Reading and writing and eating a picnic and watching the kayaks at Malpas last night, evening high tide. Man to small boy, also watching the kayaks: "You could do that if you want to, but first you must learn how to swim." Boy, knee-high, reaching up to hold hands: "Yes please, dad." Impressed tone. Future kayak driver. And a couple of teenage boys, one of them talking to the ducks. Doing it for a laugh, but doing it remarkably well: him on the edge of the water, walking along, quacking away, looking around occasionally for a laugh from his mate, the ducks swimming alongside, keeping up their end of the conversation. He didn't seem to realise it, but he must have been saying something.
    Dropping off and picking up for a trip to the cinema. And a box of cheesy chips shared in the back of the car afterwards. The film was 'The Inbetweeners', and would I like to see something while they watched that? Preferred my quiet hour. Minor glitches in the day's work unravelling themselves; phrases presenting themselves, tidied up and no longer clumsy. The story has come to life again, over the past few days. New things happening; it's a surprise again.
    Kayaks, gliding out onto the open water. The leader, pausing between the red and green channel markers, looking back. Yes, they are still behind him. Their spreading wake on the flat water, paddles rising. There's a haiku in there somewhere.

Ironic title, yesterday's. No water this morning; leaky pipe, nothing left in the taps. Memory of that delightful children's book 'The Tiger Who Came To Tea' by Judith Kerr (title and name both take you to Amazon sooner or later) and the line in it: the tiger, having eaten and drunk everything else, "drank all the water in the taps" (quoted from memory). Lovely child's eye view of where the water comes from. Most impressed.
    So. There's a parallel reality in which we entertained a tiger to tea yesterday, and it drank all the water in the taps. Unfortunately, we're in the reality where we found a pool of water making a mirror of the tiles in the, er, laundry room, and were faced with the question: how do you put a bowl under a leak that's just above a stopcock that's right down at floor level in an accessible corner? Answer: turn the water off; damp string wrapped round the pipe to siphon any residual water; shallow baking tray for the other end of the string. It worked.
    Today's early-morning entertainment? Filling watering cans from the well near the house, filling bathroom cisterns with well water from watering cans - and you can guess the rest. The ability to daydream about buying gadgets - such as, for example water pumps and lengths of hosepipe - comes in useful sometimes. And I don't know about you, but I'm generally okay with (almost) anything that has a 'back-to-nature' element to it - as long as it doesn't happen too often and there's the prospect of a qualified plumber in the near future.
    Watched the sunrise first. My need - liking, desire - for early nights and early mornings. Like to see the sun rise, even if it does come up behind a cloud. The passage in the new Jim Butcher novel, 'Ghost Story', about the renewal that sunrise brings (see above re Amazon). My sleep cycle is now almost exactly opposite to that of the household teenagers. Isn't there an age when you're supposed to have returned to the sleep patterns of childhood?

Morning. Sunshine. Still haven't cleaned the windows. Yesterday's rain was furtive: hang out the laundry in bright sunshine, go inside, come out again and there'd be bright sunshine and wet laundry. [Good to see you, boy, and I hope you hung all that wet stuff on the rack I gave you.] But it was enjoyable, around lunchtime, cooking soup from the available vegetables (this year it's mainly runner beans and courgettes/marrows) plus a courgette/cheese baked thing actually to eat. Adapted from Delia, whose book contains a section on How To Boil An Egg but not on How To Make Soup. Now, soup and remains of thing in fridge; with everybody back from Scotland, let's see how long they take to go.
    Nature, nurture, surroundings. What is the English word for feng shui? Notable, how the atmosphere lightens as the room, the house clears; also notable how some pieces of furniture, et cetera, are in the right place, but others just seem to nag slightly. Not nag so much that it's really a conscious thing - it's easy not to notice - but they're where they should be but still not right. 'Should' never works, and I supppose the feng shui skill is having the clarity to see what is and could be, as distinct from what was on the plan. I wonder how much architecture exists because it looks good on the plan and/or in the architect's drawings. Not just modern: the huddle of chairs and screens around the fires in country houses, the high-ceilinged rooms, the long corridors. Cold rectories.
    This paragraph return is long overdue. Bought a Kindle the other day. Interesting device. Everything I load onto it is duplicated in my account record on Amazon; if I lose it or drop it in the bath, I can reinstate everything on a new Kindle. George Orwell had Big Brother watching (what was his name?) Winston Smith in a negative way; I have Jeff Bezos and his people watching over me with the positive intent of making sure I keep what's mine even in the event of bathwater. That kind of oversight, for better or worse, seems to be a distinctive modern experience: the world around us is becoming a day-care centre.

