White whine alert: where have all the four-exing sixty-watt light bulbs gone? The proper, incandescent ones, I mean, I still can't abide the save-the-planet ones no matter how much better people say they are. This kind of thing can have me slithering helter skelter into a rant about things in general that I find difficult about the now, looking back with rose-tinted spectacles to the proper lightbulb days of yore. We didn't have computers then, much, or mobile phones. How did we live though? I can't remember. But I do know that it was generally ok to pick up the phone to make or break an arrangement whereas now it seems an indecently intrusive thing to do. This comes to mind because there is someone from the lightbulb days who has for some time - most of the year, actually - been trying to make an arrangement for us to meet up again. Considering where we both are, this should be fairly straightforward, but it hasn't been. Small difficulties that might easily be sorted by having a short conversation become something else when one is texting (her preferred method of communication) back and forth. Emails get lost or passed over. First one who picks up the phone is a mashed potato, and I don't want to be it.

Nanowrimo has passed me by, but I am back into my novel - in my fashion. Short bursts and a bit of plod plod. But is has ignited in me again and I have found a way forward after a lovely writing time with the daughter, who is working on another play. Sometimes one just needs a small shift to get unstuck. To keep going is the thing. I have no real sense of how achievable it is, the satisfactory completion of such a task as this, but the travelling (the carrying on, the writing), rather than the arrival is really the thing, and without it I feel strangely lost.