WRITERS' BLOCKHEAD

I am seated (not sat, sitting, as Hylda Baker would have it) in the back garden. The sun is warm and heating up my right ear from behind. I am drinking a cup of cappucino coffee from a mug painted over with butterflies. The butterflies clash with the red-and-white squares of the gingham tablecloth. You can imagine the Old Carthusians playing football in the 1860s in a strip like that. Above, I can hear the sound of the wind wrestling with the tree branches. It's always windy in my back garden - windy and about five degrees celsius colder than round the front. A few wispy clouds scud by in the firmament, but do not threaten the late-Sunday morning sunshine. A bluebottle lands on the table. I swipe at it with my ruler and miss it by several inches. It spirals off into the distance, buzzing with laughter at how slow I have become. Slow and dilatory due to advancing years, the fact that my broad mind and narrow waist have swapped places, and by my complete inability to advance a single idea, not one useful coherent thought. I was listening to 'Test Match Special' but I found it rather tedious, for once, and I switched it off to write. To write what? I am as bereft of ideas as an armadillo with a head-cold. I always wanted to be a writer, and I can just about carry out the mechanics of writing, but I haven't a single creative thought in my head. My brain is like Aldi's leek-and-potato soup, all mushy and cloudy, with several inedible bits in it. The page remains blank and my pen remains poised. A ladybird lands daintily on the tablecloth. Like a pawn in a chess game, she advances one square at a time. Now you see her, now you don't. I reflect that it must be nice to be a ladybird and not to have to sit with pen poised, waiting for something constructive to flow from this Osiris fountain-pen with medium nib and ingenious screw-filling mechanism onto a blank sheet of 80 gsm lined vellum. Nor does Mrs Ladybird have to bother her pretty mind about politics, economics or religion, or be involved in endless fatuous debates about TV soap operas. All she needs to concern herself with is finding Mr Ladybird Right, ensuring the ladybird lineage continues, watching out for baleful wasps and searching out her next meal of greenfly in aspic. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I wouldn't mind coming back as a ladybird, and at least I wouldn't have this migraine brought about purely by writers' block.