It is almost midnight and I have been avoiding writing in these pages.
I would like to say that this has been because we have been so very busy ferrying people around the upland glories of the Lake District, but it isn’t really. So far I have done several trips to the first three syllables of Aphrodite’s Lodge, and declined to take a mad young man who threatened to stab me but then didn’t.
I was pleased about that but still declined to take him anyway.
The reason I have not felt inclined to write is that I have maximised my creativity today in writing an extremely dull and twee short play about a dead person for my next trip to Cambridge. I have been obliged to do this for the purposes of what they determinedly call Workshopping, and which I think I have already mentioned is extraordinarily irritating since there isn’t a single spanner in sight, and nobody who would have the faintest inkling of what to do with one if there was.
I admit that I include myself in that.
When they say Workshopping, as if it was an exhausting and intensive activity which actually involved effort, what they mean is sitting around drinking tea and saying untruthful kindly things about one another’s writing. You can write any old rubbish you like for this activity since we are not supposed to be unkind but supportive and encouraging, and even if I have written five hundred words of absolute drivel, which in this case I actually have, then nobody is going to say so. Somebody might say: I feel I might like to explore your ideas of that character’s motivation, which actually means: People don’t behave like that, you idiot, although they probably won’t because it seems all right to have your characters doing all sorts of unlikely rubbish and nobody ever questions it. One or two of the people on the course can be excused about this because they are very young and are still just imagining what life is really like, but the rest of us are proper grown-ups and ought to know better.
We won’t even be Workshopping anyway since all of the staff are going on strike, or not as the case may be. They won’t tell us which, and very probably I won’t be there whether they do or not, since I am still considering whether I should start on the endless journey to Scotland the night before. This seems like a more interesting thing to do than to loaf around trying to sound clever and observant about other people’s writing, and listen to them trying to find something sensible to say about mine.
The only comment I ever really listen to in any case is Wow That Is Amazing. If anybody says anything else then I just assume they haven’t read it properly.
I have written the piece anyway, at least I have written half of it. One of the irritating things about having to drive myself to Cambridge is that I won’t be able to do my homework on the bus on the way there, as it were. I should have finished it tonight but didn’t bother and indeed kept my computer closed so I wouldn’t have to think about it. This was difficult because my book was rubbish, some daydreamy piffle about a woman who thought it would be a good idea to have an affair even though her husband seemed perfectly nice to me and she was at least forty and jolly well should have known better. I lost interest in it quite quickly, it was even duller than Facebook or the Guardian website.
I have read on this website that they have let Gary Glitter out of prison, and that some people are up in arms about it. He is eighty now, but they think that he might still pose a danger to ten year old girls, so if you are visiting care homes any time soon, keep an eye open for any old gidget wearing sequinned silver flares under the blanket of his wheelchair and warn the nurse not to sit on his knee.
In other news I have made tray of biscuits and a large pan of curry with which Mark can feed himself in my absence. I am quite sure that he would be more than able to feed himself unsupported, but I can’t quite think how, and so I have left him a back-up. There are now several bags of curry in the freezer, all he needs to do is remember to take one out every morning before he goes to work, what could possibly go wrong?
I might not write much over the next couple of days. Tomorrow is Saturday and on Sunday I will be driving to Cambridge. This might take me until so late that it is time for the first glass of wine, after which there will be no chance of literary communications, apart from possibly a hasty conclusion to an awful short play about a dead person, which might flow better once I am intoxicated.
I hope so.
I will see you next time I get round to it.
