words in the morning

I’ve been up early, but to write instead of run. I read somewhere about a pulp writer who didn’t allow himself his first pee in the morning until he’d written a thousand words. That’s dedication my bladder won’t allow, I’m afraid. I fear it may lead to a somewhat strained and impatient prose style, as well as the odd mess.

It’s just me and the cat at that hour. The house is quiet but for the cat’s impatience. Not content with my lap, he’ll leap to my desk and cross in front of my laptop as I try to type. I throw him aside a couple of times and eventually he gets the message.

The words come though, some mornings faster than others. I don't know where they come from. My legs don't even work yet, and my fingers couldn't tie a shoe, but they find their keys and letters and words and phrases and sentences appear. Hemingway said to write drunk and edit sober. I'm having a go at writing while still asleep.

My editors are going to love it. 

Or kill me.

 

Buy My Book. Please. 

morning tumble

I find it easier to get out of bed at 530 than at 715. I'm not sure why, but at 530 there's no flailing for the snooze button and crawling back under the duvet, curling back into the bit still warm. I tumble out and rub my eyes. The cat looks at me funny, if he's there. Sometimes he's gone for an early breakfast, and is returning up the stairs, surprised to find me stumbling down in the other direction. My legs take awhile to work in the mornings, due to a condition called 'getting older' and getting down the stairs is precarious to say the least. At 715, I know I can get away with a minute here or there. An extra 9 in bed can be made up by skipping a shave or espresso. In fact, my espresso machine is on the fritz at the moment. Verging on calamity, that.

At 530, though, there isn't time to mess about. If I've set my alarm for so ungodly an hour, it's because I have something to do. Make wine; catch a plane; make a train. Something that just won't wait is afoot, and somewhere along my staggered road to being a grown-up, I've managed a degree of diligence in such things. I don't like it. I like waking up at 930.

930 is early enough that you can have breakfast without it reducing the appetite for lunch, while still giving you the satisfaction of not waking up at 530, 630, 730 or 830.

In any case, I made my train with ten minutes to spare. The tube was quiet, and the train nearly empty. Heading north as the bleak turns to dreich. It's a random trip, this. I'm not sure what on earth I'm doing, but hopefully I'll work it out by the time I head back tomorrow.

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too dark

It's too dark in the mornings. I should be expecting this by now; it's a yearly thing, after all. But the sound of my alarm in the dark feels more like an interruption to sleep than a call to start the day. I get up regardless. Everyone's getting up in the dark, I guess, my own grumbles about it make a pretty shallow dent in the universe, if any. 

And so the cat hears I'm awake and headbutts me to make sure I stay that way, and that while I'm that way, I feed him as soon as possible. 

I check the baseball scores, lamenting the lack of Red Sox in autumn ball, and try to get the balance right for the caffeine in my life.

early mornings and an expectant gaze

The cat knows when I'm waking up before I do. I think my breathing changes, because he pads right up to my nose, without touching it, and waits there until my eyes open. And so my return to consciousness is greeted and punctuated by his expectant gaze. If I just close my eyes to drift off again, he'll prod the pillow in front of my face with his paw and utter a small meow, weighted with impatience. 

If my strategy works, and it's a big if, he'll bugger off, usually climbing to the top of my closet to cover whatever jumper that isn't yet entirely encased in cat hair with his fur. Most mornings, though, it works. It works because he knows I'm waking up anyway. So up I get, hobbling on my morning legs to check his food. If there's more than a bite left in the bowl, I swear at him and go back to my room, trying not to wake my flatmate. 

Not many mornings have been warm enough to crack the window open. When it is warm enough and the window is opened, the sounds of the lobsterman, the seagulls and the harbour drift through my room. The cacophony acts as audio caffeine. I'll slump into the chair at my desk and fiddle with my glasses, wondering whether they're dirty or if my eyes just can't quite focus yet. 

It's usually around then, after my eyes focus, that I check the clock and realise it's before 6. And so I swear at the cat again and go back to sleep. 

strange swans

A strange swan showed up in the harbour uninvited this morning. I assume he was male. Immediately he started antagonising our resident swan couple, first chasing away the female and then charging after the male. He never flew. He just squatted his neck, tucking his beak into its tight curve, and motored after the resident male. Never have I seen such a wake follow a swan, and I've seen a fair few swans in my time. The newcomer pursued relentlessly, caught up, and outside the mouth of the harbour, between the pier and the beach, they fought. At that distance, I had a hard time telling who was who, but in the end one pulled away, shaken, and it seemed to be the resident. The victorious male then turned his attention to the female, lingering in by the smaller pier, and to my surprise, he chased her away too.

I don't know much about swans, other than that they are as aggressive as they are beautiful. I've lived near many in my life, and have always appreciated their presence and aesthetics. I find their proximity bizarrely comforting and admire their familial loyalty. But my admiration is mostly aesthetic. I am fond of art, but I'm not an expert by any stretch. So it goes with swans. I like them because they're pretty to look at and it is richer to have them around than to not have them around.

And so this morning's fight saddened me. Our current couple has been here for a couple of years, and to see them chased off by what I assume was a rogue male, well, that's unsettling. I couldn't be an ornithologist. Standing on the balcony in the sunny but cold spring morning, my sense of loss far outweighed my fascination at the display, and I doubt the newcomer will endear himself to me with time.

Speaking of newcomers, sat on my desk is the growing, scribbled outline of the new book. It turns out, to my surprise, that not all blank pages are created equal, and that getting lost in writing new fiction is very different from writing new non-fiction. And so yesterday, with high hopes and genuine enthusiasm, I set to it and within two or three paragraphs came to a screeching halt. With the novel that was no problem - I could just be creative; ideas could, would, and did come.

I'm not writing a novel at the moment.

