Warming Up

No ladybird corpse today. Perhaps the ladybird was an angel ladybird sent by the ladybird Jesus to test me. Maybe my whole life is the dream of a ladybird. Would explain the 1976 ladybird attack and me living behind the ladybird book factory between 1971 and 1976. And the time I got off with a woman who studied ladybirds (she was lovely). And the ghost ladybird.

It wouldn’t explain anything else though.

And the ladybird might just have died in a corner.

Luckily I am not going mad, because after a day away from the stocean, I returned twice today to clear a few hundred more stones. And spare a thought for the twilight Autumn stone-clearers, because in the half-light and half-darkness of that evening collection it is very easy to mistake fallen leaves for stones. Sure, those guys get the pick of the new day’s stones before anyone else, but think of the leaves they have to sort through as their torch flashes on them on the ground. Poor fuckers.

I’d had a wonderful night’s sleep, after one of my worst for a long time last night and my brain was back on track. I did writing all day and it was easy peasy, I was on to episode 3 of series 2 of Relativity, which after the read through a few months back, I had thought was some way off being ready. But on looking at it with fresh eyes, after many weeks away from it, I realised it wasn’t far away at all. And it was a joy to work on. Didn’t quite finish it by the end of the day, but I worked on it hard and got it close and enjoyed it. It’s remarkable that all the time I wasn’t looking at these scripts I was feeling they were a lost cause and that I’d lost my mojo, but that I could (in theory at least - perhaps the time away from it was key) have polished off these three scripts in a week any time between May and September. 

There is nothing of script 4 to speak of. But having one and a bit scripts to finish feels a whole lot better than having 4 scripts to do as I felt I had a fortnight ago.

Being a writer is a lovely job and it’s a stupid one. There’s so much self-doubt and self-recrimination and pain as you attempt to squeeze and idea out of you. And then it turns out when you sit down (or lie down in my case as I mainly worked in bed today), when the stars have aligned, it’s kind of easy.

But let’s see how the final episode goes before I get too cocky. I am now at least, looking forwards to this.

And Twitter came to the rescue where a dictionary could not. I wanted to know how to spell “zhuzh”, as in the phrase "I “zhushed” up my wedding dress” but had no idea how to spell it. Was it Jujj or Juzgh or zhujj or jizz (probably not that last one, though that would also improve a wedding dress in my opinion). It’s hard to look something up in a dictionary if you don’t know what two letters it begins with. The debate raged on Twitter like a wild-fire all day and the consensus seemed to be for “zhuzh”, though “zhoozh” also seemed to be allowed, even though to me that would be pronounced all wrong. Someone tweeted that Nigella Lawson had asked the same question recently so she should know and she tweeted to say she had known but she couldn’t remember. Still I got a tweet for Nigella Lawson which really jizzed me up. Have I spelt that right? I think I have.

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See it on video here - youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHP1-g9iaPs