The Arvon Friends Office has been collecting some delicious words on friendship. Here’s some turns of phrase for all friends out there. (Thanks to Sara for compiling these.)

Jane Austen -
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.

Italian Proverb -
He who finds a friend, finds a treasure

Jane Austen -
Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.

C S Lewis -
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.”

Sir Francis Bacon -
We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.

Oscar Wilde -
True friends stab you in the front.

W H Auden -
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

William Blake -
The bird a nest
     the spider a web
          the human friendship.

Virginia Woolf
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Mark Twain -
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

William Shakespeare (from Much Ado about Nothing) -
Friendship is constant in all other things save in the office and affairs of love . . . 

I want zany words nudging each other
Giggling teenage girls
Tottering on gangly loops,
Hiccoughing glottal stops.
I want singing sounds
Punning, balancing
Acrobats across two sentences
To clutter syntax.
Underground, beneath words,
Dark roots grow, birth
Flowers of meaning.

40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.

Words, Wittgenstein’s net, to grasp the world -
and many worlds. One single word
wafts myriad thoughts: ‘free’ ‘fuck’ ‘global’…
Words, jewel-nets, webnets
connect emotions, link shared meanings -
over continents, as I skype Dalits*.
Words translate, communicate, obfuscate,
challenge, overcome, transform.

* Ex-Untouchables

40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.

Words connect inside out and the outside to within. Like worker bees they can nourish or sting, so choose them well like quality chocolates, for you might have to eat them. And once they’re out, they can’t go back in.

When intimidated by the vast emptiness of the page, a word is a risk.
It denotes a life of contemplation, with no delusions of grandeur.
The immeasurable interim of the page is my host.
With words, I mark my space.

Words, meaningful, meaningless vibrations to the outer wor(l)ds, reverberations to the inner ones. Words abuse, confuse, profuse, they are tantamount, Tao mantras with silences. Atoms are the smallest unit of matter, words the smallest unit of speech.

40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.

For me, words are important for the way they engage the emotions - whether it’s through angry song lyrics or funny TV dialogue. As a writer, you hope your words will find their way out there to connect with someone.

Language stopped by laryngitis, thinking blocked by sinusitis, reading blurred by blefaritis, word-processing curbed by spondylitis…So grasp words to allay suffering: images of impermanence, cloudfree skies alleviating mind-pain; meditate on ‘Truth, Beauty’ and ‘Damn blasts’ and writings of Goethe.

40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.

In 2000, having written two novels for children and having had one accepted by a small Scottish publisher, I registered for an Arvon course on Writing for Children in Moniak. I was terrified, as up to that point I had been writing in isolation and had no contact whatsoever with writers of any description. Indeed  the last time I read anything out that I had written was as a schoolgirl. To cut a long story short, the Arvon week proved formative. Not only did I get the opportunity to talk to professional writers for the first time and pick their brains (the brilliant Cathy McPhail and Theresa Breslin) but I had an opportunity to read an extract of my embryonic novel for Young Adults to a critical audience and to receive impartial feedback and constructive criticism. Those days at Arvon utterly galvanised me and now, eight years on and twelve novels later I am a professional, full-time writer.

I would recommend an Arvon course for ANYONE who wants to write. In a nurturing and supportive environment, new writers can try their wings. Michael Morpurgo is right: there should be a thousand Arvons. Visit my website.

BEGIN….

No. You won’t get him. I was told. Don’t waste your time. Impossible. But I have always been stubborn and instinctive, and I knew that Anthony Minghella had a profound love of Beckett. I had seen it in the way he had directed Play for Channel 4. So I dared to do, believing never say never, and asked him to write a radio play to mark Samuel Beckett’s centenary. And he replied and said he would - but only if he could direct it too. But he wouldn’t charge Hollywood rates. Just the standard BBC rate would do. Elegiac, at times funny and intensely poetic, Eyes Down Looking was Anthony’s first radio play for 20 years.

‘You run the comb through the experience of your life, and  some things stick. And you don’t know why they do.  What DO they do, when we tell them to each other? What are they for?’

That’s what he said his play was about - the way our lives become stories even to ourselves, which we tell to others, pass on, and then get transformed. Like  his great hero Samuel Beckett, Anthony believed that mankind is at heart, a storytelling animal, making sense out of pain and laughter, death and life, by telling tales. And like Beckett, Anthony also believed profoundly in the power of words, weighing them up carefully even when he spoke in his characteristically resonant voice with a reverence he so clearly felt each one deserved.

