The mind is a secret place. We love, we resent, we fear, we wonder, we imitate (oh, how disingenuously we do that!) we change, we conform and usually with little awareness why these states are occupying us. It is as if the world our mental faculties survey swarms with violent mannerisms and tics and it is purely a matter of chance which ones will innocently pass us by and which will cling and chronically infect us.

Of course I didn’t understand any of that back when I set out to track her down. I was a callow product of the working class, a scholarship girl who had risen above her station. I understood only the hand to mouth business of council estates and the double-edged sword of aspiration. Her name is Edna Cartwright and she was my first literary heroine. She had published a novel called The Ginnel then simply disappeared. Not into thin air but carefully manufactured anonymity. Or so it seemed to me.

You may well have read the book, translated into more than thirty languages, an international bestseller that has since inspired a feature film and a television series. The action takes place on one of those estates that served to rehouse the families displaced by post war slum clearance in the industrial north west of England. It enchanted me. The insightfulness about childhood rivalries and warring neighbours and criminal incompetence could not have been fabricated. Where did this story come from? Who exactly was the author? Why had her creative gift so abruptly expired?

These questions stalked me through my student years and nobody I consulted appeared to know the answers. Eventually in my rookie year as a trainee journalist, ambitious for a scoop, I wrote to Edna’s publisher requesting to be put in contact with their client and I received a polite brush-off. The company was under strict instructions to safeguard her privacy. I was clearly just the most recent in a long line of nosey hacks who had sought to violate it.

A couple of months passed and then by sheer luck I found out through the friend of a friend who worked in a south Manchester hospital that Edna’s widowed mother was being treated as an outpatient for phlebitis and I managed to contact the elderly lady. She had no qualms about passing on a letter from me to her daughter. I had no real reason to believe it would be answered and as autumn turned bleakly into winter my premonition proved correct. Then on February 3 a picture postcard arrived in the mail. A brash technicolour image of Cromer pier on one side and a few scrawled words on the other plus a phone number. “Please ring me to discuss this matter. Edna.”

It transpired she didn’t actually live in Cromer but a few miles north in a picturesque seaside village, one of eight modern homes in a gated community. “Don’t be late,” she advised me once an appointment had been arranged. I travelled there by train from Liverpool Street station then by taxi, arriving twelve minutes early. The communal gardens blazed with daffodils. The fresh salt air instantly disposed of my travel fatigue. As I waited for my doorbell ring to be answered I heard canine yapping distantly within.

“Excellent! Right on time,” Edna was suddenly addressing me. Smaller in stature than I had expected with piercing blue eyes and shoulder length light brown hair held back in bunches.

“You live less reclusively than I’d been given to believe,” I responded foolishly.

“I hate that word,” she amiably rebuked while ushering me towards a choice of plump pink sofas in the lounge. “It makes me sound like a hermit or a nun.” Petite but radiating physical purpose she actually has the persona of a fitness teacher, belying her 51 years. “I’m not at all anti-social,” she confided. “Experience has taught me to be circumspect in my relationships, that’s all.”

We’re off to a flyer. Edna’s obviously open and I jump straight into the space. “So why me then?” I ask. “You’ve never done an interview before, I’m told?”

“In your letter referring to my novel, you said what touched you most was the quality of the pain expressed by the younger sister,” she replied. “If we can’t regain that degree of feeling in our adult selves, that sensitivity, you wrote, then we are truly damned. Exactly right. You hit the nail properly on the head. And nobody to my knowledge ever has.” I am momentarily non-plussed, both surprised and flattered. Then she adds with a grin, “There was a secondary reason for inviting you. I did a spot of googling and it turns out your dad is one of my heroes.”

“Oh, you’ve been to see him for counselling?” I said, stupidly misunderstanding.

“No, for sheer entertainment and excitement,” she corrected me. “Johnnie Skelter, the greatest all rounder of his generation. I’ll never forget his eight wicket haul and unbeaten ton to win us back the Ashes at the Oval.” So, however improbably, I’d got my foot in the door because Edna was a cricket fan! “I knew he’d retrained as a psychotherapist after he retired,” she continued. “I’ve read his memoir – ‘Helter Skelter, when the going gets tough the Jungians get going’. Love that title! May I ask who you work for?”

