ANNA BLUNDY

I am Josef Vissarionovich

26th January 2012 | 2 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Chapter One

The patient was crouched on his bed, rickety knees to his hollow chest, black eyes staring towards the small barred window, out to the pale grey sky. It was snowing in relentless wet streaks, but the room where he huddled was blisteringly hot. Only a few feet wide and ten feet long, it was heated by a gurgling, institutional radiator, coated in the early 1950s in thick, cream-coloured gloss...

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We Know It and They Know It: It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes

30th September 2011 | 3 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

We Know It and They Know It - It's The Emperor's New Clothes

(A quick response to all your comments and messages – could probably do with a really good Daily Mail-style edit…)

The response to a blog I wrote about writing for The Daily Mail has been astonishing. I have had hundreds of messages, mostly from journalists who have had similar experiences writing for The Mail and other papers and magazines....

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No Need to Hack Phones – We Stitch Ourselves up

26th September 2011 | 64 comments | 3 people like this

Anyone who has ever written a feature for the Daily Mail knows what it feels like. You only have to read the features pages to understand that something strange is going on – lots of first person pieces all written in the same style, with the same vocabulary, the same mawkish self-revelatory nature and bizarre turn of phrase. Who are these people who all write exactly alike, suffer bereavements, mental...

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Two Letters From My Father

18th May 2011 | 3 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

My mother is moving house and she found all these letters. Some I have read since and included in my book about my dad, published in 1998 and called Every Time We Say Goodbye. These two, and hundreds of others, I hadn’t reread since I received them. He was killed in 1989, when I was 19, reporting the war in El Salvador.

1 Undated and typed in capital letters, this is...

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Letting Go of the Moon

8th March 2011 | 3 comments | 1 person likes this

Driving through France last week, my children were watching Despicable Me on my laptop in the back of the car.  At one point the anti-hero is trying to steal the moon and still make it back in time for his adopted daughters’ dance recital. I know this because I was listening from the driver’s seat, having to imagine what the scenes looked like. He is cutting it very fine and...

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The Gym – the perfect arena for displaying infantile anxiety

16th November 2010 | 2 comments | 1 person likes this

I was at the gym yesterday. I did a ‘Total Body’ class – a lot of squats, weights and sit ups.  Then I mooched about in the sauna. Lovely. While I was getting dressed again I overheard a big row about something that had apparently happened underneath our noses in Total Body. One woman, in her matching underwear ensemble, was saying: ‘She came in late and moved my step! My...

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My analyst kicked me out of bed

6th October 2010 | 0 comments | 1 person likes this

My analyst told me we should start seeing other people. It was a strange experience. I first clomped self-consciously up the stairs in his Victorian (could be Edwardian) house in a grim area of North London when I was 25.  I had realised very slowly that my state of constant terror, insomnia and blind panic was actually something I needed to address. I lived on my own and, as my...

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The More They Talk, The Less They Mean

26th July 2010 | 2 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

I was sitting on a friend’s terrace the other night surrounded by olive trees in big terracotta pots, stars flicking on one by one in the darkening sky and the (many) children watching Home Alone II projected on to a whole wall inside.

My friend, who has a pale pink and green straw hat designed to look like a cabbage, though she was not wearing it, said:

‘I only find men attractive...

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An Ex’s Wedding

21st June 2010 | 2 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

A breakfast meeting at Claridges was embarrassing in a white fox fur wrap. All the Russians and Americans were in jeans and my date was in a track suit and just out of the shower. She clearly has breakfast there every day and she went round the room slapping the odd solitary general on the back before she sat down. The waiter put her usual in front of her before...

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