Blog
Step Inside Love - 07 December 2011
Last night I saw a clip on tv of Cilla Black singing Step Inside, Love. That comma after inside makes the line an invitation to someone at your door whose name you’d forgotten, or that you’re just very familiar with (or not, depending). Without the comma I suppose we’re taking about an invitation to step into a feeling, to inhabit love. All right, I spend too much time watching tv and allowing my mind to wander around these things…and wasn’t it a lovely, sparkly dress Cilla was wearing…and I never used to like her voice but now I do…is this a symptom of aging….? Would I have learnt to love Blind Date if it was still on? Should I have another cup of tea? Or go to bed, even…I wonder where son Husband is. Because he’s quite late home from work…at the pub? Car breakdown…? Go to bed, Marion, for goodness sake…But then think of all the things you have to do before you’re in lovely bed – coax the dog off the sofa, (difficult…) tuck him up in his basket and give him a kiss (could take a moment). Faff around putting tea cups in the dishwasher…Putting the last of the just-finished-reading Sunday paper in the recycling…brushing my teeth…Then there’s the actual lying in bed thinking not about song lyrics – as if – but making up that story where Mark from Say You Love Me (my third novel…read it…) falls in love with an absolutely gorgeous man who is a Swine and hurts him…but he comes out of it all right, living as he does in his lovely Hampstead house with his critically acclaimed novels selling by the container ship load. Mark is me, of course, and always was (except I had a very much happier childhood, and am a woman…And no man has ever been that much of a swine to me, but more from luck than good management). Being Mark sends me to sleep, sometimes. Other times I am Paul – who goes down a very different track than he does in my novels about him – he stays in Stockton, (Thorp), for one thing, and doesn’t leave his family…He would hate me if I messed up his life like this in print.
I have always gone to sleep making up stories. Those stories never get to the page, or even to the keyboard, mainly because it’s always the same story about Paul or Mark. They step inside love and have a very lovely time, then a horrid time, and then they get over it/die. I used to say, if asked, that I wrote about sex and death – which was very glib of me, but what can one say when put on the spot like that? Occasionally I’d say historical romances – but that seemed wrong although there is a big nugget of truth there, as big as the sex and death line. Truly I write about love; true love, mistaken love, confusing-love-with-lust love, I’m-going-mad-for-it-over-here love. What else is there, after all? Murder. Murder would probably sell more books. Vampires ditto. How about a novel about a murderous, madly in love vampire…? I’m going to write it. Tomorrow. I have to go and boil spaghetti just now.
Here’s Cilla, anyway and the song was written by Paul McCartney - I never knew that, being much too young...
