Operation Joybells

By Joybells

R and R. No, not an acronym for a college course in how to speak with a West-Country accent, but Rest and Recuperation, which I’ve had quite a lot of over the past month. At first I thought, ‘fantastic’, I’ll be able to type away all day satisfying my inner need to spill every intimate detail of my life threaded with a comedic vein of mild self-deprecation. But hey, - I have Face Book for that! What quickly became obvious was the discovery that every time I attempted to write, I’d get distracted within a few sentences.

There was a piece on Jimmy Saville which I gave up half way through pondering whether Edward the Second’s torturer would have Probed Jim with as much penetrative zeal as the British press, but short of digging him up and throwing a little necrophilia into the mix, no amount of new revelations will produce ‘satisfactory’ results. The man is dead!

Then I started writing about Princess Kate’s holiday snaps. While mountains and molehills spring to mind do we really care? How many soldiers were killed in Afghanistan that same week?

I dabbled with a piece about Michael ‘Gove’ puppet; a politician scrambling education with the mind-set of a celebrity chef in the hope that no one will realise it’s the same old Tory driven drivel to spend a lot of money on bureaucratic paper shuffling. Unfortunately his resemblance to a newt sent reptilian comparisons, like cold blooded and fork tongued tumbling through my thoughts which totally disturbed my creative juices.

Then I thought about a piece on how technology influences evolution. For instance how typing on I-phones and androids might result in our fingers becoming tapered so that we actually hit the correct letters and don’t miss any out. From my work in finance I know that missing the ‘o’ out of ‘account’ can cause a lot of offence.

Feeling useless I began making paper chains and listening to The Archers on Radio 4.

What was happening to me? The first thing I blamed was the anaesthetic. It’s like stepping into the Tardis and stepping out one second later to discover 3 hours have passed. One minute you’re prostrate with a sheet hiding your embarrassment and chatting to a stranger about intimate parts of your body, the next someone’s softly calling your name and giving you the eye to eye from two inches away! We all know that real sleep bumps along in a mad dash car chase that crashes into a road block where someone chases you with a Kalashnikov and you suddenly realise you’re not wearing knickers.

When it came down to it though I accepted it was writers block. But rather than feeling more buggered than Pulp Fiction’s Mr Wallace I decided to embrace its fogginess. I spent time with Tarentino, got under the covers with the Cohen brothers and ate chocolate and drank wine with the Wachowski’s. I came to some enlightening conclusions. Morpheus in The Matrix intonated like Captain James Kirk, Scorcese’s film ‘The Departed’ was an American remake of the sub titled Chinese ‘Infernal Affairs’ – which is just as good as it’s US counterpart, and George Clooney is horny whether he’s an escaped convict (Oh Brother Where Art Thou), a murdering bank robber (From Dusk Till Dawn), or a confused middle aged father, (The Descendants) – which I suppose I knew already.

I’ve cycled to Cardiff and half way back and read ‘Here Comes Everybody – The Story of the Pogues’ at the same time! That’s what I call multi-tasking. OK it might be an exercise bike, but I still had to peddle.

In the end I decided to write about writers block and notice now that I’ve nearly finished the article. So, whilst I may never find out if Eddie Grundy’s cows get over foot rot or if the residents of Ambridge survive the dodgy sausages from the farm shop at least I’ve made enough paper chains to decorate the house for several Christmas’s to come.