Indefinite Leave

Muesli.

Yet more muesli.

I bought a Euromillions ticket this evening, and I didn't win. This latest disappointment in a lifetime of raffling non-triumphs has made me so miserable that I find I am unable to meet the objectives I set myself with this blog: to say something amusing, or interesting, most days. Until I have come to terms with this great sadness, I am putting myself on compassionate leave, and excusing myself from all bloggerly duties... (Well, it's that, or the sense that having made a very little progress with my writing, after a spell of complete gridlock, I feel I ought to devote all energies to that.)

I'll keep eating breakfast, of course. I just shan't be photographing it (which, let's face it, is a profoundly odd thing to do -- but then that was at the point).

As you were.

A Misattribution Worth Investigating

Boiled egg and marmite soldiers.

Apparently Hemmingway never did say "write drunk, edit sober." Never-the-less, given my recent authorial paralysis, it's worth a shot.

I have a bottle of Jura, my serious face on (glasses too), and I may have had a half bottle of prosecco headstart. 1,000 words. Do not pass go; do not collect £200.

Cry Me a River

A very health breakfast.

My imagination is often very visual. I see the things I want to write and then I search for the words. For a little while at school, I thought perhaps I was a screenwriter, not a novelist.

For a long time I have had an image in my head from the book that who knows if I will ever write. A woman in tears wades out into a river and stands weeping in the water. She cries so hard, her tears turn the river into a frothing torrent about her. When the waters subside, there is a rock in the place where she stood, and she has disappeared to fairyland, swept away by a kelpie.

Sometimes I feel like I could cry up my own raging river. Perhaps that's where the picture came from, through eye blurring tears, that roll down your cheeks and splash on the floor. I've certainly cried some floods. So far though, no kelpies.

It's Always Ourselves we Find in the Sea

Rice crispies.

Well, it's turning out to be a poetical sort of a weekend. Today I went to Crammond, which I think needed. I am, after all, an island girl, and sometimes I just sort of need to be by the sea to start finding my way again. ee cummings was quite right: "For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea":

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,

and milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:

and may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) 

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Tom Hanks is not wrong about the ding

Raspberries & rice crispies

A meagre banana

My granny had a blue typewriter, a heavy old thing with a plastic cover that soon became mine. I still remember the heady thrill of bashing key after key, ink blotting paper, as you made your percussive advance towards the end of the line and that delicious ding, then the flick of your wrist as you returned the carriage to the start.

This was what writers did. Sure-fingered, they struck at floating keys, smudging out stories as the carriage lurched forwards towards the ding and scrape -- another line done. They tore their pages out from the typewriter in frazzle-haired frenzies, and crumpled them into smudgy balls, then began again: thump, thump, ding, whir; thump, thump, ding, whir. On and on.

I suppose then, it was only a matter of time before this happened: world, welcome the typewriter app. Somehow that Tom Hanks did it makes it better…