‘Do you think that word at the end of the 9th is right on the 13th page?

‘I am not sure about the balance of that line starting ‘the medal we bought him with the St Christopher on it and the wrong phone number on it.’

‘How do you think it would sound if we overlapped Mother’s voice on top of the Father’s?’

For 2 months, we exchanged phonecalls, texts and emails about Eyes Down Looking. He was excited and energised,  and we worked together crazily on it, across time zones and geography,  scrutinising every line of the emerging play, swapping notes and thoughts. He was in Lithuania producing an opera one week, then in New York another. I was talking to  him in between talking to scientists in the Ukraine and Russia about nuclear physics. I was investigating a documentary to mark another anniversary - the Chernobyl disaster. But between us we found the gaps in time and space to  work, work, work on this marvelous play. And it was the love of words which linked us.  The ones on the computer screen. Or by text. Or the  ones in the post. And I found I had the intense pleasure of working with someone who had the same passion to get it absolutely right - right to the very end. To that final full stop. Then silence.

“At the beginning of my life, I was an ill-educated and beligerant 6th former, who applied to do a drama degree at Hull, and then fell in love with Beckett in the most profound and adolescent way. He damaged me for life.”

It was characteristic of Anthony, that he would tell  this story of his interview for a place at Hull with a disarming frankness. He confessed he had never heard of Beckett before he stepped into the interview room. So when he was asked about the great Irish writer in the interview, he blagged, remembering the words on the spine of a book. ‘Yes I love Beckett’s ennui.’ He had got it all comically wrong.  But he also got it comically right too. He was offered the place at Hull and became inspired by Beckett. Went on to do a doctorate on him at Reading. Become a Patron of the Beckett International Foundation.

“Like Bach, Beckett has a mathematical language for the heart. He asks us why we write. Everytime you read something of Beckett’s, it asks us questions, demands a rigorous perfection, and makes us confront the necessity of writing.”

Anthony speaking again. Remembering Beckett. Reflecting on his writing.  What are the words for? What is the sky for? Those are Anthony’s words in Eyes Down Looking. But they could be Beckett’s too. But that’s not the ‘all of it’. Because writing is also about memory - our relationship with time. ‘Eyes Down Looking’ confronts us also with the necessity of remembering. The play was infused  by Anthony’s obsessions, shown clearly in his film ‘Truly Madly Deeply’  - his interest in ghosts and the twilight world of the line between life and death.

“Every day when I am in London, I walk across the heath to my office. I see these benches and I ask myself. Why do people put names on park benches. Part of our fiction, good or bad, is to comfort us that all the ghosts have a place in our life.”

These are the things I remember about Anthony. These words and thoughts. Intensely. But also laughter too. The sheer vaudeville in Eyes Down Looking, with the Father figure played by David Threlfall, the bingo caller in denial, calling the numbers like some spiv.  ‘God’s in Heaven, number seven.’

“Laughter is the key to Beckett. His work is rooted in the vaudeville tradition. You have to remember, that if Beckett was sitting here with you today, he would be talking about Buster Keaton. The vaudeville tradition was a close tenplate for him
 and his writing. The profound agony and silliness of it all.”

The why of it all.

Those words. In place.

A year later, I am working for the Arvon Foundation. Anthony is one of the charity’s most devoted Patrons. He organised the extraordinary Love Letters fundraising event. He taught on our courses.  Ian McMillan, the poet, who presents The Verb for BBC Radio 3 and with whom I worked, started his life as a young writer on an Arvon course and became inspired.

The paths which join us. That’s a phrase Anthony used.

Anthony’s third play. The lost play. The play no-one has mentioned in the obituaries. But it’s a profound play.  A great play.  Close to his heart. So much so, that he asked for the broadcast rights to it, so it was only broadcast the once - on April 1st 2006. A ghost - presently absent.

What else? Where to End? To begin again -  A wide heart, laughter, profound sincerity, an all encompassing love of words  - Anthony.

‘Eyes Down Looking’ written and directed by Anthony Minghella was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 April 1st 2006 on The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan. The play starred Juliet Stevenson, Jude Law and David Threlfall. The producer was Ariane Koek.