And so I pushed back the laptop and pulled out the notebook and a pen, and started the clarifying task of building a scaffolding, a structure from which this new project can grow. It turns out that writing into the void is not always possible, or even preferable, and while the pages may be blank, the mind can't be.

As the newcomer swam triumphantly back toward the inner harbour, I looked towards the bank on which the old couple nested. Floating next to it was a female swan. The female swan. I turned back towards the male and realised what I should have guessed from the beginning: the newcomer was no newcomer at all, but the resident, defending his nesting area from another couple. Triumphant, he returned to his mate while in the distance the vanquished invaders sought safer harbour. My heart lifted at the return of the familiar and I shook my head at my mistake.

I guess I really don't know enough about swans.

 

 

a morning in winter

My pillow seems to have greatly expanded gravitational pull these days. Everything is heavier near my bed, including myself. The grey at my window announcing morning does little to lighten the matter and rising to face the day must break down into small, incremental phases. The cat disapproves. He feels I should be leaping up with vigour that mirrors his own. He climbs over the peaks my limbs form in the duvet and presses his face to mine, eager and clumsy. His purr is an odd noise, almost silent, internalized. Pedey head butts me and then clambers over my face to lap the water from the pint jug I keep next my bed. The water thievery is the last straw and I pick him up or just push him, meowing in protest, off the bed.

Thus the first phase of getting up is complete and I sit myself up and rub my eyes and run my hands through hair that is no longer there. The grey light is brighter, though no less grey. I check my phone and iPad and might make a move against someone in Words with Friends (a scrabble knock off I'm constantly losing). My legs and shoulders are sore. I make fists with my toes and stretch out. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed to stand up shouldn't take as much concentration as it does. I grab the cat-tainted pint of water and stand up, not taking a sip. The first few steps fall as though my legs are in braces, or should be. The cat couldn't be happier at my resurrection, believing the sole purpose of my animated state is to feed him. He races underfoot, howling, delighted to have a feeder and a playmate. I'm delighted if I can avoid tripping over the wee shite.

If I've dreamt, I'll ponder them, trying to draw details back from the recesses of my subconscious and attempt to assemble some manner of linear narrative to the abstract. I delude myself into thinking this is a good morning brain exercise, but all it tends to do is confuse me.

Coffee becomes incredibly important about now. Espressos. Or perhaps a run before coffee. The road splits, and this is where everyday is not the same.

Today I ran. It was still dark when I set out. Frost coated the roads and sidewalks and grassy embankments. The sun rose more in the south than east and the sea sat calm beneath it. I could see my breath and by the end my whole body steamed as though I'd just been removed from an oven.

I staggered home and the day started.

ice crystals on pavement

It's too cold to run right now. The sun shines bright on the frost-crusted pavement and I doubt the grip of my feet upon the earth. Silhouettes walk their dogs on the beach, bundled tight. Every silhouette has their personal cloud of mist that trails them like steam on a locomotive. I can imagine the crunch of frozen grass as one of those silhouettes takes their wee Scotty dog along the lawn that runs behind the beach for a couple of hundred yards. The lawn used to be a putting green, though I can't remember if it was 9 or 18 holes. I never used it myself. I tend to use the Himalayas, adorning St Andrews' more famous beach, and most famous golf course. It's about as close to golfing as I intend to get.

Some people are golf people and define themselves as such. It permeates their conversation with other golf people and frequently spills over, inflicting itself upon the silent and weary who don't and never will give a shit about golf. I'm one of those people. Living for so long in a town synonymous with golf has lead me to define myself - to some extent - as not a golf person. This troubles me somewhat, as defining oneself as what they are not seems negative, and vaguely smacks of scientific method. Still, I find it necessary when my own countrymen, visiting to pay homage to this most ancient and adored bastion of golf, stare at me aghast while I explain to them that I don't play their precious game.

It's too cold to play golf anyway. Or even have a leisurely stroll along the putting green. My window has a new frame, an edge of sparkling frost that the heat from my room has as yet been unable to melt. Inside this cocoon of warmth I've meandered through iTunes, putting together a morning playlist: a long overdue endeavour. There are many songs perfect to wake up to though the fuzziness of morning means that often I just hit any old shit. Playlists like this are made on mornings like this. The sunshine cannot but wake you, entice you outside. But the bitter cold halts you in your tracks. Awake and ready but trapped. The playlist is ecclectic, odd even. AC/DC and Nina Simone, Beastie Boys and The Beatles. I'm liking it so far though. Liking the jump from 60's soul to 80's rock to 90's punk rap and back to pop again. I air guitar and sing along while my fingers bang the keys. I'm still in my pj's.

The temperature's risen from -3 to -1. That's celcius. I switch back and forth between celcius and farenheit. When it's cold I feel celcius is more descriptive. 0 is freezing. It's apt. In the summer, however, it falls short. Farenheit must be called on to provide a scale for the warmth. It's hard to think of it as warm when celcius claims it's only 25.

There are more silhouettes wandering the beach now, some with dogs and some without. The frost covers the beach as well, the sand more silver than gold. The lobster boats are all out, checking their traps no doubt. The thought makes me hungry. Munching fresh lobster while looking out over a sun-drenched frozen beach, sipping white burgundy and enjoying the banter of friends.

Most of the lobsters go to Spain, which is of use to no one, except perhaps the Spanish. So I munch on their manchego, pata negra and chorizo while they crunch our crustaceans. It still doesn't seem quite a fair trade, but maybe that's just me wanting something for nothing.

The frost doesn't seem to be melting, in spite of the sun's best efforts. My ecclectic new playlist just pumped out James Brown, Van Halen and Pulp. My mouth's watering but I don't want to eat just yet. The silhouettes seem to prefer the far end of the beach to the near.

It's too cold for a run, but I'll go anyway.