WORDS in ACTION

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Tuesday

I am working by candlelight just like Dickens – the candle that is, not the writing. It was fascinating to hear comedians and senior lawyers appreciating Charles D on Armando Ianucci’s prog last night. No telly tonight then.  Will the lecy come back in time for this to be posted? It’s been out for 9 hours now.  Fortunately I have a gas fire and hob – the luxury of being able to have a brew!

But someone please explain to me how it is an improvement to have landline phones that don’t work in a power cut. I’ve unplugged and reconnected my clockwork phone but then can’t ring folk whose lecy phones are dead.  Could ring mobiles of course – unless, like us, they have lost both signal and battery power.

And talking of battery, it will soon give out on the mini laptop here. I did some work with pen and paper this morning to conserve, but blogging, even if it can’t be posted, seems to need a keyboard…

Chunks of masonry lie around Rothesay and a boat washed up on the road at Port B.  I can be well informed about N Ireland owing to the fact that my (battery) radio is picking up Radio Ulster instead of R Scotland. Weird.

Darkness is falling around me.  Time to get the stovies going.

Wednesday

Yesterday evening (after the stovies) listened by candlelight to a Radio 3 recording of live Prom – the Mariensky Theatre orchestra playing the entire 1895 score of Swan Lake.  Went to bed at 10 and was wakened at 11.30 by the freezer beeping like a reversing lorry, the signal that the power was back and the freezer was unhappy at being too warm.  But only for 15 minutes.   Intermittent reconnections -and beepings -have gone on until about 12.30 today. Yes, it can be restful relaxing by candlelight but hard to maintain any motivation to work when shifting between emergency and normal mode.  When the gloom descends again – because daylight is an over-generous description of the conditions – I just want to go back to sleep.  And avoid thinking about the fact that half the roofing is in the back green.

I spent a gentle half hour on Sunday listening to U. A. Fanthorpe’s Christmas card poems read by Sheila Hancock. Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and others commented on the delight of being on the poet’s card list.

As ‘U. A.’ put it, she turned to the animals and bit players in the story when she had run through the main characters in the story.  ‘What the Donkey Saw’ is just one of such. Not sentimental, but thoughtful and droll.

Her partner Rose who survives her, reminisced about the banda on which they reproduced the early cards.  Some of us can remember the purple ink on our fingers and the spirity smell!

If you’ve a half hour in the kitchen or decorating the tree, listen to it on iplayer.  It’s a treat!

Between storms, I travelled to Norwich and on to deepest Suffolk at the weekend.   Not so much ’4 weddings and..’ as 4 trains and a boat!  All the connections dovetailed, I got there and back on schedule – and the sun shone all day Saturday until a full moon came up over the Blythburgh estuary.

I had a fun time reconnecting with my publisher and fellow authors.  Shocked though to realise that ‘How to Stop Flogging a Dead Horse’ came out in 2006. Have promised to send suggestions to the commissioning editor.

It was quite bizarre to be transported from power cuts to a wine bar in Norwich and thence to doing Advent stuff with the Vicar of Wangford.  This included singing evensong in a thatched church, standing opposite my sister (said vicar), me being the other half of the two person choir.  The splendid organist sang along and the congregation of half a dozen or so seriously elderly folk joined in heartily.  How, we wondered, had the journey of our lives,  sometimes lived half a world away from each other, brought us to this moment?

They wake me at night – they’re pounding the window right now.  I’ve been looking at the forecast for the end of the week when I’m booked to go south to sunny Suffolk for the weekend.  Yes, there is a jolly yellow thing on the BBC weather page for down there.  (Rothesay hasn’t made it on to their new not quite all singing and dancing version – please, no suggestions as to why.)

Short of hiring a helicopter, I’ll get off the island if I can but one of the advantages of advancing age is that you know ‘this too will pass’.  At the risk of sounding more philosophical than I actually manage to be all the time, I do get less worked up about my own plans being disrupted.  I hate to let anyone else down but then they too have their own version of the zen of hailstones to work out!

Yesterday, I joined two meetings by phone conference because icy roads precluded driving.  Business done and still home and cosy.

