Ideas like buses

I had an idea earlier on today.  I was in the middle of writing something - I was concentrating, and then this idea sneaked up and wanted my attention. I pushed it away, fobbing it off with '...in a minute...' and it was so offended that it disappeared and hasn't been back.

I knew I should have written it down. I should have made a mental (or physical) note of what I was doing, suspended that thought process for a moment or two and scribbled down the idea before resuming task one.

Silly me.

Now I'm left with a nagging sense that it was a Great Idea. One of the best. And now it's gone.

Two ideas came at the same time, you see, and I was flummoxed. Like waiting for ages and ages at a bus stop (in the rain) and then two buses come at once. As I clamber on the first, fumbling for my bus pass, the second sails on by. I will never know what it might have been like to ride on that bus; who I might have met, what I might have seen - because I got on the first one.

That's what happened to me this morning.

Can't think why I didn't make a note. I am such a note-writer that my desk, every handbag I own, the kitchen counter and bedside drawer all house multiple notebooks. I have scraps of paper all over the place. I keep a notepad by my bed and several nights a week I attempt to capture something that comes to me in the hours of darkness; a dream, an idea, a snatch of dialogue, or some vague and random thought that I don't want to let go of.

This Notebook By The Bed technique has been met with variable degrees of success. I have tried not putting the light on, to avoid waking the husband, or indeed to avoid waking myself up too much, but this is not to be advised. You can very easily find that you've written a paragraph, but with each line overlaying the first and rendering them unintelligible. Or the first three words are on the notepad, the rest on the bedside table. Or, as a friend of mine shared, it turned out that the pen had no ink and you're left trying to decipher the indentations.

Very often my nocturnal scrawling are illegible come the clear light of day; whatever it was that was burning in my brain did not translate well to my hand. Of the messages I could read, however, I have captured some remarkable insights in my night time notebook. Consider the possibilities of the following:

'The lard in the bushes is too eggy. But THIS WILL BE ALRIGHT. It will be ALRIGHT.'

or:

'Try putting ALL of them in.' 

Alternatively, this could be a fascinating story prompt:

'He asks her, and she just stares at him. It was too late.'

No idea who he is, or who she is, or what he asked her, but the drama of those two sentences. Breaks your heart, doesn't it?

For sheer frustration value, I can't beat the following:

'THIS IS IT! THIS IS DEFINITELY IT.'

What?! What?! I really need to know..... Or then there's the terror of waking to find this written large on the notepad next to you:

"Don't do it."

On a lighter note, my husband once told me that I stirred as he came to bed after watching a late film. Without waking completely, I grasped his hand and said with some urgency:

'The blue ones. You've got to watch the blue ones.'

He wrote that one down, after he'd finished laughing.

Then there are the myriad of notes that I can't read. Excerpts include (and this is just what they look like - could be accurate, knowing my propensity to scrawl things that make no sense):

'Lemons. All of them used to be fussy lemons but now they're aggressive, unpleasant.' 

'Get your act together.'

Yes indeed.

My absolute favourite, however, is the time I awoke and reached for the notepad, and wrote the following:

'No worries.'

I even underlined it, and added a smiley face. It was clearly discernible as a smiley face, even though the eyes were slightly offset in a cubist kind of way.

'No worries. :-)' 

I like to think that one was from God.

Badger on the roof

Here's a sneak preview, and a word of explanation. Believe it or not, this is based on a true story. 


Julia lay in bed holding her breath. She didn't know what had woken her so abruptly, but something had, and she lay with her head held stiffly just off the too-soft pillows, straining to hear any sound.

Nothing.

Slowly she blew out a breath and tried to relax but the earlier rush of adrenalin had made her heart pound in her ears.

It was very dark, and very quiet. Too dark, and too quiet. Out here in the countryside there were no streetlights, no passing headlights, no light pollution of any kind, and so when it went dark, it really did. Sometimes moonlight sneaked through the thin yellow cotton curtains, but not tonight.

The first time Julia knelt on her bed and looked out at the beautiful world of blues and silver trees and hills on a moonlit night she had been enchanted and amazed at how bright the moonlight was; the shadows it cast. Another night, one without a moon, she had picked her way through the soft blackness to the clearing at the side of the house and sat wrapped in a blanket gazing up at the sky, enthralled by the billions and billions of stars. She had shaken her head in amazement; surely she had been under the same sky in London, but she had never seen it before.

There were stars and planets and galaxies and ... what else? What else was up there? Constellations and meteors and satellites and things. She remembered that some of the constellations were named after gods and stories in ancient mythology: Zeus and Cassiopeia and Andromeda and so on, but she had no idea which they were. Which was Orion? One with a belt, somewhere. And one shaped like a 'W', was that the Big Dipper, or a saucepan?  Julia had shaken her head with irritation at her lack of knowledge and knew that she'd have to find some books on the subject.

