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desperanceThere's never much hope of keeping up a strict work-pace at the weekend. Even disregarding the temptations of a social life - even spurning them, as sometimes one might do - the days are built to sabotage honest effort. Deliberately built, I tell you.
To start with - to top and tail and slice and blanch and stir-fry, with added soy - the Lit & Phil is only open till one on Saturdays, and not at all on Sunday. Screwed, frankly, before we begin. And then Someone Else always gets here before I do, and takes my table. Mine! Can you believe it?
And then there are more distractions, foodie columns in the weekend rags and so forth. And these summery days, there is cricket. It is faintly conceivable that I may have spent more time in the last couple of hours watching the BBC feed from Edgbaston than writing deathy* prose.
Still'n'all, I have a darling from this morning. It's quite long, for a darling; but it speaks to what I'm doing here. If you like that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing I like:
His beard bristled with iron vigour. His blue eyes were faded, salt-soaked, ironic; his skin had weathered sun and wind, ten thousand days, a thousand thousand miles. His voice still held a Navy crispness, under a roughening of tobacco and hard use. And of course he’d been in the war, so had every man his age, every man worth anything - not half the men she knew in London, those who had fucked her and spurned her and judged her and fucked her anyway - but there was more than that. Something of her own father in him: the last thing she’d have looked for, the last thing she’d have hoped to see but there it was, clear and authoritative and revelatory.
* this would of course be the opposite of deathless. But you knew that.
To start with - to top and tail and slice and blanch and stir-fry, with added soy - the Lit & Phil is only open till one on Saturdays, and not at all on Sunday. Screwed, frankly, before we begin. And then Someone Else always gets here before I do, and takes my table. Mine! Can you believe it?
And then there are more distractions, foodie columns in the weekend rags and so forth. And these summery days, there is cricket. It is faintly conceivable that I may have spent more time in the last couple of hours watching the BBC feed from Edgbaston than writing deathy* prose.
Still'n'all, I have a darling from this morning. It's quite long, for a darling; but it speaks to what I'm doing here. If you like that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing I like:
His beard bristled with iron vigour. His blue eyes were faded, salt-soaked, ironic; his skin had weathered sun and wind, ten thousand days, a thousand thousand miles. His voice still held a Navy crispness, under a roughening of tobacco and hard use. And of course he’d been in the war, so had every man his age, every man worth anything - not half the men she knew in London, those who had fucked her and spurned her and judged her and fucked her anyway - but there was more than that. Something of her own father in him: the last thing she’d have looked for, the last thing she’d have hoped to see but there it was, clear and authoritative and revelatory.
* this would of course be the opposite of deathless. But you knew that.