Days just begin sometimes, and once they've begun, there's no time to go back and begin them properly. The phone rings unexpectedly (as today), or there's a tarpaulin blown off the shed roof (example taken from Saturday, although that wasn't a morning drama), or you get a few things out of the way early, get up to flying speed without realising it, and then it's almost lunchtime before you get a moment to think about breakfast. [Background information: we are taking the tiles off the shed because some of the wood under them is rotten. Incidental observation: if your roof is a green tarpaulin, the watery green light inside is very pleasant.]
    But those are the moments when thoughts of breakfast (or other morning ritual) are worthy of attention: what is this idealised moment of which you think? Moments are more enjoyable to live through, if they've been missed and you're living through the imagined version. Discuss. Having just re-read Joanne Harris's Chocolat, I have a thought going on whether Lent has the side-effect of making chocolate (insert here any given-up pleasure) too much the focus of attention, and whether or not that matters. A religious festival with an unintended consequence? [Completely irrelevant incidental information: there is a bowl of left-over chocolate sauce in the fridge, and the last inch of a carton of double cream. The former has solidified, so it could count as a pudding with the addition of the latter. I don't even like chocolate. The power of books.]
    Anyway. Breezy. A very fresh wind. Newness. Barking of farm dogs and sheep being driven along the road from one field to the next. Even our traffic jams are organic. I can hear the wind again, in the trees, and it's time to water the plants in here, refill the bird feeder outside the window.

Sunday in all this stillness. Damp, warm wind. My supposedly clever little phone bleeped at 2am to let me know that it was going back to 1am, and that led to an hour of being awake in the night. The warm, damp air of this morning, privately there already in the darkness, a whisper of wind bringing it close to me, not quite a clear sky but all the stars. After yesterday's errands, and waiting, and curious turn in the story, and surprising, delightful conversation with an inspired young artist, today is another step away from each other. We are building a future out of these brave, painful moments.
    Remember: the girl with the lost, heart-shaped balloon; the boy peeking over the door; the photographs from the beach. And the conversation with the woman in the art shop about paper and time. All that, and the laughter in the kitchen, the older two departing for Newquay. So many gathered here, and this sense of waiting.

Late sunrise. Clear sky, narrow band of cloud, colour behind the trees, but as yet, no sun. Late mornings, too. Dreams. Woke up at 9am yesterday. This is an exercise in writing 'Morning Pages', as first discovered during a seven-hour wait in Casualty (there were reasons, although I still say, it would have been humane to explain them to those of us stuck waiting, rather than leave us in ignorance) with only Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way to read. [It's not hard to find; harder to pick one link of the many.] Recommended. The book, I mean. The various other bits - don't know. There's a blog.
    So if this is a Morning set of Pages , and I'm clearing my mind for later, what's on my mind is - maybe I dreamed this too? - a lengthy report on the radio, as I drove into St Mawes at lunchtime yesterday to post some letters and then walk the dog, about the government's newly published plan (sic) to "tackle obesity". We're all too fat, apparently, although I've never met the Prime Minister, and unless there's been some spectacular breach of confidentiality, he doesn't know how much I weigh (come to think of it, neither do I). But he and his chums have found time in their busy schedule to (1) determine that I'm too heavy, and (2) "take ownership" of my problem, if it exists.
    I like the idea that the Opposition will now feel obbliged to come out with an argument against - obesity is good, or we should get thin more slowly than the government suggests - and I also appreciate how much easier the next election will be. Judge the government's track record on whether or not we weigh less. If I move the weighing machine next to the armchair, I can sort the whole thing during the ad break. Do it on the way, as I waddle towards the kitchen to fetch some more doughnuts.
    And the resignation of the Canon from St Paul's over the protest. I note that he is now the "left-wing" canon, according to the news, and there's a gradual, unspoken over-simplifying of the whole thing into good guys and bad guys. But it's all a gift in another way, isn't it? A complex moral issue, practical one too, involving parties that have come to it with conflicting moral and/or practical "agendas" on which I think we're being invited to rush to judgement. And isn't it a magnificently symbolic spot for it all to happen?  Should (could) we rush (festina lente; the word 'rush' seems to go with 'judgement' these days) to judgement on this matter, and if that's what we feel obliged to do, could (should) we find out the truth of it for ourselves?
    Neat little tents. Looked like a pleasant spot to live for a while.
    Sun.