Try this. Adrenalin Quarry. It's - you guessed it - a quarry full of water, converted into a small-scale adventure park. Just off the double carriageway near Liskeard (Menheniot, actually). You take the left/right turn, then it's on the left after maybe half a mile. Long track full of potholes, car park, pay your money in the little wooden hut (cheaper than I expected), then your two eleven-year-old companions (and you, if you're crazy enough) get to jump off a platform and slide down the zipwire over the water.
    Over to one side is the big swing, voted more frightening (in a good way, apparently) than the zipwire, and if you're queuing for the said zipwire, you can see people lower down, in crash helmets, jumping off a sheer cliff into the water, then climbing up the cliff again. People go down the zipwire with cameras, and later, I'm going to take a wander round youtube. Very small children can go down the zipwire, but there can be a change of mind when they're hooked up and look down the wire for the first time.
    The whole thing is run by amiable twentysomethings, the kind of people who, in another Summer, would be sitting around the lifeguard's four-by-four on a flat surfing beach. Amiable, relaxed, very focused on the key skill of checking that safety harnesses are fixed correctly. If your eleven-year-olds have worked up a hunger, turn westbound onto the double carriageway, come off just after the industrial estate and double back to it. Very satisfactory bacon sandwiches at the, er, farm shop (a caravan with tables in its own fenced-off area) outside Mole Valley Farmers. Easy enough getting back to the big road in either direction.
    That's it. A happy day.

Let's not forget the evening, couple of days back, taking a walk on Pendower Beach. Onshore wind, storm on the horizon, tide up just over that point on the beach where it slopes most. Really big waves, foreshortened, all close in to the shore, perfect for a surfer in search of a very, very short ride. And such a clean wind. The storm was big, black and bruise-coloured, with straight rain underneath it going down onto the sea. Light as bright as you get it on the edge of a storm, wet rocks, bright sea. Standing on the edge of the water getting my feet wet, not thinking but 'just' standing there.
    The edge of the sea is as real as anywhere else, if that counts as a thought on the subject. Imagine that 'Being in the moment' is plugging in, not just to your own moment, but to all the moments connected with it. As I write this, the waves are still there, and that beautiful sky, loaded up with rain. Another day and different weather, but it's good to think that the world can do that as well as put me in front of this screen. I'm touching that place now, and the people out early with their dogs.
    We used to talk, do you remember, and there was often a time when we'd agree that words only went so far? That was another lifetime, but it still holds true. The moment in meditation where you spread your awareness over the world and nature? Description is not enough sometimes. Close your eyes or travel: be there.

Sometimes, happiness is a good night's sleep. Comes with regret attached, though, because by the time you know you're doing it, you're no longer doing it. Perhaps the happiness part is back there at the beginning, when you're ready to sleep and none of those thoughts even occurs to you - so tired, need to sleep, worried about getting to sleep, et cetera. Or maybe happiness is watching the Avatar DVD, longest version of the film, with a medium-sized boy who has wrapped himself up on the sofa with his duvet, pillow, drink of water, and who falls asleep not long after the tree comes down. Before all the battles. Two people in need of sleep.
    Keep waking up in the morning with a clear purpose for the day. Not a big thing, necessarily, but a clear perception: this needs to be done. The action of the day is not always to blur it, but often enough. A matter of keeping up momentum. And carrying on with this enormous paper-shredding exercise. Any successful exercise in clearing out clutter, taking stuff to the dump, recycling paper that didn't need to be kept even when it was first set aside, making spaces free - any such exercise seems to involve a spiritual loss of weight. We're getting lighter by the day.

