negentropic

If my New Year’s resolutions were to sleep badly and watch more Eastenders, then 2007 is well on course. I am subject to spells of sleeplessness, even when Hannah isn’t ringing the doorbell at three in the morning. I lie there. Sleep stands at the foot of the bed, stony-faced, eyeing me judgementally and refusing to approach. In the morning I feel like a chalk drawing of myself.

Hey, how do you like that imagery? I am reading a book about writing (called About Writing) by everyone’s favourite black gay and massively-bearded science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. Fascinating as it is, it isn’t the kind of guide that tells you that whoever you are, you can write a novel. It’s more like: don’t even pick up your pen unless you know you represent a significant improvement on Shakespeare. Sample quote: ‘You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception.’

From now on this will be my motto.

I went back home to Ingrave to catch up with the latest teenage craze in the Mail On Sunday (dancing on the roofs of moving driverless cars) and to keep abreast of the latest village gossip (as a festive touch, the new vicar put a red light in his porch, which some thought inappropriate). My other home - the one in which I do actually live - is on the move. Soon we will be in Copperfield Gardens, an area which has variously been described as a haunt of drug fiends and ‘relatively quiet’. Of course there isn’t necessarily any contradiction between those statements. It may be quiet because everyone’s on horse tranquillisers.