This week, I am experimenting with ‘organic’ writing. I have, as usual, lots to say for myself, but it all wants to come out at once in an alarming hiccup-fit.So, I am abandoning my normal (cunningly subtly) structured approach and playing with the ‘dribble-of-semi-consciousness’ technique.

Admittedly, my focus is not helped by the fact that my daughter is in her second week of learning the guitar (Wonderwall and Let Me Entertain You) but I am pleased she is applying herself so am grimacing and bearing it.Also, we have been minding my Mum’s dog, who has been a bad influence on our dog, inciting running away on the beach and barking the street down in a  grating doggy duet if so much as a leaf falls onto our block-paving.

Last week was a Busy Week. Well, it’s all relative, but it was action-packed by my standards. And I am highly aware that I am not as young as I used to be, having spent much of my twenty-second wedding anniversary gazing at the photo of my husband with a woman in a wedding dress and trying to recall where I had seen her before. Maybe she just reminded me of someone.

Highlights included a trip to the hospital(still waiting for the results: that’s got to be a good sign, hasn’t it?), going to college (determined to stick it out until Christmas because we are not a family of quitters), attending a ‘gig’ (daughter’s friend singing in a pub- that counts, right?), completing Chapter 13 of Blues (at a rate of half a  paragraph per millennium),  said wedding anniversary (bouquet and whiteboard pens, ta very much), and going out for a meal with friends we lost touch with ten years ago (more gazing at myself, wistfully pondering the passage of time and its physical ravages, but at least they didn’t walk past me).

This doesn’t seem like all that much, when I put it like this, but I am hyper-sensitive to activity.

And this week may be an Even Busier Week. This week promises being presented with a poetry competition prize (how do I make that sound like a stress, rather than a pleasure?), doing my micro-teach session at college (on the subject of limericks, currently over-running by two minutes),getting my nails professionally done ready for graduation (yeay, but what if I fall over on the stage?), trying a new writing group (what if they do not ‘get’ my work or me?),getting the carpet and suite cleaned (now that we are no longer a boarding kennels, plus it’s that time of year when we start caring what  festive guests might think of us if they saw how we really lived), a pitching workshop (not very good at ‘selling’ myself- can you tell?),moving my daughter into the spare room once it has been painted in her preferred shade of white (it is bigger than her current pink and turquoise box but near the top of the stairs and I had a fear of dropping her down the stairs in the night when she was a baby),starting Chapter 14 of Blues (resisting urge to micro-edit/delete Chapters 1-13 and hoping that my punctuation is better than this),more guitar practice (just be thankful she didn’t want a bass and remember the problems your parents had with your sax).

Someone please stand me on my head and pass me a glass of water and give me a big fright (not now – I’m expecting it now). Failing that, a whack over the head. Aaah, the relief. That’s better.