Empty.

I’m lacking material for a blog post. I’m tired of talking about House and Harry Potter. I’m tired of talking about meeting dogs on dark and dingy days in my little local market town. I’m tired of talking about matters relating to meaning, motivation and intimations of mortality. I can’t say any more about glum Swedish dramas until I watch the final episode on Saturday night and find out who did the dastardly deed, and I can’t reprise the old Lady B theme because my orbit has been entirely devoid of Lady Bs for quite a long time.

I thought I might make a post – or even a series of posts – about women-who-made-me-sad, but I’d only end up revealing things which are not fit for public consumption and become even more self-indulgent than I usually am in the process.

And then the light bulb flickered and inspiration fell upon me like a monsoon in Maharashtra. Why don’t I tell my life story in words without pictures? OK, here goes:

It was a dark and stormy night… Sorry; I’m not a beagle. Start again.

It was five minutes past five on a cold November morning in the year of our Lord 19-- (have you noticed how all old novels do that? They never give the actual year and I always wondered why. Now I know.) The place in which this tale begins was a cottage hospital situated in a northern English industrial city. The fifth chime of the geriatric clock in the old Victorian building had barely ceased its echo when the cry of a new born baby rent the silence of the ancient corridors (that was me.) Almost immediately, a male blackbird alighted on the window sill outside the room in which the new arrival was taking his first taste of antiseptic air. And then he began to sing.

Now, at this juncture I have to admit that such was my mother’s version of events and it must be questioned on the following grounds:

1. Blackbirds are rarely out of the roost as early as 5.05am in late November. Why would they be, since daylight is still a couple of hours in the future?

2. This is but the first reason to suspect that there’s a hint of a possible fiction going on here, the second being that blackbirds are not generally given to singing in November either. Singing is associated with the breeding season between late spring and early summer.

Then again, the blackbird might have been some angelic being in disguise, proclaiming the birth of a Very Special Personage for the enlightenment of coal miners, steelworkers, early-rising employees of the many ceramics factories in the neighbourhood, and insomniacs troubled by the density of soot particles in the smoky November air. (There weren’t many shepherds around where I was born. Sheep were known to be adversely affected by the smell.) If that is the case, sorry I failed.

And that’s just about my life in a nutshell. Maybe tomorrow will be kind and feed me some material worth talking about.