Everything You Never Needed to Know About Inspiration and Where to Find it.

The real secret to finding inspiration, I am told, is to simply look more closely at what surrounds you every day…

Well, I am currently sitting where I always sit, at some stage, almost every day of my life.  Directly behind the laptop screen that I spend a fair chunk of my life staring blankly at, is a cork notice board.  It has photographs of my wife, my kids, my grandkids, my mum and my dad all pinned haphazardly to it in a manner that reminds me uncomfortably of the incident boards in TV detective dramas.  If I had some red string, I could be Vera.  There are no photos of me though.  Nobody is going to be able to think through that.  There is a wooden ruler, a memory stick on a piece of string (I have no idea what is on it – when I plug it in, the lights go out), a gizmo for getting the sim card out of an iphone, and what appears to be a small gobbet of pizza.  I don’t think that it actually is pizza but, if I am honest, I am not inclined to investigate too closely as I’m pretty sure that I didn’t put it there and I have the uneasy suspicion that it is growing a beard.

Along the wall above the cork board are shelves.  This is the only room in the house in which I am allowed to keep ‘my stuff’ and it is consequently choc-full of crap: shells and fossils from trips to the beach, a selection of mugs, a hand-forged nail I found on the floor at my daughter’s wedding, a ukulele, a hand-painted pint glass from my fortieth birthday, my felt fedora, my snakeskin boots, many many books, even more and manyer CD’s, DVD’s, a Melodica, a brass sundial, a selection of Victorian bottles dug from a golf course at the dead of night, a Marmite jar, a porcelain duck whose back lifts off to store God-knows-what, an anxious looking stress ball, a Meccano radio-controlled car, a mini-drone (still boxed, because I know my limitations), a microscope with a plastic penguin where the eyepiece should be, a knitted monkey and dust.  Lots and lots of dust.  Perhaps that is what is clogging my brain.

The books tell a bit of a story, I think*: Alan Coren, Spike Milligan and Tom Sharpe, all of whom, at one time or another, I have aspired to be.  Sherlock Holmes books – which I love for the slyly hidden comedy that runs through them – although, on occasions, I fear only seen by me – Inspector Morse books – which are brilliantly written, but far too complicated for my poor brain to hold together (I read them all many times without ever remembering whodunit, to whom they dunit or why they dunit) – Woody Allen – whose prose leaves me breathless, although I don’t read it so much since the ‘doubts’ set in – and a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings, upon which the dust is very thick indeed.  I have a ‘history’ of over fifty years with that particular trilogy.  It was the ‘must read’ of my sixth form days that I never quite managed to get through.  It left me cold – which wasn’t cool – and although well-meaning friends continue to try and draw me into this Elvin world, I remain defiantly detached from it.  It is part of a literary litany of books that I am not quite bright enough to enjoy (nor, in truth, to ever finish): Ulysses, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, Catch 22, The Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice, anything by Salman Rushdie (even the stuff that hasn’t quite managed to upset half the world) – I do not get lost in these books, I get lost on the way to them.  It is some form of selective dyslexia in which I understand the words, but I have absolutely no comprehension of (nor indeed interest in) what the sentences mean.  Give me Orwell, Bradbury, Stella Gibbons even, and I will read all day; give me Tolkien or Joyce (that’s James Joyce, not my Aunty Joyce, who to the best of my knowledge has never written anything more lurid than a note to the milkman) and I will stare at the pages as the words swim in front of my eyes like Busby Berkeley on acid, whilst my brain drowns behind them.  Inspiration lies in Coren, Milligan, Sharpe, all of whom I strive to emulate, all of whom I am desperate not to copy.  I cannot read Milligan when I am writing as everything emerges in substandard Milliganese.  I cannot read Coren because I am left limp by the knowledge that I cannot come close.  I cannot read Sharpe because I laugh like a drain and my mind becomes full of ever more elaborate plots from which I cannot begin to draw a coherent thread.

Atop the Milligan Shelf is a box of ‘Chinese Puzzles’ – little interlinked bits of fiendishly-shaped wire that you are meant to twist and manipulate in order to separate them.  I can only ‘solve’ them with pliers.  The box has a thick layer of dust on its unopened edges.  I don’t remember who bought it, but if ever I do, I will give it back.  I am also surrounded by musical instruments: the Melodica, the ukulele, a harmonica, two guitars and a box of kazoos.  I cannot play any of them, but I can make a noise.  It helps.

Most of the time, inspiration actually lies for me in three large tubs filled with pens and pencils of all types and hues.  I choose my pen before I write.  My pen decides what I will write and how I will write it.  Today it is green biro, the letters sloping gently forward.  Yesterday (checking back through my feint lined ‘School Essay’ book) it was red roller-ball and it sloped backwards**.  I haven’t yet tried cutting letters out of the newspapers, but it will come.  Meanwhile, I pluck away tunelessly on the red ukulele (which may or may not be in tune – who can tell?) and ponder my inability to get to grips with Hobbits, Irish drunkards and irony.  Most of all, I am left wondering why my green pen has just run out mid-word and pondering whether the time has come to look for a new colour of inspiration.  Anything as long as it is not indelible black…

*Oh come on.  It was there to hit, I couldn’t ignore it.

**Yes, I too have looked this up on Google and I am sure that it is wrong.  I am not mad!  Wibble.