Author Afloat: Breakfast

 Thursday 9 April 2015 10am, 12℃ sunny and still

Today I had breakfast sitting in my car overlooking the marina while listening to a programme about the Greek poet Sappho.

It was warming up to be a beautiful day with pink blossoms out and the water glistening and still. I liked the way I could see the electricity lines reflected perfectly in the water – the lines all unbroken. My chap and I had had a late night and an early start (long story: I hired a van to move house but someone put a dent it in when we weren’t looking, and we’d just dropped it back after re-hiring it to get it repaired) and I needed some time out. Melvyn Bragg had just come on Radio 4 with In Our Time about Sappho as I parked. I don’t know much about Sappho and so fancied a listen.

Having not yet got a radio sorted out in the narrowboat (my digital radio is in storage with a broken plug, my plastic bath duck radio needs new batteries, the TV is on DVD mode), I had the idea of retiring to my car. So I took my bowl of oat clusters and mug of green tea out into the sunshine and learned about Sappho sitting in my car seat, whilst idly picking up the first emails of the day and propping my eyes open with matchsticks.

As mentioned, I know very little about this famous Greek poet. As a culture, it’s daft that we go all nudge nudge wink wink if her name is mentioned, just because she lived on the island of Lesbos, and because of her fame, we ended up with the word lesbian. As though it’s only possible to appreciate a gay love poet if you’re gay yourself, or if you’re a gay love poet yourself. Literature might have a certain er bent, but it’s for everyone.

A programme about Sappho seemed apt because yesterday morning I’d happened for no particular reason to be relaying to my chap a story about the time when I’d rented a house for the winter with a friend in Whitstable on the Kent coast – this was just before the town began to be gentrified. Fresh from fame for one of her novels (I couldn’t remember its name) set in Whitstable, the novelist Sarah Waters was booked to do a reading and Q&A in the town. It was a rare and exciting cultural event in the locality and she’s an excellent author and I’d read the book. We signed up. She also happens to be gay and writes gay love stories but we didn’t think about that bit.

To our very great surprise, when we turned up on the night, the event was jam-packed, the audience 99.9% female and nearly all the women there had short hair and wore black leather jackets. We stood out. Still, it’s a fine book, and Sarah kindly signed my copy. I seem to remember blubbering something to her about writing myself. I went red when I told her this, a state that was surely misinterpreted by the rest of the women in the queue, which only added to my general air of feeling flummoxed.

 Anyway, I learnt lots about Sappho from Melvyn and friends. Back in the day and the day was 6BC, Homer was the great (male) poet and Sappho the great (female) poetess. There have been new “papyrus finds” (I like this phrase) but still only one per cent of what she wrote survives in around 200 fragments because it wasn’t copied onto codexes by the sixth century. She is famed for setting the original, highly romantic and erotic standard for writing about “symptoms of desire” (“My tongue has a breakdown and a delicate / – all of a sudden – fire rushes under my skin. / Sweat pours down me and a trembling / seizes all of me…” – from fragment 31.) Sappho’s poetry has influenced the way writers have written about desire down through the centuries, all the way to today’s silly love songs. Whether it’s boy meets girl or girl meets girl, love is love is love, and it can become very beautiful when elevated.

In between the academics on the programme saying things like “that’s a very rude word” and Melvyn’s coughing fits, they dropped in that people who like Sappho tend to be either bohemians, people who’ve had to be covertly homosexual, or feminists, because she was the first great female poet. I’ll plump for the third category, but hopefully, when I’ve er dipped my toe in the water, I hope I’ll end up as a bohemian too.

Funnily enough, around 10pm last night, as my chap and I loaded a ton of my stuff onto a trolley at the storage centre where many of my belongings are now stored (we thought we may as well make the most of the van whilst we had it), a book fell out of one of the boxes. It was Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet. The inscription said, “To Justina, Good luck with the writing”.  Thanks.