Okay, so I came
to learn the hard way that children and paint are not good bedfellows when it
comes to writing. You may already know this; you may already have come to terms
with the idea that the craft must be committed with four walls (or a peaceful distance)
separating the two.
Ordinarily I
write by night, usually after my daughter is in bed and my partner has gone to
work. At this point, I usually turn the idiot box off and settle into a comfortable,
undisturbed, flow. It’s been a routine that has worked for me for years now,
and I've been happy with it. As long as I can punch out half a short story and
add two thousand or more words to the current novella I am working on, I am
happy.
But today
was not one of those days.
At
nine-thirty, I had close to two hundred handwritten pages. Each neatly bound
and filed. By nine-thirty-two, I had roughly one hundred and ninety-one. What
happened to the other eight pages? Well, those pages now belonged to my
daughter. She had liberated those eight pages for herself, scrawled on each of
those goddamn pages with paint and crayon and whatever else she could find, and
then, somewhat happily, pinned each to the fridge door as if to torment me just
that little bit more.
I was a
broken man.
I could have
cried.
In fact, the
only thing stopping me breaking down like an overgrown, petulant, teenager was
the fact that beneath the random images my daughter had drawn were the words LOVE
YOU DADDY in script only the parent of a five year old could read.
Somehow,
that made it all right. And that’s the reason those pages still hang there even
now; bleeding a sorry mix of colours onto my brand new, chrome, fridge freezer.
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