Seeking September Sanity September 1, 2008
Posted by Jen in : Journal , 33 commentsSo it’s September how? Good Lord. And hello. Here I am, back from my jolly jaunt to Jersey. Off I went, full of longing and sentimentality for the place I grew up. Hmmmmm. 5 days of bullet grey skies, the beasts - severed from their PCs and gadgets - moaning about their terminal boredom and 1500 quids later, it all feels like a dream. Not a sentient dream but one of those crazy feverish dreams where everything is melded and blurred together like a watercolour left out in the rain.
My travel writing book went unread. My camera groaned at the drizzle, mist and monotone drabness. The barbecues on the beach as the tide whooshed in and the sun bent low went un-barbied. But hey ho. We swam in the sea and let the waves buffet and shove us about until my hair turned into a giant shredded wheat. I saw my little sis for the first time in six years. Caught up with the domestic doings of my parents’ neighbours. Listened to my daft duffer of a dad on repeat.
Daft Duffer, yowling with laughter (other diners looking over and tutting a bit): “Hilarious eh?” Isn’t that the best story you’ve heard?’
Son No. 1, smiling indulgently: ‘It was very funny the first time and reasonably so the second. It did lose a certain something on the third telling.
Gawd.
I really have changed since I left Jersey 6 years ago. We don”t notice time ticking on until we’re forcibly transplanted back in time.
Anyway. The travel writing? Pffffff. That can wait. In the meantime, I’ve been ploughing through Sophie King’s How to Write Short Stories. After the Cheggers chapter, I’ve learnt my lesson about dissing others. So I won’t mention the punctuation cock-ups in Sophie’s book. No, I won’t mention them at all. My teeth are itching though, that’s all I’ll say. Besides, I’m not sure I want to write ‘feelgood’ stories. I want to write stories that make people gasp. Make them wail. You there! Stop that smiling!
Time to dust off my lesbian vicar, methinks. Misery and weirdness are the way forward. Maybe with just a smattering of feelgood jollification, just in case I bump into it on life’s inevitable return journey. Being poked in the eye by one’s own story is so not good.
