space

I think I was beginning to forget about the seasons and the fact that one doesn't always live in winter or post-winter when there is no more snow or ice but the cold goes on until one just takes it for granted that this is how it is and will be. Today being properly fine and lovely I took my first real walk of the year, this made doubly attractive by the invitation to have cake and vanilla-infused coffee at a friend's house. I have a hot, scratchy feeling in my throat and a buzzing in the limbs that threatens something or other, but I am ignoring it - not in the sense of doing anything stupid, but sometimes these virusy shadows move on without turning into the real thing and if I pay it no attention it might just naff off.*

I have been doing too much but so it goes. No way that I could have missed the readings in London, which took place at the Art Workers Guild in one of those lovely squares surrounded by Georgian houses. Trying to remember if I ever won first prize at anything before: some kind of ski-ing competition when I was fifteen comes to mind - a race I should never have won and can't think for the life of me why I thought to enter it. But in a race like that it is quite clear - first one through the barrier wins it. A poem depends in large part on the person judging (thank you, Myra Schneider, who I met for the first time on Saturday). That night I stayed over at my friend's house and talked about The Writing: friend is on the brink of lovely things to do with her completed novel, with associated heady feelings of joy, and also a kind of vertigo. I am also on the brink - of something I feel I can properly commit to, even though it is still early days, however long it takes me. Next day, at the Daughter's flat after celebratory mother's day breakfast, there was an impromptu reading of a play she had just written and was preparing to send off - Son, Daughter's boyf and me taking the three parts. Fun! Afterwards, an arduous Sunday journey back to the Edge.

And life goes on - the other life, I mean, the spaces on the wall calendar that fill up with dental and blood test appointments, Signs Cottage repair work, choral practice, workshops (and I have just realised I need to get a poem writ by Saturday), whatnots, and the long spaces where one must do nothing or very little other than monitor the progression of dust motes from bedroom window, not the bit of life where one actually sits down and does The Writing. But this is what I intend to do, by hook or by crook, and by a bit of cunning re-organising of actual, physical space.

Watch this space.

* update on virusy shadow which has, in the space of a few hours, turned into a complete bastarding cold. So the not paying any attention to it didn't work. Dang and blast.