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TV fixed
27 August 2004
I should, I am sure, have more faith. Or less. perhaps: it may be that I put too much faith in propaganda, I let people persuade me that we live in a throwaway world with obsolescence built in, whereas in fact most things are most likely fixable. Well, most machinery, at least. I'm not sure about damaged people or fractured relationships, but my sick TV has been to hospital and come home all better, and quite cheaply so.
Meanwhile in its absence I've been cooking and spending time with unexpected friends and having business meetings disguised as dinner parties, unless it was the other way around. A while ago m’friend Sean O’Brien suggested that we might write ghost stories, for an evening of readings. A succession of chance encounters and bright ideas, largely in pubs, has inflated this into a performance, publication and sound recording extravaganza, with its concomitant funding application, which has of course thrown me into utter panic-mode. So we needed to spend time with the prospective publisher and my new application-guru. So we cooked food (a mushroom risotto, with dried ceps and girolles and fresh wild mushrooms, and a wine-and-chocolate cream to follow) and ate it together, and talked of budgets, and I came away feeling much calmer. Until I confronted the paperwork this morning, and am now once again like unto a nest of wild monkeys, if monkeys make nests. Gail would know. But I do hate paperwork, all forms and proposals and such. I think someone should just hand me a cap of gold and tell me to get on with it. That, I could work with; this renders me inoperative.
So does cheap music being pumped through my windows at volume. The park over the road is having a community fun-day,which I’m sure is great fun for the community. For me, it’s signal interference on the precise wavelength of my brain. I made a nice roasted-cherry-tomato-and-garlic soup, but that’s about the most productive thing I’ve done today. I’m supposed to be working on rewrites of Selling Water, but work is simply out of reach.
Still, the story for the Durham Literature Festival website has gone live, which is a good thing. It’s called Absent Friends, and it’s a part of that suite of stories I’ve been writing about Aids carers. You can find it here.
© Chaz Brenchley 2004
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.