Not doing.

It is very peculiar to be me today.

For the first time in absolutely as long as I can remember I am not trying to write something, apart from these pages, of course, which really don’t count. I can write any old drivel in here, even if I have been drinking, perish the thought, and it doesn’t matter, because it is my diary and if I want to write junk I can.

Obviously I don’t want to write junk, in a perfect world every word would be full of insightful insights and unique turns of phrase and pithy observations. Actually some of those might be better when I have been drinking.

What I mean is that I am no longer scratching my head trying to write thrilling prose about dragons, and I do not have an assignment to write, because I have handed in the very last one of the year. The next thing I have got to write for Cambridge, which is where I am doing my Master’s’s’ degree, did I mention it? will be my finally final dissertation. I am supposed to have thought of a title and topic for this but so far I haven’t. I do not have the first idea what I am going to write. I thought about more dragons, but I don’t think they are exactly dissertation material. You are supposed at least to try and sound like a deeply cognitively aware intellectual.

I could do a book written in non-rhyming poetry. That is the sort of stuff about which Cambridge makes admiring noises, and I think it is reasonable to assume that the markers expect to be bored, so it might work very well. All I would have to do is explain that it was a braided narrative about some lived experience and I would be right up there with the meta-nodding.

I couldn’t do that really. I don’t have the literary appreciation to be able to read that sort of stuff, never mind write it. It might have to be more dragons, which is about as intellectual as I am ever likely to get. One of the dragons in my last story was really clever. I could write about her.

Anyway, I woke up this morning to the slightly disconcerting realisation that I did not have anything to write.

I also woke up to a large spider on the bedroom ceiling, but Mark persuaded it to go and live in the garden, so that was all right.

It made the world fade to grey a little bit, the not-writing, not the spider, obviously. I can jolly well tell you that a day which involves cleaning two bathrooms and pegging out three loads of washing and does not have a single dragon in it anywhere is not my favourite sort of day. I thought I might go for a walk, but to my extreme irritation my peg-leg is still not recovered, and in fact my foot has become fat and unwieldy again after too much trying to stump around on sand dunes and through beautiful pinewoods.

I might try again tomorrow. I do not like not going for walks, especially when the world has been filled with hawthorn blossom and elderflowers and it isn’t half term so nobody is trying to drag reluctant children around the fells telling them, against all the evidence, that they are having a lovely time.

Please do not worry about the dogs not being sufficiently exercised. Mark has been taking them to the farm and making them run behind the car. They are so fit they are practically bursting muscles out of their fur, and Rosie has decided that she is the sort of dog to whom all other dogs should be polite. Given that she is only about eight inches tall at the shoulder, sooner or later some other dog is just going to eat her.

I am going to have to do something different. I have spent all day not writing anything and not going for walks and if I have to not do it all again tomorrow I will become disgruntled.

There will have to be some Changes Around Here.