badger

I haven’t written creatively for a long time.

I’ve spent five minutes looking at that short sentence, while sucking a Rennie and absently gazing out of my study window at the tops of trees and the sky –which surprisingly in this dreadful summer is showing a pale wash of blue amidst the storm clouds. There, that’s a much longer sentence.

I haven’t written creatively for a long time. Repetition can be effective, though it isn’t here. I’ve been wrestling with anxiety Apart from that, I have nothing to write. Nothing that needs saying.

But that leaves me extremely bored. Therefore I’ve made up my mind I’m going to write, to write this –journal, let’s call it—for an hour each day, and just see if anything comes. And I’ll put some of it on my blog, so that other writers who read it can be tremendously encouraged by the display of my helpless sterility.

It’s late afternoon; I’ve just stubbed out my twentieth cigarette of the day; the sun outside, past my computer, is actually visible, shedding light on wet leaves. God, that’s almost a poetic phrase! I really ought to go out and –oh no, it’s behind a cloud again. Too late. I tell writing students when there’s nothing in their heads, just write. Like this. Something will come. Sooner or later, something will come.

Yesterday I came across a dead badger at the bottom of our long, sloping garden. I don’t often walk down there. At first I thought it was a large sleeping grey cat; then, that it was a large, dead cat. I saw its snout, and flies landing on its pelt, and realised it was a badger. A young badger. Sad.