‘When an early autumn walks the land…’

When I swam regularly then all of these good writing ideas would come pouring out of my head, it was as if my sequence of 4 -8-5-3 and one for luck flushed out a series thoughts and provided me with a clarity that I could easily capture on paper.

I haven’t been swimming very much of late and I haven’t been writing either, the correlation is oblique at best but it does exists because suddenly writing requires a stimulus, an Aid Package sent from the first world to unlock my inclination and rekindled these Amazonian scribbles of my boring little life.

Easily my main problem is that I miss certain things and I miss casually doing those things with somebody and those impulses have been prevalent as Autumn creeps into my routine. This quiet pining doesn’t really make for good writing, indulgent depictions maybe but because I’m easily bored I just can’t be bothered to decode it.

And since I’m not swimming all of those other potential intellectual pings remain trapped in my lazy state of consciousness and they are not being capture here in this space. I reckon you could call it a rut and I have tried to steadily get out of it, sometimes with a fair amount of success other times with considerable strain and tangible frustration.

I always try to spend my way out of my ruts, the plastic bends without buckling, it’s just the easiest first step but even consumption gets to a point where you have to stop; to digest and in the digestion or the processing of the digestibles, that’s when you miss the girl most of all, not only in the wee small hours of the morning… and you wonder without getting lost if the feeling maybe mutual.

One of the things that I bought to get myself out of this little, pre-season’s change, rut that I’m in was a 21 disc Cary Grant box set. I do like Cary Grant, my intention was to nibble at it on Sunday evenings, my Sundays are for listening to jazz, window shopping, drinking high tea and now for watching classic movies. The box set is a little uneven because some of his better movies are not contained in the selection, there’s no: To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest or An Affair to Remember for instance but there’s more than enough magic in the collection to keep me from complaining.

Last night I settled in and watched, That Touch of Mink, which stars Doris Day as the leading lady in that old cat and mouse romantic comedy game which is full of clever dialogue and sweet charm. Doris utters this rather great line in her first scene as she collects her unemployment cheque:

“I would enjoy going out with you, Mr. Beasley, if I just didn’t find you so personally distasteful. You’re a sneaky, crude, offensive man. Of course that’s just how I feel. I’m sure there are hundreds of girls in this city who admire those qualities.”

From that moment you know that you are in for a treat and the film doesn’t disappoint.

—

I break out an 18 year old bottle of whisky, after being without tipple for 39 days, yes I stopped at 39 and not 40, religion has two premises, faith and forgiveness, I wanted a little of the latter so I stopped a day early. All the money you save should go to the poor but I don’t save anything other than myself and that’s all but momentarily so there isn’t anything left over for the poor, they do get a raw deal don’t they when it’s all said and done.

The whisky is only as good as my appreciation, it dawns on me as I’m sipping, slowly, surely, I try to resolve for myself how much of this is great and how much of this is snobbery. It’s a pretty special drink I conclude, my appreciation hasn’t turned rogue, I still have it – thankfully.

—

Some nights I’m just not able to sleep, even if I turn my shoes in opposite directions my mind still wonders.

I curl up and count my blessings or sometimes I choose to watch CNN because both eventually puts me to sleep.

When I’m counting my blessings I start at three, I got blessed twice by mistake when I was confirmed. It’s ironic because we had an exam to write and we wrote it in the church, I never studied and I copied from the person who I was lifting with, he was serious and diligent, I was neither but I got a higher mark and for my sins I got two blessings which was a mistake but I’d take it any day.

I count from three and I think about all of the people in my life, a roll call, it goes on for a while even the people I don’t like, those are the ones I call out, wishing them good fortune, health and happiness, it’s the notion of the butterfly’s flapping wings that causes the tornado on the other side of the world.

I go through the roll call of all the people that I can remember and then I remember myself and I am gone into the warm embrace of the night.

—

Lloyd Cole does me no favours, he is quite brilliant and ridiculously cool in my opinion and then he does a Burt Bacharach cover and that song stays with me for days on end, and I just don’t know what to do with myself.