That small and perfect read is breathtaking - for its inspirational quality. You sound kind of excited which feels miraculous. The water experience seems especially momentous. Bloody hell. There I was, pondering the state of the world and feeling sad. Now I feel hopeful. Much appreciated. I marvel that your writing has the power to do that. Brilliant.
Hi Linda, this is Hanif here. Yes I just read your piece. Thanks for following me on this blog. I hope we can stay in touch. Ive always liked your journalism.
Dear Hanif, I am going to carry with me into the day the image of you swimming. And hope that the experience in the water enlarges, over time, to your swimming in the world. I hope when you are reviewing what you have written for the book you will allow yourself to marvel at the energy (even in despair) and truth of it, so you will have the amazing experience those of us reading the blog have been having, of being in the presence of the real thing.
Leaving the security of the hospital is scary. But you have the light of your awareness of that fear to help you--to experience it and then have space to experience all the other things and feelings that will see you forward.
Hanif, you won't remember me, but I remember you. You were a student at çbromley tech for a while with my wife, Fiona Brown, as your English lecturer. While she took maternity leave I stood in for some of her classes and remember meeting you there. Fiona and I went out separate ways, and I, after a spell of running an English department in a bilingual school in Bogotá for three years, decided that I had had it with institutional education, came back to the UK and spent the next 30 yers making sculpture and propping the whole thing up with private lessons ( no bureacracy, no politicas, no tax ...). I am now retired and livi in Spain, ina small town well away from the coast and all that that implies. Apart, of course, from My Beautiful Launderette, the novel of yours I most remember and admire is The Budha of Suburbia. How thinly disguised some of the characters are.! I have always loved the fusion of Mary Finnegan and David Bowie's mum. That was a time when SE London really felt like it was "where it's at". Not any more! Much that was scruffy and charming has been gentrified, sterile and castrated, and the integration of different races , instead of growing, has gone backwards, and when I go there now (my partner splits her time between Valderrobres and W Norwood, where she has eight grandchildren) I see fewer inclusive groups of young people than I did later on even when living in Tunbridge Wells! Sad! I really admire what you are doing. Keep up the good work!
Your body may be greatly limited in terms of motion but your dynamic account of daily activity on the ward, which advances at a steady pace through space and time, abounds with life and with observations that blossom as they assume visual form in the mind – like the long meandering take through the back corridors and kitchens of the restaurant in Goodfellas, or in Russian Ark, which was filmed in a continuous unbroken shot though the eyes of the protagonist, as he moves through different eras of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. There is anguish and there are frustrations, and doubts and fears in regard to what the future might hold after you are discharged, but I also sense a lessening of the overriding gloom that has bubbled over from your previous dispatches. I see a man with a sense of purpose who is leaning into the world.
I think there is an inversion of a creation myth to be told, where the ancestors of humankind leave the oceans and seas to try their luck on the land. Eventually, a handful who have been seriously injured and disabled while hunting woolly mammoth, or as a result some other prehistoric mishap, drag themselves back to the water where they are delighted to find that they are able to walk again and move around in the shallows. A handful decide to return to the oceans permanently where they become whales. Maybe the story is being told by a man to his young son, as an explanation as to why he never joins the whaling parties. He had a disabled brother who disappeared when he was a child. Though he privately suspects that the boy suffered a darker fate, in the presence of his child he entertains the notion that his sibling found his way back to the sea and lives there still.
And who could have guessed that crippled old woman who was once known to abide in solitude, in a tumbledown stone cottage, on the shores of Her Lake, at night entered the waters and wandered upright among the weeds, under the enchanted moonlight, as the Lady of the Lake.
One of the life-affirming aspects of working in healthcare is witnessing the resilience of those who have been permanently disadvantaged by illness or injury, or both: The tragic young men on your ward, smuggling in dope; their spirits bearing the chips and scars of their misfortunes, but not yet broken. (As I write this I am listening to Sleep's bludgeoning hour-long stoner rock opus - Dopesmoker, which re-imagines Christianity as a weed cult, and describes a religious pilgrimage by 'lungsmen' and weed priests across the sands of an alien world, towards Jerusalem. I regard it as a Christmas song, in the same contrarian way that some people consider Die Hard to be a Christmas film).
