Recently, I finished a whole pile of paintings about musical instruments, and put them on my page here. Now I’m sort of lying fallow. I used to worry about the inactivity that always seems to follow a period of hard work, but I’ve finally come to see it as something necessary, a bit like recharging batteries.
When I’m working hard, I just have to get on with it, and make myself ignore the things that need doing in the house. This means that when I’ve finished a body of work, the piles of clutter are quite overwhelming. But unfortunately, when I’ve got more time, the last thing I feel like doing is tidying up; what I really want to do is lie on the sofa and stare at the ceiling.
There is a writer (Doris Lessing? Iris Murdoch?) who said that you need to go through a period of  ‘drifting and dreaming’  before you get new ideas. But although I know it’s necessary, I still find it a frustrating time, and feel guilty that I’m not getting on with something constructive.
But I suppose we are all just so conditioned to think of daydreaming as a waste of time. A few years ago, a little boy in my child’s class was given a certificate in front of the whole school ‘For resisting the urge to daydream’. Isn’t that depressing? When surely most creativity stems from letting your mind ‘drift and dream’.
Meanwhile, I have at least been practical enough to dispose of five carrier bags of cassette tapes, which I’ve been tripping over in my room. A few months ago, these cassettes , plus their entire shelving, suddenly cascading off the wall as I was walking past them. They made a fantastic sound, and I suppose it was about time we got rid of them, as our cassette machine now plays everything so fast that it sounds like chipmunks, but it felt worryingly like a metaphor for something, though I’m not sure what. Although they had been fine on the wall for more than 10 years, they decided to collapse at 8.15am on a schoolday; not really my favourite time for a cassette catastrophe. I have been putting off sorting them out ever since, assuming that it would take several days, and then in the end it was only a couple of hours. I don’t think I’m very good at judging how long  jobs will take; some jobs look like they can be done in ten minutes, and then you find yourself, hours later, still at it, surrounded by every single tool from the tool box….