Every upgrade contains a message from a software designer, saying, ever more insistently, "Do it my way!" The new release is a big offer of exciting new features, new functionalities, services, et cetera, but it's somebody else's idea of what a typical, focus-group version of me would want. It's also a "you should want this" message, given the strength of the marketing. And how rarely it just adds to what went before: there's almost always a change to the settings and some work to be done before you can actually use it. Does it seek to increase IT-dependency, more functions to suck in more of what you do with your life? Leave that suspicion for a grumpier morning.
    If I was called up by the said software designer, with his screen open, asking what I'd want in a software system designed just for me, I'd want to bolt it together from scratch, like an old-fashioned hi-fi system. Wouldn't want Office, but I'd take Word; email, yes, and could I have text-massaging software on my laptop as well, please? [I meant text messaging, obviously, but I'll take text-massaging too, on the understanding that it doesn't load a talking paperclip - or, hold on a sec, could I have little bomb with a lit fuse, to drop on any insistent animations, pop-ups, et cetera? Easier than searching for the tick-box to turn them off. And now I think of it - I'd be a big spender, once I got into it.
    Any new software package, like my new StupidPhone (to get any realistic battery life, you have to leave the Smart parts switched off), or indeed any show flat, is also a description of somebody. Who is this man (I'm guessing man) who uses this combination of functions, who needs his phone to tell him when it's raining (and then, if it's Smart, to die from getting wet), who watches YouTube on an inch-square screen that won't stop rearranging itself every time you (accidentally) touch it? Turn that round: here's today's creative-writing assignment. Describe yourself in terms of the applications that would match who you are. Real or imagined.
    Happier note. If you're within range and it's not too late (couple of days left) go to www.duchyopera.co.uk and book tickets to see Heinrich Marschner's The Vampire, Philip Cade in the title role. Short review: it holds the attention of teenagers.

So much rain, and now a dry, cloudy morning in a wet world. First circumnavigation of the garden: sparkling grass; wet ankles. The trick of writing anything is to forget everything else until you've got it down, and then not worry about anything, grammar, 'rules' of punctuation, whatever, until you have something on paper (screen) to edit and play around with - when you're in that mood. Writing an email in response to a question about how to write for a local paper (a person made a columnist by virtue of a local position), my answer was: if you can speak it to somebody, or to your mirror, or imagine yourself doing so, it qualifies as writing. And scribble stuff down when it occurs to you. Don't just open up a blank screen and start work on thinking up the first word.
    A brief exchange with Kath last Thursday, about whether the objective of writing in general, and storytelling-type writing in particular, is to make itself transparent. In the sense: the story comes through, but you're not conscious of the writer working away to make that happen. Very brief, actually. Me: "The whole idea is to make the writing transparent." Kath: "That's not the whole idea." Conversation moves on. Maybe it isn't the whole idea. Reminds me of Dave's long-ago remark about an actor, possibly Lawrence Olivier: "You never catch him acting." I think Dave was quoting somebody, but I remember it.
    Last night, the interested member of the family, and his friend, and I, sat down together to watch a rented DVD called 'Green Lantern'. I love the peculiarly stretched suspension of disbelief, and the wonderfully warped logic, of superhero movies: the first thing you need to do, if you're doing to 'fight crime' (invariably the career choice of a fictional person who discovers that he/she has unusual talents), is to find youself an outfit and a mask and go it alone. And usually it has to be a skimpy little mask that somehow successfully conceals your identity - until last night. Green Lantern to girlfriend, after kissing her with his mask on: "You recognise me?" Girlfriend: "Of course I recognise you!" Compare and contrast with the similar moment between Kirsten Dunst and Spiderman - although I suppose he was upside-down at the time.
    More of Katie today. Looking forward to finding out what happens next. Find out by trusting that it'll come, and opening the file.

