In Bildeston, visiting Dad while Mum is away in Spain (Valencia). There’s still no mobile phone signal here, and once again I think of the calls I’ve happily made to London while walking around in Morocco, or on the ferry crossing the Mediterranean. Once you’re a few miles out of Ipswich or Stowmarket, you’re on your own. But there’s email and the Web, and that’s more than enough.
Dad’s in good health. One unexpected silver lining of his stroke last year is that his lifelong migraines have vanished completely.
I find the change of setting conducive to reorganizing a routine, and am getting up to write at 6am each morning. I love the sense of pen hitting paper while the world is flickering into life, before my brain has a chance to realise what’s happening. Leave it to my brain to instigate the day, and its first thoughts tend to be of procrastination, tiredness, self-pity and resentment, setting me up for a day of ‘if only’ and ‘what’s the use’. In my case, the mere act of getting up early is a kind of Prozac. Oh, look, brain: 500 words before 7am. Didn’t see that coming, did you.
Rising at 11am, as I’ve done too much of late, may be fine for some who work at home, but for me it feels like I’m missing out. Not necessarily missing the best part of the day, as the cliche goes, but missing the most hopeful. Get past noon without anything done, and I feel the day has already been a failure.
To this end, I would like to thank the large moth which woke me up this morning, making a truly disproportionate racket as if fluttered angrily between the window and the roller blind. Thank you, Moth.
***
Yesterday morning. 10.50am. Catch the Tube down to Liverpool St, worrying that I’ve left it too late and will miss the 11.30am train to Stowmarket. David B and Rhoda get on the same tube carriage at Archway and keep me company. David reassures me that I’ll still make it okay, as long as I make the Moorgate Manoeuvre.
This is one of those tips that separates Londoners from the tourists. If your Tube journey involves a single-stop trip at one end, it can work out quicker to make the connection on foot. This is certainly true between Covent Garden and Leicester Square stations, where the getting to and from the platforms (via lift or escalator), added to the waiting for a train plus the train journey itself, takes several times the duration of walking the same distance along Long Acre.
Likewise changing at Moorgate for Liverpool Street. Quicker to walk the last stage, as long as you know where you’re going. From Moorgate, you walk along Eldon Street or Finsbury Circus, look out for the 2001-like monolith, then descend the steps straight into the main part of Liverpool Street station. Easy. I make it to the train with no rushing.
But the reassurance from David and Rhoda on the way makes all the difference. ‘You’ll do it’, say your friends. And so you do. It’s my own brain – or rather, the part that shouts the loudest – that says ‘You won’t make it. You can’t write. You can’t catch trains. You can’t get out of bed. You’re useless.’
It can be a real struggle to ignore this inner critic at times, or worse, actively seek out condemnation from real critics to support it; I’ve banned myself from Googling my own name ever again and heading down that particular self-serving spiral.
Never underrate kind friends. And moths.
