Beer. An incomplete A-Z

From ale to zymurgy, I've always wanted to put together an incomplete and under-researched A-Z of beer. So I'm going to. Just not necessarily in alphabetical order.

Mosler. GT Seasons

I once ran a fan site about this big, fat, grunty, hand-crafted-in-Cambridge GT racer. So I thought I'd keep tabs on the marque once more.

Photos: Snap

Sometimes there are times that So Need A Photo. I'm refining my photo skills and looking for that SNAP moment.

Food: a smorgasbord

If I'm not eating it, I'm thinking about it. Here's a rattle-bag of recipes, market visits, challenges and general gastronomic malarkey

Music: prattle and drum

I'm a drummer without a kit and a ukulele player with no sense of pitch. But I'm working on it. Painting a picture on silence. One beat / note at a time

Tuesday 22 May 2012

The Right Not To Write

I used to be bought the Letts Schoolboy Diary every year as a Christmas stocking filer. January's became crammed with spidery text telling of snowball massacres, worm executions, tries almost scored and faint glimpses of teachers' cleavage.

By mid-February a pattern emerged: "Got up. Went to school. Came home. Had tea".

At an early age, I'd discovered the tyranny of a diary's expectation. How they mocked me with blank days passed by. "You want to be a writer?", they sneered. "You can't even find fifty words for a diary entry. Pah!".

One year, I asked for a voucher instead of the Letts. I bought a chunky A5 lined notebook. No dates, no boxes into which I'd have to shoehorn teenage angst or leave as a tribute to ennui.

My book. My rules.

Rule 1: The right not to write.

I stopped keeping a diary after my polytechnic years. I had nothing to say to myself.

Nowadays, I blog. I used to blog about whisky.  I still blog about beer. And occasionally I blog here. Not often. There's ideas... the menu bar suggests I'm writing about a real ragbag of stuff.

But, I'm not.

Why? Why go to the trouble of setting up a blog and hardly posting?

It's because I love choosing not to write.

Waking up in the morning - today it's blue sky and slight breeze all the way - I look over the shortening shadows on the lawn as blackbirds pretend to hunt worms and I rarely think to myself: I really want to fire up the laptop and spend the next thirty minutes in front of a keyboard. Because eight hours spent in front of one for my day-job really isn't long enough.

I could be writing about paradiddles or filters, fast cars or slow cooking.

Instead, as a writer, I'm revelling in something luxurious and self-indulgent.

The right not to write.


Feel free to point out that I have, of course, just spent half an hour in front of a laptop writing this. And, yes, I've sort of been here before

By Unknown with 1 comment