Desert Island...

... for Knots in the String.

I read Jo Linney this week and I think on my own connections or disconnections. I’m essentially an introvert and being social is fine in short bursts but it can be draining. I have energy when I carefully mete out my sociable activities. If I’m under par, as my husband and I both are currently, then we pay a price. Which is where social media comes in. I discover it’s possible to ‘be’ social on social media, without necessarily being actively social. A perverse win at this time.

Reading elsewhere on social media, I discover that many are starting to switch off from the TV, newspapers and radio and even from aspects of social media itself because of the swathe of grey that is wrapping up the world currently. Clever folk I say (being one of them). Because whilst it behoves one to be informed and to fight the good fight, sometimes it’s best to shelter and take stock. To find a desert island and just becalm oneself. Which is exactly what my husband and I do.

The beach is calm, empty as a desert island and the sky is like a piece of grey damask velvet, so low one can almost runs one’s fingers along the nap.

Dusk is humid, wrapping itself close about us so that we breath dense air. Like playing a child’s game of hiding under the blankets. These sorts of day promise thunder, at the very least rain. And of course as indicated in my previous post, the rain does come, with more to come over the weekend. The thunder thankfully, does not arrive. It gives me prodigious headaches.

The week really is a headache week weather-wise, something to do with barometric pressure, and yet just walking that empty beach at dusk clears our heads. We look back at the farm named after the beach (or perhaps vice versa) and which has been sold and which, with 10km’s of coast on its boundaries, we are hoping will never be broken up for development (faint hope, but what is life without hope?). A beautiful spot with some historic buildings – and a narrow corridor of arable land running a little inland. The rest is bush – a natural environment to conserve our unique wildlife. Will it remain bush? Will the new buyer want to make their mark by conservancy? Who knows? If we’d won Lotto we would have bought it and done exactly that. But we always forget to buy tickets…

The sand is hardpacked, the best sort to walk on and the tide is still coming in so we know that by the time we turn back, our footsteps, any record at all of us being there, will be erased.

I wonder briefly in my on-again-off-again fugue state, if that’s what will happen to us in the end. No record. Perhaps it’s why I write. To create some sort of history. But then fiction is hardly a record, is it?  So I write my journal and I write for Substack.

My writing lacks grunt at the moment. I write a line or two a day of my second contemporary novel, Act Three, and then spend precious minutes the next day deleting it. My Substacks feel one-dimensional. I promise myself to do better, try harder, but I wonder where the creative spirit has gone, where my love of language has vanished to. My bet is that it will just start to revive when and if we get another dog and when once again, I may have little to no time to hone the words as I try to build bonds with a puppy.

But that’s perfectly fine. It’s more important to have a new family member than to turn out book after column after post.

(One of the Famous Five or maybe even the Fab Five - as of this week. Darling things they are. I’m in awe and hope that at least one will bond with us.)

This beach that we walk along, searching for cowries in the dusk, was the Terrier’s Happy Place. He relaxed here knowing when we walked that we always picked our times – so that it was his desert island, and he didn’t have to look around worrying if an errant dog might attack him. His tail would swing from side to side, he’d develop a cool trit-trot and his ears would flop, his whole demeanour the image of one who has just had a great meditation. Or a good toke. He quite enjoyed his CBD Oil, did the Terrier. I used to call him my hooch pooch.

It's been a reflective week as we try to avoid world news and the Black Friday Sales, although my new swimsuit arrived from the US ( Michael Kors Cornishware blue) and I bought more of those beautifully comfy on-sale jeans (2 pairs for $99) and a cropped, boxy pale blue and white stripe shirt that sits at the top of my hips ($20 and I’ve worn it twice already!). I really must stop this grief-shopping!

VERY happy though to be informed that The Red Thread (get your copy via Amazon for Kindle or in print!) has been elevated from semi-finalist to finalist in The OZMA Awards. This is affirming because it’s judged by the trade, by academics and by readers and is fuel for my almost empty creative tank.

My heart was also glad when I read that the International Court of Justice has charged and issued warrants for Netanyahu and his cronies, and for the Hamas offenders who may already be dead. The ICJ stopped short of declaring genocide. But I would say after looking back on history through the ages (which one necessarily does when one studies for a history degree and writes historical fiction), and with the added benefit of compassion, when did an eye for an eye spell humanitarian behaviour?

And so the waves susurrate, whispering sweet nothings to us as we turn back toward the cattle-yards. How lucky we are to experience such freedom, such balm. How lucky are we to be returning to running water and food of our choice, to a soft bed and the sounds of silence as we drift to sleep?

Food for thought, I think…

Song this week?

Something the essence of cool… absolutely no relationship to anything I’ve just written! Or maybe so, in honour of the coolest little Hooch-Pooch ever.