A QUIET JANUARY SUNDAY

My Bart Simpson watch says 19:36. Classical music creeps across the room. The cushions are all higgledy-piggledy on the futon. The waste-bin is half-full. My brief-case lies untidily on the floor. I have been writing most of the day, and my eyes are hurting. My mood is one of introspection. I am mellow. I am calm. My wife is watching some idiotic ice-skating farrago downstairs, whilst I 'sit like Buddha in a ten-foot cell.'
That's the last of my black-ink fountain-pen cartridges. It's dirty-blue from now on till I get to the stationer's. I use the computer as a last resort. I write everything out in longhand, in a school exercise book, with a pearl-handled Osiris fountain-pen and then I type it out verbatim. It is alarming how much my handwriting has deteriorated over the years. I read a sentence: 'I jast lope I can sot myself our and stalk to see my saliva.' On second reading, very carefully prising the letters apart, I find the sentence reads: ' I just hope I can sort myself out and start to see my salvation.'
I don't really have much to write about, but I've got to keep this blog going, even though nobody reads it. I've just poked a hole in the end of the last black cartridge with one leg of a pair of scissors. That should help the ink flow more freely.
I am in a little bit of pain from a sort of wart on my left leg. My trousers rub up against it. I suppose I should go to the doctor's and have it frozen off. I'm a bit apprehensive about the Doctor's. I went to the Nurse last week for a blood test and the needle felt like a fiery poker. I nearly cried out till I remembered I'm supposed to be manly about these things.
I notice that I have ruined the last bit of writing I did because I freed the ink too much and a great blob has appeared on the end of the pen and smeared itself all over a particularly fine paragraph about what came for me in the post yesterday. I've only a minuscule piece of blot-sheet to soak it up, and most of the ink will go by capillary action onto my fingers. From experience, the ink won't come off even with a Brillo pad, which normally makes my fingers bleed. All in all, I've made quite a mess. Still, the ink will fade from my fingers in a week or so.