By this time most mornings, my mind has already usually been beaten into submission by the banalities of Breakfast news, which arrives via the steam-powered goggle-box that somehow still manages to deliver its cathode ray tube of dubious delights into the darkened living room of our ramshackle hovel sitting in our rather chilly corner of Lesser Blogfordshire. My consciousness lies quivering in the corner hoping not to be noticed as I grind the smoothed down gears of my brain into what I still optimistically still regard as “action” and prepare to face up to whatever the day might have in store for me, having already railed against the stick-thin roving reporters who somehow manage to remain in vision as they leap across the screen from pixel to pixel, sometimes vanishing as they jump from one to the next, whilst they harangue yet another “real person” into telling the nation the blindingly obvious, usually about how bloody awful it is to be a “family” these days, or into confessing something so intimate that you’d normally not dare to share it with your priest or urologist.
Ah well, that part of the day is behind me now, and the terrible lottery of the journey to the station has also been negotiated without too much peril to life and limb, although today there was a near miss which I just know I’m going to fret about, and I find myself, as on most recent mornings, sitting in my possibly mildly exciting and relatively recently purchased office chair, swiveling away as I try to think, and wondering quite what thoughts I should try to string together into vaguely coherent sentences and share with you as we venture on our journey through this jolly new day.
I have a list, you see, of half-formed thoughts and half-baked ideas of things that I thought that maybe I’d like to write about. Some days, when the eyes are very crusted and the caffeine isn’t working hard enough, and my braincells are mashed from the day-to-day, sheer awfulness of just enduring the process of being me, I will have a little look at the list and wonder whether today is the day to share this, or that, but certainly not that, with you from the relative obscurity and safety of my keyboard. Sadly, sometimes when I consult the list I find that the original thought has fluttered away and I am just left with a short sentence that seemed so urgent at the time that I had to fly up and get it written before I forgot it, but which is now a meaningless string of syllables that lead to nowhere. Still, I should be grateful that I took the time to kick up the hard-drive and type it on a keyboard, because my handwriting has deteriorated so much over the years, I think because of a fundamental laziness or a ridiculous lack of patience, that anything I scribbled down on one of the many Post-It notes (other self-adhesive notepads….) is likely to be indecipherable even to me within 24 hours. Occasionally, of course, I will consult the list and think, “That’s it! That’s the one!” but then I simply can’t think of anything to say about it, and have to file it away for use on some other day when the ideas might just come.
So I might very well try and think back to that morning’s latest news for inspiration, or dig through the few memories that I have of yesterday’s happenings for the slightest crumb of originality that might just have been eked out of my unfolding history of terribly similar days. If none of these provide me with any stimulation or inspiration, I may well fall back on a tale from long ago times when a younger, sprightlier, fitter me used to venture out, wide-eyed into the world and approach it with a sense of awe, wonder and possibility.
It was a Friday, I think.
I was twelve.
As you’ve probably already guessed, today is proving to be one of those more awkward mornings. Nothing of substance has popped in and so I’m left here floundering (I used to play a game called “Floundering” when I was younger… but... No...) and wondering whether I have anything to say at all today. I could tell you all about my not-very-new office chair of course, but I suspect that, if the day should ever dawn when I feel the need to do that, maybe the time might be upon us to give up on this pitiful charade and accept that it’s time to go. But not yet, not today, not when I can share my thoughts on…
But actually, I think I’ll save that for another day.
A list! Now there is an idea!
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