The large puppy dog is lying on the floor of the study groaning with boredom. I am not letting him outside to play because the garden is slowly flooding with irrigation water from the mountain, a widening pool of pure clear water that is channeled into the back garden once a week for two hours. This keeps much of the garden alive in summer drought.
Dog: Life is elsewhere.
Mid-week again. Lay awake for hours because the full moon coming in through the bedroom window made me think it was dawn and I kept thinking I should get up and make some tea. A night of whining mosquitoes and itching calves. Nightjars crying, a barn owl hooting from a nearby oak tree.
Eventually I sat up at 3am and read some Gertrude Stein, which put me back to sleep like a baby even though I love Stein and think she had her brilliant moments. Readable she is not.
Gertrude Stein: “There was never any beginning or end, but every day came before or after another day. Every day did. Little by little circles were open and when they were open they were always closed.”
Tomorrow I’m going off to have lunch in another village, sitting out with friends at a cafe table under sycamore trees eating artisanal cheeses and tiny crafted salads, pretty desserts of Cape gooseberries and fluffy meringues, very cheffy food, but it will be good to get out and relax and have a day away from the writing and dogs. Then the housemate and I will do some non-essential shopping and I can get wild rice, unsalted butter, goats cheeses, bulb fennel, flaky sea salt and ripe pears. Maybe some hair colour. Should I go dark ash blonde? I like the sound of it but the actual colour is never what it looks like on the packet. I might come out streaked dark and ashy and blonde which would be disastrous.
My dogs all lying on the floor looking up at me in boredom and rage. Life is elsewhere. My neighbour is clumping up and down the road and gravel drive in gumboots, carrying a bucket so he can pinch my irrigation water for his young fruit trees. I must go out and have a nice brisk argument to start the day. This meek shiny brown hair is not me, a witchy tangle of ashy blondeness might suit me better and give the underlying grey some way to show itself undisgracefully.
More Stein! On staying in the moment, that impossible desirable state of being… the dog has eaten a lump of skirting board.
“Ida never took on yesterday or tomorrow… Why should she when she had always been the same, when whatever happened there she was, no doors and resting and everything happening… Really there was never anything happening although everybody knew everything was happening.”
