The robin

This morning as we sit in bed having breakfast, we hear sudden chirrupings downstairs in the conservatory, the door of which is wide open. Then they stop. Ten minutes later they start again and Frog races downstairs.

    ‘It’s a bird,’ he shouts. ‘A robin I think. It’s gone up to your room now.’

    I put on my dressing-gown and follow him up to my writing room. The bird is fluttering frantically from side to side. Frog is dancing around in the nude, flinging open windows and brandishing the hooked stick I use to open my Velux roof windows.

    ‘Come here, you little blighter,’ he shouts.

    The robin disappears under my desk and into the furthest corner of the room inside some dusty inaccessible shelves.

    ‘Why don’t we sit quietly’, I suggest, ‘and when he appears again throw a t-shirt over him.’

    I say this three times but Frog doesn’t seem to hear me so I go downstairs and fetch a dirty t-shirt from the laundry basket. I return and we sit quietly for all of two minutes. When nothing happens, I make another suggestion.

    ‘Why don’t we open all the windows wide, shut the door and leave him to it.’

    Reluctantly, Frog agrees. He doesn’t like me making suggestions. Or perhaps it’s the robin that’s made him cross.*

    I have a shower and get dressed then go back up to my writing room. I want to switch on my computer. I don’t want a robin dying in a corner. I hope he’s gone, but how will I know?

    I open the door and see the robin trying to get out of one of the Veluxes. I race over to the window, push it open a little further, and he’s gone, zooming off to his patch in the garden, wherever that is, seemingly unhurt.

    All that he’s left behind is some feathers and a little dribble of crap down the middle of my computer screen.


* Frog says it was the robin that made him cross - and the dog as well although he's not sure why. (Perhaps he blames the dog for letting the robin into the house.)

Observer not victim

Last night we were watching a programme on television about the Edinburgh Festival in which a survivor of a Second World War concentration camp was talking about a play she has written on the subject. ‘Keep calm,’ her father apparently told as he was being taken away by the Nazis. ‘Calmness is strength.’ ‘There are victims’, she said, ‘and there are observers. I was an observer.’

    I remember too that the father of writer-illustrator Judith Kerr said something similar, as recorded in her riveting autobiographical trilogy which starts with the book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Her father was a German-Jewish writer critical of the Nazis, and he and his family had to flee the country when Judith was a child (leaving behind her precious toy).

Today is the day I can look through the full text of my novel (printed out in a typeface that I wouldn’t normally use and left for two weeks according to the writing exercise I mentioned in an earlier post).

    I take the typescript out into the garden and try to read it but am filled with disgust. It just won’t do. I think that the trouble is, it’s too close to my life. On the one hand, I’ve already written an autobiography that covers much the same ground so I’m bored. On the other, there’s too much to say and I can’t be detached about it. I want to chuck everything in just to make a point. I’m not calm. I’m not observing.

    I need to start again, picking just one strand maybe, and I’m tempted by the diary form. As I’ve said before, if I could write a novel in the same way I write this blog (confidently, regularly, without looking too far ahead but with a clear idea of theme) I might avoid the awful extremes (of overload and paralysis) that novel-writing causes me.

    Or is that too much to hope for?

Why?

You know how it is. You come back from holiday or recover from an illness and the world is different.

I’ve decided that this blog is far too self-obsessed. It’s high time I got on with a ‘big project’, some ‘proper writing’.

Why then, do I hear my father’s voice when I use the words ‘high time’, why did I dream last night that my (lovely) brother told me to be quiet, and why do I feel so unhappy?

Addicted

I still have a migraine today so I'm trying to rest - and NOT write.

I think I'm addicted to writing.

Too many words

 For about three years on and off in my late thirties/early forties (some twenty years ago) I saw a counsellor/hypnotherapist. Part of the therapy was to keep a dream diary.

