Sunday 2 December 2007

On not writing a great novel...

Pictured above...Santa writing the great Laplandian novel

Tis I again, after a bit of time off. I've been meandering around the house with various sickness symptoms caused by pregnancy. How come everyone is behaving like it's Christmas? Last time I checked there were twelve days and they don't start on December 2nd. The town was full of slavish shoppers purchasing everything in sight. Look I'm not down on Christmas, quite the opposite. I love the holiday season. One of the best things is that delicious period in between Christmas and New Year when time gets suspended and you can do your own thing, and everything is pleasant and xmassy. It's just that that time is not now, it's frustrating! Plus what's the deal with Epiphany? In other words where is it in this country? Other countries mark the day, our celebrations come down on Jan the 1st, even earlier sometimes.

As the more diligent readers of this blog will be aware, we've got cable. This means that you can watch 7 episodes of 'Only Fools and Horses' in a row if you so wish. Actually I like this programme because Del Boy is rather like my dad, well my dad's a Greek Cypriot version. The resemblance is uncanny, honest.
Normally I would not dream of parking myself on a sofa and staring at the tv but it's useful for pregancy sickness. The most ridculous thing is flicking through the channels, there are technically seven or eight hundred of the buggers. Let's do a flick...Scrubs, Takeshi's Kingdom, property programmes, Hugh Fernely-Wittingstall out with his upper class pals shooting passing partridges, Whose Line Is It Anyway? So it can be a Friday night in 1989 on a Sunday tea time. Cable obliterates time, you could watch Dallas at 3am if that's your bag, Tenko at breakfast, despite the fact that these were once prime-time shows but in the cable universe time is irrelevant. So despite my better judgement I sit and stare at the top 30 christmas TV moments. Yeah, writing the great English novel ain't going to happen tonight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hallo, Maria - morning (often all-day) sickness is definitely not conducive to writing anything - but it does go away in the end. Mind you, TV plus baby can become a way of life. One thing propelled me off the sofa (no cable, no remote control) when my daughter's age could be caluclated in weeks and days was Cliff Richard's awful "Christmas time,/misteltoe and wine". I couldn't bear the grating inexactness of that repeated time/wine/rhyme or those lines ground out with dreadfully clear diction, exposing the kind of banality one can ignore on a Christmas card. It remains my most-hated pop record.

I'm enjoying your posts, by the way.