Monday wasn't even a bank holiday. I made it through to lunchtime before the phone rang in my pocket to reintroduce the day job. Pictures needed for Friday's words; did I have the necessary contacts? Five minutes of emailing and an afternoon at the screen, but I'd had the morning, lit the bonfire, cleared clutter, burnt the hedge trimmings, done a whole bunch of bank-holiday things and ended up happier for knowing that it was bonus time - and there's a real bank holiday next Monday. I must line up some more clutter.
    Today's observation: the build-up of clutter on the desk is inversely proportional to the amount of work done in the day. This happened once before. I went away on the Hoffman Process in September 2002, came back full of self-awareness to find that, of the whole five feet by eleven feet of my work table, I'd used books, papers, clutter to restrict myself to about two feet by one foot - and parked a keyboard in the middle of that. It's happening again, paper that needs to be put somewhere, filled in, replied to, and above all, thrown away. The subtle passive aggression of paper; to be resisted.
    Today: page-proof checking; online ordering of transcription equipment; writing more of the Thursday's Child story. And, above all - no, not filing - decluttering. I want to know what happens next in Katie's world. She's out there in the fields, surrounded by all my clutter. Word for today: clarity.

Mist, with the sun shining through it. The big window at the eastern end of the barn is white with the mist and shining with the sun. The mist here sometimes billows along, like (like? It is) a cloud flying fast at ground level, but today this is just a mist to put a stop on things. If I sit here long enough, the sun will break through (it is now), and our late-starting heatwave bank-holiday Monday will get started. I remember how the birds fell silent for the eclipse. They go by light, therefore, rather than by body clock? There's the - a? - wood pigeon.
    Yesterday, hearing the children's voices from across the way. Don't usually notice the holiday families, but it's pleasant to hear them playing, or to run into them on the walk round the point. Too hot, yesterday, to get much done, but it's good, sometimes, to relax into that mood and just go with the complete absence of flow. Work to live, yes, and sometimes just live. Tomorrow, I shall be up early and gone, probably no time for an early post here, to meet a friend in town, visit the bank, post some letters, empty the folder marked 'things to do in town'.
    Today, I'm taking my cue from the slowed-down cloud. The window at the end - wow. Tops of trees visible at the bottom, not quite in silhouette but oddly lit - a few of the leaves at the top bright, but the rest black - the space above those trees, bands of grey, very bright white, grey. Rothko in a luminous white/silver period. And now it lifts. Cloud in the valley, trees on this side and visible - in a light pencil sihouette - on the far side, white sky. This keyboard, everything in this room, swelling with light as the sun breaks through. Day.

We went to Melinsey Mill last night (too many links; best to Google it and take your pick) for the [Friday and] Saturday night pizzas. Rick has built a stone oven outside, and, he said last night, thinks he's mastered pizza cookery. He has. "I can honestly say, this is the best pizza I've ever eaten." Same here.
    It's a working water mill, as one of those many links reminds me, down in the wooded valley just outside Veryan. We sat at a millstone made into a table, on the edge of the shallow lake. Strings of blue lights, canvas awnings strung between the trees, flaming coals in metal buckets hung out over the lake. The children can go look at the workings of the millwheel, or walk round the lake. There's lichen on all the trees; fish jumping.
    This morning: making scrambled egg and toast for everybody too busy packing; saying an extended goodbye (always one more thing); and now the silence after departure. A week in Scotland in a remote cottage by the sea. Flight from Exeter to Glasgow, pick up a hire car, there by nine, or probably later. Binoculars and sketching things all packed. Walking up Ben Nevis.
    And the rest of us left in this sudden heatwave in Cornwall. Perhaps we'll take the kayaks round to a beach, or to look at the ships laid up past the King Harry.

