A wild slim alien

Tag Archives: Writing about writing again


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Imagining lemons

Imagine that I’m a recovering alcoholic.  Imagine that I have issues and torments, the kind that need a troubled cure for a troubled mind.  Imagine that I’ve gathered with seven other self-flagellating substance misusers to try and effect some small changes in my life which may just set me on the road to recovery.  This is not so much therapy as self-help, with serious doses of woe and misfortune from all corners and sides.  It’s about stepping out of the mindset which allows us down and outs to proceed on autopilot, so that we can repurpose our rote behaviours away from what we don’t want, and towards what we do.  To press pause, before we press play again.

At least, that’s the theory.

Having relaxed in our seats and closed our eyes, we are asked by a gentle guiding soul to imagine a lemon on a pure white plate.  As we are mentally picking up the lemon and putting it to our respective noses, the silence – which we have been made aware is not in fact silence simply by having it drawn to our attention (the whirr of fans, talking from the next meeting room along, the cries of seagulls) – is broken by the entry of a grey-haired man with a similarly-coloured moustache and tattoos on his muscular forearms; an apparently random entity.  We open our eyes, surprised, but our guiding soul decides to ignore him and proceed with the visualisation, trying to maintain the spell, to keep us in the palm of her hand, and the lemon on the plate from vanishing.  So, in the stranger’s presence, we are asked to take a knife and cut our lemons in half, observing how the fruit feels, its colour, the smell as the serrated edge bites through its skin.  ‘Cut a slice from the lemon, and eat it.’  I eat mine with the rind on, pips’n’all, wincing at the sourness in front of Miles Davis, to see if the sight of lemon being eaten renders him incapable of playing, as the urban myth suggests is true of trumpeters, and so that a lemon tree begins to grow inside of me, the fruits emerging in a matter of minutes in place of fingers and toes and ears and nose and – no, I’ll stop my imagination and yours short of there.  The guiding soul has said that all this might seem surreal or weird to us, but to me, it’s what I do, imagining lemons, or rather, what is not, what is elsewhere, what might be, to the extent that sometimes I find it hard to be present in the actual moment, which this visualisation of the non-actual is confusingly proceeding from.

Having eaten some lemon, we come back into the room and open our eyes again.  The interloper is still there and I ask him which meeting he’s expecting this to be.  ‘School governors?’ he says, and we tell him, no, and he leaves, having witnessed something which must have seemed infinitely more surreal and weird out of context than in.

We are asked to volunteer an aspect of our behaviour that we would like to change.  When it comes to my turn, I look around the room, as if to make doubly sure that none of the people with whom I work directly are there to hear what I’m about to say, and then talk about burning the candle at both ends, and how my – ahem – ‘creative pursuits’ (a phrase which occasions some fnarr fnarring, so that I’m obliged to say ‘oi, stop it!’) keep me up till all hours and minimise the amount of time I have in which to sleep, until inevitably I end up feeling exhausted, falling into a daily afternoon slump that inevitably affects my work.  The guiding soul teases out how I feel about this.  I am conflicted.  I wish there were twice as many hours in a day, but there aren’t, and if I want to keep imagining lemons while also attending a place of gainful employment at which I am on occasion invited to imagine a lemon, then my behaviour has to change.

To finish, and without sharing, we commit to a task; mine has to be to go to bed earlier.  I already know this – had in fact resolved upon that course of action the previous day – but sharing something of myself with people to whom I rarely if ever open up gives my commitment an edge.  And last night, I did indeed go to bed early, or at least, earlier.  One harvested lemon doesn’t make a summer, and I can’t say that I feel entirely refreshed on the back of it, but I believe that will come, in time.


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Spring rain

We’re having the shower room done. For reasons too enervating to detail, it’s taking forever, and I’ve been forced to wallow in baths while the work is completed. I don’t especially like baths. They belong to childhood, to a freezing cold house with no shower. Shivering, I would scorch my feet in too-hot water upon testing it; after long immersion, my skin emerged as wrinkled as a prune. These days when I’m scurrying to get to work, baths take too long. Most of all, I don’t write well in them. They’re too soporific; don’t clear my head and induce a trance-like state as showering does. As I wash myself from tip to toe, ideas magically descend; ‘coming down like love, falling at my feet, just like spring rain.’ (Yes, I often sing too. Be glad you can’t hear.) Showers open my writing mind, allowing me to muse poetical and make connections from which a tumble of words will follow, once I sit down naked to rat-a-tat-tat them into the laptop.

So I’d been missing showering, until a holiday last week allowed me to write under water again, and dream this up. Of course ideas and sentences do come to me at other times in other ways and places, but running aside, none is more likely to birth new linguistic lifeforms than ten minutes in the shower.

The old shower at home had an abrasive power. With the pump that drove it decommissioned (health and safety), I’d been worrying that the new one might not do the trick. The holiday reminded me that such anxiety must seem mere minutiae to anyone who isn’t a writer. It’s a given that the new will work just as well as the old, and further sets of 300 words will begin life in the shower.