The clocks went back this weekend.  I really must speak to the pawnbroker to try and get them home…

I think I’ve been getting confused between fiction and reality again.  What you read about in novels isn’t real.  It’s made up.  That goes not only for the characters but for the places, too.  Hard though it is to believe Dickens’s London was only as good as his imagination.  Cranford and Candleford, Hardy’s Wessex and Scott’s Scotland never really existed exactly as the stories.  That’s why it’s fiction.

Take Gauguin for example.  He’s not a novelist?  Oh.  Anyway even the Tahiti of his famous paintings wasn’t like that when he was there.  It was just a colonial outpost of France – full of ordinary people.  But who wanted to hear about that?  He just kind of jazzed it up.  And I thought it had something to do with truth.  How naive.  Maybe it’s the fiction writer/ artist’s job to romanticise – or to turn the world into a mythology that anyone can relate to.