Monthly Archives: November 2015

Sunday Dreaming

Last weekend was mad, and I’m not sure how much time I have to type this one out too. So anyway, quickly; I’ve reached 45,000 words, hurrah. Childe is good, hubby is good. Isn’t this weather awful?

I’ve a manic week ahead. I have not one but three main events happening this week, the last one starting Friday at 5pm. So busy, stressful, and lots of it this week. The house is messy, and I have no decorations taken down, no presents bought and my 1950s dress with the pearls has still not arrived.

None of this is real.

So this week, writing between 6.30am onwards is the easy part.

There’s the doorbell. Talk to you all next week.

Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum

Well, how are ye? No, seriously, how are you? Are you okay, all right? Have you checked in with someone recently, rang them, talked to them, let them hear your voice, made eye contact?  Are you okay, are you at home, safe and untroubled? All your folks okay? All your neighbours?

These days, my friends, these terrible, terrible days. We sit, and horrors play out on the images on our eyes. Toddlers’ bodies flop and slack on beach fronts, teenagers flee down dark streets from concerts. And unlike the gentle words used in newspapers when I was growing up, all of it is visible and clear. Last night I watched video by a journalist who lived across from the Bataclan, showing people jumping over dead bodies at doorways, while on an upper storey window a pregnant woman clung to a metal bar, and pleaded with someone to pull her in, she was slipping. The footage ends before she gets in, there’s no way to know right now if she is okay. If anyone is okay. No one is okay.

The picture of the inside of the Bataclan looks exactly like the end of any concert, bar the larger mass of the bodies.

And what can I do, faced with the visual of these enemies of me, what weapons can I bring to bear on these men, these haters of my ways and my times? What armour can I clad myself in when I see the acts they will do? What can I do that is strong enough to stop them, I who know nothing, I who can do nothing? I am no soldier, not accustomed to hardship or battles. I can call no orders, lead no charge… But I do have in my bag of tricks something that is strong enough against these people. I, and everyone I know, can call forth around them a weapon  as strong as any fanatic, a wall of safety bigger than any gun. I can and do know exactly the form of words that will dispel the power of these men’s ways, and it is exactly strong enough to remove their power on this earth.

This power grew to a concentration just where this latest attack took place, In Paris, where the ideals and principles founded by our own culture and society began to take modern form. This power is founded in the creation of humanity as equal, and where each of us share Rights Inalienable, and undeniable, in the eyes of the executive and legislative function of our state. It is in the ideals of proportionality, in the concepts of Fairness and Privacy, in the motto and guide of our fallen brothers, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It has its own magic phrases such as Habeas Corpus, Presumption of Innocence, and deorum Injuriae Diis Curae, phrases stronger than any spell Harry Potter could cast about. It is a power brought about by years of argument and counter-argument, from men like Hume, Locke, Kant. It has just as much imagination, power, and yes, perhaps even magic, behind it, to make the world safe again.

These men, who would destroy us, know nothing of us, for they don’t know we can control the very turn of the earth with these words. They think we are all alike, and that we will live in fear and hate because they must. They think we will turn into them, and hate back, kill back, because that is all we can do. But they are wrong, for we have laws as strong as a mother’s love for her child’s heart. We will find these men, and all the other men. We will track them down, and we will stop them. We will look them deep in the eye, and do the one thing they do not want us to do.

We will arrest them in the name of the Law, that thing that they act against and that thing we must use now more than ever.

In the name of the Law, may it always be strong.

Something Has To Give.

Hello, sports fans. Hopefully you’re indoors on this rainy, play-called-off Sunday. I’ve the headphones on listening to Chopin, himself is cooking listening to ACDC (hence the headphones), and the child is either asleep or burning something around here somewhere. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to get a few lines down.

In terms of writing, still managed to get into the desk twice this week at 6.30am in the morning. We have now reached the thirty-one thousand word mark, and I’m reaching the inner landmarks of this novel that I’ve carried around with me for so long. One of them was reached this Thursday, in an early morning session that was just wonderful. One of these characters is, after a dreadful period in her life, regaining her sense of humour. As she lies in bed at the end of a long day, her imagination takes on a long fantasy so comically outrageous, she makes herself burst out laughing, the first time she’s laughed in years. I’ve carried that moment around in my head over and over and over again, a glass snowball of her life and her heart in that exact moment that I have had to write out to finally make free. And this Thursday she and I finally got there, we finally got to see it together.

A lot of paddling to get to that shore…

But all this is taking its toll. I’m exhausted, and really I don’t have much in the way of mental … character left in me by doing this. I normally am scrupulous with what I eat, but I just can’t keep that up this week. I came home and made Chicken Casserole with tonnes of potatoes. It tasted amazing, but the carbs should have been a big no-no. I’m finding my hands full, of all these loose fraying threads, and there is only so much energy I can give to everything. Someone took too long at a traffic light on the way home on Friday and the fury I felt was irrational, exhausted, just nonsense.

By the end of this I’m going to be a basket case. Seriously. I’m going to be nuts.

Don’t care. I think.

Stupid is as Stupid Does.

Bank holidays mean there are no work. So my work began on Tuesday, after not three, but four blissful days with the other half and little man. I’m in luxury when I can spent four days with them, which at times can seem a little unfair. Anyways.

Tuesday, I get up, I get myself out the door as usual, I pull into the car park at 6.30 am. And that is when I realise I have left the keys to the office in my other coat. The keys that will let me get into the building and which otherwise won’t be open to me for at least another hour. Back at home, in the hall.

Idiocy. It’s rare, but it’s real, people.

So what do I do? Sit in the car and think?? Well nuts to that! Back in the car, drive home, pick up the keys, back in the car, and back into work. I make it to my desk at .650 am and turn the computer on. I turn the coffee up to Sqqqqueeeeee! And I get going. And what I wrote was an interesting little cul de sac for one of my characters about a sad little moment that I have always wondered about and am now able to write out and use, no, exploit, for my own uses.

By 8.00 am I had two thousand words down, in an interesting counterpoint to the movement of the novel so far. Managed to make it in on Thursday without clapping my hands together like a seal, and got the word count up to 26,000 or so.

All we need now is for the coffee be emptied over the machine or for the computer to blow up or for a bloody comet to hit the office and it will be the icing on the cake.

“Weeeeeeeee!”

Have a good one, lads.