Such a good walk yesterday. Parked in the small National Trust car park at Towan Beach, left along the coast path, walked all the way along to the hut above the beach just down from the Rosevine, late lunch of soup and bread and can't-remember pudding with custard on it, then tea in paper cups ' all the while sitting out in the air watching the waves break: the seaweed and perhaps occasionally fish silhouetted in the waves as they rose up to break into the surf. A wild sea always looks foreshortened, as though you're looking at it through a long lens; the sound, however loud, has a muted quality, as though there's more you're not hearing. But mainly the wind, wild, very strong wind, coming in off the sea, enough to open a coat against it and nearly fly - to imagine flying. Telling stories all the way; laughing. A day to remember; a memory to treasure.
    And the change in the wind. All day, from wake-up time, a strong, sustained, cleansing South wind; we went out in it before breakfast, let it blow the light through us, let it blow out the cobwebs and shadows. At the start of a day spent in the wind. What is a proper wind-change? A time to hold onto what's valuable, to open your fingers and let slip the rest. All this tightness, these harsh truths spoken by friends not exactly taken for granted, but relied upon to be a certain way, giving a glimpse of their different reality.
    This morning, one of the many varieties of rain found in Cornwall, neither heavy nor light, wetting. A thorough wash for the air, to wash away the departed season? And yet, the radio yesterday, sadly, a spokesperson for the protesters at the cathedral; the protest now, apparently, is all about the familiar bland buzzwords: democracy, government without a mandate, austerity measures (I think he did use the traditional word: cuts). To which I would say: yeah, sure, but you don't have to talk in exactly the same terms as everybody else; could we go back to the beginning, where the grievance was corporate greed, bankers, politicians, maybe now even pick up the faint near-biblical tone of some commentary?
    Those buzzwords may make you a no-brainer of a story for an unthinking media, may get you airtime, but they mean you're just fitting yourself into a demo story we've heard before. Express yourselves in your own deeply felt specifics, give us something with which we can engage.

Gazing out of the window at the high birds taking the wind in the pre-dawn sky. Dipping into it, rising, gliding back, flying forward again. Can't be insects they're chasing, this early in a clear-sky chill; must the the wind itself, fresh against their wings and bodies, substance enough to fly against. The sky white-blue, pink at the horizon, brightening vapour trails, odd shapes of cloud. Up above, just the one, two torm-off bits of grey cloud chugging across on a straight course to show the strength and direction of the wind.
    [I must, should, could, probably will do something about the climbing rose, grown beyond its supports and blowing acros the kitchen window.] What do we do with the moral choices of this life? Perhaps it's not the answer we find, if we ever settle for long enough on an answer, but the looking for an answer. The phrase used is the spiritual journey, not the spiritual arrival. We are - no, not exactly wrong, but given the parts of a puzzle that tests our putting-it-right skills without ever having a final form. Life defined as a cross between a set of exercise bars and a joisaw puzzle. And if that doesn't work as an answer to the question, maybe we're engaged in "showing our working", as the exam paper says, rather than just writing down a final answer.
    Moral: don't be too sure; do seek answers to the questions that present themselves. Be inconsistent if that's how you are. The words "integrity" and "truth" want to be included in this paragraph, but today, I think "integrity" has the prior claim.
    Ah. Sunrise. Excuse me.