Nick Cave once mentioned that sometimes, while disciplining his young son, he found it hard to keep a straight face. I know how he feels. Two friends of a patient on the Stroke and Neuro Rehab Ward, took advantage of a supermarket offer on wine, They smuggled the bottles into the bay where the three of them proceeded to get drunk as Lords. It was funny and horrifying at the same time.
A couple of years before, when I was working in Oncology, a terminally-ill woman asked me the way to the nuclear medicine department. Knowing that is was an easy place to walk past, I told her: “I'll take you all the way.”
“It's been a long time since anybody said that to me,” she cackled, as she grabbed a handful of my arse. I didn't begrudge it. I can tell the difference between actions that are driven by malice and those that are governed by other wayward impulses. In her own way she was telling me that, even after the horizon stops moving away from you as you move towards it, you hold onto your humanity; the same drives remain and, even in the depths of illness, that bright spark of life can still kindle behind the eye.
I’ve written for a living for thirty years, yet I find myself deliciously and completely unable to express why this simple reflection of your trip to the gym brought tears to my eyes. I’m just going to stay here a bit. Stay with you a bit.
Dec 9, 2023·edited Dec 9, 2023Liked by Hanif Kureishi
Hi Hanif you are sounding good , great to hear about the swimming- walking and about going home and the book. Great to read you all the time, an artist can't stop being an artist, and in a way that is what saves him-her. Good to hear you will be home after so long, changes are always a challenge and a chance. You are amazing. Much love.
Amazing stuff. Thank you for the ongoing inspiration.
We met years ago at Riverside Studios where you were teaching a course, and I was performing. Then again at the Cannes Film Festival. You inspired me to write, and as a result, I have written several short stories, a full-length film script, three plays (still working on the third), a TV series in progress, and a novel outlined to date. Could write more but find it difficult to dedicate the time and space in all I do.
Good luck with your move, and hope you get better soon. MUST!
Hanif just a small thing from me as it’s come into my head and stuck there - it’s the thing about you eating. It has brought back the last time I shared a meal with mum / I chose a place near to the sea front and ordered fish and chips - I just had chips as I’m vegan but anyhow it arrived and looked so beautiful on the plate - we got on a decent outside table it was a good fine fresh day too. Mum made tiny moves with her meal / she said Maddi I’m sorry I’m so slow. I said it’s ok mum. It didn’t matter how long it took - people that love you won’t mind Hanif. They’ll just be glad you made it. Your writing always brings something up from the deep and this is what it brought today. It isn’t long for your next adventure- and all that brings. You must have made an impact on so many others in limbo in pain in despair - and then on us out here. It’s so tempting to countdown as you are so close to your leaving. With lots of thoughts and care from the tiny village in Norrh Yorkshire Maddi x
Extraordinary writing as always - rich in detail, emotion and sensation (right down to the weed).
The swimming pool scene reminds me of the glee of my younger brother Edward who had a Glioblastoma which, in the process of taking his life, paralysed him on one side. He too was lifted and descended into a pool, and just beamed so brightly. I was with him in the water. None of us wanted to get out. It was a whole new lease of life.
The transition home will be a whole new experience... transitions are just not the same as "change" - or the "event". May you, your wife, and all other friends, family and carers be gentle with you and themselves during the process. Go gently. Especially with yourself.
I am over the moon for you about the swimming-walking, and the freedom and movement and exhilaration you felt in your body. You're in your element writing, making observations and connections, and now you have this new element too. xx
Dear Hanif, Your writing so raw, your observations so tactile--I’m gobsmacked again. I want you to go swimming every day! We must find you a new home with an indoor pool. I am thinking that Shattered will be a raving success, a remunerative sunburst that will pay for the new home with the pool. This is my dream for you today. Your loving reader, Lorraine
That small and perfect read is breathtaking - for its inspirational quality. You sound kind of excited which feels miraculous. The water experience seems especially momentous. Bloody hell. There I was, pondering the state of the world and feeling sad. Now I feel hopeful. Much appreciated. I marvel that your writing has the power to do that. Brilliant.
Sandy, I came here to say the same, but you said it so much better. Happy for you, Hanif.
