Danger! Genius at work....

A while ago, we Gerard Butler fans were asked to contribute a story for a book detailing our GB-inspired trip to Glasgow back in January. “A doddle!” I thought, and plonked myself down, confident that I was about to produce the next seminal work of literary genius, albeit limited to three hundred words....

Coffee IV in place, I sit in front of my computer with fingers poised above the keyboard, and wait for inspiration to strike. It’s a long wait. Like my computer screen, my mind remains a blank. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building. Nobody’s home. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Diddly squat. Far from striking or even tapping gently at the door of my mind, Inspiration has packed its spotted handkerchief and taken a hike to pastures new, leaving me bereft of all ideas with which to titillate my potential readers. (I like to think there may be more than one.) However, after this, I fear my readership may decline somewhat and follow sanity and Inspiration out the door.

Why is it that I have ideas in the most inconvenient places, but when I have a deadline to meet, everything shuts down and refuses to cooperate? I’m often in the bath when a concept occurs to me, and by the time I’ve dried off and hastened to get pen and paper, my memory has played its usual trick and the idea has done a bunk. That’s one of the pitfalls of getting older as I am discovering to my cost. I simply cannot retain things in my head for more than a nanosecond these days unless I can commit thoughts to paper the very instant they occur to me. One cannot interrupt coitus with one’s beloved by shouting “Hang on a mo’ while I write something down!”. It’s simply not the done thing, not to mention a tad rude to admit that you may not have had your mind on the job in hand, so to speak. (Oh, the sheer volume of my untapped genius that has been lost in such situations!)

I have a brain like a sieve nowadays. It gads about all over the place like a bluebottle searching for fresh turds. I have become known in my local supermarket for screeching suddenly to a halt mid-aisle to scribble maniacally on the back of my shopping list, much to the disgust of other shoppers. I have learned to do my shopping late at night to minimise the risks of being run over by trollies travelling far too close and too fast to avoid a collision. But as usual, I digress. That’s my brain for you. I was saying how my mind flits all over the place; I’m sure that part of the problem is my advancing rapidly into middle-age, but am equally convinced that sitting in front of a computer day in day out has played its’ part. That gently whirring contraption that sits so innocently on your desk, urging you to forget everything and just play one more game of Solitaire....Where’s the harm in that? I’ll tell you. While you’re pitting your wits against the seemingly benign machine, it’s gradually but subtly draining all the grey matter out of your head via your fingertips and storing all accumulated memory on its’ own little chips. “Out of memory,” it lies if you try to open more than one application at once. Sure it is, only it’s you that’s out of memory. Your computer is chortling happily to itself, knowing full well that it can repeat the process ad infinitum once you’ve recharged your batteries with a quick kip. It’s all part of the master plan; computers are taking over the world. They will drain the knowledge from every living being on the planet, then eradicate all human life by electrocuting us all as we type.

Paranoia rules. I find that increases with the degeneration of my memory. Perhaps it’s directly linked? Maybe I can attribute my ever-expanding waistline to that too? Got to blame it on something. Perhaps it’s all part of the computers’ master plan that we all become fat gibbering wrecks who are tethered to our keyboards in order to facilitate the removal of the very essence of our minds? Who knows? I certainly don’t, but I’m sure this thing is conspiring against me somehow.

Where was I? Oh. Seeking inspiration. Um.