The Landlady has a way with words
I am a columnist who fears the weekly onus of having to write my column.
My column is always up to date, if not even slightly ahead of time. I do not understand columnists who write columns way in advance in order to ‘stock pile’ them. I do not have time to do this, because I’m always too busy fielding the piles of crap that life throws at me, which with the passing of time, become remoulded from curved balls of dung into acceptable things for people to read.
Traditionally, writing has been something I do when I’m so bored that I could dissect my own eyeball. This is because I grew up in such a wart of a place that you had to do something just to take your mind off it. When writing became a career some 30 years ago, it was a bit of a problem, because people expected me to dissect my own eyeball in accordance with their deadlines, when having got the hell out of ‘Wartsville’, I was too busy experiencing the very things they wanted me to write about.
Frankly, I have always forgotten most of the exciting things I should write about, because in order for me to write about them, I would have to do it immediately. Even when I was 19 and writing a regular weekly column for a London magazine I remember making myself wear a notepad and pen round my neck in order to write down the really much more brilliant stuff than I managed to come up with in the cold light of the next day.
“It was like extracting real front teeth from a WAG”
It worked for one night at least. Pens and notepads didn’t rock the ’80s look. When I had to write something as tortuous and lengthy as 2,000 words with a looming deadline it was like extracting real front teeth from a WAG.
Subsequently, and with the advent of mobile phones and the like, I have, on three occasions at least, recorded myself speaking into my phone about ‘stuff’ that would be good to write about. The first tirade was so lengthy that I remembered it anyway, once I’d gone to the trouble of saying it into my phone. The second was not retrospectively remotely funny, and I couldn’t possibly comment on the third as it’s lost forever in an irretrievable digital miasma. I should imagine it was really funny though…
The reason that I am writing this – which is a stock-piled column, just for once – is because I’m stuck in the Domestic Terminal of a provincial Turkish airport with at least two hours to wait for a transfer to where I’m going. I am the only person drinking beer and I don’t think I’ve had enough to dissect my own eyeball just yet…
