Creative idleness.

This 'flu has hit us both hard, but is slowly losing its force, Normally in six days I walk thirty miles. This week two and a half miles. I was worried that I'd find it difficult to get started again, but to no avail. Saturday and Sunday, three and a half miles each and no ill effects. Today back to five miles, and could have gone further.

Yesterday I celebrated Mass at St Dyfrig and St Samson's without difficulty. No terrible outbursts of coughing or snivelling, although at other times of day this was terrible. Apart from walking, I spent much of the day watching the remaining episodes of 'The Mallorca Files', which certainly improved as it went along.

Today I did the week's shopping, and in the course of doing so, gave myself a terrible fright. As I came to the checkout in Tesco's the zip on my outer jacket stuck, at the top, and I I had to perform a few contorsions to extract my wallet from an inner pocket. My house key and Tesco club card are on the same ring, and once I'd had it scanned and picked up my change, I then had to put goods, keys, change etc in the appropriate places before leaving the store. Somehow, in the confusion of not being able to get my top jacket open, I dropped the keys, and only discovered this when I was standing on the doorstep back home. 

Clare was out and not answering her 'phone, but fortunately a neighbour was in and I was able to borrow a spare key to get in the house, dump the shopping and then head back to Tesco's, hoping and praying it was the only place I'd visited where I might have dropped the keys. I was fortunate that they had been picked up and left at the Customer Service desk, so all was well in the end. I think that's the first time I have lost a set of keys since I lost a set irretrievably in July 2013 on an outing to Abergavenny with Mike and Gail. Funny how something as simple as a stuck zip can initiate a chain of events that sow chaos. 

The power of co-incidence and chance encounters is something I have found myself engaging with as I've been writing my ever evolving novel. We never quite know how anything in life is going to work out. Look carefully at what seems to be a predestined straight line through life, and in detail, it's often wavy, wobbly and almost broken. There's an inner logic to events and connections hardly visible at the time. Change is never as absolutely random as we think of it. I now have developed a full plot outline, and am finding that filling in the detail is less difficult than I thought, with new characters and incidents unexpected emerging from the depths of my imagination.

Spending a lot of time this past week in bed half asleep or awake in the dead of night seems to have given free rein to my inventiveness. I don't get up and write, but occasionally scribble down notes, which I don't use much later, as the ideas seem to prompt me to insert them in the right places as I am reading through and making an effort to spent time writing. It's decidedly odd, but enjoyable.

I wish I could write for longer, but sitting to do so for any length of time becomes uncomfortable and painful. I get so frustrated. It seems so unfair.