Waiting for Godot brought in enough money to enable Beckett to buy himself a Paris flat and a small house in the country where he did much of his work. Other than simple everyday needs, his expenditure on himself stopped there. His French publisher was often in financial difficulties and Beckett not only forewent royalties but used revenue from performances to get him out of trouble. He did the same for no-one knows how many others. Anyone in need went to Beckett and he would borrow to lend money that was never returned. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 and a large sum of money came to him, he told me that he did not feel he deserved it and could I give him a list of needy writers he could help. By the time he received my list it was all gone. Others had come to him, often asking for as large a sum as they dared. When he died there was nothing in the bank, money was owed in tax and his heirs had to wait for it to be paid before they received any benefit.
from an article by John Calder

Hello, Mr Baker, this is Julie from npower. How are you this morning?
I’m fine, thank you for asking.

What we’re doing this morning, Mr Baker, we’re ringing to see if we can make some savings on your bills.
Oh, I don’t want that. No thank you.

You don’t want to make savings on your bills?
No, certainly not. Oh, no, not at all.

May I ask why?
I can’t afford it, Julie. That’s the main reason.

You can’t afford to make savings on your bills?
No, can’t afford it. I’m certain about that.

But we’re talking about making savings on your bills.
Oh, no thanks. I’m paying enough already.

There’ll be some areas we can offer discounts, so you end up paying less than you’re paying now.
I’m already paying enough, Julie. I can’t afford to pay more.

But if we can save you money on your present bills; that is, if we discount what your paying out already, then you’ll have more free cash and you will be able to afford more.
I know, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, Julie, I simply can’t afford it. I’m stony broke.

You don’t want to save money?
Skint . . .

Or even talk about it?
On my uppers . . .

OK, then, it doesn’t matter.
(There is a clicking sound as Julie disengages).

My first thought is, perhaps, under different circumstances, we could have been more to each other? Later I reflect that she was probably looking for someone slightly better heeled.

Allende discusses women, creativity, the definition of feminism, passion and Sophia Loren (she walks elegantly, like a giraffe on the African savannah) in this TED talk, which was recorded three years ago.

Of Basque, Spanish, and Portuguese descent, Isabel Allende was born in Peru of Chilean parents. She now lives in the USA.

According to Alexandra Alter in an article in The Wall Street Journal, Allende, as a young woman in Chile, translated English romance novels to Spanish. But she lost the job for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue of the heroines, in an attempt to make them seem more intelligent. She also twisted the endings of the novels to allow the heroines more independence.

I’d heard of Manuka honey, of course. When something costs upwards of £7.00 per teaspoon, the news gets around. And there it was on the shelf – Manuka Honey – a little jar, a huge price-tag. I patted my back-pocket to make sure the credit-card was there.

Now, not everyone knows this but Manuka honey is, actually, all made by one bee. He was always a very special bee, of course, even when he was a certified member of a bustling local hive community on the North Island of New Zealand. He decided to go solo, oh, some time ago, and not without raising some controversy.

He said later that there was no choice for him. He was a perfectionist and could no longer watch the antics of his fellow bees, almost all of whom were little more than drones of an evil consumerist society. He now no longer gives interviews.

To cut a long-story short, I handed over all of this weeks and most of next weeks pocket money and took the jar home. I had my £7.00 teaspoon immediately. The house was empty. I was alone.

Within a few moments I was experiencing a religious awakening. I sat down and felt this shot of spiritual morphine, just absolute bliss and joy. I recognized it as a Holy experience immediately.

Initially my feelings were clouded by an inability to see where the all-consuming light was coming from. Was it the light of Almighty Allah, or that of Jesus, the lamb of God?

Not wishing to raise the ire of any fundamentally Islamist nutters, and also being a coward of fundamental proportions, I decided it must be the work of Jesus. Jesus and the Manuka bush and a single perfectionist bee.

This has been one of the few experiences in my life which is completely untainted by any whiff of commercial pressure. Sweet; so sweet.

Next there’s two women and their kids and they’re standing ten fifteen meters away squabbling about direction. The elder one tells the other, ‘I’m gonna ask that guy.’

‘How do we get to the Norvik Viking Centre?’ she asks. ‘Can you help us?’

‘You mean the Jorvik Viking Centre,’ I tell her.

‘Or the Minster?’ the other woman asks. ‘The Minster would be better for us, because we’re going to that museum.’

‘Which museum?’

‘The museum just round the corner from the Minster.’

I think. It takes a moment. ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I don’t know where you mean. But I can tell you how to get to the Jorvik Centre or the Minster. Where do you want to go?’

‘We’ll go to the Norvik Centre,’ says the first woman, and the second woman nods a reluctant agreement.

‘It’s the Jorvik Centre,’ I tell them, and if you go to the end of here and turn left you’ll see it.’

‘Where that bus came from?’ the first woman says. ‘That’s the Norvik Centre down there?’

‘Yes, but it’s Jorvik. The Jorvik Centre, with a J, but sounds like a Y.’

She thinks. It takes a moment. ‘So we turn left where the bus came out and that’s the Norvik Centre spelled with an I?’

‘Y.’

