Paper trail
I'm completely devoid of bloggish inspiration and it's nearly time for bed. I remembered something I'd half-written and was going to resurrect that, but I can't find it; half a poem, or maybe a whole poem, I can't remember if it was finished. Often I think things aren't finished and when I go back to them they feel complete, or else I can't get back into them. It was written on either a yellow page or a blue page of a tiny spiral-bound notebook with multicoloured lined pages (I bought a pack of 5 of them for ninepence or thereabouts in a Booksale or similar) and I was fairly sure the notebook was in the bottom of a bag but I've looked in the bottom of all the bags I've used recently, and there's no sign of it. Which means it's probably at work underneath the enormous pile of choral music underneath the pile of things I've absolutely got to read really soon, in the pile of things I've got to remember to take into work or bring home from work or transfer from one pile of stuff to another. There are three notebooks in the rucksack I've been taking to work for the last few days because I wanted to have room for my running shoes which I'm sort of carrying to and fro because I'm deluding myself that I'm going to go running at home as well as Tuesday and Thursday lunchtimes: the new shiny red blogging notebook and two 'work' notebooks, both of which are in a state of nearly-finished where I know I need to go through them and check if there's anything still useful or relevant in them. One of them is the slightly thinner pale blue notebook with some corporate brand on the front; it feels like a more anaemic notebook somehow, and has an aura of guilt about it because of the 6 pages of outraged ranting disguised as 'notes' from a conference about e-learning which are tucked at the back of it (real notes at the front, inbetween rants at the back) which I've been meaning to write up into a coherent blog post since the conference, which was some time in April or June or some month along those lines. I could talk like this for hours. I could fill up another 60 years with this sort of shuffling of things from one place to another. I could gather up all the bits of paper into a big heap and sort them into smaller heaps and file them away with complicated systems of cross-referencing. When we moved house when I was about 8 my parents numbered all the boxes and wrote the contents of the box on a corresponding numbered index card. They have what always seemed like an infinite supply of index cards, pink and orange and turquoise and white. I could gather up all the bits of paper and set them all on fire.