Saturday 25 February 2012

Nocturn

It’s three in the morning, mountains have proved impossible to complete past Alps, Apennines. I could skip the Bs and get to Carpthanians and Dolomites but integrity grips me. I wonder why I think the quality of sleep would be different if I cheated in my game. I know, I’d stay awake worrying about cheating. So I move onto a novel variation; Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, ... Zambia. Still no sleep. Maybe just a quick peep then on the worries. Like picking a scab, without fail they bloom and flourish from my horizontal wanderings. Does brain blood come to rest in different zones whilst lying prone? Blood fertilizer to nourish paranoia. Maybe. But at least the alphabetical exercise produced a longer list tonight; a sign of recovery from the scrambled egg I’ve been passing off as intelligence these last few weeks.

How long shall I try to sleep before trying to read back to sleep by a low light? One hour, two?

Finally, restarting the paragraph of the night before that blurred into nonsense, my mind is sharp and focussed which means sleep is way off. This is no way to start a day that’s going to stretch long, long.

Think about the wine. Being lightweight in the drinking department, one or two glasses can send me groggy so at least physical damage is limited when drinking to forget. That’s good.

There’s not a story in me. Up Close and Extremely Loud didn't supply it and the Museum of Innocence was a wipe out too. Sense of an Ending wasn't bad. James Michener’s 'towering saga of a proud land and its indomitable people' might do the trick if all the pages don’t fall out first. Vortex spin-off, lack and loss. Let’s play with that.

Hungry people may lack food but they have not lost it. The potential for food is always there but the physical manifestation is not. Tell that to the hungry. Would they feel the hunger less? Tell them there are hungrier people. Would they feel their hunger less? There is a worse war here or there. How bad does a war have to be before fear is validated? Has some agency somewhere graded the severity of war? Even before that sentence is finished one senses that the answer is yes. Which is worse? The worst war? The hungriest hunger? The unloveliest love? Sleep does not come.



Friday 10 February 2012

I have six minutes

But now it's five minutes. Tch, there goes another one wondering whether to follow this thought and losing the one I started with. I had six minutes in between remote working and lighting the fire and finding the Scrabble and unloading/loading the dishwasher and fetching logs and planning an evening meal for when the hordat descend (don't ask what a hordat is, I made it up a long time ago). So now I have one minute left before the kindly neighbour comes to keep company so I can go to the supermarket to buy the food, to cook, to nourish the hordat, to please, to sink gratefully into a chair and say, 'could someone clear please?', to start again tomorrow, to care, to nourish, to tire. So tired.

Saturday 4 February 2012

There is always music

Not all the time, not always good. But there is always music.

Today is a good day; my fire-lighting skills are improving, the sun is shining, the frost is crisp and clean and the puppy ate his breakfast. An email arrived from an Italian PhD student I met on Thursday, headed 'The Italian Job'; a new friend. I even asserted myself with my sister-in-law. Wow to that. So now it's off to buy some lovely food to share with one of my lovely daughters. Good.