I'm not prone to losing things – words
perhaps, marbles certainly, but not actual 'things'. I'm far too obsessed with
time wasting to be able to cope with 'looking'. Tick, tock, that clock goes,
tick tock, another few seconds of valuable life spent in the futile search for
a key, only to be repeated tomorrow. Nope, that's not for me. My key goes in my
bag, maximum time spent on life – I quote (yes, I'm a joy to live with.) But sometimes,
very occasionally, I lose something. Properly lose it – not, in the car, under
a pile of papers, in a different bag, under a cushion, absent mindedly placed
in the fridge instead of the cleaning cupboard, kind of losing it. No, proper losing,
the, I am going mad type of losing.
The object in question? Half a ream
of paper. The half is filled with scribbles and post-its and ticks and smiley
faces. I have lost an edit, or more precisely, half an edit. The half with all the
comments I haven't yet typed up onto the document, the half I've pored over for
hours, the half which will have to be entirely re-done.
It isn't even my own writing.
Although I'd like to be clear at this point, just in case the writer in
question is reading this, the edit never left the house. It will appear again,
of course, just as soon as I have re-scribbled the final remark which brings me
back to the point when the edit first disappeared.
Meanwhile, I am cutting my losses and
moving into damage limitation phase. The search has been officially curtailed
at two hours and fifty minutes*. I have printed out a new hard copy but, ever
the optimist, I will start from where I left off, kidding myself that the
fairly-elves will flutter by, wink as they drop the offending missing extract
into my lap and whisper, 'Hey, we enjoyed that,' moments before I finally admit
defeat and re-commence editing the fated first half.
*Now, when I say, two hours and
fifty minutes, it isn't strictly accurate. Yes, my Saturday morning slipped
between 10am and almost 1pm and I am no further on with this editing task, and
a whole lot further behind. However, a few choice items did appear as I threw
my study upside down and it would be a little misleading to pretend a few
moments hadn't been spent marvelling in them. There's the photo – I have so few
– of my half-brother and half-sister from over twenty years ago. One of them may
have recently celebrated their 30th birthday, but I still think
they're cute. And oh, how proud were we all of that snowman, standing almost up
to my knees.
Next up were four packs of pen
refills which had slipped inside a ruled notepad. I thought I'd bought a lot
lately, but assumed I'd been working hard. There were the inevitable coins
(although disappointingly, no notes, not even in the pockets of coats I found
myself looking through which would barely hold a folded sheet of A4, let alone 250
of them) and a girl can never have too many emery boards, hand lotions and
cuticle softeners, uncurled paperclips (it's a dreadful habit, along with
chewing my nails when I'm really concentrating) hair bobbles, old diary pages (now
shredded) new books - ahem – which I'd forgotten about (do NOT tell the hubbie
or the authors) and chargers. I'd had a big cull in the summer, clearly not big
enough.
And then I found this. I didn't
find it exactly, everything in its place, of course, but I had forgotten it was
there. There were letters from my school friends when I'd taken a 'year out' in
Germany as an au-pair and they'd gone to uni while I was seriously questioning
what I'd done. It's hard living with a non-English speaking family when, A-level
in German notwithstanding, you're barely able to say your name let alone ask
for theirs. Suffice it to say, the disconcerting beginning had been all but
forgotten but thank you Helen and Rachel for cheering me up in the early days.
I did a couple of seasons of tour
guiding 'in Europe' in my early twenties. (I wrote about life as a tour guide
with no sense of direction, here) and
some of the American holiday makers sent me beautiful, long and lyrical thank
you letters after their trips. They were a short story in themselves, and
remain mementos of a by-gone age I've long since discarded. I'm glad I kept
them. Although incredibly touched by their efforts, I'm sure I didn't appreciate
back then how precious they would grow to be over time.
There were even some letters to
myself. I wrote a diary from the age of 13 which was wonderfully cathartic. I wrote it until, aged 23, I had a Forrest Gump
moment, deciding that my diary and I had been through a decade of loves and
loss together but suddenly, I didn’t want to write it anymore. And I never did.
But sometimes, very occasionally, I'd write a letter to myself instead. They
were how I found some calm in a few iconic moments in my early adult years.
I was flicking through some of
these letters when I found a
scribbled note on Mr Men headed paper which looked like a letter but was merely a few rushed bullet
points. They were based on an
exasperating experience I had getting back from Birmingham train station one
day, and the people I'd met along the way. Those notes were all I had of an
idea for a novel.
Until today.
I have since written over a
thousand words and am seriously considering bringing the current manuscript I'm
working on to an abrupt halt and working on this instead. My instinct is
telling me to do this and my instinct told me to stop what I was writing once before
and write Glass Houses in its place…
I shall leave it there for now but
let's just say, far from a lost morning searching for my lost edit, my Saturday
is turning out to be very fruitful indeed.
Although, forgive me, if I have just
one more look in the 'edit in progress drawer.'
*Update* I scribbled this blog post
down a few weeks ago. The edit is now done and submitted. The Lost Edit has
still not returned. Meanwhile, the
Birmingham inspired novel has become all-consuming and I now have 15,000 words
of the first draft under my belt. I cannot tell you how happy I am that the Gremlins
stole my work that fateful Saturday.
