Days Like This

 One hopes for days like this and then one comes along.

The main reason for celebration is the second dose of vaccine which seemed so far off when first booked but came round in due course, having waited patiently. It is a heart-breaking and heart-warming experience with the helpful, cheerful volunteers and the kindly nurses. It is so well-run that it can't possibly be anything to do with our vainglorious Prime Minister and yet his otherwise inexplicable popularity is on the back of its great success as if he personally had invented it, arranged all the appointments and performed the injections himself.  But what really happened is that he underpaid the heroic NHS staff that saved his life among so many others. Incorrigible isn't the word, it's nowhere near damning enough.

So, one didn't at all mind walking home in drizzle. I like drizzle, I quite like rain in a number of circumstances. I have no conception of why people think that a holiday on a sun lounger in a resort that sells lager and cocktails in happy hours is essential to them but it looks like the same delusion that makes others, some of them the same people, think that the football results matter.

 

In the meantime, weeks can pass without anything getting written, with nothing that presents itself as worth writing. I had imagined that having all the time in the world would bring with it the chance to be a 'writer', whatever sort of writer I chose to be or of whatever ideas came to mind, but one needs something one believes in to write or else there is simply no point. 

It is more worthwhile to read good books than write bad ones and having torn through Alexei Sayle's percipient version of his early life, finished the Collected Hardy stories and gratefully completed my reading of the novels of Rosemary Tonks, I was waiting for Prof. Armitage's Oxford lectures. I had fetched from upstairs some of Oscar and a book by Goethe that I was once sent by mistake. I had ordered more Balzac and the Hardy biography I've been meaning to read for 15 years since it was published.

Those books will pile up as a bulwark against any early summer shortage because the Armitage book arrived today. I should be able to tell you about it next week, including why poetry is a 'vertical art'.  

But also, on days like this, when one gets the creative capability, or thinks one has, when it seems possible and suddenly anything seems possible, one must cash in. Out of thin air, an idea for a story arrived, I know not from where, and I added 700 words this morning to the 1800 I did yesterday and I haven't lost faith in it yet. Then, again in the way that 'inspiration' (as it were) comes not single spies but in battalions, a pop song was gifted to me and I knocked out two verses and the chorus, according to my Nile Rodgers-type formula. And then the Shakespeare biography work was miraculously woken from its coma. 

This time next year, then, I'm confidently expecting to be riding high in the hit parade as well as readily available in your nearest Waterstones in the fiction and biography sections if not the usually deserted corner they find for poetry, too. Or, on the other hand, the significance of a day like this might only have been the second dose of vaccine, which is thing I'm most grateful for.

The enjoyment to be had from the writing is in the doing of it. Unless it's prose fiction and then it's drudgery and almost certain to be as tortuous to read as it was to write. And, by the time any of it sees itself in print, it's long over and done with.