You are what you do

When I read the Sunday papers, I often think about what it means to be someone who chimes out copy for a living. To be someone who takes their children’s exam season, and turns it into a few hundred words of light-hearted, relatable and yet meaningful commentary on everyone’s lives.

He manages to squeeze in some hilarious Mumsnet craziness in amongst the more significant points about the nature of exams and skills and measures of success.

I wander around all day thinking up interesting things to write, but I don’t write them. The moment passes, I become absorbed in some pointless stuff happening in the world on my phone. Not sure what I’m going to do about the destruction of knowledge or even self-interest. Maybe the irrelevance of truth makes me bored of writing.

I wanted to write about the weirdness of creativity, but I am really distracted by the story Richard has started in the car with the kids, which started with him driving past an ad for Victoria Plumbing,and now theres a ransom sort happening about little victoria who lives in Weston super mare and married Bananaman when she is 17, and now I just want to curl up and do maths questions.

Creativity is in reality about complete accuracy and discipline. There is always Hemingway as the counterexample, but I bet he didn’t actually write much when he was drunk. He probably wrote when he was hungover, wrote really fast and then got drunk again. Only one other novel is written like that, probably. Alone in Berlin (jeder stirbt für sich allein) was written in some similar flash of inspiration, and never replicated in any other novel written by Hans Fallada. He was writing of the trauma of the war years, covered in only the thinnest layer of fiction. It reads as if all of it happened to him or to people he knew, because it probably did. But as the last witnesses of that time are nearly all dead, we forget and pretend it couldn’t really have been like that. A population couldn’t be enthralled by a cruel, racist authoritarian into following policies which are actively bad for them, their children and grandchildren. But they are, and they will only continue, helped in their delusion by useful idiots misguidedly supporting various terrorists.

Being good at playing an instrument is a slow process of technical work, until such time as the technicalities are good enough to allow maybe a few moments of what feels like creativity, and then I’m out of time again.

That’s it really. It’s over 90% failure, with occasional moments of joy. Most people’s lives. I’m not sure if it’s obvious that I’m hopelessly, irredeemably tired and feel like it’s all completely futile. My eyes hurt and my skin itches.