The Introvert’s Dream.

It is the second May bank holiday and I am ruthlessly taking it off. I lie in bed with the sun streaming through the blinds and the sounds of birdsong and rattling tractors coming in from the open window, and I think: what shall I do?

The glorious answer comes. The introvert’s dream answer.

Nothing.

I am going to have a whole day of nothing. No obligations, no To Do list, no stern voice in my head. I shall laze and lounge and dream and potter and pootle and wonder and wander and stand very, very still.

Nothing isn’t of course quite true. I shall cook food and eat it and I shall walk the dogs and I shall look at the trees and I shall pick up dung and generally care for the mares. I will certainly read a book. I might secretly write a book. (There has been a novel living in me for the last two years, and I say I don’t have enough dreamtime to write it, because of my three day jobs, but it has been coming to me insistently and I am starting to think that the secret would be to make it very, very short. I love the idea of a slender novel, so that I absolutely would have enough time to dream it into existence. It starts with light, and Canvey Island, and a bus, and that all came to me as if someone had sent it in the post, and how can I say not to it?)

I love writing when I don’t have to do writing. It’s possibly my purest pleasure in the world, apart from sitting in the magic field with half-ton flight animals and murmuring to them and smelling their sweet earth-leather-biscuit scent.

The tractor has gone and there is instead the swishing noise of wind.

I will get up and move very slowly, that’s the main thing. The nothing shall spread out under my feet like a Turkish carpet. I shall look at the telephone when it rings and not answer it. There shall be acres of silence.

I can’t even quite believe the luxury of that.