Gray Days and Writings

It doesn't take much to convince me that curling up with a book is going to be far more rewarding than whatever else I had planned (Saturday's cleaning; Sunday's trudging the dog through the rain), and as the child was equally happy to do the same (with a copy of Coraline in her case) whilst the husband wheezed and sneezed through his cold, I basically sat cross-legged on the bed for a large part of the weekend until I'd finished this book:

"I have many of the instincts, though none of the grace, of a porpoise, I believe - I saw a kindred spirit, a recumbent porpoise, toes turned up, arms stretched out, head cushioned on the water. It was the wife of the man with Alzheimer's, the Alzheimer widow, as I've come to think of her, not fussing and worrying and scowling, but taking her ease in the ocean, lolling to the manner born..."

"... found myself swimming away, heading out to sea as fast as I could until I was out of my depth, and then swam a bit further, and a bit further, the sea got colder, my body weaker, until I couldn't swim anymore, the waves seemed to be rolling inside my head, I started to shake, pawing feebly at the water as I slipped under it, and the next thing I was in his arms."

"I've just raked my pen across my yellow page, and jabbed it down and down and ripped it across. An attempt to write a primal scream. After all, I'm a writer and should be able to express everything, but here, once again, I've failed - who, on looking at these marks would think they represented a primal scream without my having to say so - the need to do something savage was because I'd been sitting with my head in my hands, running my fingers through my hair, and thinking how I really couldn't put down another word, I really couldn't..."

"...what really incensed me was - is - that 'to be fair' has now become a sort of tic with sports commentators, every other sentence, sometimes two in a row, beginning with 'to be fair' - 'to be fair on the lad', which is how one of them began a sentence on Trevor Sinclair, 'to be fair on the lad, he did play very badly', that's what he actually said."

I loved it for the ice-cold honesty that made my eyes widen; the rambling streams of thought that appeared to spill straight from his head to the page; and the unconscious pathos (which I suspect he would have hated) of his almost-casually announced illness. The flashes of searingly bad-tempered comedy made me laugh out loud. Now I have to spend the autumn tracking down everything else he's written, and hoping for more gray days spent in his company.