Pretending to be Normal

You know, I haven't written anything for weeks. It's not a case of writer's block as much as one of writer's break, one of those fallow periods you have now and then. In past years, I've found the summer a surprisingly unproductive season: I never write on holiday (so I no longer expect myself to); my day job slows down to such an extent that the dust even loses all motivation to shift in the stale air; and August gets filled with the festivals.

I've come to accept that summer isn't a time to try to push myself into generating new poems. But it's an odd sensation, since I feel like I'm pretending to be a normal person. The pretence can't last long, of course. I start to fidget interally and can't really rest after a while. And normal people don't exactly get excited about going to a Messiaen concert or get interested in hearing Lithuanian poets read. In fact, I have strong suspicion that all normal people usually found in Edinburgh evaporate for the month of August, perhaps due to the heat generated by the sudden influx of artistic types from all over the globe. Maybe there's a solution to the looming energy crisis in there somewhere. Now, if only we could find a way to harness ...