Day 296

Despite a late night yesterday, I managed to get up before 9, just. There is some sort of physical energy brimming below the surface, a rebuilding f reserves that have felt entirely depleted for the last two weeks. I spent the morning doing homely things, things I hate (like the washing up – yesterday it was vacuuming the downstairs of the house), things that make me feel like I’m being distracted from the greater and better things I can do (like putting words together, like thinking and reading and being). Then on to carrying on in the office, sorting out spaces so that O and his cat can live in here temporarily at the beginning of November when, hopefully, fortune and fame in Norwich will beckon for him (I’ll settle for a living wage and obscurity for him at this point, to get a foot back on the ladder of living). And now it’s dark outside again already, it’s almost done, and it looks like a big space rather than a bomb site of paper and electronics and abstruse objects thrown into a room without much thought.

I went for a long walk, prefaced by a visit (my first ever) to a Turkish barber 8 minutes walk away from here. A Number One haircut expertly done, which included a trim of my almost non-existent eyebrows as well, and the anointment of my head with some wonderful fragrance, the like of which I’ve never smelled before. And then a walk along one of my old longer routes, up the Norwich hills until I could see the top, and then the entirety, of Aggie’s cathedral, before veering off to the east and up past Mousehold Heath again on the homeward leg. IT’s good to build up a decent sweat and feel tiredness in my legs that’s not the tiredness of disease.

There are only 8 days left until the deadline for the National Poetry Competition, and I really need to get some thoughts down on paper in a form which to me seems to be appropriate. When I was lying on the sofa last Saturday (I think it was last Saturday) I had very many thoughts that crowded into me and onto my notebook which I hope will become a poem, or two or three. I need t start threading a line of words through the eye of the needle of existence again.

It’s 33 years ago to the date that M and I first kissed. That’s time passing, right there.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 230