​It’s the most beautiful morning imaginable in London.  The sky is a shade of blue you only see in fairy stories and the air is so clean and fresh you would think it had been scrubbed by Christmas elves at the north pole.  The leaves are that startling shade of green you only see for a brief time in spring before they turn dark and dusty and dehydrated when the seven months of drought and humidity hit London in May.  Trudging around Russell Square, I heard several robins, blue tits, the occasional wood pigeon, a crow and one startled blackbird.  This is about as close to magic as the centre of London ever gets.  It all faded away a bit when I got back to my housing estate which has been annihilated by workmen but I expect my spirits will soon be rescued by some (fake) coffee and a (real) hot cross bun (or two).
It’s the sort of day that reminds me to let go of my problems.  One can’t just keep dwelling all the time.  It’s exhausting.  My jaw is clenched so hard that I’ve virtually dislocated it.  Really time to let go, I think!  So I’m keeping myself busy with immense amounts of DIY, a lot of it rescuing my flat from the destructive forces of evil workmen, but also the destructive forces of virulent mould and damp.  I’m also doing a lot of sewing, something I used to do a lot of decades ago.  I’m currently creating a vastly complex blind for a vastly complex window.  It should be finished this year some time.
All this is about as far away from writing as anyone can get.  You’d almost think I’d stopped entirely.
Heh!
In the midst of all the drama of life, an idea that had been edging around the borders of a far off land suddenly popped up and went HELLO!  Not another bloody idea, I thought.  I get lots of ideas.  Most of them are crap.  The last time I had a “brilliant” idea it turned into That Difficult Novel which has been abandoned for over a year now.  But I ran this new idea past my daughter – who has a zeitgeisty finger on every pulse – and she seems to think it has legs.  I’ve begun making notes, currently on hold over the mad DIY days of the Easter break and am looking forward to getting back to it.  I need to make a lot of preparations:  while the story is straightforward, the universe it’s set in needs a lot of development.  And I really want to get it right.  So I’m using my trusty “Teach Yourself Screenwriting” text book (yes, really!) and once I’ve made every note I can think of, I will be doing a writing course and applying what I learn to this novel.  A lot of work to be done!
Quite a large part of me would like to never write anything again.  But then in the darkest despair, it becomes the one and only thing I can look forward to:  not so much the writing but the creation of something new.  More than that, if this proposed series of novels works, I will finally have found my true voice as a writer.  It’s that good.

I’m finding myself listening more and more to Radio 3.  This isn’t necessarily due to a love of classical music.  I’m pretty clueless and only know the very popular pieces and/or composers.  But there are mornings when the Today programme on Radio 4 seems determined to hammer me into the floor with nail after nail of bad news.  And when it comes on top of one’s own endless array of problems, it’s all just too much. 
Whichever way I turn, another huge, vast problem looms at me until it seems there is no escape and even my dreams are fretful and anxious (when I can actually get to sleep, that is.)  I was practically sobbing at work this morning, completely unable to pull myself together, where, as a final straw, I was confronted with about a zillion books to deal with.  Fortunately I was rescued by the marvellous library manager and after a cup of truly foul but highly caffeinated coffee laced with aging soya milk that separated, I managed to get going again.
It doesn’t even matter what all these problems are.  Everyone has them in one way or another.  What upsets me mostly is that at the bottom of every single one is a lack of money.  “If I had money, this wouldn’t be” is the line that goes through my head several million times a day.  I still dream pathetically of winning the lottery, though I almost never buy a ticket (can’t part with the £2).  I would settle for winning the £25 thousand cash prize on the Dorset Cereal camper van box but though I’ve eaten tonnes of Dorset cereal in the last year, I’ve not yet managed to buy the lucky box. 
And then, when my dreams begin to run out, I think perhaps I’ll get lucky with my writing and actually write something that sells and makes money and I can live off it and live happily ever after and all those problems will just vanish and everything will be just dandy.  And then I remember that so far I’ve been the saddest failure of a writer there ever was and have to turn up the radio VERY LOUD indeed so that I can block out every aspect of my life.
But to follow that famous bit from Carmen with "O Quam Sauvis Est"* by some bloke called Alonso Lobo is just sublime.  And I’ve just discovered that if you select a programme to listen to again on the Radio 3 website, it lists the pieces played so that you can pick just that piece to listen to no matter where it is in the line-up.  Bloody magical, that is.

​* Google it.