I am still ploughing on with the introduction of the very tiresome villain into my story.
I am being obliged to do this because my supervisor has decreed that although the story is perfectly pleasant to read, it is insufficiently packed with peril for a modern publishing house, and that I must go back and introduce some.
Hence I have invented a new and terrifying rogue.
I am fed up with him already. I really do not like stories where dreadful things happen to the heroine who then brainlessly decides that the best course of action would be not to tell anybody and then plans just to drift along whilst things get worse and worse until ultimately somebody has got to rush into a burning building to rescue a little girl.
I know how stories go. I have seen American drama films.
I am cross about it and writing it with the least possible enthusiasm. I do not like jeopardy in stories anyway, nor do I see the necessity for it. Flora Thompson managed perfectly well in Lark Rise to Candleford with no element of suspense whatsoever, not even a mildly upsetting neighbourly dispute over a barking dog, and it is one of my forever favourite books. Certainly there were no burning buildings, with or without little girls.
Hence I am becoming impatient with the tedium of writing something that I do not in the least like, and which is feeling unpleasantly contrived. I have been frowning at my computer all afternoon, and have kept inventing excuses to stop, and to go and do something else.
Happily, my friend Amanda had got some time off from her very expensively thrilling job negotiating in some very expensively thrilling course case, and we settled down in front of Zoom to exchange gossip about mutual Master’s’s’ degree acquaintances, and to bemoan the difficulties of writing a dissertation. She is going to take two weeks off from next Monday, and not do anything else other than write her dissertation.
I have been trying to work out why, with nobody to look after other than myself, I have not managed to achieve a dissertation already, and completely failed to come up with an answer, quite as thoroughly as I have failed to come up with a dissertation.
Tiresome as the dogs are, they can hardly be said to be a full-time job.
Obviously I have actually got a full-time job, but since I only do it when everybody else in the world is watching television, it doesn’t really count, and I ought to be using the rest of the full-time job time, ie, the daytime, to jolly well get on with it.
I am not quite sure how I am managing to mess this up, but somehow I am.
I procrastinated yet further by trailing up the stairs, there are a very lot of stairs in our house, and hunting through the piles of fabric I have stashed in the loft in order to find something that Lucy would like as living room curtains. Once up there I was crippled by indecision, and had to take photographs of it all to send to her, by which time I had made a massive mess, all of which needed to be put back.
I kept out the piece that she wants. It weighs about as much as a frolicsome bullock. I have left it on the table in the loft ready for a day when my dissertation-procrastination has reached a truly colossal level.
After that I stripped the sheets off Oliver’s bed for the laundry. This is another job I have been shirking. There are just too many stairs between the kitchen and Oliver’s room, but since I was up there anyway it seemed that I might as well.
I went to work, which, incidentally, is where I am now, but the evening has been so terribly quiet that really I need not have bothered. Worse, I occupied the time looking at dresses on the mighty Internet, and eventually found something that I really quite liked, made of cotton with sleeves and decently concealing shoulders, and a properly even hem. There was a choice of colours, with the uncomfortable drawback that it cost a hundred and sixty quid, and in any case, the colour that I really liked was sold out in any size that would fit normal people, you could still have bought a Size 6 but it is a very long time since I have been one of those.
I sighed, and turned to eBay, and then blessed the magnificent privacy-invading algorhithms, because despite there being a hundred and twenty pages of cotton dresses, there, on the very first page, was the exact dress, in my size, in the right colour, for twenty five quid.
My size, incidentally, turned out not to be 22 after all when I measured myself properly, and has not changed since the last time I purchased clothes. I can’t remember when that was but it was reassuring. Perhaps I had the tape measure the wrong way round.
Better still, I could get my money back if I had messed it up and it didn’t fit.
I have spent twenty five quid, which is exactly what I have earned this evening, and am feeling mildly guilty but I will learn to live with myself.
It may be that I shall manage to appear middle-class after all.
