I woke up into grey silence this morning. It was sliding through the gap in my curtains. I felt particularly cosy. My duvet, light but warm, was wrapped between my legs. My face nestled in my down pillows. Not a black bird whistled. How lovely, I thought, and stretched out my legs. I turned on my side. I don’t have to do anything immediately, I’ll go back to sleep. A thought inveigled its way through.

‘You haven’t written for weeks.’

I write a poem every week,  I counteracted, slipping my hand under my pillow. And I have my mother staying, and I’m busy running a workshop (I must bring them that character description by Karl Ove Knausgaard today and bake biscuits for them today). And AT The Edge, Cavan went well last night. I was tired. And today I have to take the car to the garage and do a shop, walk the dog, swim…

‘You are supposed to be a writer’, I interrupted. ‘You tell your workshop participants to write every day and you’ve stopped. A poem a week doesn’t cut it.’

I turned over. What will I write about?

‘Just write’.

So I opened my eyes, dragged myself up the pillow into a sitting position. I fumbled for my glasses, dragged my notebook from my bed table, turned on the light. Do you know how hard it is just to write!

Good morning, everyone.

Ok, I’ll write my blog. And then I’ll start revising the collection of short stories that I thought I had finished but it turns out I haven’t. While walking yesterday, I decided to totally revamp them. You know writing is a very messy business. At least I find it so, I never know what I am doing which is a tad unsettling. And I don’t know if I’m rewriting it because it needs changing or I’m rewriting because I don’t know what else to do with it. Or if I’m rewriting so I don’t have to write something else! I just have to go with it, I guess, because I know it’s not right as it is.

Karl Knausgaard captures the difficulties of writing perfectly in his new book, A Man in Love. He deals with the writing by writing about his everyday life (hum, am I copying him now?)  and emotions as a writer and a lover. He describes the prevarications of the body and soul. He writes about his experience of falling in love and having his first child. He writes and describes everything in such detail: his flights of fancy, his drunken bouts, his attitudes to people, his shame, his lack of shame, his love, his anger. He took pages to describe the detail of a children’s birthday party: the tensions between the children, the strain between the adult parents, the almost violent undercurrents that existed in the kitchen (where the parents were) and the marauding children in the rest of the flat. But it was an ordinary everyday children’s birthday party. It was perfect. I wish I could write as well.

You will, if you write every day…

There, that’s a good way to end.  I’ll go and get a cup of tea, then, of course, I’ll have to feed the animals….I can start my revisions tomorrow before I go to Galway. Actually, I’ll just have a little read now. Reading…it’s a part of writing,  it’s one of the perks of the job. Totally justified!

It was good to see the sun shining through the cracks in my curtain when I opened my eyes this morning and to hear the birds sing. I stretched, revelled and tingled in the sun’s glow and my soft bedsheets as I wondered and anticipated my day. I love that feeling.

I was particularly pleased as I plan to stroll down to the old bog to examine the budding bracken. I want to write a poem about it. Have you ever noticed the bracken/fern in bud? It is the most extraordinary transformation from tiny green and brown spring coiled bud to fully fledged fern! It seems impossible that so much green could be contained is such a small bud and even more bizarre that the unfurling happens so slowly. The bud seems so full of tension, like a spring. I attach a picture, along with the wild spring flowers in my garden from last year (its only buttercups at the moment).

Also, sunshine is good for the sale of the house. Granted, it may reflect on the glorious strands of colour weaved in webs by those thin legged industrious spiders who spin as fast as I can hoover, but it also transforms Drumbriste House into spectacular. Yes, our home is looking particularly lovely at the moment. The attic filled one skip last weekend. The out houses filled another last month. I once wrote a poem about filling a skip with my self-doubt, my self-pity, my arrogance, and my jealousy. It was much less physically demanding, I can tell you. Anyway, so our home is looking good. The garden is de-weeded (though weeds are as industrious as spiders), the place is painted, and lo and behold, as we sit back and sip our birthday cocktails last weekend, admiring our handiwork, we wonder should we stay! We rang the auctioneer there and then before we changed our mind.

So, I hope the summer stays sunny, and the auctioneer doesn’t open the presses when he comes. They ‘hide a multitude of sins’ which haven’t been tackled yet. And if you want to buy a nine bedroomed, two kitchen beautiful house on the edge of old bog in the lovelyl lake lands of Cavan, with five delightfully clean outhouses and a steam sheet ironing machine thrown in, let me know. We also have a welly boot dryer.