gone quiet
Hang on. Must find some socks.
Ah. Bettah. Although I must say that the unalloyed joy of putting on fresh warm socks when one’s feet are cold is apparently only an inland delicacy. Nothing ever quite gets dry here. One has the feeling of pulling on one’s socks against the socks’ will. Ah well. They can’t all be winners.
I have, I believe, finally managed to right my hours, after only - hm - two months of being back on old-world soil. I have bounced myself into going to bed quite early and waking up ridiculously early as a result, but there’s something precious about waking before the sun does: a world of silence and possibility and the warmest pastries. It does have its downside, though: the height of ambition involves me doing the laundry at mad hours, in our washer-dryer which sounds a bit like Plumbo Jumbo galumphing across a parking lot. I’m sure the neighbours don’t appreciate it.
Not sure if there is too much to say or too little - November always seems to be my Long Dark Teatime and this year, my twenty-ninth, was no different, no matter that my birthday smacks right in the middle of it. I learn nothing from experience: I always look forward to November. A bad Jew, I love Christmas, but this year is looking a little more Dickensian than I’m comfortable with. I’m as skint as a skint thing, less struggling independent writer than out-and-out kept woman, and this season promises to be a Christmas of Love, the most exploitative Christmas of all.
Although I have hurled myself face-first back into the typing pool in the short term. Where were the loud wise voices telling me that I ought to have begun the job search process early in the summer? Or those, for that matter, telling me that a graduate degree is a farcical waste of money? I’m suddenly overqualified for everything, despite my protests of willingness to debase and debase just to get onto the radar screen, any radar screen. When I went in for my typing test last week a man who must have been ten years younger than me cocked an eyebrow at my CV, looked at my Master’s qualification, and said ‘Don’t worry, we can overlook this.’ I’m sure I didn’t properly express my gratitude. (Graditude? That was what I almost wrote.)
I do type, however, like BONANZA.
The writing life is a good one. The married life is a good one. The London life is a good one. But vocation awaits, worthiness, structure, contribution to the greater machine. I haven’t been unemployed for this long in - not in my adult life. I do have a novel, though. And the flat is unimaginably clean. I remember an axiom of my mother’s: anyone who folds her underwear has too much time on her hands. So I consciously do NOT fold underwear. But laundry! Floor-scrubbing! Today I brought the chairs in from the garden and wiped them down and stored them for winter - as though this place somehow needs to be battened down - scrubbed the tiles with a tough-bristle broom, polished the faucets in the bathroom. The bedroom - well, that’s my crowning achievement. It’s a dump and will remain so. The day I clean out the bedroom is the day I will step in front of a double decker and call it a life.
And now, back to work. Genius awaits, you know.
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
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