This Is This

A lot of people say to me: “Cliff, I read this site every day and I like the way you write - what do you look like when you’ve just had very little sleep with your hair cut too short?” Well, hopefully this post will answer those questions and more.

I’ve just come back from a long weekend spent in a log cabin on a farm in the Midlands and I feel completely refreshed. No DVDs players, no computers and no electricity. Nope, just a wooden floor and canvas walls and the elements - oh, and a woodburning stove, gas lamps, sink, a cooler box, table, chairs (obviously, what good’s a table without chairs?), flushing toilet, radio, mobile phone, my car and my wits upon which to survive. In other words, I got back to basics.

It was good. I didn’t even write much, apart from this:

It’s 9:55 in the evening and I’m sitting in a tent with views of Leicestershire rolling off and vanishing behind me like the mist of breath on a mirror while I’m turned in towards a page, writing this by candlelight above a three-beer smile.

I don’t want to overdramatise this, because the weather has been awful over the last two days, and I’ve been secure behind canvas walls with a strong pine floor under my feet. I’m in the glow of a storm latern and a small wood-fired stove, listening to a piano Grieg’s Piano Concerto while the kids sleep soundly a few feet away.

It gets better than this - of course it does, but this will do until better happens.

And that’s pretty much it, which for me was gratuitously unproductive for a four-day stretch. Everything I have written since Thursday on here until now has been a LIE. Or at least it was scheduled to publish while I was away, but apart from that it was a LIE because I didn’t write it and then hit go, like I usually do.

But it was good. I took walks and pictures like this (right). I know I don’t look very happy, but that’s often me and I thought I’d be honest after what critics of this site (myself, at least) are already calling the Great Forward-Publishing Ruse Of July 2007. Maybe I was going for pensive. Maybe I was pensive for going. In the background you can see one of the so called tents I stayed, if not slept, in. Click the picture if you want to see the full size high-res nosehair version, but I’ll fully understand if you don’t.

Things had been getting to me lately, to be honest. Last Thursday I had this exchange in a meeting with a new member of staff who had just finished her first week where I work.

New colleague: I’m really getting the feeling that people here understand the business we’re in and really want to make things happen.

Me: Yeah, that’ll wear off.

So I’m back - a bit windswept if not more interesting, to pick up with my little blog gig and a raft of one-stop word to brain solutions.

Thanks to Wendy for being Monday’s subject, the joke of which she was the butt for a post I pulled out of mine.

Also on This Is This
But if I write “Dear” at the top of a page in a Word document, maybe I don’t want to write a letter. Maybe Mister Clippy should mind his own beeswax.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 7:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.