Skip to main content

The quiet hours

It's near enough 11pm (scratch that, it is 11pm - the bells are chiming) on a Friday night and I'm sitting in bed, scantly dressed (it's warm in here), book in hand and suddenly I'm smiling. I'm smiling because I have missed being able to sit in this room full of books and hear the turning of pages without the background noise of drunk people or music or the smell of cigarette smoke or weed drifting into my window; without knowing I will be woken up in the early hours so I can steal these and read late. It makes me smile because I love, more than anything, to fall into a book completely.

Admittedly Tigers in Red Weather is currently strewn, along with my cuddly toy of choice at home, behind this laptop but alas I had the itch to write. I want to capture this feeling and put it into words so I can again gain the sweet taste in my mouth right now.

I feel like I should be in a YA novel, or a TV show, or am a stupidly young, naive and geeky Carrie from Sex in the City. But it feels good to just want to write and want to read and want to be all wordy. Even if it does make me sound like a pretentious so-and-so.

One of the reasons I want to do Nanowrimo this year is so I force myself to get some quiet word time. Today I spent six (yep, six) hours watching daytime TV and at the end of it I felt yuck. I feel helpless in my own body sometimes but through words, as silly as it sounds, I can run a bit. I can feel like I can actually do things. Yes, sitting and watching Gilmore Girls from 2-4pm on 5* is lovely; in fact, that show is my exception to the creativity rule because Lorelai and Rory manage to make me feel like I can actually do things, whereas endless Food Network just makes me damn hungry.

I want to write. Or book. (To book is now a book-related verb in my world, okay?) I just want my career to revolve around books somehow because, really, that's what I know. I know how to read and edit and appreciate the written word. And I love doing it. The fact that I can sit and write (well, ramble) about it for nearly ten minutes on a blogging site says it well enough (though my coherency is probably debatable).

It's just one of those moments where you stop and think 'this is nice, I want this more often' and then you feel all fuzzy. (Yes, I do realise I am going to end up alone, surrounded by guinea pigs and books.) I know it makes me sound silly, but feelings like this are meant to be silly because they're nonsensical and lovely and like a big hug or a cup of tea.

In a couple of months when I'm feeling stressed I can look back at this and think 'hey, that's how I can feel good again' and voila. And that, dear reader (ha pretentious!), is the beauty of the written word.

I'll leave you with an appropriate quote, which just so happens to be my favourite: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe someone long dead. And it's if a hand has come out, and taken yours." - Alan Bennett, from The History Boys

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Teens don't read"

Earlier today Maureen Johnson pointed out that the view of "teens don't read" in the UK is deeply entrenched (which is a word that I now love  and had never heard before). As a teenager in the UK, the stigma around reading seems to be - to me - it's "uncool", it's "geeky", there "aren't any good books out there". I think the fact that a lot of teenagers in British schools are exposed to older literature or, perhaps, not that popular literature in lessons and forced into over-analysing and spending countless hours on 'what the author meant'. A point that was raised in this twitter discussion was that people didn't want to be seen reading, or didn't want to be seen reading certain books. It's made me realise that I never   ever ever  see people reading in the older years in my school ( ever ). Perhaps the odd year 7 (12 year old) or year 8 (13 year old) will read, but - from experience - they will probably be ...

Ask FML

Ask FM infuriates me. I'm not going to take a moral high-ground and say I've never asked a question on it, because that would be lying but it still makes me angry. (Note that you can in fact dislike something that you have partaken in previously...) I can understand the appeal to both asking and answering questions - yeah, it can get some good conversation going. What I don't understand is that those two people could have that perfectly civilised conversation about all those deep and meaningful questions without the anonymity. Furthermore, why does someone immediately think "oh, I'm bored I KNOW let's post a link to ask.fm on my facebook/twitter page"? If you're bored go and do talk to people (text, phone, family, skype DO IT), read a book, make a video, write a blog post. Why ask people ask you questions? I just... I guess I don't get it. I have seen people horrendously bullied on formspring and ask fm and yet they continue to allow themselv...

Unexpected Art

As I was walking in Lincoln today down this random footpath that I've always wanted to go down but never have I came across a myriad of things. The canal ran along side the path; said canal was littered with ducks, geese, debris and - unfortunately - litter. Every so often I came across a 'Fish here with licence' type sign which more often than not had been graffitied on with a penmanship or a heart whose ink dripped down quite morbidly. Hugging the canal was a spread of jigsaw houses. You could almost see the development of house after house, developer after developer. Every now and then a person would pass me, sometimes child in hand, others bag. To my right was an industrial sprawl and here lay the most unexpected part of my journey. After venturing past factory after factory, some more decrepit than others, I arrived at this old, rusting, green-rusty-orange-brown-old factory. It was quite pungent around the area and the wall facing me as I approached had a sprawling...