Writing is work. It is quite remarkable that I have to keep revisiting this idea and then forgetting about it.

 

On Friday, I decided that as my first-born was coming home from Brighton for a couple of days, I’d take time off from editing and writing. We went to the 12.15 showing of ‘Bangkok Dangerous’ at the Wood Green Cineworld and shared an enormous auditorium with about three other people. The feeling of decadence and debauchery was quite unsuited to the level of transgression, but for some reason it felt incredibly daring. Now hang on, that’s just sad. But there it is. We also got a large popcorn, sweet and salty mixed and I rather enjoyed the movie which was a good old-fashioned moral tale of the sort that only Hollywood can dream up.

 

But I digress. The point is, that by the time evening came, instead of feeling exhausted and drained, I was full of joie de vivre. Strange, I thought. Friday evening I’m usually knackered. But oh, I thought, aha! I haven’t been working today.

 

I suppose I’m so used to thinking of writing poetry as a selfish pleasure/pain activity, I don’t think of it as work. I don’t think of it as something that might make me tired. Work is something you make money out of, surely, not something you do out of some manic, desperate, personal drive thing?

 

Well, whatever. It still makes me tired.

 

What made me even more tired, though, was going to see the latest Sam Shepard debacle, ‘Kicking a Dead Horse’ at the Almeida. Maybe if I hadn’t seen five short Beckett plays the week before at the Young Vic I would have been more forgiving. But this was hopelessly derivative, sub-Beckett ramblings by a writer I have always admired, performed rather crudely by Stephen Rea. So disappointing. But luckily only seventy minutes long. Which left time for dinner afterwards.

 

I love the audiences at the Almeida; they’re so site-specific. Not kind of tweedy seventy-somethings with bi-focals and fat ankles of the type one tends to see at the National Theatre, but more trendy, well-heeled north Londoners with rectangular spectacles and leather jackets.

 

Upper Street is still achingly trendy and expensive, but on a warm September evening it’s good to feel a part of all that chattery, slightly intellectual vibe.

 

I’m yawning. Can it be that writing this blog has tired me out?

 

Tomorrow it’s back to work, to heavy eyes at 9pm and early nights. And poetry. I hope. I hope ...