‘I dunno,’ she tells me, suddenly becoming impatient. ‘You’re the one telling us where to go.’

Later in the sauna, Azra, the Egyptian goddess, talks incessantly about herself, how she and her world interact, how the universe hangs on her every breath. I ask her about the wearing of the niqab and she tells me it should only be worn by a beautiful woman to stop men fighting over her and an ugly woman to hide her face. I nod until my head comes loose, topples, bounces once on the slatted bench and rolls over the glistening tiles of the floor, but she doesn’t notice.

And in the entrance to the steam room, Chen Ming, the diminutive Chinese chef from Acomb, has a long story about the poisonous ribs prepared by his chief rival. ‘You can write it in your book,’ he tells me unnecessarily.

Long after they’ve left, rejoined their various streams of life, I’m still reading the Life and Times of Michael K by the poolside. Can’t seem to drag myself away.

When I heard his thin voice answer the telephone, I dreaded saying my name, imagining that he would be utterly dismayed at the sound of it, but at once he began to apologize, saying: “I should have written, just a note even, I should have written to thank you for the lunch.”

“Oh, no, Gerald!” I said relieved, “it was a terrible lunch and I think I should have written to you really. You see, I was brought up in India, Gerald, and I’m afraid I’ve never quite lost it, the habit of never saying anything that’s helpful. No one in India seemed to have a feeling for helpfulness, only a feeling for what is right, and it took me a long time to see that almost everything they thought was right was actually not all that right, but in fact rather wrong. And this deficiency in helpfulness, I mean, I’ve had it all my life and I blame India, but who can say if it was India or if it wasn’t born in me, because it’s a long time since India now and thank goodness all those feelings of rightness have been swept away . . .”

“If you were ringing to ask me to lunch again,” Gerald said quietly, “I’d love to come. You were right about no one helping. They don’t.”

So he came round the next week. Over a rather tasteless lamb casserole, which he didn’t seem to enjoy and I didn’t either, he began to knead away, gently at first, then more firmly, at his own misery until the pain of the kneading doubled him up and he began to cry. He kept apologizing, through his tears, for this crying, but it seemed to me that if you can cry over lunch with a fat woman that you hardly know, then your need to cry is probably very strong and your tears might feel like a balm. So I said: “Oh, no, Gerald, you’re quite wrong to apologize. Don’t even try to stop crying. Cry as much as you like.”

“You can’t imagine,” he said at last, “what it’s like to lose someone you knew was all you ever wanted. All, you see. I used to think, she’s one of the wonders of the world, my Sarah. You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose one of the wonders of the world, to lose her in a single day!”

“Well, I can’t Gerald, I know. But I can try. I mean, I know if anything happened to Leon – not that he’s a wonder of the world, far from it really with his co-respondents and everything – I’d feel dreadfully lost. I don’t know how I’d take root again. I might never.”

“I never will,” wept Gerald. “I shall never be strong or patient or anything at all for the children. I feel I can’t give them anything and of course it’s terrible for them too, to lose a mother.”

“I’d say they might be your salvation, Gerald. I mean, they love you, don’t they, and you love them.”

“I feel as if I love no one any more. Not even the children. I feel as if I was born just to love one person.”

Gerald blew his nose and dabbed at his eyes. Between his elbows, his helping of lamb casserole was congealing. I felt empty of words, but wanted to put my arms round Gerald, imagining that since Sarah had left, no one had touched him. But then I remembered that because I am fat I sweat quite a lot and I thought, my heavy sweating arm will disgust him and he will want to tear out of the flat and never come back, thinking, even longing to cry and not crying is better than that, if that’s the price. I stayed motionless and Gerald, getting no more help from me, no word or movement, faded back into silence and very soon left.

That night Leon went out to dinner with a client and I got into bed early, not bothering to make myself a meal and glad that I wasn’t in the restaurant with Leon and his client and their bottles of wine and glasses of brandy and cigars. I lay back in a clean nighty, having bathed and powdered my body so that there was no trace of sweat on it, and after a while thought up one of my poems about Gerald which went like this:

Today for the first time
Gerald wept.
I’ve never heard him weep before
But now I know
that while the world’s been weeping,
I have slept.

There is more to say, Sister, about my comforting of Gerald Tibbs, but I feel tired out by the thought of him at the moment . . .

In a Letter to Sister Benedict, Rose Tremain gives over the narrative to her protagonist, Ruby Constad. Ruby has been abandoned by her children, and her husband has suffered a stroke and lies in a nearby hospital on his death bed. Wealthy middle-class Ruby is overweight, her money and her lifestyle have combined to make her silent, and now loneliness is added to her burden.

But in writing letters to her childhood teacher and mentor, long dead Sister Benedicta, Ruby begins to find her voice together with a quite wicked wit, and, eventually, a will to live. She is a woman quite devoid of self-pity and as such, will steal your heart away.

Letter to Sister Benedicta was published in 1979, and Tremain has published several novels since then. She told The Times:

“Time is catching up with me now. I’m 60 in August and this looming birthday has made me think. My life seems to have gone by so fast I can’t believe it, but I don’t believe it’s over. I feel full of ideas and power.”

Here’s one reader who is very glad to hear it.