Tonight she wasn't thinking about the stars. She was wondering what on earth that noise was.

A thud, and then a scrabbling noise. She lay, tense and immobile, eyes wide open as if to gather any stray photons of light that might be of some use. The bedside lamp was no good to her as she hadn't yet replaced the bulb, and the main light switch was by the door. Julia felt like a small girl, unwilling to get out of bed in case something grabbed her ankles. She gripped the covers in both hands beneath her chin.

Julia had never minded the sounds of the city around her. She was used to car engines, gear changes on the hill behind the house, distant sirens and the all-life-is-here noises of people on their way home from a night out. Even the most peaceful day in the garden in London had a soundtrack of traffic, aeroplanes, voices, telephones, and she had wrongly anticipated quietness in the country. She was quickly learning that the countryside had it's own soundtrack. Birdsong, squawking pheasants, mooing cows, the whisper of stirring leaves, drumming of rain on the roof or the whistling of wind in the chimney. And, in the small hours, the downright unnerving and unidentifiable.

Scrabble, scrabble.

It was some sort of animal. She relaxed a little at the conclusion that it wasn't an escaped convict or someone trying to break into the cottage, but only a little. She had locked up securely and checked the doors and windows four times.

Thud, scrabble, scrabble. Whatever it was, it was on the roof. The noises were closer now, almost directly overhead. What on earth was climbing on the roof in the middle of the night?  What creatures were out there?

Julia's imagination spun out of control. Squirrels? Were they nocturnal? Surely they wouldn't be heavy enough to thud. Cats? The only cat she had seen was the stripy ginger one that bounded recklessly across the lane in front of her car the other day. Surely a cat would be quieter than 'thud, scrabble'? Cats were supposed to be stealthy. Rats? Julia shuddered in horror at the idea and pulled the covers closer to her face. She would buy traps the very next day. Could you do things like that out here? Was it allowed? What if she caught some innocent little creature that had a right to be there? Do rats have a right to be out here in the countryside?

Not on my roof, she decided.

Birds? She'd heard birds up there before with their tck tck claws. No thud, not even if it was a big, fat owl. What else was out there? What lived in the woods and came out at night?  Hedgehogs? Not on the roof. Voles? Mice? Too small and light.

Badgers?

How big were badgers? Julia had only ever seen pictures and it was hard to gauge how big they were in real life. Like a small dog?  She'd heard that they had big teeth, badgers. Quite aggressive. Could badgers climb? Could one have jumped from the hillside onto the low gable of the house and scrabbled across until it was over the bedroom? Or from a tree?

Can badgers jump?

Even as she lay there, wild thoughts running through her mind, Julia had a faint inkling of the absurdity of the conversation she was having with herself.

Was there a badger on the roof?

Nocturnal scufflings

I'm feeling sleepy today.

Lots of things going on in life at the moment; my eldest daughter, a talented swimmer, has been moved up to the next squad at the swimming club and has started training a couple of days a week at 5.30am. Five-thirty-in-the-morning, in other words, and so requires her chariot to be available at about five fifteen and her alarm clock, breakfast-provider, chauffeur and cheerleader to be ready for duty at 5am. This has had knock-on effects on the rest of my life.

Sleepiness. I think this may be the year where I am forced to learn how to push on despite wanting my bed with a longing previously unknown to mankind.

So, here I am taptaptapping with strong coffee.

There's another reason that sleep is at a premium at the moment, and it's rather wonderful. I'm finding that as I settle down to sleep at night, my brain kicks in. While this has never been a positive before, I'm finding that as I let go of rational thought, so to speak, ideas are occurring to me. Little scenes, snatches of dialogue, quirky things to weave into my plot; they're coming to me in the drowsing stages of sleep.

I'm not sure how keen my husband is on this new development, as I am given to sudden lunges for the bedside lamp and then a series of scufflings and rustlings as I find the page in my bedside notebook and scramble for a pen that works (I once wrote down a long and involved dream that somehow seemed vitally important only to find in the morning that the pen I used had no ink in it). No sooner do I empty my brain onto paper and switch out the light than it happens all over again.

So this routine can happen several times in a night until some sleep hormone takes over and washes like a tide over the creative centre in my drowsy brain, sweeping all ideas before it.

This sometimes works in reverse, as well. This is not so good.

The other night I woke up abruptly in the small hours suddenly alarmed that there was a large and ominous plot hole in my book and unless I could find a way to fill it and smooth it over the whole premise of the novel was rendered useless. With this revelation came a rush of adrenalin which meant it was a good half an hour before I started to feel sleepy again, and so for that time I lay there in the wreckage of my embryonic novel trying to work out how to plug the gap.

When I woke up in the morning I realised it was quite straightforward, and a word of explanation early in the story meant it was all alright.

Some night-time moments of inspiration are to be heeded and others are to be disregarded. Unfortunately there's no way to tell which is which until morning comes.