Time this article was written – 3.30-4.30 am. Kilos – 87, that’s, minus 1 (with apologies to Bridget Jones): Units of alcohol consumed this week – 12; Cigarettes – 0 (but then I don’t smoke), Number of close shaves while out on the steed – one, white van man in a hurry to turn out near Kew Gardens.
It wasn’t a New Year’s resolution exactly, but it crept into life in early January, revealing itself as the only inspiring plan to cut through the insistent chaff of a chaotic writer’s life which consists of too many projects, none of them a solution but all somehow demanding to be fulfilled.
Unexpectedly it arrived disguised as the Voice in the Night: that intrusion we all fear, which wakes us unreasonably at 3am and gnaws at us in our dark and silent solitude (yes, even when another person is asleep within two feet). It dwells on our anxieties, amplifies anything that might go wrong, stokes our fears and denies us the one thing that we crave - and need in order not to appear like a zombie the next morning - a slide into delicious slumber.
We know the nation hasn’t been sleeping well since life was disrupted by Covid 19 (and this journal entry was of course written at 4 am). But in my case there has been a small existential thing too: the fact that there hasn’t been much use for travel writers lately. Not so long ago I considered myself one of a few old beasts savaging the carcase of a dying industry; now I just think there’s no grace in being an ageing freelancer.
So this burden, this simple, chilling question -‘What am I for…?’ - has been building for years, seeping, steeping, stacking up anxiety with the pressure of some Alpine dam … well, in my case more like the weight of a chaotic accretion of sticks and general detritus in a beaver’s dam… Nonetheless it is fit to burst: after three years of hopes unrequited, plans foiled, replacement plans... foiled… delays, further delays, even a ‘get off the bus’ directive from the doctor…
I should say that this agitated, introspective, bed-bound state of mind militates against my every thought and sinew (as a generally jolly person who loves an upbeat, outward-looking plan ), but there I lie, defenceless, irritatedly awake, as the voice in the night creeps around me, probing, provoking, presenting life in the worst possible light. Where’s the work going to come from? Why do editors never answer emails*? And why can’t I even manage to organise the travel when a travel article has been commissioned… Aargh, tax… TAX. Before the end of January. And what of that website I need to get moving; and yet, do I really want to take on another blog? How long will that last? And if I want to get a contract for a book then I’ll need to put the proposal out there. Again. To all of which add a list of injuries and ailments, none quick acting or terminal, but all capable of reining in an active life.
It’s a constant flow of negative thoughts, washing around me, highlighting any hints of laziness, needling me with my inadequacies, churning desperation, breeding bitterness, even metaphysical dysphoria: I was descending into a vortex, no, in my case, a plughole, of despair.
But suddenly, at the beginning of the year, an unexpected shard of light lanced the dissonance, sharp as a laser, scrambling the voice in the night into irrelevance. It was irresistible, compelling, exciting. I’d like to say I fell asleep immediately, but in good televisual cliché I sat bolt upright and slapped my forehead.
What was the idea that cut through the chaff, lifting me out of this plughole? A landscape of cobalt blue lakes and lungfuls of pine-scented air on a forest-clad mountainside under a limitless cerulean sky, and… and… the sensation of sharp, cold air on my face, the heightened sensitivity of physical stress, and to feel my muscles working again, millions and millions of fibrils and their billions and billions of contractions firing in unison as I make my way across a mountainside...
It was, of course, an adventure.
* With one admirable exception. Sarah Hartley