Of Sensational Serendipity November 25, 2009
Posted by Jen in : A210, Journal, Novel , 24 commentsIt’s funny. I always think I write in my journal on a regular basis. This is, in fact, not true. It never fails to amaze me that quite often a whole month – sometimes many months – have gone by without me jotting down where I am in life. What I think. What I feel. What I think ‘now’ never seems that interesting, you know? But then, when I read back over old entries, it’s like reading the words of a different person. Strangely enough, when I started this journal I didn’t write down the year. Just the date. February 27th. I suppose I thought it would be obvious which year it was. It wasn’t. It took me a while to work out that it was 2006. I was a different person then.
Last week, I was deep in indecision. Head or heart? Heart or head? I read through all your comments on my last post. I pondered my future. I decided that I’d made the right decision to finish my degree and put the writing on hold for a year. I’m sensible like that. And then I changed my mind. I’m fickle like that. On Friday, I was missing writing. Missing it a lot, I mean. No, even more than that. I wrestled and wrangled and scowled a lot. And then serendipity charged in. Did I want a place in the short-story group I’d been grovelling for? Grovelling for over a year, in fact. Too bloomin right I wanted it. And then, an unexpected but lovely comment about some of my photos sealed it. I’ve withdrawn from my OU course. It’s not copping out, I keep trying to convince myself. It’s a positive decision. I want to write. I’ve taken the day off today to make friends with Novel 2 again. I shall shake the characters’ sketchy hands and apologise for neglecting them. I’d somehow become the wrong person over the past few months. But I think the ‘real’ me is back now.
There has also been a new addition to my life. I’m quite cautious about new relationships but he seems lovely and I admit, I’ve fallen for him already. It’s a shame I’m allergic to him and have to mainline anti-histamine to enjoy his whiskery kisses. He likes me to write in bed and is fascinated by my words, especially when smudging them with his nose.
‘D’you want a cat?’ Tweed Clad Colleague bellowed at me down the phone.
‘No, not really,’ I replied in my determined voice. ‘I’m allergic to cats.’
‘No, it’ll be fine. He’s a hardcore farm cat. You’ll never see him.’
Three weeks later, Tommy is stretched out on my pillow. ‘Oh yes,’ he purrs, ‘I used to be a farm cat. It’s a mug’s game. Is it salmon or duck for dinner?’
Ok, that’s enough of the soppy cat talk. I’ve got to go order a new journal. My sporadic entries have meant that it’s taken since February 2006 to fill this one but it’s nearly time to tuck it away. It seems apt that it’ll be time to start a new one soon. Not just a new journal, but a whole new chapter. Life’s a funny old game, isn’t it? I really love it though. I’m purring, just like the cat, today. For lots of reasons.
Of Brain-Bursting Burblings November 12, 2009
Posted by Jen in : A210, Journal , 19 commentsHello hello. I am scrawling this from the confines of my padded cell. Madness brought about by a combination of counting grass, ignoring cows and OU rigors has rendered me insensible and I am having to convey these words for you by telepathy to a hedgehog who is scrawling the words in blood with his plentiful pointy bits. Spines, he says they’re called.
In these days of recession, we have to think carefully about re-using what we can. So, in this spirit, I confess that those opening words have been recycled from an email I sent a friend yesterday, trying to bamboozle him with weirdness so that he wouldn’t notice I was actually bailing out of a longstanding drinking arrangement. Well, I say longstanding but we’d probably have had to sit down. And it’s a drink we said we were going to go for about, ooh, 21 years ago. No, really. I actually am that bad. I can’t remember why we didn’t have that drink all those years ago, in Jersey as we were then. Not to mention the fact that he was *rather* handsome and I really wanted to. I expect I was too busy, working full time and spending each evening barricaded into the Jersey Opera House orchestra pit tootling my flute.
Now? I’m just as bad. It appears, to those who don’t know me properly, that I devour deadlines and stress for breakfast. I don’t. I’m more of a tea and toast kinda girl.
‘Are you tired and stressed now?’ I was asked the other day. Erm… It is, it would seem, my default setting. That’s not good, is it?
Would you like a shameful confession? I have plenty, of course, but today’s is that I recently worked studiously through Paul McKenna’s ‘Change Your Life in 7 Days’. Needless to say, it took me a month to get through. Too busy, you see. And what did I learn? That teaching, which I’ve been pursuing for more years than I can remember, didn’t feature even once. I don’t want to be a teacher. I just didn’t know it. So what do I want? Um… no idea. To write, obviously. But there’s no time to write right now because of the studying. So, do I abandon the degree and write the novel that’s nagging me? Or look upon the Lit degree as an investment in time, something that will make me a better writer when I pick it up again? Answers to the usual address, if you please.
The rather super-at-time-juggling Beleaguered Squirrel noticed something in my last blog post that I hadn’t: I’d somehow taken a day off work in order to do something ‘yesterday’. I know. I have struck upon a genius idea, no? In between the Other Things, I shall build a time machine. I will construct it from empty ketchup thingies, tins of salad-crisp sweetcorn and some knicker elastic. I expect I’ll need some tin foil too. Time machines must be shiny. I could use tinsel too, seeing as it’s now almost Chr… no. Let’s not think about that. All aboard the crisis time machine. Make haste, people of the frantic world. And could someone please pack the hedgehog?
