writing the dreams

Stressed of Signsville. Son of Signs has a bastard throat infection with ulcers thrown in for good measure. He is on antibiotics and gargles of every description and due shortly to go to the USA for a two-week singing tour with his group before returning to uni. Painkillers are having no effect and he suffers. It’s all looking a bit grim and I haven’t much else to say until it resolves, my psychic energies being directed to this end.

It is National Poetry Writing Month, NaPoWriMo for short (sounds a bit like a disease though). The idea is to write a poem a day for the whole of April. That’s thirty. Well I’ve missed the first two – other stuff to do, and I’ve only just emerged from Poetry Boot Camp for goodness sake. But I’ll be there, I’ll be there, I tell the angels. And make my son well, you hear me? The angels are (I have noticed this before) inscrutable.

I have, though, been given a notebook by a writing friend in London. It’s really a jotter, one of those pads you flip over and when you’ve covered all the pages on one side you turn it over and do all the pages on the other side. But it has an elastic strip holding the pages together when not being written on, and it has yellow-gold covers. I have it beside my bed and have resumed the practice of recording dreams, something I used to do but haven’t for years. The other thing I haven’t done for years is to write regularly in jotter-size notebooks. I buy those big bash-you-on-the-head A4 things. Very nice when you are up to your neck in NaNoWriMo, not to be confused with NaBloPoMo (both in November), but they are heavy, whereas my new little golden sweetheart is light and easy, will fit anywhere, take anything and give you a satisfying flip every minute or so as you cover the slim pages with words. Perfect for NaDreReMo. That’s National Dream Recording Month – I’ve just invented it so remember you heard it here first. I haven’t decided which month it should be yet, am still test-running the process. I will keep you informed.