Nothing today, but the honey-coloured light and the bird crowing to celebrate morning. The fire in this room has burned down to ash, and if I listen, there is such a silence that even the slight noises of morning don't penetrate it. These past few days, I have been celebrating the gift of work; of being busy, creative, inspired. And today, I am late, and there is silence, and closed windows, and through them, the sheep grazing up the far slope, the early sun behind them, the sheep eating their shadows.
    I hope sheep live in the moment, this moment in particular. We have been through the presence of the ram in the field, with his pack of dye on his chest, and all the girls ending up with an orange patch of dye smeared on their backs, and through the pragmatic business of sheep antenatal care - the scan, then the spray-painted 1 or 2, never saw a 3, on their backs - and we have been through the very early days, tiny lambs, tails wagging furiously as they drink, contantly the bleat that means "Mummy, where are you?" and the deeper-voiced answer.
    Now we've got to the fun part, where the babies have grown up to be, I suppose, teenagers, and roam their fields in lively packs, always in a hurry, almost jumping on each other to keep up. A moment when it is good to know the present moment, and that only. Perhaps some of them will end up grazing peacefully, calling out "I'm over here, darling" at intervals. Perhaps some of them will end up wondering why they have to wear this pack on their chests, but in every other respect, enjoying their Summer (Autumn) holiday.
    How uncomplicated it must be, to love the taste of grass and all the instinctive things - parenthood, childhood, early independence within the boundary of the field - and to know only the present.

Interesting to sit in a room with a big window to the East, big door to the West, facing a smaller window that looks out to the South. Over to the East, I have a riotous white sunrise, streaky with cloud (odd moment to think of bacon) but still too bright to look at directly. Over to the West, the light is blunted by rainclouds. A split day, just now. To the South, everything very still. The shadow of the house, then the sun shining round the end of the house, making a halo for the must-find-out-what-it-is bush. [I'm not the dominant gardener in this house, nor even the reserve gardener. I guess I appear on the cast list among the chorus, probably as Second Lawnmower Driver.]
    Taking that guess about the cast list out of its brackets and into this paragraph, do you ever play that mind-game: if life is a novel, or a film, or a play, or a sitcom, or an HBO drama series now available as a boxed set, or a tale told by a - storyteller? - full of sound (yes) and fury (sometimes), signifying - what? - sorry, I'm losing my grip on this sentence - do you ever play that game, and if life is one of those things, what is your role? Are you the hero? The sidekick? The bad guy, even? Or one of the extras in the background? More important: is it comedy, tragedy, farce, failure or Broadway hit, and here's the big question, what happens next?
    If you get the upgrade to this particular mind-game, you are, as you might expect, allowed to be the scriptwriter for whatever it is, and you get to decide what happens next. You can also run multiple games, in each of which you play a different part. There's another mind-game, which I suppose would work better as an assignment for a creative-writing class, where you get to pick a shop-window display, full of mannekins in exaggerated poses, or (better) the picture in an ad, full of people strangely delighted by their new phone, sofa, bottle of detergent, vacuum cleaner, and work out the back-stories of these characters' lives. What do their shrinks say about their air-freshener fixation? What joke has their new smartphone just told?
    You remember that story about the emperor who woke up and couldn't decide whether he was an emperor who had just dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming that he was an emperor? As the wise man probably didn't reply out loud, maybe we're sheep, boss, and this is all a daydream anyway.

Good, now and then, to be reminded of how dependent we are on wires and wireless. Go back five minutes, and there I am, pressing a button on a machine I don't understand, to find that, for a reason I don't (yet) understand, the internet can't be found. Go back another distance, and there I was, with my typewriter, and my ink pen with the scratchy nib, and my crusted bottle of Tippex. Do you remember the day I mended the broken n key with a paperclip? Go back a longer distance, and there we are, sealing our letters with sealing wax while the monks in the valley letter, by hand, the books that we will collect for our library. The clocks tick, and need winding. Go back further, and we know, without doubt, that angels and demons and the spirits of the unquiet departed roam a flat earth.
    Go back even further, and we know on which side of the tree the lichen grows; we know which berries and mushrooms to eat; and all of us here in this temporary shelter have known, from early childhood, how to make a fire from what we find on the ground and in the bushes around us. We know how to be part of just about any acre of wild ground, how to live from it, draw warmth from it, find or build shelter on it. We are not proud of knowing how to navigate, track each other, hunt, eat, find safety, live; we just take it for granted. And I hope that the knowledge we have always had lives on in some vestigial bone-memory of how it was, let's suppose it does, so that an archaeological site, or the stones at Carnac, or the faces of bystanders in a mural in a Florentine church - they trigger a faint recognition, even touch a deep memory. We were there, weren't we?
    Do you feel that? Look the other way, and can you feel our descendants, in a distant future, moving through the museum, looking at the illuminated manuscripts, the stone tools, the sextant, the triptych, the portraits of the Medicis, the bronze-age weapons, the icons ... and the the funny old laptops, tablets and smartphones? Everything we've left? I wonder which reproductions and souvenirs they'll choose in the giftshop.
    The internet? Oh yes. Problem solved. There are evenings, in this house, on which children cannot be relied upon to go to sleep unless the wireless connection is switched off. No skill required, not even the memory of how to tell a soothing bedtime story.

