UPCATCH: How Bad News for Some is good News for the Same Some.

Have I told you about the clattering rattle of Event after event, like gravel escaping from the truck ahead and striking the windscreen? What a shit past year, not just for me but for you too, probably. Also, for him, her and it.

In case you haven’t kept up;

I’ll pass briefly over the horror of Covid. i have known many who were invaded, a few died. It’s such a horrible death I can’t talk about it.

But then there were all the other things, and in the words of Dostoyevsky in the Brothers Karamazov playing now on BBC Radio 4 Extra, ‘Everything that has happened to me I brought on myself’.

Evidence: the bike accident which crushed some vertebra, caused by me wearing a long scarf and ignoring the woman outside Sainsbury’s who said, yes really, ‘be careful with that’. A seer. A prophet who never had the satisfaction of seeing her prediction fulfilled about five minutes later as the scarf caught in my front wheel and I was flipped over the handlebars onto my head.

Ach! But how lucky was that! The date 2nd March 2020. 10 days in hospital, Out of the Pandemic’s way. Discharged just before the virus tiptoed into the hospital, sharp, cold, dangerous. Arriving at home just in time for Lockdown 1 and a letter telling me to Shield.

And then, Shropshire Marc who had come all the way to London to look after me, left me on the Monday with tons of food and everything I needed. On the Tuesday he came down with Covid, and I didn’t;

The year scraped on like fingernails across a chalkboard. Episode after horrible episode. My novel’s plot and main character was stolen, for example. My fault! I’d put it into a WordPress file for my Beta readers, easily found by the pet author of a publisher I had been in discussions with. Yeh yeh, coincidences happen – I’ve always said that ideas hang about in the cosmos, and the first person to grab them is the winner. But there are far too many similarities to be explained away by serendipity, or an errant mischievous muse. Much more likely an errant mischievous mouse.

And the film script! Super, crazy, original. The sort of plot and characters SO current, SO relevant, the BBC or Netflix would give their left testicle for it. Possibly the right one as well. My mistake? My wonderful co-writer (who has screen credits) after innumerable edits and rewrites refuses to believe in the substance of the plot. We’ve worked on it for about 3 years, ironed out all the inconsistencies – rewrite after rewrite. It drove me mad. To the extent that I refused to do even one more. So he refuses to submit. Our perfect darling, lying in cyberspace unloved, aborted. It could have been Einstein.

FUCKING 2020! 

Thing after thing after thing. I’ve forgotten half the disasters, thanks to psychotherapy and medication.

Then on February the 2nd this year – ok ok ok we’re on 2021 now – Robins & Day send a man to pick up my car for its MoT. I didn’t want to drive it there and take a bus back so fine, why not take advantage of their free pick up/drop off. The driver is a young chap. So I say, with an insincere wink (it was a powerful sporty car) (note, ‘was’) ‘Don’t show off’ I say.

Plant a seed, get a giant beanstalk with a giant on top.

So on the way back he drove it full pelt into the back of a truck. Wrote it off, the little bastard. Walked out unscathed. 

As to me, I was scathed. Carless. Bereft. While I hardly ever used it (I’m learning to be Green, after all) I was rather attached to its sleek, low-slung sexiness, the illusion that ensconced in the thing in my pre-Covid rides to Shropshire, I had magically become young and spunky.

Moan moan moan, me me me. 

Yes I reached out for psychotherapy, folks, which was a good thing. The NHS gave me some gratis anti- PTSD CBT after the accident, then some more and now I’m paying for a trainee therapist to practise on me. It’s quite fun.

So NOW I’ve come to this conclusion, and it may be as a result of allowing strangers into my brain: 

Many’s the twists and churns

And some, but not every disaster turns

Around

So MAYBE: Maybe Ragazzo, the novel is wrong. However wonderful. Maybe my attempt to escape my destined genre is a mistake. Maybe I need to go back to political satire of the Apartheid type. Maybe I need Levine. 

A brief, very carefully worded explanation (in case ——— still haunts my cyberoutput in search of more ideas to steal): Levine goes to the toilet, where he has a set of gears. Hillbrow about 1966. Ha! ——! Try stealing THAT! – an idea I started working on about 10 years ago. Poor chap, 120 pages in and no resolution. Left dangling. Unborn. Why did I stop working on Levine? Too stoned, possibly, if I was still doing stuff. Don’t remember. But finding the notes for the novel has opened a door….to a box full of chirping, chanting, fussing and fighting fools and floozies…they were lurking, waiting, ready.

Exciting!

And get this: I have a secret little mantra, which has been tumbling around my conscious and unconscious. It goes: ‘every day in every way I get greener and greener’. Dear Robins and Day! Eventually they gave me a chunk of money as compensation for totalling my sports car. Which I have spent on a gentle little hybrid, a Virtue Wagon. (No smartie it’s not a VW) Which allows me to proceed smugly about my business, on the extremely rare occasions I fire up its little heart and take it on an utterly essential car ride.

Things are looking up. (Probably looking up skirts, the dirty buggers. I would never look up a skirt.) 

Dear Peter just invited me sailing, as soon as this virus buggers off.

I still mourn the deaths, I still ache from the accident – but have the promise, at least of an operation. So bravo! Baste the rest of 2021 in honey and fire up the barbecue! 2021 maybe I’ll be born anew!

I love you all, natch!