Interesting challenge. Having dropped in all manner of clues and hints to what'going on - in the first three batches of 2,000 words for the Thursday Group - I'm now faced with the task of working out what is going on. Some of the clues and hints are dead ends, but the challenge is to work out which ones. It feels as if the answer is already there, and I have to, er, chip away the stone to find the figure inside. Kath called me an 'organic writer' the other day; that's what you are if you don't know what's coming next but would very much like to find out. Free range too, probably.
    It's raining, and it's a Saturday morning, and the pressing task is to do the final edits on the page proofs of 'Ten Steps to a Bedtime Story', which are long overdue. The answer to the niggling problem there, curiously enough, came to me as I opened my eyes first thing. Shift the disclaimer to its proper place; bring a 'step' forward. I say 'curiously enough', because answers usually wait until I'm in the shower with shampoo in my eyes before coming to me.
    Which is why I'm sitting here with wet hair and an A4 pad next to me covered in scribbles. I made it out of the shower, but couldn't wait for the 'information superhighway' to open up before me. Time between pressing on-button and being able to type is still a lot longer than time between taking lid off pen and starting to scribble. Does that make me an old-fashioned writer as well?

To Penzance, unload, back to Penryn, load, back to Penzance, unload, back home, shower, out to the Thursday Group NOT in the van. Sometimes, the change needed is to go from driving a big, furniture-laden Mercedes van to a light, empty, ten-year-old Honda Civic. But a day within which the whole much-discussed removal to Penzance is achieved, and I still get to the Thursday Group with five minutes to spare (after being held up at the start because the man buying the old, incredibly heavy cast-iron bath was late), such a day is a good day.
    Hot sunshine. Open windows. And now hot sunshine and an open barn door. Tentative observation: bright sunshine is quieter at this time of the morning than any other class of weather. And just to confound that, the birdsong - one bird? Two? - starts up in earnest. Two small something-or-others (I must get to know these things) are arguing (?) out front, and there goes the cockerel. Now they're all at it. Maybe we're all more connected that I realised. Aha! The wood pigeon. So insistent. Revised tentative observation: silence can be noisy at this time of the morning.
    Such stories at the Thursday Group. This is a six-session Group, meeting once a fortnight, but I want to know what happens next to the young woman in the hostel, for example, and the two self-contained written-for-magazines stories have been so neatly done. Either I get into signing up for more of these courses, or we exchange email addresses and follow each other's progress - or both. Pleasant thought, either way. 

Fish and chips on the bench at the end, where the ferry docks, between a stack of lobster pots (and an enormous anchor) and a small-ish boy fishing. He has a blue beach-bucket, shaped for making castle-shaped sandcastles, and an insubstantial fishing rod, possibly bought at the same holiday shop as the bucket. Skinny little boy, very light hair, quick and busy. It's - what? - 9.30pm, full dark, looking back at the town and the many windows looking out at the sea and the sea reflecting back at them. So many lives, curtains open. Those windows would be black from the inside.
    We don't notice the boy, particularly, except that he's about right for what he is - very alive, very quick, very engaged with what he's doing - and that is satisfying to see. Then - "I think he's caught something" - he's holding the rod up above his head and it's bent down into a u-shape and then there's the fish - about a foot long, flipping, trying to breathe. He gets an audience of older men, boys, who are interested now in what bait he's using (prawns from his bucket). He accepts help releasing the hook, and then he races off to show his grandma, who is in a house on the front. "Could you watch my stuff?" Of course we can.
    He comes back. His grandma was delighted, he released the fish, it swam off, all is well. We are back to eating fish, from boxes, on our bench. Each of us has a bottle of beer/cider and we are talking about future plans: a flat in Penzance; a flat in Bath; Swansea; perhaps Truro; the family diaspora. The water is multicoloured with the lights along the front. The ferry has been moored and left dark; now it wakes up again - there is a last boat across to Falmouth.
    The boy catches another fish. This time, there is a problem. The fish has swallowed the bait. We go to help. Somebody in the audience says, and repeats, "I'm a vegetarian." The hook is set deep and there is only one thing to be done. But the boy hasn't killed a fish before. We show him what to do, and do it.
    His grandma will cook it for him. "He'll probably have it with chips," somebody says, as we collect up our polystyrene boxes and the empty bottles.