Is there a solution? An answer? One single action, or agreement, or understanding, that would transform life from the arena in which we argue over, wrestle with, the challenges of the day? To the arena, if that is still the word, in which we contemplate challenges met and overcome, resolved; contemplate a life empty of - I'm tempted to write 'life', but perhaps I should substitute pain, suffering, the debt crisis in Europe, the other guy's point of view in the studio debate, poverty, that squabble over not bringing in the laundry from the line, the chill this morning, the child's bicycle thrown down in the doorway of the shed where we store the logs (and the bicycles), blocking it.
    No.
    Tempting to end there, with what my old mentor Dave used to call a "Mozart ending". [An abrupt ending.]
    But perhaps - yes.
    If the spiritual path teaches anything, it teaches: look inward. And heal thyself, et cetera. And I wonder whether, if we're talking about the challenges of the day, we might consider adding this: a snappier, more instantly quotable way of saying - a soundbite to convey the message that - what you find inward is there to be projected outward, if you so choose. Inner peace is great, wow, but is your house peaceful? Bring your inner peace, as well as your attention, to the protest, the demonstration, and examine your awareness that the other side threatens (seems to threaten) violence. To say "We were peaceful; they were violent" is similar to "We were right; they were wrong", and just as true or false. But is it peaceful to be contemplating their potential for violence?
    How is it right to blame wrong? There's something to say here about casting the first stone, and I think it's more subtle than "She did it!" The sun is shining in through the window, lighting the dust as well as the various things I "should" dust. My back is aching, I'm coming down with a chill, and the "My" and "I" of this sentence both have their place in this beautiful day.

Lovely, very brief, sunrise. Preparing for rain, the weather has laid a flat, dark, bruise of cloud across the eastern horizon. At something before eight, the sun glowed through, never quite visible, bright fading out to purple over one very small stretch of horizon; an oval, pebble-shaped sunrise. Then the sun rose behind the cloud, and here we are in a cloudy day. Eleven new ducklings and their mother in the goose house - spent yesterday afternoon chasing the mother, after she got out as we were buying her - so the day's main task is to pull together leftover bits and pieces and bodge together a run for them.
    The protesters are still camped out at St Paul's, and the radio tells me that the Dean (?) declined the offer of police protection, and instead invited people in. So he should, and no marks for thinking that strange. The big question today is, apparently, what do the protesters want? Things to be different, I guess. A change of status quo. A world that is different in ways that seem obvious to those of us on the outside, but hopelessly naive to those on the inside. If I was to write an alternative history, it wouldn't be the one in which, let's say, the losers won a big way, or a key historical figure wasn't assassinated after all.
    No. It would be the one in which the politicians did nothing. Left us to sort out our own problems. It wouldn't be a utopia, and yes, I know, it almost certainly wouldn't work without some kind of centralised administration, and okay, yes, it would no more solve everything than the present arrangement. But do we really want cabinet ministers going on air to squabble about whether I want my bins collected weekly or fortnightly? Do we really want to buy (apparently non-voting) shares in these ridiculous banks? In my alternative history, the words "Get out of my way. I want to deal with this myself" would have legal force.
    Camping at St Paul's isn't a long-term strategy. But has anybody thought about how to word a petition? I wonder.

