I am very late in starting to write this tonight.
This is because first I couldn’t be bothered. Then I was doing some of the reading for my course, and after that another taxi driver came to talk to me. Obviously I am far too polite to tell somebody that I am engaged in communion with the Creative Muse, and have no interest in drinking tea and gossip, and hence it is now the very middle of the night.
Reading for my course is really another way of saying that I couldn’t be bothered. Reading is much easier than actually trying to write something. Also I can perfectly justify this because we have been given an enormous list of books to read this term, most of which were purchased for me by the Number Two Daughters as an early Christmas present, and they are taking me ages to read.
This is brilliant, because I have spent a very great deal of my life deliberately not reading books so that I have got something to look forward to. Having a shelf full of interesting-looking unread books is a joy and a novelty, and I am appreciating it very much.
Also I am using compulsory reading as an absolutely brilliant excuse for loafing about. Obviously when you are completely obliged to read everything on the Booker Prize shortlist you will not have time for dull things like writing to the council or arguing with One Com.
I have never bothered with things on the Booker Prize lists before, because I have always considered that on the whole they tend to be introspective drivel.
My own preference in literature is for a jolly good story, and I find myself quickly and thoroughly bored with the literary equivalent of French cinema. I have modified this opinion very slightly since commencing my course, although not very much and an external observer would probably not be able to tell the difference, like looking at a flock of sheep and trying to distinguish which is the cleverest.
I am now prepared to tolerate a certain amount of tedious self-examination, although I must confess that modern fashions in literature leave me mystified. I have been astonished to discover how many books there are which feature a person who wishes to be of the opposite sex to their own.
These people are invariably presented as brave, long-suffering and a victim of an indifferent society. There are so many of these that they are practically becoming a genre on their own, like Westerns or Historical Romance.
The ones I have read so far have been invariably written by women, and been stridently against all injustice. I think this is dull. I would very much prefer to read a book where such a person turns out to be wicked, exciting, ruthless and solvent, and enjoying their life very much, although I don’t suppose it would win the Booker Prize. Perhaps I should write one.
I have not written anything today. It has been a drizzly sort of day, too wet even to hang the washing outside, and I have draped it, wetly, all over the house.
After that I put the storytelling programme into the computer and listened to a story whilst I got dinner ready and baked biscuits.
It is not a story from my reading list but a superb collection of yarns written and read by a pathologist, telling anecdotes about Dead Bodies He Has Known. I liked this much better than stories about people who are agonising about their Inner Lives, and will be looking forward to the sequel. The writer has just done a national tour, telling people ghoulish stories about his work cutting up corpses, and I was very disappointed to realise that it finished last week and I have missed it.
Perhaps he will do another one next year. He can go on my list of things that I want to see, along with Derren Brown.
Mark arrived home from his rural broadband adventures just as I was setting out for work, and came out with me, which was good, we will be able to pay the school fees again this week.
It has become very late now and I think that probably enough is enough and I would rather be on my way home to bed.
That is exactly what I am going to do now.
