"The way to . . .

. . . rock oneself into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw."

So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on Tuesday 22nd August 1922. She walked on the beautiful Sussex Downs and that week she was reading Thackeray and Joyce, and that month was reading Homer, Joyce, Proust, Ibsen and all the rest for The Common Reader. And, as for writing: that day she wrote in her diary "It is only 11.30 and I have left off Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street."

Firle Beacon by Duncan Grant

My fresh air was to go out and find that my broad beans have all germinated in the greenhouse (where they have to germinate, as mice will eat every last one in the garden). Cheered by that, I read Virginia Woolf's diary. And now I am settling down to write on a lovely poem by anon. And this blog is the equivalent of that diary. Here I am saying that oh thank goodness the end of that horrible RAE period is in sight. I see the chequered flag -- not with the success that I was aiming for, but with a far greater thing: the peace of mind that comes from a complete change of attitude to it. I have done my best, and somehow that always does the trick. "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." William Shakespeare.