ALL THINGS CHRISTMAS

Finally I have managed to start putting up the Christmas decorations, but like all good craftsmen, preparation is all.  So the house has received a thorough cleansing in every nook and cranny.  With my blackened sorely foot, it seemed to take forever, but once the job was done and everywhere looked shiny, clean and stinking of beeswax lavender polish, out came the decorations.

This is the mirror in the hallway having received the treatment. Then it struck me that in less than one month it will all be coming down again.  The appeal of fleeing southward to a much warmer climate, to be pampered and spoilt over the festive period, seems to increase with age.  I am beginning to wonder why I do it every year and whilst friends and family always say the house looks divine and the decorations look as though they have jumped off a film or a stage set (don't go too close they probably have - I have a gold sleigh in the bottom garage that Santa left here when Jo was aged six or seven).  I don't seem to have a problem conjuring up the love, it is the continued enthusiasm I seem to have a problem with.  By Boxing Day I have fallen out of love with it all.

It can be compared to my approach to writing.  The start of a new project is just sooooo sexy and interesting and wonderful and so clear in my head, but by the time I've laid out the plot onto cards, jiggled around with some of the character arcs and sat down to write the fecking thing, I have gone off the boil.  I am beginning to think that as I was a child I slipped through the net, undiagnosed with some terrible personality affliction that is only surfacing now, or could it be I am only coming to terms with it now? I can write, I can go the distance, I can complete and to deadlines, but maybe I haven't met my story match yet or worse still maybe I haven't actually found my natural voice. Maybe, the perfect story is like the search for Mr. Perfect, it/he doesn't exist.   Like any worthwhile relationship you just have to darn well take the rough with the smooth and add a little tweak here or a little tweak there and morph the story around the characters like a piece of seamless knitting.  Storytelling is a little like playing with puddled wax, you have to be careful not to go in too soon or you get your fingers burnt, but if you leave it too long, you cannot mould it to the shape you want.  Hmmm...   Hey ho... 

I will be writing tomorrow as my maintenance man is here all day odd jobbing, the whole point of having him was so that I could be free to write rather than DIY (destroy it yourself).  It is true and I am full of shame that I have absolutely no desire to be the woman with the golden drill, or know or understand my AC from my DC, or wire a plug, or plumb in a dishwasher; cook a casserole a resounding YES, knit a rug, sew a pair of curtains in a couple of days and add the flourish of a pelmet YES, but put my head down a soil pipe and rod the drains, definitely not.  

Foxi - Over and Out and off to puddle her wax...