Get a Grip

I'm trying to write by hand each day, usually in the morning and usually with no inspiration other than the will to feel pen on paper. Amazing. how I lost that connection over time, a thing taken for granted pre 90s, pre online mirror ball disco distraction.

The thing is, and this is the thing. it really is, is that it requires total commitment to do this. As the pen, in my case a fountain pen, glides...no that's a fib...as it stutters, yes stutters across the page, I can think of nothing else except this act, this task, The sun just peaked out for once and in this grey town that's a rarity and a gift.

Everyone is moaning about the change in the weather and how “this time last year, it wasn't like this”, yet they never comment on the nonstop cloud seeding above their heads. I guess they think it's just some pretty pattern making, a bit like a Red Arrows air display. I'm not sure what the French equivalent of these Jolly chaps is? My young daughter feels the damp greyness as a physical intrusion, an attempt to smother her joyful psyche... and it really fucking is...it truly challenges the soul...isolation or a sense of solitary confinement. I feel it too.

It demands a lot to swim through these days sometimes, and I have always been a shit swimmer...taking in water as I try to breathe, struggling to establish a pattern... not waving but...not drowning but...treading water with heavy shoes. I remember when they used to make us jump in the pool with pyjamas on, it was a swimming badge test. Struggling as the waterlogged sleepwear dragged me down. Preparing us for the moment when our luxury yacht sank whilst we were in bed, or, and this is more likely, for when the P&O ferry fucked up and sank as we all headed out on a day trip to Dover.

I hit my face on the bottom of the pool on one of the weekly school trips. Diving into the shallow end, as I often do. They had to clear the pool because my nose bled and diluted with the water... I thought it looked cool, a bit like a lava lamp effect. My nose has bled my whole life. That's not a euphemism, it's a fact.
When I was a kid, I had to have it cauterised because it would just kick off at random moments...
Ice, Pinch, Head Back, a sort of youthful ritual that would stop me in my tracks...’get a grip on yourself’...’but the money’s good’...as I would later come to discover.

I can't resist musical thoughts, or are they intrusions, they run through my head like a constant ticker tape. Can you have musical Tourette’s... lyrical ADHD? Not lyrical in the poetic sense just in the way that lyrics force themselves into your thoughts. I get it with old 70s adverts, too. “There are two men in my life to one I am a mother to the other I'm a wife and I give them both the best with natural Shredded Wheat”.
That’s a giggle fest of controversy with no chance of a re-run.

And so on and so on... I've run out of steam on this one, it's a practice and I will try again tomorrow...”I was a toiler on the sea”. Fuck off! You see there is a clear example of lyrical ADHD....squeezing its way into my head!

It just popped out at the end. It’s not random and I can see where it came from P&O, swimming pyjamas, treading water, lava lamps and blood. Hugh Corwall whispering in my ear!