And so it begins. The voice in my head that gets me up at five in the morning and tells me to go and write. That voice has caused a lot of work to be done, many words on the page, short stories, whole novels, four of them, and all this. I’ve been looking back through the memoir and this diary, so much talking, so many stories and still they keep coming, that voice still finding a reason to send me to the kitchen table while the rest of the world sleeps. That’s how they feel, these five am sorties, as if I am the only one awake in a snoring world. And my brain before it organises itself into what’s important and what is not tumbles out this jumble of half-baked thoughts, the rubble and the left overs and the not fully formed, the beginnings of a day. There is a silence unlike night. There is a quiet that I can pace through. This kitchen is a jumble of yesterdays; the washing up liquid set down with the lid sprung open as a pan that is already put away was washed. A coat slung over the edge of a door by Andy who came in late, exhausted having spent four hours in Reading being locked out of his van. Kenny on the table spread out in post breakfast haze amongst fruit and water bottles. The chicken stock that I got going yesterday after dinner and which sat all night lidded and warmed on the hot plate of the rumbling Aga now put on the right hand burner to slowly rumble itself into life and think about flavour. I notice it’s waking a little too quickly while I sit here, I put coins beneath it to turn down the heat. And someone’s got the knitting basket out, the needles last put away when covid trickled out of our lives. Kenny raises her head to a distant shout of pipes or something further in the woods beyond, and satisfied the world isn’t ending, goes back to sleep. And Percy comes in and claws at my leg, purring, saying hungry. And I have written five hundred words and it’s time to stop.
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Good morning. I overslept today and it was wonderful. All the way until 6:30. Time for tea.
Nice Eleonor!