The Year of Vertigo
A belated 2023 roundup
Worldwide, more terrible things continued to happen. Ignoring all that to focus on brightness and possibility, this is what happened for me.
Month by Month
January
I wrote a letter to end a 26-year friendship. Some friendships, like marriages, are not meant to be forever. I will always miss the version of her who, for a long time, I called my best friend.
February
My daughter and her girlfriend became wife and wife. Taking the “Best Man” slot (with my power tool collection provided as evidence), I delivered a ten-minute comedy tribute to the happy couple known in this house as the “Fuck the patriarchy” speech. I also delivered the Kit Marlowe talk for the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable that Covid had knocked off the roster in October.
March
Alexander Waugh and I were expert witnesses in the Moot Court Trial of William of Stratford at the Middle Temple in London. The orthodox KCs and the orthodox judges ensured orthodoxy was upheld. Well done them! Nevertheless, it was a high-profile event for the SAQ, and I was rewarded with dinner at the Middle Temple, with Gyles Brandreth as my exceptionally entertaining dinner companion.
April
I stayed in Cornwall in a cabin in the woods to enhance my woodworking skills on a cabinet-making course, battling a heavy cold and an infected thumb (splinter under the nail). I filmed for a day with an Argentinian film crew (an authorship question documentary). After six months of my unsuitable agent sending the still-not-fully-edited manuscript of the best novel I have ever written (number 6) to unsuitable tiny publishers for reasons that never made any sense to me, we came to the end of that particular road.
May
Amsterdam. Finally, after approx 26 years, I fulfilled my promise to my younger self and returned to my favourite European City with someone I love (a trip originally booked for May 2020). Stayed in a camper van in a library and on a luxury houseboat with a sauna. Returned without luggage. Moved my daughter and her wife out to my father-in-law’s house so he could move into her bedroom for full-time care. Elizabeth Winkler’s excellent book, Shakespeare Was A Woman and Other Heresies (which includes an interview with me in the penultimate chapter) was published in the UK.
June
Something happened that existing subscribers know about that I’m no longer speaking about for reasons that I will one day explain. This took up most of my energy for the next three months. I suspect the ‘vertiginous fall’ that this represented to my psyche was the reason I ended this month in bed with a week-long bout of vertigo. (If you think this means ‘fear of heights’, blame Alfred Hitchcock. A fear of heights is ‘acrophobia’.)
July
Post-vertigo, but unstable and dizzy for most of it. I demolished the 1980s bathroom that my daughter felt dirty showering in, but I didn’t have sufficient health to rebuild it. (They still don’t have a bath, shower or sink). Overdoing it a bit led to another week-long bout of vertigo.
August
Dizziness and very slow tiling continued all the way into the final week of the Edinburgh Fringe, which I had planned a year in advance. It turns out I can’t sleep on sleeper trains, but it was fun trying. Our AirBnb was spectacular, up a windy stone staircase on The Royal Mile. I was still feeling unbalanced and weird and was beginning to wonder if something serious was going on. But a week of laughing (six shows a day, almost entirely stand-up) cured me.
September
I sacked my agent and signed up with a new agent. This is agent number 6 (since the late 1990s). He reminds me very much of agent number 4 (who sold The Marlowe Papers), which gives me significant hope. The physical relief (after handing the physical manuscript of my epic to him in the British Library) was palpable. He is the editorial type, the knocking-on-doors and having-lunch type. I began writing a new novel.
October
I discovered I had accidentally snubbed the King! A royal invitation for a Shakespeare celebration at Windsor Castle in July was in my Goldsmiths inbox. Perhaps I am not as heretical as I thought. Or are the winds changing? This month also marked something that feels quite significant: with two of the trustees of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, I delivered an online event on the authorship question for the New York Public Library (which you can watch here). We were approached by the NYPL, something I don’t think would have happened 10 years ago.
November
US trip during Reading Week. An amazing 11 days. First Florida, staying with my aunt and uncle and visiting the Kennedy Space Centre. Then a two-day road trip in a red Mustang convertible, with an overnight stop at Panama City Beach. I drove into New Orleans as the sun was setting. A panel on the Shakespeare Authorship Question at Tulane University, a jazz and dinner cruise on a paddle boat down the Mississippi, another panel (on publishing) at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship conference, and a successful conference paper (which you can watch here). There were many more fresh faces than I’d seen before, and many of them came up to me to tell me they had got involved in the authorship question because they had done my MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). This year, registrants for that course ticked over the 15,000 mark.
December
Caught up on a backlog of marking and correspondence; wound down.
Know Your Onions
This is a year in which, on the surface, I seemed to have produced nothing. No new books or academic articles were written. All I have produced creatively is a single opening chapter for a new novel.
But.
Spiritually and personally, these last two years have been deeply important. The two significant challenges I have faced in these years (neither of which I can write about publicly at the moment) have allowed me to dig up a whole nest of demons that needed blasting with a firehose. In peeling off the layers of the trauma onion, we have reached, my friend, a foundational level: the damage inflicted in the womb. And I feel, at last, a great sense of peace.
I will write about this, too, in due course. A memoir has been on the back burner (and slowly growing) for a couple of years now. This year, I have made huge shifts in understanding. I can feel significant shifts in the world directly around me, too, both in responses to me as a person and in a heightened receptivity to my work. I finally discovered patience (rather than panic) around the novel I conceived in January 2013 and began writing nine years ago. It will take its time to find its way out into the world, and that’s okay. You will get to read it, eventually, if you want to.
What’s on the slate?
Ahead: four months of editing, reframing and perfecting this enormous world I’ve made. After that, we’ll have to see what’s calling me most strongly.
There are so many ways of being productive. I am learning, finally, that word count isn’t the only one that matters. I hope your 2023 was fruitful in ways you didn’t expect and your 2024 will find delightful new ways to surprise you.
Joke of the Month
Send me your jokes; I’m all Christmas-crackered out.
Inspiring. I wish you every success on every level for 2024 and beyond.