Lions

Vastly incapacitated by a hacking cough and what is likely the cumulative effects of uninhibited worrying, I'm once again in that slightly embarrassing condition of not being able to do anything at all - that is, including sleep, eat and/or work.

The thing with this condition is that you find yourself working on another time-scale, while the world flows on around you. Phone calls come in, some demanding, others enquiring; emails, messages, chores, reminders, meetings, proposals, favours. Your watch and calendar become objects of tyranny. Time is parcels. You pack more into some than you can afford to. Loved ones usually get the smaller ones.

This evening, I decided to take some of those parcels out of circulation entirely. I switched off my phone, shut down my computer and went to the book shop. Time and again it happens, but I never spot it as soon as I should - the reason why one feels that writing has suddenly become so terribly difficult is because one has stopped reading altogether. Walking between bookshelves is like walking amongst of a pride of benevolent lions. There was Borges, speaking from the grave with his voice as precise, elusive and complex as a difficult perfume. Pamuk and Auster, magicians at the height of their powers. Le Guin, wise and fiery - sympathizing with but suffering no fools; knowing the importance of naming something right. Anais Nin, so recognizable it's difficult to look at her, but somewhere in that limpid wandering is finely tempered metal thread. An attentive magpie could tease it out like a worm, only to discover it makes up a web (or a net?). John Berger - compassionate, powerful, wonderful. And of course, my old friend of the sea Patrick O'Brian - well I went home with him tonight.

I guess, to walk amongst lions is to feel the continuity of time, in the sense that all time-scales are contained in it. Somehow or other even this particular one - the time-scale of 2am in the rainy month of March 2008 I can't sleep or work and I am running out of time - fits in there. Yes, fits right in there with the time-scale of I am waiting for my husband to come home, and the time-scale of two people dreaming in the desert, and that of when will I know when my visa is approved, and on and on...

There's time. There's plenty of it.