Dread

We’ve been trying to get a handyman. We need a new cooker; and they don’t make the cooker that we’ve got any more. All the new models are wider. But if we can saw off about an inch of our kitchen worktop, we reckon we can fit a new cooker in. It’s only a small job. Not worth hiring a carpenter for. If I was more confident, I might even attempt it myself.
We don’t know any handymen, and we don’t know anyone who can recommend one to us. So for the past few days, we’ve been going through Yellow Pages, Check a Trader, etc. But the whole thing is a displacement activity, because what we’re really scared of is having strangers in the flat. I have a dread of workmen (I’ve never yet had a work woman; I might prefer it if I could).
The worry is that you’re going to get a cowboy; somebody who will botch the job, or overcharge you. Even the idea of ringing somebody up and getting a quote turns me to ice. But it’s a fear; I’ve got to conquer it. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Because there’s a lot, an awful lot, which needs doing around the flat.
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This week, I’ve been on leave. I’ve hardly written anything, but even so, life feels good. We all need downtime. I’ve done some more to my characters’ biographies. I wish to God I’d done them for a lot of my other projects, if not all of them. They always repay dividends to your fiction. But when it’s come to flash fiction, I’ve literally just written them on the hoof. It’s time for a change.
I’ve been trying to ease myself away from horror fiction and onto other sorts. It’s been partially successful. I’ve started watching episodes of Only Fools And Horses again. My favourite sitcom, and I haven’t watched it for ages. John Sullivan’s wonderful characterization and dialogue, the innate sense of farce that runs through it all; the pairing of David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst. Yet to me, putting an Only Fools dvd has been like climbing Everest. Your instinct is always to put a horror film on.
I picked up Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy from the public library the other day. I loved the first two Bridget Jones books, yet when this one came out, I just sort of shrugged. Anyway, it’s good, so far, one chapter in, as good as the other two. Again, though, I had to make myself borrow it and make myself read it. I haven’t even seen Nick Hornby’s latest yet; in fact, I haven’t read Slam, Nick Hornby’s teenage novel, or any more of his collections of book reviews. It wasn’t that Nick Hornby has got worse, as far as I can tell. Only that as soon as I read M.R. James, I went overboard for horror.
Yesterday, we went into our little public library, and I came away with four books about the supernatural. Obviously this isn’t an addiction like a heroin addiction; on the contrary, in many ways it’s improved my life. I’ve begun to enjoy reading again, and that’s fed into my writing. I’m finishing stories and sending them out; and some of those stories have ended up published on Microhorror and Paragraph Planet. I feel a little disappointed with myself.
What I’m hoping is that, when I start writing my Cinderella story, as I think of it, it will encourage me to read more broadly. Perhaps it might get me to read poetry, dramatic plays, ‘serious’ novels.
But I don’t want to knock it. Life feels good, at the moment.