Dear Hanif, I see you met Will Pike. His father is a university friend and I wrote about how appallingly he was treated by the British government after his ordeal. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/10/will-pike-taj-hotel-mumbai-terror-attacks
Best Linda Grant
Hi Linda, this is Hanif here. Yes I just read your piece. Thanks for following me on this blog. I hope we can stay in touch. Ive always liked your journalism.
Best wishes H x
I’ve followed you since your first tweet. Always read your updates. If I can email you I can say more. Xx
That's a very sobering read. Glad he made it through the next 14 years or so with his spirit intact- thanks for posting the link.
thank you for connecting some important dots, Linda
Dear Hanif, I am going to carry with me into the day the image of you swimming. And hope that the experience in the water enlarges, over time, to your swimming in the world. I hope when you are reviewing what you have written for the book you will allow yourself to marvel at the energy (even in despair) and truth of it, so you will have the amazing experience those of us reading the blog have been having, of being in the presence of the real thing.
Leaving the security of the hospital is scary. But you have the light of your awareness of that fear to help you--to experience it and then have space to experience all the other things and feelings that will see you forward.
Always wishing the best for you and your family.
Your loving reader, Patricia
Hanif, you won't remember me, but I remember you. You were a student at çbromley tech for a while with my wife, Fiona Brown, as your English lecturer. While she took maternity leave I stood in for some of her classes and remember meeting you there. Fiona and I went out separate ways, and I, after a spell of running an English department in a bilingual school in Bogotá for three years, decided that I had had it with institutional education, came back to the UK and spent the next 30 yers making sculpture and propping the whole thing up with private lessons ( no bureacracy, no politicas, no tax ...). I am now retired and livi in Spain, ina small town well away from the coast and all that that implies. Apart, of course, from My Beautiful Launderette, the novel of yours I most remember and admire is The Budha of Suburbia. How thinly disguised some of the characters are.! I have always loved the fusion of Mary Finnegan and David Bowie's mum. That was a time when SE London really felt like it was "where it's at". Not any more! Much that was scruffy and charming has been gentrified, sterile and castrated, and the integration of different races , instead of growing, has gone backwards, and when I go there now (my partner splits her time between Valderrobres and W Norwood, where she has eight grandchildren) I see fewer inclusive groups of young people than I did later on even when living in Tunbridge Wells! Sad! I really admire what you are doing. Keep up the good work!
Your body may be greatly limited in terms of motion but your dynamic account of daily activity on the ward, which advances at a steady pace through space and time, abounds with life and with observations that blossom as they assume visual form in the mind – like the long meandering take through the back corridors and kitchens of the restaurant in Goodfellas, or in Russian Ark, which was filmed in a continuous unbroken shot though the eyes of the protagonist, as he moves through different eras of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. There is anguish and there are frustrations, and doubts and fears in regard to what the future might hold after you are discharged, but I also sense a lessening of the overriding gloom that has bubbled over from your previous dispatches. I see a man with a sense of purpose who is leaning into the world.
I think there is an inversion of a creation myth to be told, where the ancestors of humankind leave the oceans and seas to try their luck on the land. Eventually, a handful who have been seriously injured and disabled while hunting woolly mammoth, or as a result some other prehistoric mishap, drag themselves back to the water where they are delighted to find that they are able to walk again and move around in the shallows. A handful decide to return to the oceans permanently where they become whales. Maybe the story is being told by a man to his young son, as an explanation as to why he never joins the whaling parties. He had a disabled brother who disappeared when he was a child. Though he privately suspects that the boy suffered a darker fate, in the presence of his child he entertains the notion that his sibling found his way back to the sea and lives there still.
And who could have guessed that crippled old woman who was once known to abide in solitude, in a tumbledown stone cottage, on the shores of Her Lake, at night entered the waters and wandered upright among the weeds, under the enchanted moonlight, as the Lady of the Lake.
One of the life-affirming aspects of working in healthcare is witnessing the resilience of those who have been permanently disadvantaged by illness or injury, or both: The tragic young men on your ward, smuggling in dope; their spirits bearing the chips and scars of their misfortunes, but not yet broken. (As I write this I am listening to Sleep's bludgeoning hour-long stoner rock opus - Dopesmoker, which re-imagines Christianity as a weed cult, and describes a religious pilgrimage by 'lungsmen' and weed priests across the sands of an alien world, towards Jerusalem. I regard it as a Christmas song, in the same contrarian way that some people consider Die Hard to be a Christmas film).
