‘Anyhoo...’ – an unconventional tribute to a unique individual

There has to be a reason for writing. Otherwise why bother? There’s enough blethering in the world. The motivation for Anyhoo…was outrage. How could someone so smart, so funny, so free-spirited go so soon, and so quickly? It seemed beyond unfair.

The day she had a stroke in 2020, Hayley phoned me and I called the emergency services and helped get her to hospital. I’d known her for 15 years, she lived on the other side of the estate on the north-east of Cambridge. She was gregarious, intellectually precocious, and fiercely independent. I took on her dog, a super-friendly border collie called Tilly. For a long time I was hoping and praying Hayley would be back in action somehow, post-Covid, after the care home lockdowns ended. Then, in March 2022, just before her 48th birthday, those hopes ended.

Tilly – plus friends and family – probably saved me, gave me a reason to keep going, get out of the house. It helped I enjoy my work. Later that year, I decided to write a book about Hayley’s life from Tilly’s point of view, because that might be a fun way to record some of the adventures they had. I wrote a chapter and a half and couldn’t get any further, so I shelved it.

Then, earlier this year, I finished one of my scribble books. I’ve kept scribble books for years, they’re not diaries, they’re for ideas, lyrics, jokes, songs, poems – anything that’s not derivative. So when I finished this scribble book, I noticed it had been started in 2017, and I thought, ‘Well, let’s look back at what’s been written’.

I was pretty startled by what I found. It was all bright and sparkly enough to start with, then the clouds arrive, and finally the torrential downpour which soaks you to the bone so you have to seek shelter, and in that shelter you have to wait out the storm…

Publishing a booklet of poems is right out of my comfort zone. I’m a journalist, though I wrote a book six years ago about journalism in the digital age. With prose you set out a story, it has an introduction and a middle section and some sort of conclusion. But poems are different: you might start out with a theme, but while you’re writing it, it takes on a life of its own.

For instance Home Truths (reproduced below), which is part of this collection, starts out quite simply – “she was a nomadic spirit and I fell in love with her” sort of thing. Then, after two lines, it widens out and when I got to the words “the stench of our failure” I pulled up: where did that come from? Whose failure? And I reread it and pictured migrating animals dying en masse, with “the stench of our failure” being the failure of the human race to turn around the climate debacle, and the stink we’re going to leave when we’re gone from the Earth, and the animals left behind go: “Wow, those humans, what were they all about?” Take away the first two lines, and Home Truths is a totally different story. It’s a Trojan Horse poem.

Robert, the designer who took on the cover of Pressganged, my earlier book, was excellent as ever but Anyhoo… wasn’t a smooth process because I kept reworking the title. Eventually I decided the rule was this: if she walked into the room, what would she say? She wouldn’t, for instance, have wanted my name superimposed over her photo for the cover – that would be taking ownership of her image, and no one owned her – so I just used ‘Anyhoo’ because it was one of her favourite phrases. Some massive catastrophe would happen, and she’d exclaim “Anyhoo…!” and get on with things. The ‘real’ title of the booklet, The Pyre of Love, appears on page three. I see it as a theatrical device – the celestial compere comes onstage and intones ‘Anyhoo…’ with a flourish of their hand, and the page turns, and on the next page it’s The Pyre of Love, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood is playing loudly on the jukebox...

The design was a challenge because convention says you have a title for a book or booklet, plus the name of the author, on the front. But Hayley wasn’t conventional so she shouldn’t have a conventional tribute.

- Anyhoo… is available at G David Bookseller in St Edward’s Passage because “Hayley loved the market and loved independent booksellers” and online. All proceeds go to Tilly’s upkeep.

‘Home Truths’

Your nomadic beauty

Full of home truths

This fine life

Wired with wild dreams and

Inescapable conclusions

Soon they will fill the mystery

Of your passing with

Incontrovertible facts and

The pathology of death

Will replace the stench

Of our failure

And then

Who will bear witness

To your reign?