A mental block and that terrible birthday song
I’D already caused a rumpus in the Italian restaurant by knocking over a tall fluted wine glass which smashed, with its contents (and broken fragments) going into my partner Kitty’s paella, onto her lap and all over the floor.
On the next table it was some poor wretch’s misfortune to have a birthday.
The waiters plonked a silly hat on his head and they and his fellow diners serenaded him with the world’s worst song ‘Happy Birthday to You.’
Matters deteriorated further when his table mates shouted ‘Speech! and urged him to stand. The man did so, sheepishly.
The speech, shall I say, had brevity on its side.
‘Thanks’ he mumbled, his face as red as a bottle of vino rosso.
He looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else. He sat down again.
Can someone create and register for copyright a less appalling birthday song, please?
The words are trite, the tune is trite and the renditions are usually lacking in harmony.
At the same table a woman asked the waiter at the meal’s end, ‘Can I take this home in a doggy bag?’
I have several things to say on this matter. Firstly, what has such a bag got to do with a dog?
The food is not going to be given to a dog. Dogs do not have a great yearning for risotto. Plus which, I have an strong belief that when out having a meal, that is the time and place for the eating of that meal – right there in the restaurant, that same Friday evening (or whichever day applies.)
The food should not be stuck in a box, taken to your house, locked in a fridge overnight, from which it’s removed the next morning, looking cold, unappetising and out of place.
I was in any event in a bad mood, one of those moods where the possibility of writing one more column seemed as likely as a one-legged man with vertigo climbing Everest backwards without drawing breath.
Being a writer is wonderful in that most times there is no-one else to tell you what to do.
There again being a writer is sometimes a nightmare for the very same reason – there is no-one else to tell you what to do.
These are the times of inadequacy, creative block, call it what you will. At such times the thought of working behind the counter of a newsagent or as a shelf-stacker in Morrison’s seems strangely appealing.
I sat at the laptop screen and what words did emerge were slow, lumpen and dull. And I needed about seven hundred of them. I could just pretend, like the writer Jack Nicholson in the film ‘The Shining’. He clatters away on his typewriter all day only for it later to be revealed that he’s typed the same sentence over and over and over: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’
It was at the moment of discovering these hundred sheets of typed repetition that Shelley Duvall (his wife) realised all was not well with her husband or indeed with their marriage.
Come to that, his supposed novel wasn’t looking too hot either.
Alternatively I could confess that we are all human and as humans, we occasionally fall short and therefore for this one week my column would not appear. Would the world end? No.
Would people laugh at me on the street? Would I be hauled before a judge for failure to do my duty? How many people would even notice the omission? Had they all not got better things to do?
There have been almost three hundred columns since my efforts first saw the light of day at the pandemic’s start in 2019 and thus far it had not missed a beat – or in this case, a deadline.
This has been a matter of pride with myself but not I doubt with many others. Hang on though – I seem to have written a column about how I’m not able to write a column this week.
What a cheek.
Planet Corona – the First 100 Columns, IRON Press, £8.00, pmortimer@xlnmail.com