I often used to write in the mornings even 'til lunch. I'd start meaning to do half an hour over breakfast, but hours would fly past and I wouldn't even notice I would feel guilty not to have been more "productive" in other ways. I see things differently now and anyway, while guilt stopped me doing a lot of things, it didn't stop me doing that. It felt like life.
It was always like that - easy, effortless, addictive. Revision was more of a task. But writing flowed. There was never a dearth of content, subject, ideas. There are scores of drafts that haven't been published, from just not enough time to get to them, or they were superseded in waves of other topics.
There hasn't been a lack of material to write about in this long hiatus either. But fear is an eraser, a great inhibitor. Fear is murderous. And publishing is public, it's in the very word, which means, not necessarily safe.
Meanwhile, strangely, the readership has not gone down, but up. It used to be that readers were in the UK, then Europe, Russia, Australia and New Zealand and then the US and then a few years ago it was Singapore, Hong Kong. And now it's south east Asia and South America, Vietnam and Brazil for some reason and Singapore still.
Is tango big in Brazil? They have lots of great Brazilian dances. Many strike me as upbeat, for parties and carnivals. I was told recently, by a tango teacher living in the UK, that the southern part of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, which borders northern Uruguay shares the same culture. I already knew Uruguayan culture is similar to Argentina, maybe in a way that echoes similarities between Colombian and Venezuelan cultures but I'm stopping there as I am losing my feet. Do we say that in English? Or is it from Spanish? French? When you start to go out of your depth.
There is so much to say. It is as though I have been underwater for a long time and seen many monstrous things and some special and rare.
I am underslept. My back aches, pain nosing it's way down my leg probing. I cancelled a hike today which has left me at a loss, at least, so I thought. This week has been carefully planned with restorative, joyful or new experiences, things that don't let me think too much. But maybe this is where I am meant to be now.
Although, actually, I don't want to be at home even though it's quiet and most of the family are out or away for hours. When I lie in bed or sit very still I can partly hear, partly feel a mechanical noise that seems to come through the ground. On, on, on then for a second off; on, on on etc. I don't want to believe it is the new underground pumping system they have just installed a few streets away beside the Tay. The sensation pulses night and day.
I don't want lists or tasks either. I want to be in a modern, quiet, anonymous chain hotel where you know what you are getting, and no one wants to know who you are. No demands, co-codamol, away for at least two days, because of the first night effect where you adjust. Ideally I would like to be away much longer. By the sea perhaps. Or beside woods, or gardens, with birdsong, like the youth hostel in Chester where I booked a private room breaking the long drive back to Scotland after spending the week on the Devon/Cornwall border, dancing and camping, with more clothes than on my impromptu arrival last time.
I slept so badly the other day that's exactly what I did. After much prevarication, and self-justification I took myself off to a Premier Inn in east Dundee a mere half hour from me. £52 for 8 hours sleep. A grand trade.
But here we are, at my dining room table, which at least, after five months is mine again. Is this like surfacing? A gasp of air, a shake of the head, the sun on your face.