I answered directly then added a proviso. “But this article, if you permit me to publish it, of course, would not be for them. I’ve already sounded out the Sunday broadsheets and had positive interest from the Observer and the Telegraph. It all depends on the content and that in turn depends on you.”

“Not the bloody Telegraph,” she gently scolded me. “But feel absolutely free to fire away with whatever questions you’ve got.”

I hardly needed any further encouragement. “Well, what every serious reader wants to know is why you’ve never published a second novel.” She gestured as if to imply the matter did not seem relevant to her. “I mean you must have received lucrative advance offers,” I pressed on and Edna nodded her head. “Have you been bereft of ideas?” I asked ineptly.

This made her smile. “That’s one thing I’m never bereft of,” she said and I began to wonder if she had just become too affluent or indolent to be fussed. Writing is hard work. Not everyone needs to be as driven as Tremaine and O’Farrell to replicate their success. On the other hand in the years since the success of The Ginnel Edna had experienced two traumatic losses, her husband Jim and one of her two twin daughters, Sophie. What did I know first hand about such devastation? That stupid word bereft resonated darkly through me and a huge chasm suddenly loomed up between us which I hesitated to transgress. So I asked for a toilet break – to regather my sense of purpose, as much as anything else – and she willingly allowed it.

The bare facts that I had ascertained from internet searches were as follows. Edna and Jim had been childhood sweethearts since their shared primary school days in Oldham. He became apprenticed as an electrician while she took two A levels, advanced to a secretarial college before acquiring her first job at the ITV studios in Manchester as an administrative assistant. Jim had a passionate interest in darts. After winning several amateur tournaments he decided to turn professional and rose quickly up the national rankings. It was during this period that their first daughter Sophie contracted bacterial meningitis and subsequently died aged three and a half. What happened to Jim is less clear. He seems to have suffered from something like a nervous breakdown and eventually committed suicide a few years later. I decided to tack carefully into the tundra of her life.

“When did you first start writing stories?” I asked on re-entering the lounge.

“At school, I suppose,” she recollected. “I used to read them to Jim and he’d encourage me. They were very small beer back then, mind you. A love of sport and stories – that’s what Jim and I always had in common!”

This animated mention of her late husband’s name served to embolden me. “I know you’ve had a couple of tragic losses,” I ventured. “Have they impeded your ability to write? Excuse me for being so direct.”

“Not blocked it exactly,” she reflected, “but certainly curtailed my impetus, especially in the short term. I tend to aim to produce about five hundred words each day. Not less anyway.”

I did a quick calculation. Over a year that would be 180,000 words. More than enough for at least one novel, even allowing for radical revisions. So in twenty-five years, allowing let’s say for two or three fallow grieving years, that’s an enormous amount of verbiage. What had become of it? “Stored in bottom drawers,” she laughed. “Or more recently in computer files. I throw nothing away. I’m a hoarder.”

“So you’ve never wanted to publish anything?” I asked. “I mean your agent and publisher must have nagged you to death!”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” she shrugged. “But there’s nothing I’ve come up with that completely satisfies me. Something is always missing. Characterisation. Narrative structure. Tone of voice. That sort of thing. Do you write stories yourself?” I shook my head. “There are so many elements to a novel. I think of it like juggling with a dozen balls and desperately struggling to keep them all in the air at the same time. Does that make sense?”

It didn’t entirely but I nonetheless pretended it did. “That must be hugely frustrating,” I said. “What keeps you from just giving up?”

“Oh, it’s a habit like anything else,” she replied. “Like brushing your teeth or going to the loo. What did that man Picasso say? Sometimes you’re empty, sometimes you’re full. That’s all there is to the mystery of artistic creation.”

“You consider yourself to be empty in some way, do you?” I asked in surprise.

