I took a couple of days off. I’ve been working on too many things at once and I had to disentangle them all. I found myself in a cul-de-sac I had created for ‘plot one’ that had since embedded itself in the middle of ‘plot 2’ and I could find no way out. I remembered the huge jumble of wiring that used to lie at the centre of once-upon-a-time computers when I, and they, were so much younger and I decided that my only options were a) to bin everything and start again b) to bin everything and not start again or c) to sort myself out. I decided on option c) and concluded that the best way to do so was to switch off the ‘thinking’ operations for a while.
At this point I am uncertain who, exactly, said that Nature abhors a vacuum (I think Aristotle, but I will check before I publish. If I am right, you will never know that it was ever in doubt. If I am wrong, you will just never know.) but I am inclined to disagree. (Check him out, disagreeing with an ancient Greek. Who does he think he is?) I think that nature loves a vacuum because it gives it somewhere to dump all the excess baggage it has been lugging around for far too long. I had just begun to sort the spaghetti jumble between my ears and laid it all out neatly, like a raffia placemat, in preparation for my refocus, when all the unused crap that I had forgotten was up there rushed in to fill the void. Every half-baked, unresolved idea I ever had, thrown into a bowl with my lovely linear pasta and stirred wildly until there was no chance of ever separating the olives from the anchovies, but similarly, no point in emptying it all again, because I had no idea of what might replace it. (If it is anything to do with beetroot, my time here is done!) I put a lid on it, pushed it into the fridge and hoped that by the time I got it out again, it might have turned itself into a traybake.
In 1979, a musician called Judie Tzuke dropped an album called ‘Welcome to the Cruise’ including the single ‘Stay With Me ‘Til Dawn’: they are probably to this day the only things that most people will remember her for (if they remember her at all). Yet she has consistently produced great music ever since and yesterday her twenty-second studio album dropped onto my doormat (Jude the Unsinkable should you wish to search it out) and an empty cranium was the perfect place to lodge the songs. Very little cheers me as much as new music.
Then, a little later the same day, I received an email from Amazon informing me that the inestimable Petra Jacobs (formerly Inkbiotic on this very site) has a new book that I might care to read. Well yes, thank you Mr Jassy, I certainly would. The notion of spending a few hundred pages tucked up in Ms Jacobs’ febrile imagination would suit me very well indeed.
Any-old-how, by then positively content – approaching cheery I would say – I decided that I would leave my head alone: that things would somehow or other ‘sort themselves out’ as I wrote – they always have in the past, haven’t they?* – and that is where I find myself today: back from a couple of days off with a brainful of minestrone and just a fork to eat it with. As ever, I carry the conviction that crouton-like, something will bob to the surface and present itself to me in a form that will allow me to smother it in parmesan and serve it up in immaculate, tiny portions – possibly with braised samfire and a slightly warm House White…
…although, sadly, for now the raffia placemat is otherwise engaged.
*The truthful answer to this question is, of course, ‘No’, but this is my own deluded blog, so we’ll just gloss over it for now.
Getting On 