There was a worldwide day of action yesterday, apparently. This morning's news, if I heard it right, tells me that 500 people spent the night outside - was in St Paul's Cathedral? - while the internet says that 70 people were arrested in and around Wall Street. The protest was described as being against corporate greed; capitalist greed was another term used in something I read/heard. I'm going to take a wild guess, and suggest that earlier drafts of those reports might have tried such terms as: banks; the banking bail-outs; bankers' bonuses; politicians; politics in general; the people who got us into this mess; the people who not only got us into this mess but haven't resigned in shame.
    And the people who got into this mess, while fiddling their expenses, who not only haven't resigned but have the cheek to be lecturing us on the "hard choices" we face. This in a week, perhaps longer than a week, dominated by reports of how difficult it is for young graduates (and others) to find jobs. Perhaps politicians should hire more researchers; perhaps banks should expand their graduate-trainee schemes. Although - no, not that. Anything but that. You work somewhere, you absorb the mindset. We may need warriors, as Ruth suggests under the heading 'Celebrate Men!', but we don't need more bankers and politicians.
    To the graduates, I wonder if it would be helpful to say: don't just be what you are; be what you could be; be what you want to be. Way back in a previous life, I interviewed graduates for entry-level jobs in media. I remember those searches through piles of CVs, looking for some spark of something more than the standard education and qualifications (every CV had all that). Perhaps these days, in the context of media, my interview question would be: why haven't you set up a blog, website, online news, YouTube TV station? Why aren't you already active in the media?
    Is that helpful? I wonder. Maybe I could have spent last night outside the cathedral, objecting against all the human incompetence of today; maybe I could have been there for this point in all the historical cycles. Maybe - who knows? - maybe this time, with all our globalisation, we'll find the solution that Wat Tyler was looking for in 1381. Maybe the point is that we're all here for this one.

One tenable explananation would be that when Soviet communism collapsed, capitalism was left without a counterbalance. So we're living in an era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989. We could tie that in with the 'Big Bang' deregulation of the City of London, 1986, which released the banks from constraints on their activities, and we could possibly also throw in the abolition of UK exchange controls in 1979. Lots of other stuff, no doubt, and lots more from beyond the UK, but it makes a kind of sense to me that maybe there's a causal link between today's meltdown and those triumphant eighties yuppies with their brick-like mobile phones.
    Not sure what triggered that rant, and maybe a certain kind of enlightenment requires its own specific kind of befuddlement to afflict us first. There are too many causes, and finding the cause, finding the explanation, is not the same, nor even remotely similar, to finding the solution. If indeed there is something so simple and finite as a solution. Gandhi said "Be the change,"* and beyond that, any solution to any problem is, to some degree, an act of placing it at arm's length. [*Try Googling "Be the change" and then try Googling "Be the change Gandhi". Top of my results list for the first was a conference organiser that looks interesting, but top for the second - here comes the zietgeist - was the question, did Gandhi really say it? Which misses the point in a very modern way.]
    Fog, fog, and more fog. And a very particular, very present silence. The fog was in bits for a while yesterday afternoon, as though a cloud had broken on impact with the ground. It's very localised, I think, and perhaps something to do with the sea. I like the way the wind sometimes blows within the fog, rolling it along. An issue of the magazine went to bed last night, which means I have a backlog of urgent things to do combined with the sense that I've just finished work. Difficult combination.

Found this written on a scrap of paper on my table. Making up part of a 'still life' with an electric razor, a roll of address labels, a pack of brass hooks, a hose connector and a torn-out square of cardboard with the word "Ladder!" written on it in black marker pen. It doesn't turn up on Google, so maybe I thought it up all by myself. Apologies if I've filched it. Here goes: "We may find that the future is not as reasonably priced as we would like it to be. We may assume, however, that it is correctly priced."
    Imagine that echoing over the hills and down the valleys. Imagine having that etched on a tablet of stone. How much extra would the stonemason charge for "Continued overleaf"? I thought the future was free, anyway - and delivered with a gift pack of components, characteristics, challenges, et cetera. The other piece of paper that turns up regularly in my life is a square torn from a cereal packet, somewhat smaller than a playing card, with the message written in ballpoint: "You've come this far, and you still want answers?" I like that one. It's in the category of photographs, cards, letter, papers that I keep in books I might read again. Happiness is a bookshelf packed with added surprises.
    Fog today. There's a category of rain that I've heard described as "wetting rain". I think this is wetting fog. Not just that, but it dampens down sound very effectively ... and I have just made a (re)discovery. Looking out of the window at the grey wheelbarrow glazed with fog (in which I have just retrieved some logs for the fire), I remembered the red wheelbarrow. Long time ago, university, struck by the William Carlos Williams poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow'. Here's the Wikipedia link. Williams was an Imagist, I read now, in my other open window, and the Imagist philosophy was: "No ideas but in things".
    That'll do for today.

