Week 51 - Building Blocks of Success

Do you remember when you were a small child and you had one of those brightly coloured toys that was made up of different shaped holes? You had square blocks, round ones and so on and you had to fit the right shaped blocks into the right shaped holes.

Early learning at its best. Except even then I wasn’t overly fond of playing by the rules and I can vividly remember trying to hammer a round peg into a square whole.

How about that for a sign of things to come?

For the past eight days that’s what I’ve been doing. With the exception of a brief reprieve on Saturday to pick up some CDs from Calow Classics, all I have done this week is work.

If my name was Jack, I would be a very dull boy right now.

It must be said that there is a sense of the fate about it all. As inevitable as a Thomas Hardy heroine’s bad luck, I have too much work to fit in the available time. With just a week and a day to go, I am drowning in final draft pages, notes and those little scarps of paper I always meant to type up but now litter my desk like confetti from a Royal wedding.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Why? Because if you have no deadlines, if you can carry on and on like an Oscar acceptance speech, if there’s always more time then chances are you will never finish anything. Which means you’ll never be in with a chance of publishing anything...

Let’s be clear. It’s incredibly tough, I have bags under my eyes that would probably exceed an airline’s carry on quota and the last time I took time off Gladstone and Disraeli where squaring up to one another; but I can’t think of a better way to spend my time.

Unless I get my Fisher-Price garage down from the loft...