I’ve been trying to think what’s been happening around here lately to tell you all, and can only come up with events that involve unusual modal tenses.
There are things I ought to have done but haven’t. For instance, several months back I was invited to chair an author event at the local bookstore. I did that thing where you look far ahead at a blank calendar and think, oh I shall be so free and well-rested in those empty days! And agreed to do it. After all, I used to chair a great deal, back in the university era. Well, I quite liked the idea of it for a good six weeks or so, and when I had a chronic fatigue relapse I thought, I’ll doubtless be fine when the time comes. I even bought a new pair of boots (any excuse!). Then, when we got to a couple of weeks before the event, I began to feel the stirrings of horror. Did I really want to have to stand up before an audience and talk? I always did have stage fright, but there was a time when I was very stern with myself about repressing it. Plus I was practised then and knew I would do the performing stuff well. I reminded myself that this was a local event which would probably have no more than twenty or so people in the audience, half of whom would be related to the author, half of whom would have wanted to come in out of the cold. But still I trembled and the chronic fatigue was settled in for the duration; knowing your body can give out on you at any moment is a fun thought to take into a stressful situation.
Preparation is the key, I told myself, and so I went to the bookshop and asked whom I should talk to, in order to have a look at the space we’d be in and familiarise myself. I was a little surprised to find the bookseller had no knowledge of the event. And when I looked at the advertising posters in the shop, it clearly wasn’t on them. I went home and checked the internet, nope nothing on the website either. See, I told my chronic fatigued self: this will be the best event ever, because it’s going to be just you, the author and the publicist! You can all go down the pub! But I was still chronic fatigued and easily stressed and I began to think that finding someone to take my place might be the best idea. But wasn’t it unethical to hand an event over to someone else, knowing as I did that it was going to be…well, intimate?
Just as I was getting tangled up in knots over the various strands of worry involved, I received an email from the publicist telling me the event had been cancelled due to ‘poor ticket sales’. I’ll say! It’s hard to sell tickets to an event no one knows about. Through the immense relief, I felt a stirring of sharp curiosity to know what had happened. Had the event been cancelled before I went in the shop or after? Was there someone in a London office somewhere tearing at her hair and yelling ‘Christ, I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do!’ or was it more the case that no one had the heart to disappoint that poor blogger, who was probably gagging to appearing in the real world rather than the virtual one? Either way, I was just relieved, and it was a good reminder to myself that my public speaking days are over at the moment. Just because you were good at something in the past doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.
Then there have been things I wonder whether I shouldn’t do but am still doing. The cancellation of the event meant I felt able to commit to writing another chapter of the book I am STILL working on, knowing it would be a tiring thing to do. Since I began writing this book in the early summer of last year, there has been a string of disasters, some acute, some chronic, all unpleasant, that make me wonder whether the universe is not on the side of this particular project. Despite my best efforts, I cannot help but read omens and portents into the world around me, and maybe these scare tactics of fate are a way of saying: Give up! Do something different! And still I stubbornly trudge along, churning out stuff that probably no one will want to read out of some cussed conviction that what I start I ought to finish. Of course there is a line of theory that suggests life is random, and cannot be interpreted as if it were a narrative whose end is obscured by future time. But given that every part of my life has been bound up with stories one way or another, what sense would that hold for me? Surely a refusal to interpret would go against everything I have ever held dear?
Mind you, away from these mental minefields, there has been some straightforward stuff, too. My capacity for comedy accidents continues to astound me. On the way into the funeral last week, walking in the slow, solemn procession into the crematorium, I suddenly realised my forward progress had come to an abrupt halt as the heel of my shoe got stuck in a grating. The line of mourners snarled up behind me as I struggled to hoick myself out, and I wondered for a moment if I’d have to walk in barefoot. To the kind woman behind me who said in a most sympathetic voice, ‘That sort of thing happens to me all the time,’ thank you.
And then yesterday I noticed as I headed out to my car that an industrious and quite substantial spider had constructed a large web across the garden path. Ha! I thought, and avoided it by walking over the lawn. Yes, sure spiders are great, but not on me. When I returned, I remembered the spider and carefully walked around it again. And then, mid-afternoon, I realised there was a book in the library I needed and I thought I would nip out quickly and collect it. You know what’s coming next, don’t you? I really hope my next door neighbor was not working in his garage as there was rather a lot of squealing. And I did a little raindance, too. Proof that troublesome as my brain may be when it’s working, not much good comes of switching it off entirely.
