Return to Base-camp

Not that I have taken a break or anything but with the child-shaped on holidays, the hub-person still in a bad way (having left the bedroom only 3 times since October) and given that I have been sleeping in two hour bouts since Christmas time I have been working on my laptop on the sofa mostly under a duvet for the last couple of weeks… and comfy though that is, it isn’t particularly productive. So today I have returned to my office. Not that today will be any better work-wise, since the children have taken it over and it is currently a huge mess… but I have cleared myself some workspace anyway – and have done a couple of PLT exercises I was cunningly avoiding (because I had reached a stage of having to look inside myself and was slightly scared of what I might find!) and now here I am once more in the midst of two reviews, researching for an article on auto-suggestion and (obviously) writing this piece for your entertainment.

All this and it isn’t even half ten yet! Frickin’ marvellous, eh?!

Something that has come out of my downtime is that I have rediscovered the joy of reading for fun. One of the issues with studying all the time is that there is a need to read relevant texts; this stops me from reading recreationally and I had really forgotten how great it was to give yourself over to a really good book just for the sake of it. I guess in a lot of ways this is why I have ended up reading… I can just say “the book” can’t I? You won’t be thinking I mean the Bible or anything, because we have an understanding, yeah? You know the one I mean? Anyway – the thing with ‘that’ book is that I can just pick it up and read without really thinking about it too much (or at all!) – Okay it kind of helps that as I read it I can almost hear his voice reading it to me… but that’s healthy enough isn’t it? I mean reading is all about using your imagination, right?

I picked up a heap of ‘other’ volumes written by authors of some of those books we have all read a while ago (Huxley, Golding and Orwell amongst others) and decided I could make a start on them – I’d forgotten how good it was to challenge the mind slightly; not to mention realising how differently our brains must function depending on what we are reading. I can generally whip through a book fairly quickly, even a non-fiction one given the right subject matter, yet it seemed to take me an age to plough through the relatively short “Darkness Visible” by William Golding. It was a peculiar process, whereby I found myself constantly re-reading sentences that didn’t seem to make sense at all to me to the point where I was almost wondering if reading was for me at all. As it happens, I am glad to have persevered with it and actually appreciate the journey of thought the book took me on; not through its theme but more for the linguistic tone and the way it has once again highlighted my relationship with the written word. Regardless, although it was a fairly good story, I am glad to see the back of it.

It used to be that on finishing a challenging read, I’d cleanse my palate on The Lovesong of Alfred J Prufrock or another Eliot classic… seems I have a new sorbet now as my first thought on having had that hour or so of digesting the closure of the story I had just read was somewhat predictably to blast through Random Thoughts again.

But anyway – tea-break over now; time to return to work!