Cloudscapes change completely in the space of ten minutes, true or false? Maybe the precision of ten minutes is a false accuracy, but they don't stay around for long. Waiting for the bus this morning, there was a mountain in the sky in front of us. White cloud as the shading around a blue mountain-shape, and even a few wisps of cloud in front to suggest crags and bumps and [I'm sure there's a word for what I mean]. But it was definitely a mountain.
    Then the bus came and there was definitely no longer a mountain in the sky in front of us. Just bands of heavy cloud, bright horizontal cracks between them, and below, in the tractor-gap into the field, breaking the hedge, an inch, perhaps two, of horizon: the sea with the sun on it; a bright distance where no clouds were. It was dark at 6am this morning, still dark-ish at 7am, then pretty much light at 7.15. The mountains, clouds, et cetera, came into my life at, oh, 7.35, and then, at 7.45, opening up the hens, a definite, unmistakable sunrise happened behind cloud - just visible, like peeking through a horizontal curtain. I love the way sunrise changes the substance of everything.
    Do we make our own lives? Imagine them into being? If so, there's a lift under construction here that has a lot of sky in it. And - reading this over - a precision about timing. Hadn't expected that. To my mind comes that eleven-year-old discovering the value of short intervals. Race, when the bell went, to the shabby, comfortable leather armchair in the far corner of the school library, behind the piano, where the only reading within reach was bound volumes of the Illustrated London News dating back to the 'Great War'. Escape from it all into black-and-white pictures.
    Short intervals, not long ones. Precious time.

If this is the sequel to yesterday's post - no, there wasn't any money in the little red money box, and yes, everything is still exactly where it was when I had my attack of inventory-taking. Except - and this is what matters - the tide of paper has somewhat abated. And I did get some work done. We took the dog for a walk along Pendower Beach at lunchtime, I made a fire in the evening, and we watched about twenty minutes of a "Transformers" film. And yes, of course I know that Transformers are toy cars that can be refolded into toy robots. But this one was about the revenge, or maybe the return, of The Fallen, which was kind of odd.
    Before the water boiled for the pasta, we watched a scene in which the dad made out that the mum was the emotional one about his son going off to college - leaving home for the first time - and then a little bit later, we came in for a scene where the dad was trying to get the son, as well as the mum, into the car to escape an assortment of rampaging Transformers. The son said, "Dad, you have to let me go!" and the dad reluctantly saw the logic of this. If you're dealing with uncontrollable, incomprehensible, unpredictable technology, hand over to the younger generation and accept that your place is in the - actually, I want one like that - yellow sports car with your life-partner.
    Mid-life crisis, here we go. Playing the dad: Kevin Dunn. And it was Revenge, not Return. Curious collection of themes: the whole "Dad, you have to let me go!" thing, inter-generational, male-bonding, and yes, I can grasp the whole "Stand aside, dad, I understand this technology" aspect. Girlfriend A drove the car like she'd had some serious practice, and when Girlfriend B got so turned on that she turned into a robot with a tail (don't ask), Girlfriend A flattened her under a car. And The Fallen, planning their Revenge. "I have waited a long time," said a black Transformer that seemed to be stuck on another planet. Hmm.
    So many themes, so many old stories, raising themselves in a family movie about toy cars that can be rearranged into robots. One thought: we're hard-wired (film about robots, geddit?) to respond to the old themes. Another: they matter right now, and at a level beneath the speeding cars and robots punching each other, we want to deal with them. A lot to think upon, hidden in plain sight, among the robots.     

