Marina Kemp – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Marina Kemp is a best-selling author based in London. Her novel Nightingale was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer List, following the story of a young woman who moves to rural France to become a carer for a tyrannical elderly man. Kemp also co-founded Ink Academy, a hub for bespoke creative writing courses and tutorials.

These are a few of her favourite things…

Glimpses of strangers’ domesticity

There’s little as intriguing to me as a stranger’s home. I think most of us do this: peer through the windows of a house and try to piece together the lives inhabiting it. Ordinary, everyday things – the detritus of breakfast scattered across a kitchen table, the notes and pictures tacked to a fridge door – can become so eloquent and even portentous when they’re not your own.

When I’m in the middle of a writing project, I need to walk a lot – and I have to confess that when I walk, I spy.  I love spying.  The quick flash of a hallway when a front door is opened and shut – it provides relief from the insular world of the story I’m writing, but it provides material, too.  Intrusion, projection, escape; peering into someone’s private domestic space has much in common with writing fiction.

Writing fiction

Writing isn’t always my favourite thing. Most of the time it takes hard work and considerable effort to push a story along, to keep up momentum and pace and enable the characters to take shape. But every now and then, a strange alchemy happens, and the writing involves no effort at all. It barely involves conscious thought. It’s a little like cutting wrapping paper – that lovely moment when the scissors start to glide. When that happens, I can barely type fast enough.  The characters take over; they surprise me. They say things I didn’t know they were going to say. They reveal things about themselves and their pasts and the story as a whole that I didn’t know. Hours pass. Those moments are rare, but there’s not much in the world that feels as good.

Hair salons

I don’t get my hair cut frequently enough, maybe one and a half times a year, particularly now I have young children. But I have a weird, enduring affection for hair salons. I have often thought that I’d like to set up a comfortable bed in the corner of one, behind a thin screen. I’d lie there and be lulled by the clean, clean smell of shampoo and all the noise: the whoosh of hair dryers, the blunt snap of scissors, the continual, low-level chatter, the brush that sweeps cuttings from the floor.

Breakfast

Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day. There’s always a sense of boundless opportunity, even when the options are scant. My favourite breakfast foods are simple ones: Irish soda bread, lightly toasted, lots of butter; porridge made with just unrolled oats, water and salt.  Always accompanied by a very strong cup of tea. And I have an unhealthy love of Coco Pops.  I had a bowl at 3.30pm yesterday. When I do that, I have to hide from my daughter, I’ve told her we’re only allowed them on weekends.

Trains in foreign countries

My novel, Nightingale, opens as a train arrives at a small station in a forgotten nook of rural France.  I love getting a train in a foreign country, particularly to forgotten nooks: the impenetrable information boards and announcements, the strange machines that punch holes or print codes on your ticket, the ticket itself that feels somehow unreal, like Monopoly money.  Boarding the train, which with all its unfamiliar whistles and screeches and shudders always feels exotic, even when it’s nothing more than a shabby commuter train. The double-decker ones are the best, of course, the most exotic of all. And then passing out of the shiny centre of a city, through endless sprawling suburbs into countryside.  The small stations that pass by in a blur.