THE WORDS

It's difficult at the moment.

I'm sitting here on a Sunday evening having actually missed posting a blog for the first time in quite some considerable time now and, whilst it has been a bright and sunny day, it never quite got warm enough to dry the washing which I optimistically hung out this morning to make the most of that window of sunshine between the endless November storms.

This was after I'd been to the shops because the bread ran out, and that followed the emptying of at least one of the bags of clothes which had lurked, eyeing me contemptuously for weeks, in the kitchen ever since the bedroom had to be cleared for the builders oh, several lifetimes ago now.

Afterwards the vacuuming was attempted with the brand spanking new device (which replaced the similar and now traded-in old device) which finally escaped its cardboard box prison this weekend after weeks of waiting and watching the debris settle upon the carpets. I'm not yet convinced that being newer has necessarily made it better than the one it replaced. Certainly the stairs seem to be more of a conundrum to it as yet but that might just be my own incompetence with the new-fangled.

After that I sat down with one of my DVD box sets and watched some telly as the beloved finally returned to her knitting, whilst remained unable to relax because I knew that upstairs there remained a date in the year which had a void which needed me to fill it, as the day had rolled by without me being able to fling a few words at it.

The words won't come you see...

In fact they haven't done for quite a few days now and, if I'm being honest, those days have joined together and formed into weeks and, whilst the blog calls out to me with its siren song and constantly craves my attention, the words remain smudged inside my head, unable to link arm and do their magical hokey-cokey, and simply won't come.

Everything in the world of wordsmithery seems so utterly pointless at the moment and every thought that I so rarely muster manages not to coalesce into anything that I can believe anyone else might be interested in, which makes it hard to sit down and actually attempt to do the old conjuring tricks that made our daily interactions so worthwhile across these past few years.

"Worthwhile...?" Or do I mean "worthless...?"

Probably not. I already hear those loyal hearts who came to read and stayed to ponder (or do I mean ponderous...?) sucking in their collective breaths and flexing their fingers to crank out their words of support, as they so frequently have whenever I have faltered on the road to self-confidence (or do I just mean "con...?") as I so regularly have.

You see, recently people have been so nice in a way that I had forgotten was possible, and yet, having rediscovered the niceness of people, it's hard to let it go again and fade back into my own dark little world all over again.

And yet... I really do appreciate that support and, on numerous occasions it has dragged me back from the brink of whatever I happened to be on the brink of, and I'm grateful for the care of all those relative strangers whom I consider to be my friends.

But somehow it feels different now. Things are not the same. Things, I suppose, can never really be the same again. We are, after all, now able to make plans again, and start to look towards a future of some sort although with such thoughts come the inevitable realisation that the old adage "Men Plan, God Laughs" is undeniably true...

That should, of course, be "People Plan" and you should insert your own belief system of choice in the second bit, but it kind of dilutes the point...

So here I find myself, sitting in the gathering dusk of a November Sunday evening, and trying to knit fog, or at least make something of the nothing of a dull day at home finally attacking those long-neglected chores because the weekends are not now as full of distractions as once they were, and all of those less-than-bright and oh-so-original trains of thought which I was once so arrogant as to believe might actually mean something are suddenly turning to ash inside my mind...