Up early and the view from my window silver with mist and the faint green outline of hills barely visible –dressed for walking and rambled around the grey streets of the deserted market town before climbing down to the paths alongside the Wye, shining and rippling like a rumpled satin bedspread. Birds very loud in the woodland — I was dismayed to see the invasive Japanese knotweed higher than my head and flowering with small pea-blue orchid blossoms.
As I walked along I wasn’t paying attention to what was around me as I usually try to do. I was at time plotting fiction, the rhythmn of dialogue matching the beat of my walk, and I was composing a long post on not being superficial. When I realised that the point of it was to prove how unsuperficial I myself am, I stopped and watched hoverflies over white bramble flowers.
All the same I do wonder about those who get their psychology from Oprah and Dr Phil rather than Melanie Klein. Those who have never read Sissela Bok on lying. That lure of the easy and popular. I can see it in myself and my love of glossy gardening books with full-colour images of English country gardens, manicured and colour-themed, so much more enticing to read than DIY books on gardening or botany textbooks. When I have to try and reproduce the glossy images in my own garden, I need the gritty knowhow. The superficial never gets you there –
Both S and myself worrying about a friend who wasn’t at a meeting last week and hasn’t called at all. Nearly three years sober and doing well, so it might be fine. But there is a tiny cold dread in us as the silence from him continues.
Hot and cloudy morning — going back to the battle with fiction and intermittently thinking about my duck breasts with orange sauce, tonight’s supper. Each time I retrun to the story I am trying to write I begin yawning and a delicious sleepiness creeps over me. Resistance takes many forms.
