THE SLOWEST MONTH

There’s not much going on at the moment, so not too much to write about.

And it’s always the stories, the things that happen, that I like reading. Oh sure. Sometimes I’ll circle around the past posts where I’ve done nothing but think about life, or I’ve come up with some half-baked theory. But most of the time, I don’t read them, or I don’t really understand them any more. Make of that what you will.

January’s ticking by at its usual breakneck lollop. New Year’s Eve feels like it was a month ago, not eleven days. It’s brought a month’s worth of weather too - heavy rain, floods, sunshine, and dustings of snow, we’ve had the lot. And we still have to turn the lights on at 4pm.

Oh! That’s a thing that happened: my lightbulb arrived. It’s an energy efficient daylight bulb beaming in 806 lumens, or, if you like, 6500K. It’s bright - which is perfect for concentration, and yet subtle enough for Sammy not to have noticed it yet.

I just imagined her reading that last sentence and saying she has noticed it actually, she just hasn’t said anything. She reads this from time-to-time and we talk about things I’ve not remembered correctly. If she hasn’t read as far this paragraph yet, she will almost certainly have stopped to talk to me about lightbulbs. And by the time she reads this, who knows, maybe the moment will have passed.

I tried drawing some illustrations today for a new poetry book I’m working on. Rubbish. There are days like this, I suppose, when you feel as though you can’t do anything well. For one poem, I was drawing the moon as though it had fallen into the ground and was half-buried in a crater. It looked like an egg.

Yeah that’s it. A pockmarked, grey egg, kids. Let’s put that one next to the wonky cathedral and the lousy drawing of a Bible covered in mango leaves.

See. Not much going on at the moment. January, it seems, is determined to be the slowest month.