“Absolutely I do!” she retorted as if I was being disingenuous. “Bored, Unfulfilled. Restless. Incomplete. Broken. Choose your own synonym. Since losing Jim I have always thought of myself as a deflated balloon. A decent session of writing seems to put the air back into me, provides me with a shape – well, at least the temporary illusion of one.”

I found it hard to credit the validity of this. Edna spoke with such energy and clarity. Nothing about her personality suggested insecurity or vacillation. “There’s a couple of other things that stop me from publishing my stories too,” she suddenly added, “if I’m completely honest. The search for quality is one but the search for understanding is just as problematic. You know, I still to this day get mail from people thanking me for confirming their faith in Jesus and the Christian church! The quantity has been incredible. Entirely inadvertently I must have done more than my bit to rescue the religion from its fallacies and contradictions. Only last week I got a letter from the archbishop of La Paz inviting me to Bolivia to talk to trainee priests about what he called ‘my journey with the Lord Jesus’.”

For those who don’t know the plot of Edna’s book, it is about a lonely naive little girl called Donna who befriends a reclusive man renting the adjacent house, separated only by a ginnel. Unaware that Tony is a gold bullion robber on the run from a police hunt, she comes to think of him as her best friend and a substitute for her father who died when she was a baby. Eventually the robber escapes abroad with the loot, only to be murdered by treacherous colleagues. In the final chapters Donna is interviewed by the police and informed what a dangerous and wicked man he was. She is dispatched to her grandparents home in County Durham for a recuperative holiday but finds herself still missing Tony’s company and utterly confused about the accusations made against him. One evening she cannot sleep and goes downstairs to find her grandparents watching a film called Angels With Dirty Faces. “Can’t even a very bad person do things that are good?” she asks them. Grandad answers her consolingly, “Certainly they can. And we’ve got it on the highest authority. Whichever of you is without sin, cast the first stone.”

“It’s crazy that readers have chosen to attribute the belief expressed by this character to me,” said Edna. “To effectively turn my story into a Christian allegory, when all I’ve done is pluck out a rather nice quotation from the bible to mollify a little girl’s grief.” Suddenly the dog who I had entirely forgotten about began yapping in a nearby room. “There goes Sparky,” she announced. “That means we’ve lost another wicket. Excuse me for a minute, I need to see this.” I was summarily left to my own devices and when she returned it was in the company of a Jack Russell terrier who had no compunction about leaping up on the sofa and nuzzling my left ear. “Butler bowled by a googly between bat and pad,” she explained contemptuously. “Didn’t read it.”

Somewhere on an unidentified continent a fifty overs a side cricket match was in progress and Edna had left the dog monitoring it on a satellite television channel, under firm instructions to yelp whenever a wicket fell. “You actually taught Sparky how to do that?” I asked in mild surprise.

“Absolutely. Sparky’s an exceptionally clever dog,” she concurred. “He’s the third generation of terrier who took the part of Eddie in the sitcom, Frasier. You’ve watched Frasier, I assume?” The conversation had veered off in a very unexpected direction but no matter, my task was to stick with it. “I’ve always loved that show,” she continued, “and I couldn’t believe it when Kelsey Grammar wrote me a fan letter saying how much he loved my novel. We became friends and he arranged for me to have one of Enzo’s offspring.”

“Er, Enzo being who exactly?” I asked.

“The second dog who played Eddie,” she replied, replacing Sparky on the floor where he padded back to the door through which he had just entered.

“If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t Sparky your husband’s nickname?” I said.

Edna beamed gratefully at my knowledge. “That’s right. Jim Sparky Spencer,” she confirmed, pointing towards a sideboard where a framed image of the darts icon held pride of place. I took a close up look. Buffonned black hair, Elvis sideburns, lurid yellow T shirt – he stood braced for action on the oche about to take the photographer’s eye out. “I assume you will know about his decline and fall then?” she asked. Was this flippant reference to the Roman Empire a way of masking her residual widow’s grief?

My reply was interrupted by Sparky barking three times in an anguished display of sympathy. Or was it? “Oh, damn it,” Edna cursed, “that’s another wicket gone down. Probably Woakes. A full scale lower order collapse is underway.” She took a quick gander in the TV room and returned with the words, “There’s a video review in progress but it’s hopeless. He was plumb leg before. Where was I?”

