What am I going to write about?

Well, write something. Go on. You’ve got nothing else to do.

A soundtrack of puppy snores and rain.

But there’s a problem. The ideas have fled with the sunshine. Where there used to be jostling dozens muttering at me, there is bleached rock and silence.

Maybe a cup of tea would help… Or an actual drink, or a bath… A drink in the bath?

I wonder if the washing has finished… What was that noise?

Wind, it was just the wind.

Now was I going to write about the sensation of vanishing, little by little?

Or a funny story to do with a dog and a sock?

Maybe I would finally find a way to tell a story of love and what happened to it…

Perhaps it was a diatribe on verbification. (A distracting Google properly calls it anthimeria.) Toileting, for example, with regard to getting a dog to do a poo where you want it to. Not an actual toilet in sight.

There was, I’m sure, some literary mileage in the proportion of life spent on cookie permission notices, when one doesn’t know what a cookie is.

Or will I get ready to weep over the pain of our lockdown – women and children first into this misery morass?

No. It wasn’t that. Could it be a plea to the nation? I bought preserved lemons for a thing, and I can’t remember what. Two jars, I ordered. Now they just taunt me from the shelf.

Is it the boredom? A national crisis of tedium – while They do their flailing best to row us away from the rapids, we wallow, fed up and fractious.

There used to be a time when I could write to pass the time. Let my thoughts spill out in surprisingly interesting squiggles on the screen. That time, it seems, has passed.

What am I going to write about now?