The Sudden Fear of Not Being Interesting.

I always say to my writers: write as if you are galloping over an open prairie. I tell them to imagine the wind in their hair and no boundaries except the horizon. Which of course keeps - gloriously - moving.

And then, suddenly, the Not Good Enough Gremlins and the Perfection Demons barge in, sit down on my sofa, and tell me that I have to write an interesting postcard. Apparently, they’ve had a meeting and decided that I am not interesting enough. It’s official. Someone has sent a memo.

There’s something really funny about these internal voices. There is absolutely no overriding feeling in me that I am becoming dull in my old age. (I am capable of being boring and I do sometimes hear myself, banging on, and then I interrupt my own conversation, laugh at the person I’m talking to, and say, ‘Have you lost the will to live yet?’. I then ask them a question and let them talk and generally stop being a bore.

So, it’s not as if I’m dragging round some terrible permanent fear of Not Being Interesting, even though I do like to be on my guard against becoming a crasher. And yet, the voices suddenly pitch up. They don’t stay for long. Just long enough for me to think that I really do have ridiculous amounts of work and I probably don’t have much of a postcard for you, so I’ll do it tomorrow. (Because I don’t have anything interesting enough to say.)

I gave my Place of Peace group a marvellous new invention last night. It’s called The Calibration Protocol. (For some reason I am currently obsessed with turning everything into protocols, so half of my Zooms sound like a Robert Ludlum novel.) It was inspired by one of my clients. We were talking about stories vs reality and I suggested that it doesn’t have to be one end of the spectrum or the other - a totally made-up, non-helpful story in your head, probably related to an old wound or a childhood survival mechanism, versus stone-cold reality. There can be tiny calibrations along the way, and it may be that we have to move that calibration dial a little to the left on one day and a little to the right on another.

I love having new ideas like this. I’m going to take this one away and hone it and polish it. It makes me think of safecrackers in old movies with the stethoscope and the ear against the door. Just one click more to the right and - - - Open Sesame!

The You Are Not Interesting Enough voices have been popping in from time to time and I think I may be able to calibrate them out of existence. Just a few clicks to the right and we’ll be back in writing-over-the-open plain territory.

I do love interesting things. I want to write books and books full of interesting things. I think people did once do this. Were those books called Commonplace Books? Full of fascinating facts like Lake Baikal being the deepest lake in the world. It’s in Siberia and it’s twenty-five million years old. (This is thirty million years younger than the red mare. Or rather, her species. But she is her species to me, so there’s that. But it’s still quite old. Very much older than Homo sapiens, that’s for sure.)

Here’s an interesting thing for you. I saw a social media person the other day saying that life in Scotland isn’t all joy and delight. ‘It can be boring,’ she said. I expect it can be boring if you’ve got a relentless job in a dim office with no kindred spirits and you’ve got to commute in and out of some faceless conurbation and your marriage is slowly falling apart so that you sit in silence each night at the dinner table, but this person was young and lives on a ravishing island and appears to make all her money from the internet. The great-aunt in me thought: how can you be bored?

I live in the countryside and I don’t have a soul-sapping commute and I work from home and I don’t go out, so you’d think I might have hours and hours in the day to be bored in. Wild city people who love going to the Venice Film Festival and are still mourning the burning down of the Chiltern Firehouse and who go to dinner with that famous bad-boy chef would think my life was catastrophically dull.

But I don’t have enough time in the day for all the fascinations my mind alights on.

First of all, because I am apparently a secret Victorian, I am always reading An Improving Book. Then I’ve got to listen to several illuminating podcasts, so I can learn new things. (I do this whilst I am picking up the mares’ dung. The glamour of my life.) Then I have to continue my mission to read the entire works of Shakespeare by Christmas. (Don’t ask me why.)

Then I have to do all my work, which is half writing, for clients and groups, some free, some paid, and half working with people on the Zoom. Then I have to write a novel, because I set my writing group a challenge to write a book in ninety days and I won’t ask any of my writers to do something I won’t do myself, so I decided that the novel which has been tapping on my shoulder for three years was going to - finally - come dancing out into the world. So I have to spend an awful lot of time, whenever I can find a stray fifteen minutes, thinking about the characters and seeing London in 1959 and understanding what the themes are. (Light is one. Isn’t that lovely? I have a novel whose theme is light. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.)

Then I have to read some poetry and some inspiring novels to remind me what the English language can do. (Currently: Mrs Dalloway and some Mary Oliver. I may move on to The Wasteland, which I try to read once a year.)

That’s before walking the dogs and looking at the trees and feeling grateful to the trees and gossiping with my sister and cooking soup and generally keeping the house from falling down. (Not always an easy task.)

The great-aunt in me wants to tell the young internet person that she appears to have acres of time on her hands and she could read the entire oeuvre of Henry James or teach herself French or write a commonplace book full of fascinating facts. (I suspect that these young ones make quite a lot of money from their social media, and it only takes them a few hours a day, so no wonder they feel bored. Perhaps I should market myself as an Anti-Boredom Guru. I can teach them to delight their brilliant minds, so they will never be bored again.)

And that’s me, as we say in Scotland. Meaning: I am finished.

I squint my eyes a little at the screen. Was there anything interesting there at all? Who can tell? I’m very glad at least that the sun is shining through my Venetian blinds and I have fingers to type and a mind to think. And you, my Dear Reader, with your goodness and your kindness. I am glad to have you. I think, after all, that we will be all right.