Blog-Block

In the (almost) eleven years since Nelly's Garden began I have found, time and time again, that the only way to overcome blog-block is to simply blog, write, put words together, whatever it takes.

What causes blog-block? For me it is,

Distractions.

Worries.

Lack of confidence.

Happiness.

I'm distracted by family, by reading, by my discovery of an American sit-com called Modern Family, and by gardening. These activities keep me busy and happy.

I'm worried about a pain in the left side of my skull that comes and goes. It is likely coming from a crick in my neck, or wrongly aligned pillows. It is probably not a brain tumour.

Lack of confidence? The more I read the more I realise how limited are my own writing skills. This morning, as I drove to Antrim I listened to part of a dramatisation of A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. I started reading Murdoch when I was very young and I remember so little about it. Most of it must have gone over my head. I wonder what drew me to Murdoch? To find out I must return, starting with the first, The Nice and the Good which I read (with great enjoyment) when I was sixteen. And what am I reading now? The last novel in the Game of Thrones series. It's great fun, I'm a big fan, enough of a fan to wish that George R.R. Martin would get on with it.

Happiness. I really do believe that I am happier now than I have ever been in my entire life. And who wants to read a Happy Person blog? For instance, today was a wonderful day. Something happened that turned out far, far better than I could ever have hoped. All I did was drive my godson and his mum to a clearing day at our local college and, despite disappointing GCSE results, he got accepted on to a course that he really wanted to do. So very, very happy that I could help in the smallest way.

To finish, this August has been a great month. Not much of a summer in Northern Ireland but I had those two weeks in sunny Norfolk with my new grandson and his wonderful parents and lovely family days here at home,  and I had today and, despite a middling summer, the garlic, the broad beans, the raspberries and the purple turnips did amazingly well in Nelly's Garden. I'm looking forward to the blackberries.

Iris Murdoch Feet

Iris Murdoch was a favourite author of my youth and I was going to write something here that would show me being a right clever clogs who understood everything she ever wrote but that would be a big fat lie. A lot of her deeper meanings must have washed over me but I still enjoyed her books tremendously. Of Iris the person I knew little but how that has changed since her illness and death.

Now Elias Canetti, one of Iris Murdoch's many lovers, has had his memoirs published eleven years after his death and Iris gets her usual pasting. Nobel laureate Canetti was at least ten years older than Iris. He wasn't exactly a matinee idol, not that Iris would have cared about that, but he had a huge intellect to go with his enormous ego and maybe, for all I know, he had a big wanger too. He had a three year affair with Iris and in his memoir, written 40 years after it ended, he was most ungallant about her - out of sheer jealousy of her reputation and literary success I'd wager.

And how has he expressed this lack of gallantry? He sneered at the food she offered him, he mocked her 'ungainly' underwear and he accused her of being lumpen in the sack. Apparently she only became animated at the talking after the act stage and then she devoured everything he had to say so that she could use it in her best selling novels. But the worst thing he said, in my opinion, was when he referred to her as wearing 'grotesque sandals' on her big ugly feet and of walking like a 'repulsive bear'.

That hit me hard for I'm not certain that I don't have a bear-like walk and I also have 'ugly feet' and 'grotesque sandals'. Men can be so shallow.

Anyway it inspired me to write this song. Sing it to the music 'Bette Davis Eyes' in the husky manner of Kim Carnes. Of course it's about me.

Her hair is curly brown
Her temper's not too sweet
She'll really bring you down
She's got Iris Murdoch feet

She'll set her dogs on you
She'll put you on the street
She'll tell you nothing true
She's got Iris Murdoch feet

And she'll tease you
She'll unease you
She just hates to please you
She's atrocious
And she knows just
what it takes to leave you crushed
Feeling like you've been beat
She's got Iris Murdoch feet