I am going to be late for work.
This is not simply because of the usual reasons of being badly organised and flapping about uselessly at the last minute, although almost certainly those things will happen as well in a little while. It is because I have got a Parents’ Evening at Oliver’s school.
Obviously I am not going to go to Oliver’s school especially for the occasion. That would be a ridiculous amount of trailing up and down the motorway, and we are going to set off tomorrow in any case. We are going to have one of those modern online Zoom things, where you have ten minutes with each teacher and spend the first three or four of them mouthing uselessly at one another because one of you has absently pressed the Mute button, and the sound is not working. Then the screen inexplicably goes blank halfway through. Some teachers are worse for this than others. I find the ones with flowery dresses and earnest expressions tend to be the least successful. I don’t think there will be many of these tonight, not least because I have got a vague feeling that Oliver’s current teachers are all men.
That turns out not to be true, I have just checked. There is a lady, she is called Vicki. This makes me mildly anxious as well, only young and trendy people end their names with an i. I am not very good at young trendy people. They have all sorts of wonderful ideas and you have got to be at least fifty before you know that none of them work.
Hence I am writing in the break between finishing my day’s tasks and going to work late. It should all be over by seven o’clock, and although I was at work at six yesterday, I did not have my first customer until half past eight, and so I am sanguine about the delay.
I have had a difficult sort of day. I rushed through a colossal amount of housework yesterday in order to clear some time today for writing my story. I dashed through this morning’s chores, and then trailed up the fells in the rain for a jolly good think before starting.
I got completely drenched. A little stream was flowing freely out of my hair and down the end of my nose, where I swabbed it occasionally with a soaking handkerchief. I would like to say this in praise of handkerchiefs as opposed to tissues here, handkerchiefs still work no matter how wet they get, and by the end of my walk, I was wringing mine out.
I took my trousers off and hung them over the fire to dry when I got home, although they didn’t, not very satisfactorily. I got chilled almost before they had stopped dripping, and put them on again. I could have put some clean ones on instead, but we are going away tomorrow, and the laundry arrangements just seemed too difficult to contemplate.
Once I was reasonably dry and decently attired, I set to writing my story. I got down all of the bits that had been churning around in my head for the last few days, and then realised that I had written myself into a complete hole and had got no idea what was supposed to happen next.
One of our tutors at University (did I mention that I am doing a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge University? Well, I am.) told us, rather drily, that Writers’ Block is nonsense. You do not have Plumber’s Block, or Policeman’s Block. If you are going to write for a living you jolly well get on and do it, block or not. You have got to think of something and write it.
In any case, I am something of an expert at carrying on writing when I have got nothing whatsoever to say, as readers of these pages will attest.
I carried on, hoping that the next thing would reveal itself.
It did, sort of, but it was so awful and grim that I wasn’t sure whether or not I ought to write it. I wrote it anyway, because I thought it felt right, I can always cross it out later.
I think I might have a couple of days of not writing it, to see if anything nicer happens whilst I am not looking. I do not like writing stories where horrid things happen. I don’t like to read them, and indeed, JK Rowlings’ latest epic, which is about Twitter, has given me nightmares so I have had to stop reading it in bed.
Twitter is enough to give anybody nightmares.
It is time to be a parent.
I will see you tomorrow, probably. We are setting off to Gordonstoun tomorrow night, so it might be a shortened entry. We will have to see. There is a limit to the amount of writing that I can do without anything to say, although I have noticed that this does not seem to stop several politicians talking.
Until tomorrow.
