A Block of Ice

Most of my ideas for blogs come to me while I am riding my scooter. My commute gives me a good 25 minutes or so of chewing a thought up, swallowing it, digesting it through my many stomachs before finally regurgitating it to chew a bit more.

And so I feel I must blame the recent sparsity of my posting on the dismal weather we have had for WEEKS ON END NOW.

Following the ghastly experience related in The White Caterpillar trilogy earlier this year, I have become rather more wary of taking my bike out in snow and ice. And being older now than I ever have been in the past, I am finding myself less and less willing to get cold or wet unnecessarily.

So I have been taking the train a lot more recently. And I can’t just sit and think on trains. So I read.

Reading is all very well and good, but it hasn’t furnished me with that many ideas for blogs. Not ones I can pass off as my own, at any rate.

I’m on a train home from London as I write this, and I am experiencing what I suppose proper writers would call writer’s block – insofar as, in spite of having a few basic ideas for posts, I haven’t had the opportunity to masticate them properly; to grind them up between the molars of my mind into the pulpy, glutinous paste I need in order to make the ODHSNM magic happen.

I’ve started writing a couple of things, and then deleted it after a hundred words or so.

As long-time readers will attest, considerations of quality have never stopped me writing before. And so I am writing this instead to tell you all about it.

Perhaps the weather has turned and we are finally going to get some kind of spring, which will in turn see the green shoots of things to write about begin to poke their heads out of my frozen brain-soil. Or maybe I’ve just run out of decent ideas. Or maybe I’ve lost the ability to express them. Or maybe I just don’t want to do this any more.

I need to get back on my bike and find out.