“The decline and fall of your Jim,” I reminded her apprehensively.

She dropped back onto the sofa and sighed deeply. “He first started suffering from the yips during the 2003 world championship,” she began. “He’d won it the previous year and was desperate to defend his title. But come the quarter finals everything went pear-shaped. He couldn’t stop his arm from shaking and took a hammering like no other. Of course he sought help from medics and sports psychologists but nothing changed. The yips held him in their vicious grasp and in effect Jim was finished. Chronic depression set in followed by alcohol and cocaine addiction. Violence too. Not against me but blokes he rubbed shoulders with in pubs and the like, envious pricks who taunted him. You can easily imagine the mocking spasms and gibes, can’t you.” This was a question I didn’t honestly know how to answer so I wobbled my head in acquiescence. “I didn’t know what to do. My dad thought I should have him sectioned before he killed someone. In the end he turned the pent up frustration on himself. Put weights in his pockets and jumped into a river.” Edna lapsed into silence, broken after a few seconds by another outbreak of yapping. “This abject surrender is happening even quicker than usual,” she muttered, standing up. “I have to see the action replay.”

While she was out I consulted my smart phone. I had heard the word yips before but wasn’t really sure what it meant. The search engine produced the following explanation: Involuntary wrist spasms that occur most commonly when golfers try to putt. The yips can also affect other types of sports players – such as darts, baseball and cricket. It is thought the condition may be caused by performance anxiety. People in other walks of life may be similarly affected.

“Rashid caught at cow corner failing to execute a slog sweep properly,” Edna exclaimed bitterly as she came back. “I’ve switched the box off now. You must think me a terrible bore? It’s just that I find the whole ritual so very comforting. The rhythm and pace of the game, the dead time between balls being bowled. Cricket makes a perfect addendum to the activities of writing and reading. You lift your head from the page for a brief moment, take in the flight of the ball, the swing of the bat, the reaction of the fielders – then instantly return to that sacred place temporarily vacated in your imagination. The continual transition between fantasy and reality – or perhaps between two different types of fantasy, depending how you look at it? – I just love it. One activity seems to nurture the other. It’s not multi-tasking. Rather it’s a synthesising of vastly different experiences.”

She went on to explain her father had been a very good club cricketer in the Lancashire League and she had been taken from an early age to watch him play. That’s how her love affair with the sport began. The pride she takes in her council estate background became rapidly clear. She spoke fondly of the working men’s clubs that knit communities together and foster a strong sense of shared cultural identity where neither ostentation nor unearned privilege are tolerated. Does she consider herself a socialist? I asked. “More so than many of our university educated MP’s who’ve lost touch with their roots,” she grinned. “I support any policies that redress the structural inequalities caused by free marketism, not to mention the rampant consumerism caused as a consequence.” For a while we talked about immigration and the inexorable rise of populism across Europe. She believes that we are essentially a tolerant nation and that racism is directly nourished by underinvestment in public services and affordable housing. “We should not tolerate racism but equally we should not tolerate the mythology of trickle down economics,” she argued. “Or that half of England is owned by less than one percent of the population.” So how does Labour change all that? I asked and she gestured in despair. “Not by infighting, that’s all I know,” she replied. “It’s a long game, a crusade, a performative art form if you like. What it should not be is a self-serving career! Get elected first then move strategically left if and when you can.”

When I asked her if she had ever written about politics Edna shook her head. “Not in the party political sense you mean,” she replied. “I write about the politics of human experience. The ways we do power to each other.” I wondered if that was her starting point for writing a story? A long reflection ensued before she answered. Do you choose the characters you want to write about? I pressed her. “I think they choose me, not the other way round,” she reflected. “It feels like that anyway. Some people – probably most of them actually – present to me as an enigma. Their behaviour is cranky. Or perhaps I’m intrigued by the wacky set of beliefs they’ve decided to live by. Don’t we all? I believe in social equality and self-actualisation, for instance. How wacky is that in a natural world where everything is red in tooth and claw! I suppose I just try to dig into the contradictions, the mystery of what it means to be a sentient creature, as deeply as I can. I don’t know what my characters will do before I start to write about them. Their actions tend to have very different outcomes from what I initially imagine.”

