Wednesday 21st March

I am sitting in a Starbucks window seat, not on one of those ridiculously high stools with their narrow high counter, or in the leather sofa designed specifically to induce sleep on it’s habitué’s, but at a plain wooden table and chair where my croissant and latte (medium, not grande thank-you) wait to be consumed.  I am looking out over one of my favourite  parks; Green Park, and rightly named it is too, with its stately trees and sweeping slopes of rolling green grass.

The sun is streaming into my window and I am basking in it, gently turning my face to feel its warmth. At last it seems that Spring is finally here.  I was up particularly early and out by six-thirty today.  Walking, just walking and thinking about the world, life and my book, maybe plotting and planning the next moves of the protagonists in my new story.  It is going slowly, but quite well despite that. I am not the sort of writer who can just write reams and reams.  Mine is a process of constant re-reading; I read it as if someone else had written the story so far and I have to read it anew and begin the process of immersing myself in it, starting to believe in my characters, to begin to live their lives for them, before I can start to write the next bit.  I am just the humble translator of their thoughts, a slave to my characters whims.  Some days I don’t quite get there; I just read and re-read and maybe all I have achieved is changing a couple of adjectives, or maybe substituting a semi-colon for a comma.

I used to fret and worry that this writing was so slow, but it doesn’t matter.  Of course as a rationalist and an atheist I realise that nothing matters at all in the history of the Universe, in the immense spaces of time passed and yet to be played out, the entropy of the Universe, the death of the myriad stars, the workings of a single human mind, let alone the entire species or the survival of the planet itself counts very little. But then again contrary and simultaneous at the same time everything matters too.

Ah, the sun is warm on my face – surely this is the only God worth worshipping, for without its daily blessing we surely cease to exist.  Let us hope that it continues to burn brightly and that we don’t throw too much shit into the atmosphere to block out its life-giving warmth.  So while the sun is still shining, have a nice day.