Rewrite restart .
Fiction
Day one back on LHR.
Looks good – looking back but …
The fledgeling attempt did not fly.
Scrivener 3 for Windows.
The long-awaited product update finally arrived and I didn’t care. It took me a week to be bothered enough to work out to buy it because one day I might care. Buy it rather than upgrading so I didn’t get snarled in techy issues, I had no desire to tinker with, if it wasn’t a smooth process. I already have Sc3 for MAC so I am not unfamiliar with it – nevertheless, my complete lack of enthusiasm for this is a manifestation of the fact that, at the moment, I am kidding myself I am writing. Or rather, I am not kidding myself – I am just not writing more than journals about the daily goat shenanigans – which may be classed as bucket filling, on several levels, but fiction writing it is not. Re-writing fiction it is not.
Life is hard – bizarre – for all of us and I struggle as much as everyone in response to the Pandemic fall-out, that scatters the dust of our lives and leaves us in a rocky place deprived of much of the greenery of life. We miss the pleasures of being in the human race leaving us parched and angry at an enemy we cannot see.
My life changed in several ways abruptly: Flax collicked on a sunny Sunday morning 28/02/2021 and was put down at tea time. This left us with a lonely Rufus, still in his winter coat and field, and all our spring grazing plans were suddenly not going to work. That needed fast action and a lot of thought to place him in the centre of our little world – where if he had no equine companion he was at least where he could see us and be included in whatever was going on – yard, stable and field. Even if the goats are goats at least they are life and make me go out and give a pattern of activity to the days.
The second change was that my Mum’s carers gave notice – which is a mixed blessing; they had done a grand job over the last few years but could not get there early enough to help Mum in the mornings and neither could they provide the lunch visit. This left Mum cold, hungry and pain-wracked and exhausted sat in her chair waiting around for someone to empty the commode having attempted to do all her morning routine on her own. Mum’s kidney failure is real. Her Dementia is real. She does her best to appear OK for those precious few min she has ‘company’ and those that look can see through that and those that don’t look cause real harm to her. So now they don’t come and I make sure that when she is heading to the bathroom I am sorting out her room and getting the kettle on for a hot bottle and for her flasks of hot water – so she is fed watered and tacked up hours earlier and then she feels up to spending the mornings in the sunny conservatory looking at the goats and in the warm. If something happens to me no one will come in but we are looking at some ‘out reach’ help and a ‘falls’ care line instead of her normal one.
For me it is a huge relief seeing her warm and enjoying the goats or the view and also I realised that carer visit – somewhen between 9 am and 12 noon – was a vast distraction: have they been? Have they gone? Why didn’t they do XYZ? And COVID has just added to that as we all tried to keep apart. Now I know that Mum is ‘done’ we aren’t going to be interrupted and I can settle to do what I want where I want – and that includes writing this in my old place at the kitchen table looking at the garden and the stock.
‘Out of sight out of mind’ is true and being in 27 or the top of the dairy – luxuries though they are – means that things happen I do not see which can leave me fire fighting problems I could have nipped in the bud and also I look at jobs I could do outside in the garden and go and do them between writing sessions.
The haulage business remains a priority and Gordon is working to the max and is tired.
The goats progress as they will – see the updates on our farm Blog.
Anyway, things change and that is even before the issue of how COVID plays into a contemporary series I was writing etc etc etc. I may be down, and out, but I’ll be back.