The Mayday Holiday
I’m tired.
Really tired.
The Chipster’s brain has shrunk in his skull and become a pale pickled walnut of an intelligence. I’m feeling so tired that I cut short a performance of my Sherlock Holmes routine tonight. I’m ashamed to say that I left the ladies of Bangor early. Holmes hadn't even got his pipe out. I don’t know what Dr. Watson would say.
I’ve been feeling drained all week, as you can probably tell by the brief posts I've made in the last few days. I picked up a copy of ‘Brethren’ from the bookshop last Friday and it’s taken me a full seven days to get through it.That's just not like me. I love novels set in the age of the crusades yet this one has left me feeling deflated. I can’t find enthusiasm for words and I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong with me.
I suppose that I admired its historical detail. And it wasn’t poorly written. Only, it was just… okay.
Condemned by faint praise, I suppose. Hard to describe ‘okay’. It was one of those stories I could follow should a sequel appear or forget about immediately. Things happened to people I moderately cared about during a period of history I enjoy reading about. I’d wanted it to be like ‘Ivanhoe’, or even ‘The Name of the Rose’. It wasn’t noble enough to be the first, nor dark and clever enough to be the second. It was just okay.
My own writing has done this to me. I don’t know how I can continue without a break. I write at least 2000 words every day and that’s before I drag this old thong to my blogging desk and update my diary. I’m in need of a holiday, only Gabby refuses to allow me a moment’s break. She believes ‘only men without love grapes’ take holidays. All I know is that I’m thinking of having a break until Tuesday and I don’t care what people think about my love grapes.
So, if I go silent for a couple of days, you know I’ve not abandoned this blog. I’ll be off reading my new copy of ‘The Adventures of John Hatteras’. I need to find the pleasure of a story again and Jules Verne might just be the man. Of course, I’ll probably pop up before Tuesday. It usually happens that as soon as I tell myself I’m not going to write, it will be the first thing I’m itching to do in the morning.
4 comments:
Have you tried "Knight Crusader" by Ronald Welch? Good old fashioned writing and better still its very even handed.
Oh, now you've got me intrigued. Just checked it out on Amazon and it's out of print, but that's good. I hate books that just go with a trend. I'll have to find it second-hand, but it sounds just the sort of thing I'm after.
Thanks Jan.
Funny - I'm just now reading a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. It's not quite the same as a novel but pretty damn exciting just the same. My favourite name so far is Count Alfonso Jordan: he sounds like one of your colleagues, Chippy! (Bjut alas, he was poisoned. Hardly anyone in this book reaches much more than about 37.)
I'm totally incapable of reading biographies. In fact, I can't think of the last one I read to the end -- perhaps one about Churchill some time ago. Unfortunately, I find they all have the same story: birth, life, death. I know it will never be uplifting.
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