Oban has already had its Winter Festival – although a reprise is to take place this weekend on account of all the fireworks going off at once.  This now famous ‘misfiring’ has apparently resulted in the town’s hotels being booked out for the company’s compensatory second go at the show.  Sometimes a mistake genuinely acknowledged and rectified creates more goodwill than if it had never happened!
I’m now an occasional reader of the Oban Times, hence this intelligence. Work for the pisky Diocese of Argyll & the Isles takes me up there regularly. This week included a day trip to Mull.  I was lucky to get back before the worst of the stormy weather.  Have winter checked the car.  Perhaps Advent preparation should include putting the shovel and blanket back in the boot for next week’s trip!

Or do I?  Because I’ve been writing a sort of memoir, I’ve had to check the accuracy of what I think I remember.  That’s possible when I’m writing about public events.  Wikipedia is silent on the life and times of yours truly.
Not a researcher by talent or inclination, I’ve found it fascinating to see where my memory has failed or grown accretions or distortions.

Well, the dedicated writing time has come to an end.  The work that pays needs to be resumed, albeit till I go on holiday in a couple of weeks.   When I get back, it will be full steam ahead workwise.   I plan to stay in touch with the writing task by regular short bursts so that, even if progress is slow, I don’t lose momentum entirely.

I’ve been lucky with the weather here.  Yes, really.  We’ve had quite a bit of sunshine so I’ve enjoyed a walk in the evening and even a couple of dips in the warmed shallows of Bute’s sandy beaches!

I guess I need to keep blogging if only for myself -  in case I don’t ‘remember it well’.

Quality not quantity is what counts – but on the days when it doesn’t flow, just aiming for the target number of words keeps me going.   So I’m pleased to see that I’ve churned out 12,200 words so far on this July stint.  That’s not counting the 1200 for the article previously mentioned.

There is a huge amount still to write and only then does the  restructuring and editing start.  Sigh.   Why do it?   Good question.  Some writers say they just can’t help it, that writing is simply a way of being.  Others find it agonisingly hard but still feel impelled to do it.   I’m somewhere in between. When I’ve worked hard and produced something, I feel sort of cleansed, the way you do after a good cry.  As the song goes ‘don’t explain’.

Churchill apparently wrote in bed.  I do too from time to time, mostly the Julia Cameron ‘morning pages’ although sometimes I have taken the laptop and the pot of tea back to bed and worked there.  This morning I ‘wrote’ in my sleep.  Well, must have been half asleep but it felt as though I was a long way down, a bit like a lucid dream.  I drifted for a bit but when I woke more fully, I could still remember the train of thought which had been forming, not as random snippets, but as sentences.   So after a quick muesli fix, I took myself to the PC, wrote down the first sentences and continued to write about 1200 words in about 45 minutes.  They may never see the light of day publication-wise but I’m following the process of generating stuff as uncritically as possible in order to have the material to work on.  ‘Don’t get it right, get it written!’

It also reminds me of how I work best.  It’s important to write even when it feels like squeezing the last bit out of the toothpaste tube.  But knowing how and when we connect best to the act of writing is a real find!

A new and very convincing distraction arrived on Tuesday in the form of an urgent request for a magazine article.  What more virtuous distraction can there be?  I took up the challenge and slaved happily over a hot PC until I had produced the required 1200 words.  I could have opted for 600 but as is well known, that’s harder to do.  Apparently it was Pascal who wrote  ‘I have made this (letter) longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter’.   I had remembered and attributed it differently.  Which goes to show that I talk through a hole in my hat.  On the other hand, just because it’s on a website, doesn’t make it true…

Back to the grind!

Well, you might know.  After weeks of ‘mixed’ weather (I’m competing for Euphemism of the Week) the sun is blazing down as I sit here at the PC attempting to focus on the oeuvre.  Blogging does get the juices running so this doesn’t count as a distraction.   I claim.
But what about the phone call I’ve  just taken?  I’ve moved the handset out of reach but I forgot that I was meant to be screening calls and got out of my seat to answer.

The friend who rang was urgently seeking the phone number of another friend.   It was  in a professional context.  We didn’t natter and when I hung up, I reflected that I was glad I’d been able to help.  (‘I’m too busy writing about my core values to listen to you’..I don’t think so.)   If I had a deadline, it would be different.  And not every caller would be brief.   I’ve set an auto email message.  I should really change the voicemail so that folk who really need to be in touch know that I’m here and others can try later.