I’ve thought of a perfect story for Pumpkin Positive, though I’m going to need a lot of help. Prague, 2004, and my laptop packs up just as I’m planning to spend the summer - which will be slack for teaching - writing the novel I thought up hungover from a night drinking with my beginners students (what a tough class that was) the end of that first academic year I had begun when my friends were visiting shortly after I finished my CELTA when a former dentist, former stripper (she stripped with knickers she had knitted herself) teacher at the school had been sacked for bringing in bottles of vodka (or Slivovice or something) to class every morning. I had got the job through Ondrej whose wife Ema had contacted Blanka, their former teacher, for me when I was living at theirs - Ondrej had invited me to stay at theirs, taking me from the Prison Penzion, literally a former STB jail with the solid metal doors still intact, now painted an array of primary colours, it was listed as being run by nuns in my guidebook, but things had changed once again; Ondrej had been the most colourful character in our first class of students who paid far below the usual asking price to learn with novice native English speakers, and he was a serious anglophile. Read the rest of this entry »
Friday creeps up every time. Every Tuesday, Wednesday I get this sense of dread that the week is slipping by already, and the depression and anxiety sets in that I’m drifting still towards that waterfall, doing nothing with it. I started getting angry yesterday, uncommunicative and evasive. M couldn’t get anything out of me. Nothing except my desperation to write. I couldn’t do anything else. She left me to it. She has done so now again and again. We made an effort for a while, and our problems were a novelty, demanding of my time, but it all cracked last weekend when she had the weekend off and had been planning exactly what we could do with it, but I became desperate at exactly the same time and had to write. God, I can’t believe it has been a week since I tried to write a poem, The First Circle, which I shall be posting about some time soon when I get round to it. That fact depresses me. It literally feels as if I haven’t lived for a week. Read the rest of this entry »
In my time writing this blog, that is, trying to, trying not to, writing those desultory pieces in the useless downtime I could not set to any other useful purpose, I have scratched the surface of what it is all about so little that as often before, I tend to feel it is better not to have opened my mouth, put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard at all, than to settle for something so inchoate, that will inevitably allow people to know me less rather than more. One of the things I have barely mentioned is my notebooks. Strange, given that, I suppose, looking back, these notebooks, full of thoughts badly expressed, drawings, poems, names of novels and stories, song lyrics, inventions, angry jottings, ideas for anything from monetary systems to bicycle, camera and guitar designs, stories, of course, are a more consistent part of my behaviour since childhood than anything else. Also, they are the place I sketched out (literally), my ideas for this site which has, of course, come to be nothing remotely like the eccentric but coherent and characterful website I first planned out. Read the rest of this entry »