The snow plays havoc with all kinds of communication – yesterday the server appeared to be knocked out so that I gave up on all my good intentions to write a longish blog. Now I’m sitting at the far end of Wales (Pembrokeshire, at the edge of the Ocean) in a hotelroom and trying to get on my own website takes a long time.
Despite the snow and ice and the various cancellations I’ve been back and forth to Wales twice in this new year already and there is more on the horizon. I’m not sure whether to count myself lucky having the various projects to deal with or whether to feel sorry for myself as all this travelling is quite exhausting and makes me feel unsettled. I’m becoming too old, definitely, for all this and so when I lug (did you know that this word has got it’s own website, dedicated to luggage??) overnight bags and computer bags along from Norfolk to underground stations in London and from one platform to another on railwaystations, or alternatively, drive long distances with a tired brain whilst staring at red backlights, yes, then I feel definitely a kind or irritation. Why am I doing this? What am I doing here?
At other times I sit behind my desk, do some research, talk to people on the phone, or am in meetings with people and give them advice on how to take matters forward and then I quite enjoy myself, I congratulate myself on doing work that is actually quite challenging and interesting. A conundrum really.
Time is at the heart of all of this: the pressure, the onward pressure to achieve and to finish and to take forward, and… So I am reflecting on time and what it is and if you are interested in time and what it does to us, what it means, then Eva Hoffman’s book ‘Time’ is for you, as it is for me. It was one of my birthday presents, yes, now you understand my reflections on time and becoming older and what I am doing: I had another birthday, I am one year older (again) and nothing is going to stop this movement, to do with time, unalterable, unforgiving.
I started writing my review of Eva Hoffman’s book – it’s in a notebook, somewhere at home, away from me. This gypsy life makes me feel dislodged from my own thinking, the things I want to be able to reflect on. But this book is important, and I will come back to it.
And then, all those other books I am taking forward in time, all at the same time, congruously, and they all occupy spaces within my brain: I will come back to all of them, some time soon.
Downstairs, here in this Mariners hotel at the edge of the world, almost tipping over into the Ocean, when I have my dinner in the bar (open between 7 and 9) I am reading an e-book: yes, my birthday presents included an e-reader so I am now carrying the thing along with me on trains and to hotels. I am reading Hilary Mantel’s most wondrous book Wolf Hall about Cromwell on my Sony e-reader. And it’s actually quite a good experience! I pick it up, it never forgets what page I left off.
I will get round to all those other (physical) books that are lying, half opened, somewhere in my house, some 600 miles from here.
51stories 
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