There’s something incredibly soothing about sitting on the eiderdown – OK then, chain store mass print design London duvet cover – whilst the rain attacks the smeary, in-need-of-professional-attention windowpane. Having finally roused myself to put clothes on despite zero need for facing the elements oneself, the television is on, Terrestrial for once, to regale me with whoever feels the urge and has the moolah to relocate to some countryside idyll as I can merely dream of such pasture. Book to one side as I slowly witness my own Goodreads progress creep up happily, other half in the room next door looking at something wrestling related no doubt, it could almost pass itself off as a cosy, middle classed set-up were it not for the unpredictability that Mental Health throws our way. The book, though, is Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, since I certainly don’t feel I will be navigating Iran’s underbelly myself in this day and age such are the strains this country’s governments place on potential visitors and its own inhabitants. Byron wrote this based on his travels, from 1933, and I stumbled across what has been deemed ‘the first travel book’ first when I was on the BA in Kent where Travel Literature was a discrete second or third year module; I didn’t, I confess read it all then but I am making up for that now. I hope it will fulfill much of my study for the Creative Writing Masters currently well on the way to its final, nerve-inducing, act.
I have done blogging before both on this platform and on Blogger but it is to volume of interest and exposure where I tend to fall down. And, of course, the Writers’ Curse of believing to have written far more than actuality. Ho-hum, this is my training ground and my procrastination on all things work, reading, cleaning, tidying, moving et al. Trying to read widely is my biggest interest, mission, challenge and dearest hope at the moment and I would love to be a quicker – by some way – reader and still enjoy – and still remember what I have then actually read. After Byron, I have lined up a selection of books, started already, ‘currently reading’ as far as the Goodreads platform is concerned and these include the eclectic following titles: Wolf Hall, Testament of Youth, Pamela, John Clare, a biography, Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, The Art of Thinking Clearly and its, no doubt, antithesis, Ulysses. I’d propose that my keenness to get things completed and done is a lot to do with my increasingly anxious self and/or neurosis probably manifested in undiagnosed (is it worth the diagnosis?) OCD. I think there’s a time and a place for the minutiae of my thinking around this and is not for now, this introductory holding forth of who or what or why I am. Testing the waters, my dear reader – I dearly wanted to address Hector there, a la Keith Floyd, but I shall restrain. It will also be within one’s power to, for Gaia’s sake, IMPLY THE ‘I!’
Happy? Thoughts? All shall be gratefully received. Remember the Porter.
The Muse Within 