I don't even know.

I have been remiss. I went to the Lit & Phil to hear Bryan & Mary Talbot talk about their new book, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes; and then we went out to dinner with shewhomust and durham_rambler; and there was wine drunk with dinner, and then Bryan & Mary evilly inveigled me down to Sunderland with them to drink more wines and stay up late and not be home and virtuous.

So now it is tomorrow, and I still have my book to finish and all my house to pack, and all I want to do is write the story that begins like this:

***

All our great memorials are monuments to absence. Gifts to the dead, the missing, the deported. The departed. This is what we lost. We lost it here. As though we could counterbalance that with something vast and heavy and ineluctably here, something to stand against the awful suck of time

***

*shrugs*

[That's a thing I do when a thought or a sentence is unfinished: I leave the full stop off as a reminder to myself, you're still working on this. In case you were wondering.]

Also, I want to write a novella in three parts, which shall be called

There Is a Tide
In the Affairs of Men
Taken at the Flood

If I should fall from grace with bread

I am making a sourdough loaf. The way I do this, the Methode Chaz, is to work the dough through the day and rise it overnight, bake it first thing in the morning; the work I speak of is barely work at all, just ten seconds' kneading here and there, now and then. It's the joy about sourdough, is that it does all the work itself if you only give it time.

I actually forgot this one, all afternoon, after mixing it up at lunchtime - but it really doesn't matter. I've turned it over and poked it about every half-hour or so since five o'clock, and it's feeling fine. I love the way a good dough feels, light and active beneath my hands. This one's reached the stage of farting at me, as I burst gas-bubbles with my fingers.

This may possibly be the last bread I make in this house. Or there may be one more, but there's really no point my keeping the starter going beyond the start of next week. Anyone want a sourdough starter...?

Actually, anyone want anything? My friends are fabulous, and deserve gifts; so come and take them. Come and take anything you want. Come on Sunday, after lunch. Before then I won't be here, for my friends are fabulous and apparently want to see me before I leave. Thursday, Friday, Saturday are all spoken for suddenly.

In the meantime, I have to finish a novel. I have broken a cast-iron rule, that I only drink half a bottle of wine with my evening workings; I finished the half a bottle and it was only six o'clock and really I should be working until eight, so...

I'm actually quite enjoying this book, here at the end of everything. It's gone all Narnia on me; she's going through a door into a hillside. If it were only a round door, it would be a hobbit-hole. But it's not. (Hey, y'know? I could say that. It's that kind of book. Metatextual FTW. And she's such a geek...)