“So in The Ginnel you didn’t realise that Tony would be murdered by his fellow criminals until you got to the narrative point where it happened?” I asked.

“Correct,” she shot back, “and even then as it happened through the nib of my pen I wasn’t really sure if he was dead. I mean Tony may have survived both the shooting and the drowning. It isn’t clear. At least not to me. The story had to veer away at that moment from the murder scene back to the bereft little girl in England. She remained loyal to Tony. He remained alive in her imagination. So why shouldn’t the same be true for us, the readers?”

“Why do you think the book has had such global popular appeal?” I asked.

“I don’t really know.” considered Edna. “But I have a theory.” I asked her to run it past me and she talked about how most people carry a load of guilt around about stuff they did wrong, failed relationships, lies they’ve told, acts of selfishness and the like. “The baggage only accumulates as we get older,” she continued. “We push most of it out of sight like so much unwanted refuge but it never disappears. It simply suppurates somewhere in our deepest memory banks, emitting toxins. And my story recognises this. All the main characters are haunted by the spectres of their past deeds. But the story goes on to say, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not just you. We’re all in the same boat. Imperfect. Fallible. Guilty. So please try to forgive others just as you should forgive yourself. Never be arrogant in your assumptions of moral rectitude.’ So I think the book overall provides peace of mind, a sense of closure on the mistakes of the past. It promotes a healthy mental attitude.” She gazed forlornly into my eyes then, as if seeking reassurance. “Do you agree?” she asked in a sort of childish whimper. I must have hesitated just a moment too long. “Of course you don’t,” she continued into the void. “Silly of me to ask. Why should you? As postmodern critics insist on telling us, we live in the age of reader entitlement.” Suddenly the doorbell rang and the pooch spiraled out of the room. “That will be lunch!” she declared with a lurch to her feet, adding over her shoulder. “The writer creates stories, the reader mangles them to suit his own meanings.”

It turned out to be a takeaway delivery service. While Edna set everything up on the dining room table I speculated how much that final annunciation seemed to be laced with a potentially disabling resentment. Didn’t she realise people understood the written word only through the filters of their prejudices and ideologies? The market place of literary ideas behaves at best like a lottery, at worst like a whore house. She seemed less than appreciative at having accidentally drawn a winning ticket.

Lunch consisted of crab bisque, salmon quiche and a Greek salad. Sparky enjoyed a special canina casserole. The room in which we ate was painted green and had the ambience of a cricket pavilion. Surely this was taking nostalgic kitsch too far, I thought to myself but said nothing. Paintings and photographs adorned the wall and Edna directed my curiosity with the aid of her knife. Her father huddled with his cricket team. Jim kissing a massive silver trophy. The second daughter, Chrissie, staring somewhat pensively into the middle distance. Out of the blue she disclosed something that almost made me choke on my food. “It’s been five years since she went missing in Thailand.”

“Your daughter? Chrissie?” I coughed in disbelief. How come it got omitted from the bios I’d read? I hesitated to blunder even towards the edges of such a tragedy but Edna relieved me of the obligation.

No lines of inquiry had yet led anywhere. No body recovered. “Eighteen and stubborn as a mule,” Edna elaborated. “Backpacking across Asia on her own. We had a terrible argument about it. Parted as enemies. That’s the one thing keeping the embers of hope alive in my heart. Such strange resilient creatures, aren’t we?” I was lost for words and any further need for nutrition. “Two possibilities,” she continued. “Chrissie’s still disgruntled with me. Or she’s simply punishing me. You know I’m convinced one day I’ll answer the front door bell and there she will stand. ‘Don’t apologise! Don’t weep’ I’ll say. ‘I deserve it all. Every milligram of pain. The joy of your resurrection instantly obliterates it all a hundred times over!’” The terrier groaned somewhere beneath the table. “You must think me a fool,” she continued. “Sparky certainly does. Of course he’s never been a mother. Sometimes I wonder how I am able to cling on to an explanation that any high court jury would dismiss out of hand as delusional – yet cling on I do. This survival mechanism we call Hope is apparently deeply hardwired into my nature.” I tried to reply but couldn’t find the words. “It’s funny how we can believe in two apparently contradictory things at the same time,” she added as an afterthought.

