slow return ·
27 November 07

It’s hard to know how to start writing again. I haven’t written since July which is nearly five months previously. It’s not that I lacked anything to write, I just felt I’d done enough writing to last me a while. Enough at least to warrant not writing for nearly five months.

I’ve also had difficulty in reading, watching and listening. I feel obligated to write about what I’ve read, heard or watched, and this has stopped me from being able to write.

I don’t know where this compulsion to write comes from. Perhaps I was ignored as a child when reading. I do have memories of reading books in class, volunteering because no one else would. To be honest I didn’t get into reading real books until I was about seven-years old. I started off reading comics, or books that were actually comics but printed like books. I’m not sure how else to describe them, but they would have large hard covers, but inside would be pages filled with comics. I never read with my mother, it wasn’t a family thing. I read on my own, and therefore didn’t have much guidance in what to read.

I stopped reading comics when my aunt told me that I should be reading proper books. She asked me if I would read a book for her, and I took out these hard cover comics. She looked at me in confusion and then asked whether I had any real books, because I won’t learn anything from reading comics. I didn’t have any “real” books to read at the time.

That comment stuck with me for the rest of my life, even to this day. It may have meant something in passing, a piece of advice that really wasn’t meant to be an attitude shifting one, but it did change me and my whole approach to books. The first time I read a real book, was when I won one in a radio competition via the county’s radio station. The competition was rigged and set up for me to win, because my mother knew a presenter of the radio station.

When I won, it was delight and also bewilderment. I didn’t think that winning in that manner was fair, or even possible. It worked though. I won a money holder thing where you could stick 20 pence pieces in a five slot plastic casing. I also won a book. It was The Hardy Boys, Case Files 1. I read it, and I enjoyed it. It was exciting, and new for me to imagine the events taking place in the story. It was full of misery, suspense and action. I got involved with the characters, and followed the antics of the brothers, and their friends, with innocent curiosity which grew and grew.

But now, I can’t even read a book. I feel daunted at my collection of books filling black bin liners, and various other boxes. I don’t know how I can get back in to reading. The last book was a novella, and I couldn’t even finish it. I was that repelled by the idea of writing about it that I didn’t finish it. My attention span has deteriorated drastically, and therefore making the process of reading that much more difficult. The same is true of listening to new music, and watching movies. I can watch television but the only thing I have in the background is Sky News.

Well, I hope I can get back into the swing of things are feel capable and enthusiastic about writing again. It’s a difficult process for me, having had such a break, it’s also been detrimental for me, I think, in that not writing has kept a lot of emotions inside and thus fed into the voice. With the voice taking control, it makes it all the more difficult to write anything at all.

With that, I’ll make this my first entry, and I bid you goodnight.