The Sunday Salon and Write on Wednesday

I started this for Write on Wednesday, but never managed to finish it (and still haven’t…)  I was late anyway…   Too late to respond to  Becca’s challenge,   Becca asked who our favourite essayists are and what we think about reading and or writing personal essays:

So tell me, what are the areas closest to your heart?  What aspects of your life in general do you find yourself sharing in writing?  Do you enjoy reading/writing personal essays? Who are some of your favorite essayists?  

This week has been fraught with the kind of upsets that force you to take a deep breath and thenI wonder how come that life has become so inexorably hectic.  On Monday when driving to the station to another assignment in London I was hit by a van, which took the left front wing of my car as it careered out of control across my lane into the right hand verge (after having hit a coach).  That moment when it actually ripped through my car, which seemed paperthin all of a sudden keeps going through my head.  I realise how lucky I am, but also how relative some of all this rushing about is.  I could have been taken out for good.

If that had happened, I would not have finished what I want to write, my stories and it would have been as if I had not completed what I really want to do at this stage in my life.  So, time to take a deep breath and re-assess what I’m doing, when and how.   It’s been a warning.

Tomorrow there will be another week though and I am up for it.  More trips to Wales (yes, another one of those projects), a quick meeting in Nottingham and a presentation in Birmingham.  I’ll travel by train, most of it…  that gives me time to sit and ponder and maybe even write a few things here and there…

Meanwhile, I finished Toni Morrison’s A Merci, and what a wonderful book that is.  I’m not going to review it here as it takes a bit more than one or two sentences and I actually want to think about it.  So have patience – the book is so impressive and beautifully written, Toni Morrison really is a magician with words and knows how to make her characters come to life.

And today’s Salon?  First of all it was snowing outside, yes, real snow and slowly the garden became covered in white and when we went out for a walk there was slush on the roads and you knew it was not going to last.  Although I managed to read the newspapers but there was nothing much that caught my imagination: the pages are filled with doom and gloom, reposessions and heartsearching by politicians on how to get the world spending again so that we don’t move into an even worse recession than the one already predicted.  On the other hand: there is the lure of christmas and how we can be tantalised into shops and pick up bargains.  I think I stick to books and anything I can get over the internet. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent on filling in yet more accident forms and writing up statements and then trying to sort the papers for the early start tomorrow morning.  Just keep fingers crossed that trains are running and not defeated by the first layer of snow this winter!

And papers everywhere at this end of the room  ………  sigh………

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