I managed to tell her that, never having been bereaved as yet, I could not possibly make judgements about the disorientation grief might cause someone. “All I know is I am no longer who I once was,” she replied cautiously. “I feel like a void constantly trying to suck substance back into itself. Or perhaps a pile of rubble in the never ending process of rebuilding? I am constantly wondering whether my writing has intrinsic merit or is merely the incoherent ravings of a deranged psyche.” She picked up the bottle and offered me another glass of wine before refreshing her own. “But it’s not entirely unpleasant. Actually it feels like being half cut much of the time.”

After lunch she showed me the set of darts Jim used to win the world championship. Red flights. Gold spikes. Much lighter in my hand than I expected. We entered the study where she kept a board on the wall then suggested we played a 301 match. More by luck than technique I somehow managed to reach the checkout double first, only to fail in four attempts to hit it. Then, my competitive instinct surprisingly aroused, Edna vanquished my hopes with her first attempt at double twelve. “It’s a silly game,” I complained in mild frustration.

“Isn’t it just!” she laughed. “Just like writing stories.”

Given that the panorama of human culture exists with the erudite and scientific at one end of the spectrum and the trivial and absurd at the other, I found this suggestion that propelling baby arrows towards a circular target some 7 feet 9 inches away and constructing beautifully crafted paragraphs of narrative fiction to be in any way comparable a bit crass. “It’s not at all,” she chastised me. “The expert darts player finds the invisible trajectory of flight he needs to hit the exact spot on the board and once in full flow replicates that direction with mindless rhythm and accuracy. This is equally true of the writer. Once having ascended to the required zone of concentration, a synchronicity is established between the mind, the hand and the pen it holds with the outcome that words usher forth on paper as if by their own volition. We may say both the darts player and the writer are artists – if not by virtue of the end product then certainly by the elevated state of consciousness they have attained.”

“You maintain Jim was an artist, do you?” I challenged her somewhat bewildered.

“At the peak of his powers by an act of mental discipline he went somewhere else,” Edna said. “A place that only religious mystics are popularly supposed to inhabit but is accessible to anybody who is sufficiently dedicated to an activity.” She must have read my confusion for what it was because within a few seconds she had filched a book from the shelves that filled one whole side of the study wall and pressed it upon me. The Inner Game Of Life, I read on the cover. Everyday Miracles and How To Perform Them. “Take it away with you,” she urged. “It’s a landmark study. And I have a spare copy.”

She picked up the darts again as if about to throw them for fun but then seemed to change her mind. “There is so much pretentious bunkum spouted about the nature of art,” she said. “Art is always analysed in terms of its commodity value, its social usefulness or technical innovations or conceptual originality whatever – but to me that approach fails to get to the heart of the matter. It is far too narrow. Art is first and foremost the product of an elevated state of mind. When a person experiences a sense of completion through his activity, a profound peace of mind, surely whatever he has been doing to achieve it must be understood as Art?”

Before I could raise an objection Edna placed her body sideways on to the dartboard, arm poised to throw. “What do you think my chances are of sticking it in the treble twenty first time?” she asked. Not very good, I replied. She had not managed to hit it once during our game. “During practice I’ve seen Jim hit it twenty-three times in succession,” she said. “The bull’s eye I’ve seen him hit fifteen times in a row. Imagine the obsessive dedication such accuracy involves. But once the twitches began in his wrists the accuracy went out of the window. Relaxation drugs and psychotherapy only served to develop the problem in another direction. His hand refused to release the dart. It was as if it contained a stubborn mind of its own.” She proceeded to demonstrate what she meant. “He’d stand for long periods like this, priming his arm, talking to it even, ordering and cajoling it to move, to complete the throwing action. It became pitiful to watch. His hand resisted every appeal Jim made to it.”