How does the body know that Sunday is a day off? Nothing different last night, except that I didn't set the alarm clock. Woke up two hours later than I would naturally wake up on other days, head still vivid with dreams (such a spate of dreams these days) and went straight out in the open to take the air. First thought of the day: keep what works. Prosaic, but that's what came.
    So this is to be another day in the contest between <what we might call> clutter and <what we might call> efficiency. My version of working towards spotless surfaces and everything in its place. Push back the tide of paper. Shred paper, even. Don't answer this question: why do I have on my work table, taking up space, a large green watering can, a jamjar full of curtain hooks, a pair of binoculars, a box of panel pins, a ball of string, matches, a rain hat, screwdriver, crystal pendant on a plastic string, Beanie Baby monkey, framed studio pic of myself as a baby between my parents, bottle of Sacred Space Spray ("Calling All Angels"), red metal money box, copy of "Proust and the Squid" that belongs to Patricia?
    And a lot else, including an electric plug, a dongle, a kitchen timer, a "Flip" video camera and an advancing tide of paper that has reduced my available working space to the dimensions of this laptop. Don't answer that question, but do act on the answer to this question: where does it all belong? Send it all home. Or at least, rearrange it in a way that feels better for next week. AQnd wipe the table so that I can't see the shapes in the dust where things used to be. There will be dust.
    I wonder if there's any money in that money box.

Memo to self: pause in the moment to acknowledge that the moment is there. Because sometimes, the moment can be hard to detect, even in the moment. Highlight of my day so far - if we set aside the vivid waking dreams in the long century between first waking up and coming to full consciousness - was that moment of impatience as I was feeding the hens. Straightening up - because impatience is a reminder that life's now rather than in a few minutes - and thinking, "I would have missed this." The breezy air, mainly, and the sound of the trees, the light on those windows and the white-painted wall.
    The task of being out in the open, welcoming the big white duck that has resumed its habit of turning up for breakfast, letting out the resident ducks, with their clamour, all bustling off together, busy with much to say, and the hens, circumspect, feeling their way over the morning earth to the grain and whatever else it is that they see to eat. Decision to ditch yesterday's plan for today, take it slowly, maybe light a bonfire, catch up on some reading ... live in this moment of stillness in front of the screen. The door propped open. Nature is making a wind-noise and this laptop is making a machine-noise. The bird-song is tentative and the wind could go either way: it's a fresh, breezy day, but with, or without, rain?
    We gain access to everything through the imagination, don't we? Everything is given meaning, given value, given distinction from everything else, through the imagination. Even discovery, and I don't just mean 'scientific' discovery, poses the question: how do we find an answer, if we don't know enough to frame the question? How can we ask, if we don't even know whether there will be an answer? I mean 'is' rather than 'will be' because the answers pre-exist the questions; that's implicit in the term 'discovery'. And the 'answer'. If there's no question, what is it?

Interesting evening. Thursday Group huddled round two fold-up tables in one of the side rooms, getting quite heated (in the sense: enthusiastic) in the business of discussing a children's story, a love scene (in the sense: physical) and the passage out of Thursday's Child in which Katie is reunited with her horse, Windfire. I like the group, and I like the way we wrangle over words, rhythm, emphasis. Like a group of would-be composers, perhaps, arguing over musical phrasing and whether it achieves its emotional impact. Good to be down in the engine room discussing the nuts and bolts (okay, you do the metaphors).
    Rain just now, quite heavy. Drizzly rain while I was doing the chickens. Decided yesterday to be efficient and have my waterproofs in the car just in case it rained while I was out on the school run. Result: I'm in the house and my waterproofs are in the car. Lucky I haven't got more than one set of waterproofs, or they'd all migrate to the car. Think what that would do for petrol consumption. But yes, last night, good to be back together. Today: more transcribing, writing, intro-writing, think up a brief for the cover. No doubt I wortk best under pressure, but part of that is the enjoyable recurring fantasy about being better organised next time.