Living on the ceiling

Avid followers of this blog may have been dismayed to find I haven’t published a new post here for a few months. (Well, I can hope that someone cares that much!) This sounds like a “my-dog-ate-my-homework” kind of excuse but here goes... At the end of last October, part of the ceiling of my attic collapsed. And so began a lengthy process of finding a builder and then waiting a few months for a succession of builders, plasterers, electricians, painters and carpet-fitters to come along, make repairs and renovations and leave me with a newly-restored attic/guest bedroom.

Of course, you can’t repair an attic while it’s full so it also necessitated me moving furniture, clothes, books, bric-a-brac and all the kinds of things you might expect to find in an attic ( - just about anything that you don’t want to keep in any other room and can’t bear to throw away - ) into various other parts of the house, including my office. If you want to stop a writer (or any other type of creative) from working I can recommend arranging for their attic ceiling to collapse as a perfect way to scupper all creative output for several months.

I have managed to write no more than one song and a handful of album reviews since the ceiling first began to fall down. Work on my novel, several short stories, ideas for articles, recordings for my next album and even blog posts has been suspended while, week after week, tradesmen have been running up and down my stairs at unexpected times of the day, turning my electricity on and off as the whim takes them, playing Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees at high volume and generating a cloud of dust that covered every surface of the house, only to be renewed the next day after Sisyphean efforts at hoovering and dusting.     

Now that the renovations are complete and I can gradually start moving things back to their rightful places (which, in some cases, is the charity shop or the recycling centre) I feel able to concentrate once more. So you can expect more regular blog posts while I play catch-up on the things I’ve been meaning to share with you. But, first, would you mind giving me a hand with some of these boxes?...