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Writing, specs & TV
7 September 2005
It still seems to me extraordinary sometimes, that here is this thing that I’ve been doing more or less continuously for forty-odd years, commercially for twenty-eight, and somehow - sometimes - it can still be just so much fun. I’m still working on the Taiwan novella, and I’m having a breeze. A thousand, fifteen hundred words a day; time was, when that was a morning’s work and I’d be looking for three times that before bedtime, but times change and so do people. I’m happy with a thousand.
There are penalties, though, to being happy. It makes everything else feel easier; which means that the purse-strings slacken, because I’m having fun, and half the definition of ‘having fun’ is spending money. So I go to town and buy things: books and batterie, smoked garlic and sea salt, what can I say? And that’s the least of it, the very least. Those of you who know me will not be in the least surprised to learn that my current obsession with eyesight drove me eventually into an optician’s. Well, actually to every optician in town, till I found a pair of (relatively) inexpensive glasses that I thought I could probably live with. And so I had the eye-test that I needed, and here’s something to make the cat laugh: indeed, she hasn’t stopped giggling since she heard it. Why does my prescription suddenly feel wrong? Because I’ve reached that age where actually I need two prescriptions. For some years now I’ve been watching friends fumble and curse their way between two separate pairs of specs; now I get the first intimations that I am doomed to join them, or else go varifocal. Not quite yet, the nice optician thought he could probably fudge it one more time and I was happy to go along with this, but it’s there, it can’t be fudged for ever. Eek.
And meantime - double-eek! - the possibility has arisen of my participation in a TV pilot. Those of you who are crying ‘Displacement activity!’ or simply ‘Nooo...!!!’ can hold your horses; there’s a selection process, and I’ve barely engaged with it yet. Photos must be sent (hah! that’ll be that, then). But it does sound fun, and right up my street: go to some unnamed European city and solve puzzles, crack codes, decipher clues. All very Da Vinci, and why not...?
© Chaz Brenchley 2005
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.