    At first I recorded everything (which was a pain in the bum) but then I realised that some dreams are more important than others. Most are just the mental filing system working away or a jumble of the day’s impressions. The important ones didn’t happen that often and they usually woke me up. Whether that was because of their charged emotions or because I’d told my subconscious I wanted to record them, I don’t know. Either way, I wrote them down immediately. They never usually made much sense at the time but coming back to them weeks, months or even years later I would often see exactly what they were telling me.

    And, as you may have realised if you’ve read the previous post, I’ve kept and used a dream diary ever since.

    All of which is a preamble to apologising for some of the muck that appears in this blog. I’m trying to add to it every day, or at least every writing day, because that way it will be an accurate record of the whole writing process. This of course means recording the bad as well as the good because – like my dream diary – even if I don’t understand at the time what is going on I might do so in the future and be able to learn from it.

    All of which is a preamble to telling you that I have a migraine today – but I’ll mitigate that by telling you that the migraines are getting better.

    I find it hard to speak when I have a migraine. The bit of my brain that locates words and puts them into my mouth is sluggish to say the least. Sometimes I can’t write either (even though I’m not doing too badly today – or so I think at the moment. I might read through this tomorrow and think, ‘God, how embarrassing.’).

    So today's message is perhaps fairly clear. Too many words.
    I'd better stop. 

The blind girl

I start today in a bad mood. I try to work out the reason, but there are so many contenders. Frog and I had a disagreement last night and we haven’t sorted it out yet. It’s Monday. It’s raining. I have no ideas for my blogs.

    I don’t even want to write. I don’t want to get back into the constant-mind-whirring state I was in at the end of last week. Blogging isn’t proper writing anyway I tell myself and what’s the point of anything else? The chances of publication, let alone making any money, are less than the chances of a big win on the lottery.

    I dawdle through some admin and then, as the day looms emptily ahead of me, decide that I’m going to have to do my daily pages (http://seeksperfection.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/a-difficult-day.html  *). I haven’t done any since last Tuesday.

    I sit down in the conservatory and open the doors so that I can at least smell the outside even if I can’t sit there.

    And as I write, things begin to make sense again. I get back inside myself and look from the inside out, instead of the other way round. I start noticing things – about myself, about the rain-washed garden. I remember a dream.

    Now I have to make another confession. Not only do I believe that wishes can come true, but I also believe in synchronicity. (In case you haven’t come across the word before in its new agey form, I’ll try and explain it briefly. It means that nothing in the universe is random. The people we bump into, the things we notice, the things that go on around us – all happen for a reason.)

    And for some reason, I picked up yesterday a scrappy piece of paper on which I’d scrawled down the description of a dream I’d had. It is this I remember as I do my daily pages. I get an urge to tell you about it.

    I climb up to my room and fish the piece of paper out of my filing tray. It is dated (the night of) 5-6 August 2012, almost exactly a year ago. It reads:

I was engaged as companion to a blind girl. She was lovely – very beautiful, intelligent and nice. I wanted to say to her, but didn’t get the chance, ‘If your blindness came on suddenly, it was for a purpose, and when that purpose is fulfilled, you will see again.’

If the blind girl is me as well as the 'I' of the dream (as my counsellor/hypnotherapist would have said), what is it I’m not seeing?

Later, I wonder if that's the right question. Perhaps I should be asking, what is/was the purpose of the blindness? Am I still blind?**


* Sorry for this clumsy link. Blogger won't let me do it properly at the moment.

** Frog says that I should emphasise that I’m talking about metaphorical blindness here and I’m definitely not implying that people bring blindness on themselves.

Frazzled

I’m worn out and frazzled today. I’m writing in my head all the time, like that pen at the bottom of the screen in Word that scribbles away in its notebook for no apparent reason. I need a long dog-walk.

I look out of the window and see that the wheat in my favourite field at the top of the hill - the one with the three beech trees in a line - has been cut. I can walk there again. Hooray.

But first, a shower.