Again, a demonstration of the oddly difficult truth that doing is the only effective way of getting something done. Not planning to do, nor getting organised to do, nor thinking that it will be done better if it isn't started until the headache is gone - just doing.
    Yesterday, the question "Why not now?" proved unanswerable except in evasive terms - the room isn't finished, there's still a lot of organising to do, I've got something else that also needs doing (and that offsets this task neatly, thereby getting neither done) - so I opened the Word file I had - getting organised - created and named but written nothing into, opened the completed notebook, and began transcribing.
    These were the notes I'd made in London, and I'd made a fine obstacle out of them: no point in going further until I've got the notes transcribed, et cetera. No time to transcribe now, blah. London was last week. And maybe the best thing was that I didn't just transcribe. There were passages worth keeping, but others that were just marking time (overlong conversations because I didn't know what was coming next, for example). So I kept on departing from what was already on the notebook page, and going off in another direction.
    Just as these entries are a Morning Pages exercise (Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, do you mind if I don't insert a link?), so the Thursday's Child story is an exercise in making it up as I go along. Okay - in meeting a regular Thursday deadline, but that means getting along and doing - making it up - rather than thinking about doing it. So easy to get diverted into getting organiseed to do that rather than just - yes - doing it.

Okay, the proverbial blank page and the corresponding act of faith. And, because this isn't a blank page but a connection to a server somewhere, the regular compulsion to hit the 'Save to Drafts' tab. Very high tide last night, the end of the quay visible through the cafe window, plus one of the the red lights and one of the blue lights that have been strung along the edge of the harbour-edge road. Full moon two nights ago, last night's tide doing whatever it does to the sound and the feel of the air: very closed-in, very silent behind the lapping of the waves. The shimmer of the water.
    And a conversation about times past. Who we are now, talking about who we were. Memories of flats, cars, jobs - memories of meetings and a journey round Scotland. People. How we change and how we never change. A taste made out of samphire and potato pleasantly but definitely incompatible with the turbot. Mussels and linguini. The wine served by a woman last seen as a teenage girl just home from school. And the modern gadget for phoning in credit-card details - only capable of making its connection if held towards the ceiling half-way across the room.
    Out, at the end, into the cool night.

Thursday Group coming up, so time to transcribe 2,000 of the words in the notebook. Thinking in the shower: it would be a convenient habit to treat Thursdays as a deadline, always. But maybe I need to do a few more of these groups before that gets to be an automatic response to a Thursday. Would it be crazy to pick such a group on whether or not it happened on a Thursday? Does all apparent craziness have such a rational-but-personal motivation?
    New week and much to be done. The mistake would be to get organised, but it would help if I had just a few more square millimetres of free desk space. Perhaps if I did just start by shifting some of these old piles into new piles. NB: Andy's advice of a long time ago. On a day when you need to be writing, start by writing. Shift paper, sharpen pencils, et cetera, after the opening sentence.

