Looking Out Through Another Window

It is the pattern of things these days that each new post starts its life as a handful of often disassociated scrawlings in my tatty notebook, jotted down whilst my physical body – such as it is – is employed in some menial DIY task of which it is clearly not capable.  At such times, far from finding heightened concentration, I tend to find that my mind has taken flight and is preparing to land on an airstrip somewhere just south of stupid.  As far as ‘the creative process’ goes, I am often a spectator, looking in from out, wondering whether the householder realises that you can see through net curtains when the lights are on.

Today my body is carrying out general filling, touching up and making good duties subsequent to a bout of joinery that will leave a great deal to be desired, so there is much space into which my brain can wander.  Some kind of muscle memory takes control of the task du jour whilst my brain buggers off skiing in Zermatt.  (My body, incidentally, will never ski for any one of a million reasons: knackered knees, hatred of being cold, dislike of the kind of people who ski…)  I fear, in any case, that I would be about as welcome in a trendy ski resort as a Mexican golfer on the White House Pitch and Putt.  I am not made of the right stuff: I do not own a Tesla; we have only one bathroom per person (2); I do not own a bolt-hole in the Caribbean; my life has not been shaped by ritualised private school flogging…  Also, my body is not a temple: I do not drink turmeric infusions; I do not practice Tai Chi on the beach at 3am.  My body is more of an ancient monument: a warning to the young.

My task, when I sit down at my desk in the early evening hours is to splash the water into the whisky, pour the peanuts into a bowl and collate the day’s assembled guff into something semi-coherent, and this normally requires a mental re-run of the day in order to try and remember what was leaping from synapse to synapse, bent on logic avoidance, in the ever growing portion of my mind set aside for fantasy.  Each day is a fast unravelling sweater.  Each post is a record of me trying to catch the thread before it rewinds itself into a ball.

Interestingly – like everybody else who ever starts a sentence with that word, I am aware that I have nothing of any consequence to relay – the notebook today is empty.  My memory is full of ready-mixed all-purpose filler, masking tape, fiendishly shaped knives and a million reasons why it was not my fault, but no consciousness, streamed or otherwise.  I face two possibilities: either I have retained the subservient services of my peanut brain throughout my labours today, or it has started to keep secrets.  It is flying solo.

I don’t suppose I can begrudge it a little time to itself now and then – God knows, it has more than enough on its plate most of the time – but I think it only right that I know what it is up to when it is not around.  If it can’t just leave me a little note, it’s a poor show I think.

And the reason why I have nothing to say today…