The World's Your Lobster

Blue Monday, that's what they call it nowadays: today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.  I don't know how they work it out, and I'm so lethargic I can't even be bothered to Google, but it can't be rocket science, can it?

It's a Monday, in January. Far enough away from Christmas to have failed already at some of the New Year Resolutions and still feeling the flab of the festive season but having forgotten the fun.  Everyone is skint and drinking decaff and trying to stay off the booze, and inevitably it will be raining. What's to like?

Personally, I thought last Monday was worse. I had one of those days today where time seemed to fly, due to its scarcity in relation to the amount of work to be completed to specific clock and calendar tyrannies.  I was still reeling somewhat, today, from the spookiness of Sunday.

Now, you know I just don't do spooky.  Not usually.

I went to a poetry workshop. I was seeking inspiration, looking to improve and learn some new techniques.  It was in a photographer's gallery, and was about using photographs to spark creative writing: you might have noticed my interest in the juxtaposition of the visual and the word.  The first exercise we had to do was to choose one of the photographs and describe it.  Not in a poem, simply focusing on detailed observation of the physical.  Then we had to imagine what was happening just outside the frame, what might have happened just before, what would happen just afterwards, bring some imagination into the shot.  And I started to write.

Not a poem, no. Because you won't have failed to notice from my eternal whingeing, whining, bedwetting angst that I can't write any more.

Anyhow, moving swiftly on....(sob).... I started to write notes, a stream of thought, and suddenly it was about my grandad, and the day he died, and my mum. And I thought about how it might have been, that day that we never quite understood, and I felt sad for my mum and I sat thinking for a while about her, and grandad, and thought how nice it would be to see her and tell her what I was thinking.

Then we carried on with the workshop for a while longer, and she was still in my thoughts. And when I came out, there was a message on my phone saying, Hurry home, your mother is here. She had got into the car and driven 100 miles, unplanned, unexpected, unannounced, on the offchance I would be in.  She just felt she wanted to see me  -  couldn't really explain why.

I found it rather unnerving, but it meant I had the chance to read her what I'd written. It made her cry, which then made me think that perhaps I should have kept it to myself  -  but she said she cried because she liked it. 

If I could get it to coalesce into a poem, I'd be a hell of a lot happier. Maybe my Monday could make it all the way to violet, or even pink.