Readers Block

For the last couple of days I have been hobbling around my house, in agony, using a pitching wedge as a crutch as I attempt to get from one room to another. I’m not sure exactly what happened but I have had a sore ankle for the last five days. Actually that should read ankles as the pain miraculously jumped from one ankle to the other.

I’ve been to the doctor (again with the aid of my golf club) and he’s suggested further tests once we get the pain under control. I have a theory on the cause of the problem but that is based on diagnosis by Google so I’ll wait till the experts confirm my suspicions.

Boredom truly is a killer. Sitting around watching daytime TV is doing my head in. I know I’ve written before about turning the telly off and reading a book or doing something constructive instead but there are two problems with that.

Today is the first day that the pain hasn’t been such a distraction that I can actually sit and write something. Concentrating on reading would have been an exercise in futility. Secondly ever since I began my efforts and writing my own novel (some days it’s a masterpiece, others its awful and a waste of time and effort,) I’ve found it really hard to finish any piece of fiction that is more than a few pages long.

I don’t know what it is exactly; I just can’t keep going till the end. I read the first couple of chapters and then I just stop. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them as such; it’s more that it is physically impossible for me to open that book. In the last twelve months I have started novels by Stewart Lee, T.S. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy and Graham Greene among others and have yet to finish one.

The latest is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, one of my favourite authors. Up to page the 196 the characters are intriguing and although a plot has yet to reveal itself I want to know what happens to them. The book itself was a gift from a loved one and has a lovely personal inscription which makes me determined to finish it.

The thing is I’ve been stuck on that page for the last three weeks. There is at least another 500 to go. Every time I pick it up I start texting or I fall asleep or I think about something I want to write myself or…I continue to make excuses for a lack of self discipline. When I was younger, before fancy digital TV and android phones a few days in my sick bed usually meant catching up on reading.

So for the next few hours, I’m switching off my phone and my laptop and I’m going to read Owen Meany and I won’t switch them back on until I’ve read at least the next fifty pages. Take that technology.

Unfortunately I’ve left it upstairs beside my bed so it might take a while before I can even get started. Now where is that golf club?