Nick Cave once mentioned that sometimes, while disciplining his young son, he found it hard to keep a straight face. I know how he feels. Two friends of a patient on the Stroke and Neuro Rehab Ward, took advantage of a supermarket offer on wine, They smuggled the bottles into the bay where the three of them proceeded to get drunk as Lords. It was funny and horrifying at the same time.
A couple of years before, when I was working in Oncology, a terminally-ill woman asked me the way to the nuclear medicine department. Knowing that is was an easy place to walk past, I told her: “I'll take you all the way.”
“It's been a long time since anybody said that to me,” she cackled, as she grabbed a handful of my arse. I didn't begrudge it. I can tell the difference between actions that are driven by malice and those that are governed by other wayward impulses. In her own way she was telling me that, even after the horizon stops moving away from you as you move towards it, you hold onto your humanity; the same drives remain and, even in the depths of illness, that bright spark of life can still kindle behind the eye.
That whale story is amazing Sam
Been reading awhile. My first comment.
Thank you. Again, Thank you.
I’ve written for a living for thirty years, yet I find myself deliciously and completely unable to express why this simple reflection of your trip to the gym brought tears to my eyes. I’m just going to stay here a bit. Stay with you a bit.
Hi Hanif you are sounding good , great to hear about the swimming- walking and about going home and the book. Great to read you all the time, an artist can't stop being an artist, and in a way that is what saves him-her. Good to hear you will be home after so long, changes are always a challenge and a chance. You are amazing. Much love.
Amazing stuff. Thank you for the ongoing inspiration.
We met years ago at Riverside Studios where you were teaching a course, and I was performing. Then again at the Cannes Film Festival. You inspired me to write, and as a result, I have written several short stories, a full-length film script, three plays (still working on the third), a TV series in progress, and a novel outlined to date. Could write more but find it difficult to dedicate the time and space in all I do.
Good luck with your move, and hope you get better soon. MUST!
Hanif just a small thing from me as it’s come into my head and stuck there - it’s the thing about you eating. It has brought back the last time I shared a meal with mum / I chose a place near to the sea front and ordered fish and chips - I just had chips as I’m vegan but anyhow it arrived and looked so beautiful on the plate - we got on a decent outside table it was a good fine fresh day too. Mum made tiny moves with her meal / she said Maddi I’m sorry I’m so slow. I said it’s ok mum. It didn’t matter how long it took - people that love you won’t mind Hanif. They’ll just be glad you made it. Your writing always brings something up from the deep and this is what it brought today. It isn’t long for your next adventure- and all that brings. You must have made an impact on so many others in limbo in pain in despair - and then on us out here. It’s so tempting to countdown as you are so close to your leaving. With lots of thoughts and care from the tiny village in Norrh Yorkshire Maddi x
Subscribed 💕
I so love reading your blogs. Heading off to my laptop so I can subscribe ...
Extraordinary writing as always - rich in detail, emotion and sensation (right down to the weed).
The swimming pool scene reminds me of the glee of my younger brother Edward who had a Glioblastoma which, in the process of taking his life, paralysed him on one side. He too was lifted and descended into a pool, and just beamed so brightly. I was with him in the water. None of us wanted to get out. It was a whole new lease of life.
The transition home will be a whole new experience... transitions are just not the same as "change" - or the "event". May you, your wife, and all other friends, family and carers be gentle with you and themselves during the process. Go gently. Especially with yourself.
Shattered.
A good title for the book.
Dear Hanif,
SO GLAD to read today's post! Your account of the day filled with so much activity and interesting bits, the pace, the energy. Something has turned.
Your loving reader,
Jane
I am over the moon for you about the swimming-walking, and the freedom and movement and exhilaration you felt in your body. You're in your element writing, making observations and connections, and now you have this new element too. xx
Dear Hanif, Your writing so raw, your observations so tactile--I’m gobsmacked again. I want you to go swimming every day! We must find you a new home with an indoor pool. I am thinking that Shattered will be a raving success, a remunerative sunburst that will pay for the new home with the pool. This is my dream for you today. Your loving reader, Lorraine