Mindfulness. We are practising mindfulness. A book has been bought, on the recommendation of a friend, and now I am mindful of my fingers on the keys, the screen, the thought in my mind, the dogs barking somewhere back down the entry road, the clear whiteness of the end of the barn, where I now sleep, now that the curtains and the posters and the drapes have been removed - I am mindful of the need to clean the windows; the last thing, after the hoovering, wiping, washing, et cetera.
    So I am next in line to read the book about mindfulness (and discover its title, author). But is it human to be challenged by the arrival of a book about mindfulness? As if the arrival of the book on mindfulness is also the arrival of a need - a lack? Perhaps I do need to be mindful. Or perhaps the book brings, rather than just reveals, the gap that it proposes to fill.
    Never mind (sic). The barn door is open and the wind is sounding in the 'Woodstock Chimes Emperor Gong' (the name's stamped on it) that was a birthday present several years ago. Good to have returned it to its place by the door, after the long exile.

Birthday. New beginning. Life is an achievement measured in years. We could congratulate ourselves on ageing, if we so chose. Sleeping in late, a slow breakfast and a conversation that began last night, began twenty-two (three?) years ago, continued this morning in the rare peace of a house empty but for the two of us. Now just silence, air heavy with rain, and precious time in which to continue this transition. So much to be done, and space in which to do it.

Here's a question. Start from the premise that places can contain a lingering essence of the past: ghosts, perhaps; memories that have floated loose from their owners; 'just a feeling' - everything that phrase means - without a single pinpointable source; souls that have not moved on; any number of things that impart a feel to a place. Spiritual, 'spooky' or intuitive. Consider also that places, over time, see successive generations of human habitation ('places' mostly meaning 'homes' here, though not exclusively). So much is brought, so much is left behind. All those hopes, fears touching the fabric like smoke from a hearth.
    And also present: an essence that is 'lingering' only in the sense that it's there as well as here; and 'from the past' only in the sense that it's from past, present, future and all the rest of it. Messengers who stay in place. Other souls also present. Stones, fires, chanting, the figures silhouetted against the flames; only gone if time is linear. The others.
    That's places. I want to ask about people. If a soul lives forever, but each human life is so short - this isn't the question, but answer it if you wish - what comes in, each time, from the outside, and what is left by past incarnations? I think I'm talking about a simplified karma, in that the imprint of previous lives is brought into this life. [And if so, the question might be <Who was I last time?> but is more usefully <Why am I me this time?>] But what I want to be talking about is the interaction of people and places.
    How much do we project ourselves onto our places; how much do we look at a feel, a sense, an intuition, and miss only the key detail that it's ours? Equally, how much of the spirit of a place is lingering humanity, how much our own projection, how much the fabric, and how much, as the temporary inheritors of this, today's people, could we seek to heal?
    Questions beget questions. Finally: what is the answer?

Wind billowing in the trees; a fine Summer rain; chilled air. Later, work, and the massive clearance that this room needs. But for this moment ... the sense of place. There is a foghorn intermittently from Falmouth - or maybe just heard intermittently? - and the cockerel announcing either the rain or the morning or both. Birds, or course, and the occasional flutter of this carrier bag as the wind gusts in through the open door.
    London. Viv mentioned riots and there they were in the Evening Standard (I question the need for constant links) and that made sense of the convoys of police vans ('convoys' - two or three at a time) racing through the streets, the sirens, blue lights. But it was a non-news break; when big things happen, the people on the ground, at the time, aren't necessarily aware of what's up. Central London with crowds, as ever, but more memorable after several years' absence, the fleets of bicycles and the number of walled/fenced off areas being rebuilt.
    Travel as a meditation. Long walks along the embankment, south bank; long intervals in coffee shops, writing and working; art galleries, windows and people; browsing the Waterstone's in Piccadilly. A notebook filled and another begun. Books bought, long periods of useful silence. That coffee shop, Notes, in St Martin's Lane (some places are worth a link). The beautiful runners.
    And now a menu of routines to be taken up again or discarded. Work to be done, and the air.

London after all this time. Fleets of bicycles. The tube less crowded than I expect. There are riots, but not in this part of town. Whole areas of the centre pretending to be themselves: Covent Garden, Piccadilly; the business of being London for the tourist industry. A store called 'Cool Britannia' with a Piaggio moped centred in its window display. How much is closed off and being rebuilt.