Uncategorized

I think I want to be in a writing yurt at a writer’s retreat as I write the next book.  But the truth is, that would not necessarily work for me. I got married in the Yaddo Gardens – an artists’ retreat in NY and I never really understood what that was or why a writer would need one.  I scribble things on napkins – I have a folder full of them. I learnt this habit from Jilly Cooper. I was polo correspondent to The Independent at the time and we were at a polo match at the Royal Berkshire Polo Club. They had a fun Ozzie commentator who delighted in the presence on the field of a female polo player and announced ‘There goes Annabel with 15 hands between her legs.” Jilly screamed with laughter, then wrote it down, on a napkin. Sure enough that line went in her next book.

Having stalled on writing the ending for Wed, White and Blue, the event became monumental. I thought I would write it in the Elephant Café where JK Rowling initially wrote Harry Potter, but when I got there it was packed with Japanese tourists. I then found the National Library just down the road, but that didn’t feel right. So I went to a bar, the Wash Bar in fact on The Mound in Edinburgh. It was empty and perfect. One large glass of Pinot Grigio later and the final chapter and Epilogue were drafted. That felt really good.

You never know where material will come from – hence the usefulness of napkins, or if I’m organized a notebook I carry around, always assuming I have a pen. I was sitting in a cafe talking to someone yesterday about how sad it was when your dog dies. From there we got to ashes and urns. He was from Edinburgh and told me that when he was working on ‘the bins’ – garbage trucks – he found an intriguing wooden box. It was too nice to have been accidentally thrown out – and then it dawned on him, it wasn’t a box, it was an urn. Although it had been ‘binned’ once, he explained that although he had no idea who the occupant was he didn’t feel it was right to throw it away, so he carried it around for a day, feeling a heavy obligation had fallen on his shoulders.

After finishing his shift he went into the gents to change and placed the box on the back of the toilet. He forgot to take it with him when he left so in spite of good intentions, the box ended up on the top of a cistern, in a men’s toilet, in a bin yard. As of this day he says the final resting place of the box remains unknown. You can’t make stuff like that up and I quickly found a napkin and scribbled it down. It might make a scene in the next book…

I spent the best part of three years in bed – and not with George Clooney. One of my friends, struggling to understand said: why else would you do that? And btw he’s not my type.

My illness wasn’t life threatening but sometimes made me want to threaten my life. My brother bought me Lance Armstrong’s book It’s not about the bike – and ironically in hindsight it really hasn’t been for him. His tale of cancer survival helped me though and I am still a fan despite his meteoric fall from grace. Eddie Izzard, the transvestite stand-up comedian, also cheered me up. I came across him while lying in bed and channel surfing. I laughed out loud for the first time in a while and it felt good.

Lyme Disease had its light moments. My ex-husband pushing me round the supermarket in one of those wheelchair/carts when my legs gave out, was pretty funny in a black comedy kind of way. Years later, him catching me as I ‘shut down’ making a cup of tea, putting me in my office wheelie chair and pushing me down the landing to my bedroom, hitting every ridge in the wooden floor en route and nearly catapulting me down the stairs. Actually I think those might have been the only really light moments. It was a miserable existence. Pumped full of antibiotics on a daily basis, trying to fight off the side effects of toxin build up, digestive destruction and depression. The thing is you learn to live with it and so do those around you.

The appliance repair man told me that his whole church was praying for my recovery on a regular basis. That’s how prevalent my illness was in the house. He must have come to mend the dishwasher twice in three years. All of that said, I was one of the lucky ones. Misdiagnosed for years prior to my pregnancy, I finally got the proof, much sought after by Lyme sufferers – when they found Borrelia spirochetes in my spinal fluid after being hospitalized with meningitis three months after my son was born.

I was given the standard four-week course of intravenous antibiotics and declared better. I felt better until I didn’t. Relapses are common in late stage Lyme disease and that’s when my fight really started. Going from doctor to doctor, being declared mentally ill as you can’t possibly still be infected. Then fate smiled on me and I met Dr Kule, an holistic doctor luckily enough living just a few miles from our home in South Carolina. He sent my blood to a lab in California and it came back positive for Lyme – some five or six years after I’d been told I was cured. He boosted my immune system, taking the fight from inside out and I improved.

I was able to work and began to ‘get out more’. That’s when I met Lee Brittain, the inspiration for Sterling. I was working on a major polo tournament and needed to get my hair done for the launch. Lee turned me into what he called a ‘sexy mama’. We arranged to meet for a drink…and the rest as they say is history. Several years into our friendship, I sat down and began to write a book, with the working title ‘Bangabrit’. It was based on an imaginary t-shirt design Lee and I had decided would be fitting for his first trip to the UK, a dream that finally came true last year – though we chickened out on the t-shirt. I wrote the majority of ‘Wed, White and Blue’ as it is now to be known, in three months. It took me several years, to arrive at the finish.

I still have the odd ‘Lyme episode’, most recently after a move from the USA to Scotland. I was semi-conscious and unable to move. My parents called an ambulance and pretty soon I was hearing the voice of Braveheart in my head “Sarah! Open yer eyes!” Eventually thanks to the paramedic’s insistence I did. I spent three days in bed, but I got over it and touch wood I’ve been healthy since.

I think it was that final episode that convinced me to finish my book. The fear of putting my work out there, was overshadowed by the fear of never finishing it. Pablo Picasso said, or possibly wrote: “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” It’s a bit extreme, but then so is the notion of being in bed with George Clooney.