Procrastination is the thief of time, said Dickens. I think that writers are more aware of the passage of time that most, when they aren’t writing that is.

I’m trying to get back into it after over two years of not writing anything meaningful. The aftermath of losing a partner was not what I expected. After all, she had lived six years with cancer so I knew what was coming or, at least, I thought I did. The stages of grief for me were total numbness then a heaviness that one person described as ‘having swallowed a large black heavy stone’. After two years the stone is still there. I’ve come to the conclusion that’s it’s not going anywhere so I’ll just have to learn to live with it which is probably a step in the right direction for me.

So what did I do when I wasn’t writing? Yes, like many of us, I fell down the black hole of doomscrolling and there is certainly enough doom about to scroll through. It didn’t make me feel any better though, it just made the black stone heavier. Hate seems to be everywhere, spurred on by evil actors who seem to delight in setting people against each other. The USA has become schizophrenic with Trump and his coterie stirring the pot of hate as fast as they can and people seem to lap it up. Religious psychosis is rampant with mad people proclaiming Trump as being Jesus and this being ‘the end of days’. Who knows but they might be right?