the collective – antique shops. I never go in them and just looking in the window can make me feel I’m brushing through dusty, sticky cobwebs and feeling the residue of long-gone, unhappy lives. But they don’t make me flee, the way Michael Portillo did.