It's Still Life

The Last Four Pages
(in the style of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom’s interior monologue)

I poured myself into a cup of coffee this morning no sugar just milk, and then opened my notebook which has only four more pages left in it so that should give me eight days except the last page overleaf is a reorder form so I suppose that means seven days, oh that’s a week as I said, and outside the kitchen window the clouds are high and thin the sort that look as though somebody has stretched them with both hands and forgotten to let go, and it reminds me of the first notebook Grandmother gave me, well it was a diary actually with a little ribbon to mark the page and a key she warned not to lose, and she said I was to write in it every night before I turned out the light because that’s the way it’s done; you can’t write in the morning before anything happens, which made perfect sense at the time although I can’t remember what I found to write about, perhaps whether it was swimming weather or not — I wonder what became of that diary after Mum gave it along with a bag of old clothes to the charity shop — I don’t suppose Grandmother ever imagined I’d still be doing this sixty-five years later, but only in the mornings now because as soon as I came home that summer I forgot every rule she’d set down and wrote while I ate lumpy oatmeal, which Mum tried to disguise with buckshot-size raisins (as if raisins could make porridge less lumpy rather than adding another kind of lump), and I can still see them sitting there dark and glaring in the bowl and the spoon standing up almost by itself and Mum saying eat it before it gets cold although it was already cold by the time I’d finished writing, and perhaps that’s why I began writing in the mornings in the first place because there was something to do while I waited for the oatmeal to become edible, and now here I am with coffee instead of porridge and a notebook nearly finished and those clouds still stretched across the window and nothing much has happened yet, which would have worried Grandmother, but doesn’t worry me at all

6 November: poured myself into a cup of coffee, and bought a new notebook.