Time To Go Home? 7/29/10

I once told Steven Spielberg that ET was the greatest film ever made.

I had managed to crash a post BAFTA Awards party by crawling through the legs of people queuing to get into the venue. Once inside, I hovered by the late, great Bill Cotton, who introduced me to the director, who had just won an award for Schindler’s List.

“I know you’ve just won an award for another film,” I said, “but I have to tell you that I think ET is the greatest film ever made.”

“Gee,” said Spielberg. “D’you know, I was thinking about that film last Friday, and I think you could well be right.”

I maintain that it is still the greatest. It has all the monumental themes: separation and loss; life, death and resurrection; survival, friendship, science versus the heart, and, in its final denouement, the need to belong: ET, phone home; ET, home, home, home.

“Come’” says ET to Elliott, as they stand beside the waiting to depart spaceship.

“Stay,” says Elliott. In those two words, you have it all: we want to hold on, we need to let go.

That scene remains, for me, in just two words, the greatest in cinematic history.

I’ve been thinking about it again this week, as the pull of home grows strong once more. I’ve been here 15 months, and each time I go back to the UK, it is harder to return. I see family and friends, spend time in my house, surrounded by my familiar things, and never does my identity feel so strong as it does when back in Wales.

Usually, my mother comes to stay with me when I return, but this time I visited her. She lives in the house in Bristol, where she and my father moved after my brother and I left school. My Dad died a little over 20 years ago, but there are still signs of him everywhere: photographs on the mantelpiece and the wall; the Capodimonte Romeo and Juliet his firm gave to Mum when he died; the G Plan dining room suite my parents were so excited to buy decades ago, and which still looks perfect.

Walking up the stairs is to climb the family tree. My brother and I are there in our university caps and gowns; the beautiful face of my dear cousin Sarah, who died at just 34 nearly five years ago, looks out with her mischievous smile; aged aunts and grandparents stain the wall in their sepia colours.

In my bedroom (we still call it “mine”), the oaky smell of the square wooden jewellery box in which I stored my first trinkets, still permeates the room; the white bedroom furniture that arrived over 40 years ago and thrilled me so much with its in-built electric light, is still standing (and operational).

In my mother’s office, there are the books I left behind. A Course in Miracles; a poetry compilation the size of two bricks and whose title I cannot see, as neither my mother nor I will ever be able to reach it; dog-eared cookery books.

Downstairs, I go through the LPs that I want to load onto a memory stick from the system Mum bought me for Christmas. Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood; the Misa Criola and African Sanctus, which Mum played incessantly when she returned from a drama course at Barry Summer School; Elvis and the Beatles; Roy Orbison and Tom Jones; Shirley Bassey and Abba. Our family’s past, imprinted in vinyl.

Mum cooks me dinner (a “mam” dinner, as we call it – real food, with gravy) and we drink tea from two of the many mugs she used to buy from Ewenny pottery, always insisting that we stop off there on our way back from the beach (beach, two hours; pottery, four – that sort of thing).

It was a miracle there was even room for the purchases, given what she used to pack for our weekly trips to Southerndown, near Bridgend, where I grew up.

Beach chairs, table, Lilo, Floatina, wind-break, lounger, deck chairs, towel wraps, Tupperware containers of squash and sandwiches, flasks of tea – the tide was so far out by the time we reached the coast with our second home, we needed a compass to find it.

I think of the many dinners Mum used to cook – meat and two veg, plus a pudding every day – all of it coming back in the rise of the steam as she tips the potatoes into the colander. And I think how much I love my mother and the life she and Dad gave me and my wonderful brother Nigel.

And suddenly I know that much as I try, much as I am energised by my new life, I cannot start making a new history, especially in a country that barely has one of its own, and that I miss the history of which I am already a part: a history still in the making, with friends and family celebrating new ventures and achievements, and children (many of whom I have known since they were babies) growing into adults and just starting to make their way in the world.

But also people close to me, young and old, falling sick, suffering; some dying. I don’t want to regret not being there to spend whatever time any of us have left together.

There is so much to love about California. I admire the spirit of optimism, the belief that anything is possible and, of course, I adore the weather. As a writer, I try to cram in as many experiences as I can, and this, despite heartache along the way, has been one of the best. I have also completed two books here, one of which will be a compilation of these blogs.

I have made good friends and I do not rule out keeping on my apartment. But at the moment, the longing for the homeland that the Welsh call "hiraeth", tugs at my heart. Who knows, if I had crawled through enough legs, Hollywood might have held more allure, but I have found this small part of the city, with its detritus of mostly broken Hollywood dreams, a little sad.

Next week, it is a year since my good friend and mentor Blake Snyder, who was so instrumental in my coming here, suddenly died; and that, too, has been a salient reminder of how quickly everything can be snatched away.

I divide my life now into BB and AB – Before Blake and After Blake, and I am not the same person who came here in April 2009.

But in the words of the song about that great hero of my youth, Andy Pandy: Time to go home, Time to go home.