“But how can that happen?” I asked in astonishment.

‘I’ve written a story about it,” she said. “That might help you to understand. Please feel free to say no. It’s probably not that good.”

I hastened to reassure her I would love to read it. Indeed I would feel privileged. Edna looked genuinely pleased. “It’s so kind of you,” she said. “Jim and I were both fastidious in our own ways. Neither of us wanted less than perfection in our work.”

For the rest of the afternoon we chatted about all sorts of random things and by 4 o’clock when my taxi arrived to take me back to Cromer railway station I felt as if we had almost become close friends. Edna flitted like a garden sparrow from branch to branch, never stopping for long anywhere to study the topography. It is clearly more than just a restless curiosity that motivates her. She chatters on with equal fervour about the great geopolitical issues of our era and her favourite show biz celebrities. “The air is full of jangling discordant noise,” she regaled me cryptically at one point. “We need to listen very carefully to catch the strands of genuine melody.” I got the impression that life to her is one vast panorama upon which the authentic and the illusory do continuous battle.

In response to a question about religious faith she proclaimed that the Christian church had misunderstood the life of Jesus in the same way Islam has misunderstood the life of the prophet. She discussed Boltzman’s second theory of entropy and the film Groundhog Day almost in the same sentence. When I asked her if she had a favourite poem she instantly recited by heart a long passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude. She considered The Simpsons and Frasier to be greater works of art than all of Shakepeare’s comedies put together. “Becuase they make me laugh,” she explained, “and when I laugh, I pay attention.” As for music she mentioned names such as Bach, Pink Floyd, Mozart and Harry Neilsen and confessed that fiction writing can never come close to achieving what our greatest music does. And what might that be exactly? “Illuminating the quidity of things,” she replied. “Even the best combinations of words serve us, as a window on the world, not much better than frosted glass.”

When I left she hugged me with what I experienced as genuine affection and promised to email the story about Jim and his yips problems no later than noon the next day. She just needed to give it ‘a quick dusting down’. On the train back to London I checked that my tape recorder had worked properly and read through my notes. There was no shortage of material. And I felt that I may even have helped to loosen the log jam that had been blocking her output. I was elated at the trust she had extended to me, a mere novice female journalist. Surely once I’d read and applauded the yips story it would be sent on to her publisher, I surmised.

But come noon the following day her email had not arrived and when two further days passed by in unfulfilled expectation, I decided to take the initiative. “Hi Edna! I’m just checking that you sent the promised story. You may have made a mistake with my email address? Thanks!”

Within half an hour the following reply arrived: “I’m so sorry, Clare. On re-reading it I found several mistakes and clumsy bits which I feel the need to redraft. You’ll have it this weekend at the latest. Xxx” Three more weekends came and went before I finally allowed the penny to drop. Jim’s story would never be appearing on my computer screen because it would never be finished. I wondered if I should write again and try to coax her out of whatever glacial mind freeze she had allowed to paralyze her creativity. Or maybe I should suggest my dad for a session of counselling? But then I came across a passage in the book she had given me, The Inner Game Of Life, heavily underlined in red ink:

“Perfectionism is wrongly considered a quest for the best in ourselves. It may start out honourably enough, as an honest endeavour to get things right in the home, on the job or the page or the canvass or wherever else. But at some point the parasite of obsessiveness and anxiety, the fear of failure, displaces the seed of genuine creativity. The project goes AWOL and the quest becomes one for the worst in ourselves. The parasite of perfectionism tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough and we should try, try and try again. It can easily become a crippling and chronic condition.”

So clearly Edna had to be on to herself. Perhaps though she needed to be reminded of the fact? I could send her a photocopy of the paragraph to jog her memory? Then the parasite might finally be vanquished. But later that same day I recalled something else she had told me that hadn’t made complete sense at the time – “It’s funny how you can believe in two apparently contradictory things at the same time” – and I changed my mind.