by Clare Taylor (Mon Feb 08, 2010)
It's
the end of the evening. There's nothing decent on TV, unless you count re-runs
of 'Friends' on E4 that I've watched a hundred times already. I have an early
start tomorrow, the dishwasher has already been unstacked, and the cereal bowls
have been laid out ready for breakfast to minimise fuss in the morning rush
(rock and roll, baby. You know it...)
So,
its time for bed, surely?
Time
for bed, definitely. If, that is, I
were remotely sensible.
But
it seems that at the great age of 40-mumble-mumble, that's the one thing I most
definitely am not. Because instead of having turned off the lights, locked the
front door, and taken out my contact lenses 3 hours ago, as usual I've ended up
doing something far less useful. And it's not as interesting as leaving my husband snoring peacefully on
the sofa whilst I go out for a late-night salsa class, or pop to the cinema to
watch the latest subtitled masterpiece alone in the darkness.
No.
I live life on the edge, I do. So I switch over to Film 4 and immerse myself in
whatever rubbish movie is playing this evening. Or, I pick up a book (again,
probably one that I've read before but who gets time to go to the bookshop
these days? And frankly, I never remember the ending anyway...). Or I - and
this is the worst of all - wander into the cubby hole I wryly call ‘the
office', and switch on the computer.
Switch
on the computer? At Stupid o'clock?
What
kind of an idiot would do such a thing?
Ahem.
That would be this kind of an idiot. In
my defence, time during normal waking hours is usually taken up by very
important other... stuff. You know. ‘Stuff.'
So time that I could have spent in daylight hours tapping away and coming up
with fabulously creative ideas is more usually spent doing mundane domestic
chores. It's more often at the end of the day, when my sons are finally in bed,
that I get to seize the moment and spend some productive ‘alone time' with my
keyboard and Inspiration.
Except.
For
some reason, as I sit there, poised over the keys, Inspiration fails to turn
up. Tick, tick, tick. Time passes, and it slowly becomes clear that - yet again
- she must have made other plans. Off canoodling with ‘proper' writers,
probably, the hussy. Or out larging it in some seedy vodka bar with highly
strung ad-agency creatives desperate to make Tena-Lady look less middle-aged (no,
scratch that. Even she wouldn't waste her time on such a lost cause). Or perhaps she's sitting on the edge of
a desk swinging her pretty high-heeled legs and flirting with some politician's
speech writer trying to make the economy look healthy?
Well
wherever she is, it certainly isn't in this cubby hole, surrounded by
half-drunk glasses of water, biscuit crumbs, and cobwebs so old they've
gathered enough dust to be mistaken for festive decorations.
No, yet again, at the end of a hectic day,
Inspiration and those ‘fabulously creative ideas' I mentioned earlier seem to
have stolen a march on me and retired early. They are clearly much more
sensible than I, and tucked themselves in with a good book and mug of cocoa
around 3 hours ago, leaving in their place the ‘wannabe' ideas. You know, the
‘I could'a been a contender!' ideas, that frankly, once they make it onto a
page put up such a poor show that they should have stayed in the dugout. Or in
the locker room. Or the Winnebago.
Sorry - I'm mixing my metaphors. Probably
because I should have gone to bed around 3 hours ago.