Home Alone 5/5/09

I’ve just returned from the UK after my first visit there since de-camping to LA at the beginning of April. I get very emotional when I fly. For nine years, fear of terrorist attack stopped me from going near a plane, and then, ironically, along came September 11th 2001 and I thought: what the hell.

Now, I love flying, especially long haul between the UK and LA, where I am guaranteed 11 hours without my phone ringing and where, yesterday, I managed to get 5000 words written of my new book that I am convinced will make me very rich indeed.

I had the idea on the treadmill at the Marriott Hotel in Swiss Cottage (or the Regent’s Park Marriott, as they cleverly call it – trust me, there’s a difference). Most of my good ideas come on the treadmill these days, in pretty much the same way that they used to come to me in bars, when I was drinking. The difference is that when I leave the treadmill, I can remember them.

I was in London for Blake Snyder’s fantastic Beats course (any budding screenwriter should take it – you will leave a different person from the one who went in, I guarantee it), which I had taken in LA, albeit in a different form. In LA, a group of 12 worked on their individual projects; in London we worked in groups and, by the end of the two days, had five workable screenplays between us.

It’s a long time since I worked in any sort of group, and they are fascinating: a place where everyone exposes their strengths and weaknesses in unison; and what usually happens is that you see that people’s weaknesses are their strengths pushed to the extreme. My strength, for instance, is that I have loads of ideas; my weakness is my passion for them and, as a result, my reluctance to let them go (or, heaven forbid, allow other people to develop them and try to claim half the credit).

I loved meeting Kim, a fiction editor with Mills and Boon, who, I think, will be a lifelong friend. As I am 20 years older than her, “life” won’t be quite as long in her case, but at least it’s someone else who can say nice things about me at my funeral. I was revealing my innermost secrets to her by the end of Sunday afternoon and, as happens among women, we were soon laughing hysterically about rather painful issues of the heart.

Of course, I don’t want my funeral to take place for a long time and, God willing, it won’t. I don’t think much about dying these days, whereas when I was drinking it was on my mind pretty much every minute of every day. I suspect that was because I knew, deep down, that every drop of alcohol propels you two steps towards the grave, and one is already too quick in my book.

It may be a tiny drop you imbibe (and I am not critical of anyone who chooses to drink – it’s your funeral, as they say); it may be a lot; and, of course, many people are able to drink in moderation. But it’s still a poison and, while life is often undoubtedly more difficult without it, it’s better – or, if not always better, different, and exciting for being so.

But I’ve been thinking about drinking a lot the past few days: not because I want to revert to it, but because of all the places you expect to be able to avoid it – ie on a plane, over the Atlantic – this proved to the place where I was most exposed to it.

On the way to the UK, I flew Air New Zealand Business Class, where if I had been given a pound for every time I was offered a glass of wine, I could have paid for another return flight. It was the same on Virgin on the way back. Luckily, I detest New Zealand wines, and Mr Branson’s selection, as I learned last year, is no better, so temptation was never an option. But even had they had a Petrus, I would still have been able to say no.

I have gone from someone who says “I’m not drinking at the moment” to someone who says “I don’t drink”, and I genuinely don’t think about it – most of the time. But when someone is waving a bottle of champagne in your face and saying “Are you sure you don’t want a glass”, it’s hard to avoid the subject.

What not drinking does is leave you more time: thinking time, and because exercise has replaced the time I used to spend chatting in bars, I do a lot more thinking these days. The Marriott pool at Swiss Cottage has to be the most stupidly designed of any in the world. At its deepest, it is one metre; the shallow end is 0.5 metres. What they don’t tell you is how dangerous this can be when you’re swimming a length and suddenly your arm goes over in a crawl in the deep end, only to crash down on the bottom of the pool in the shallow end.

Luckily, I am a bad swimmer and keep my head above water, so I always know what’s coming, be it a shark or the shallow end; my friend was not so lucky and, with head below the surface, first knew of the change when he cracked his skull.

There is nothing quite like running or swimming to give you thinking time (squash, for example, doesn’t work on this front), and on Sunday morning, I sat in the shallow end of the pool (it was good for some things) and just cried and cried. Tears like I haven’t shed in years (although had I been in Cardiff on Saturday and watched my team the Blues lose out in the semi-final of the Heineken Cup on the first ever penalty kick-off against Leicester, I think I would have cried then).

The intensity of the creative process on a writing weekend inevitably brings things to the surface (a bit like the Marriott pool, really) – good and bad – and resurrects old wounds, alongside the formation of new friendships and ties. And, flying across continents, I think I was crying not for home, but because I’m not sure where home is anymore.

Having spent the last few years between the UK, Paris and Spain, and now being based in the States, there is nothing like sitting alone in the middle of an empty pool to reinforce the metaphor of aloneness.

Feeling a bit vulnerable, before boarding I became terrified again that I would never land and started texting my friends. Now, one of the pieces of advice everyone gives you when you’re pissed is: Don’t drink and text. I think that one of the biggest surprises to me when I gave up is that being sober doesn’t stop you. It’s not alcohol that drives you to bare your soul on your mobile; it’s just you!

It’s another reason why I, and my friends, are happy when I embark on another 11 hour flight. In space, nobody can hear me text.