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Good day
26 June 2003
One (slightly odd) definition of the best a day can get:
I was having dinner with friends in Tynemouth last night, and the only way to enjoy it thoroughly was to get drunk and stay over, so I did that. And so was woken this morning at seven o'clock (I told you this was odd), in order that I might catch a Metro home and give Misha-cat her breakfast before going up the hill to the doctor's, to have a cortisone injection into my shoulder (did I say this was odd...?). That done, I walked down the hill into town and shopped vaguely without buying anything until I reached my new optician's, where I went in to collect my new glasses. Which are gorgeous, and look terrific, and as I feared are not quite right in the prescription (should've gone back to my old opticians for the testing, if not the frames) but aren't wrong enough to fuss over. Soon as I stop staring at everything to confirm that it's not exactly crisp, they'll be fine.
And so home, to an afternoon of Chaz at work: which means inter alia Chaz walking around the hospital and Chaz walking to the supermarket, but working all the way, mulling over this section of the novella and having ideas in quantities reminiscent of Pelion being heaped upon Ossa, if it's not the other way around (I actually typed that entirely the other way around, Pella being heaped upon Ossian, but it somehow didn't sound quite right...). And the rest of the time I was writing, and it was good to find that I can still do that; and I probably wrote a couple of thousand words today, and it's very very rare that I do that. And I love the work, I adore this book and I don't care if no one else does and if it never sees the light of publication (grey and blear), my novella hath my heart and I have its.
And then it was only six o'clock (its being amazing how much one can fit in to a day that starts at seven o'clock), so I wandered up the road to my friend Andrew's house with a bottle of wine, and found him taking delivery of all his things, that have been in storage for months. So we stood and watched (being both of us separately and medically forbidden to help; my doctor had actually said 'no moving house over the weekend, you've got to let the shoulder rest') while strong men emptied vans and entirely filled the house with stuff. Then, as there was no longer room to cook, we went to our favourite local Indian for a curry, and so home. With that unexpected but exactly definable feeling that yes, this really has been one good day.
© Chaz Brenchley 2003
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.