This is me (pictured right) writing my last but one book. We were on holiday but laptop, coffee, music, early morning light - I can guarantee the house was sleeping as I worked before I had a swim and then just getting on with normal life (that has been a normal holiday for 40 years). Writing is what writers do but its not normal life. We are strangers to ourselves and our friends and our lovers. We are strangers to the world outside, we write, like painters paint and philosophers and theologians think and we all think, all the time, over lunch, swimming in the pool, thinking, thinking, and anyone who thinks academics don't work should spend a day inside our heads because its work all the time… I can't remember having a break, ever. Right now, even as I write this I am mulling comments made on an article i have to edit… It is 22.39 pm (when I started this) and I have been awake since 5 this morning. I am writing this blog as a way of winding down from the constant thinking - shutting down is really hard. When I was young I did this with a guitar and thought, am I the only one who can cut himself off from the pack and sit and write, songs in those days. Once in a small seaside resort called Eyemouth and I while everyone in the band was winding down I was writing a new song. But its all of us, all the time, composing in our heads and in our notebooks and on scraps of paper tucked away here and there. I have scraps of paper everywhere in this house. I am writing an article at the moment (see above - och the editors have responded) about a fragment of a song I started writing 42 years ago. Oh lordy, that is a long time to harbouring a lyric or a tune or a breathe but I have been digging out old books and diaries and notebooks and scrapbooks and blimey, you can do a lot with a pencil and a piece of paper. My good friends M and L who recorded two of my songs on their first album have been in touch and want to do more. I could do this, I would like to do this and I will do it because I have always wanted to record with them. But today big things happened in Winchester! The Pop-Up-Poetry-Cafe is a runner, ooh watch this space. We are already checking out space for it.
I like to finish every post with an eclectic piece of music. Its not always my every day listening (and I listen to music every single day of my life) but I like this, just because I do and when I listen it reminds me of people and things and indeed people that are important to me from a a way back, it takes me from being sixteen to sixty. Some will say the album version of this is better, psshhh, I would play it just like this, this is songwriting on my top list, never ever tried to figure out what its about, just love it - btw one of my abiding memories is being 15 and learning to play this, with a harmonica harness made out out of an old coat hanger (I remember the reaction of my mates - wow) I don't have that coat-hanger harness, but actually, I still have the one I replaced it with 40 years ago - goodness, it is sitting in the kitchen, on top of the wine rack, as I type. And thinking about it, when I showed that clip of an old song I had written (ref above) i was using that harness… I can still play this and I am a walking antique…
I like to finish every post with an eclectic piece of music. Its not always my every day listening (and I listen to music every single day of my life) but I like this, just because I do and when I listen it reminds me of people and things and indeed people that are important to me from a a way back, it takes me from being sixteen to sixty. Some will say the album version of this is better, psshhh, I would play it just like this, this is songwriting on my top list, never ever tried to figure out what its about, just love it - btw one of my abiding memories is being 15 and learning to play this, with a harmonica harness made out out of an old coat hanger (I remember the reaction of my mates - wow) I don't have that coat-hanger harness, but actually, I still have the one I replaced it with 40 years ago - goodness, it is sitting in the kitchen, on top of the wine rack, as I type. And thinking about it, when I showed that clip of an old song I had written (ref above) i was using that harness… I can still play this and I am a walking antique…
