I can be doing something else and still end up stuck on a sentence.
That is the nuisance of it. People talk about writing as though it is some noble discipline, or a calling, or one of those things that sounds better if you say it while looking out of a window. In practice, I am usually trying to do one thing, and part of my mind has caught on a phrase and will not let it go.
It does not have to be much. That is part of the annoyance. It is rarely anything grand. Usually, it is some small thing that catches in passing. The way somebody says one ordinary word. A bit of sky that is neither one colour nor another. The way a man walks in front of you. Nothing there that ought to matter that much. Yet there it is. A line starts forming, and once that happens, I am stuck with it.
Then I have to keep it in my head.
That is the part nobody mentions. Repeating it to myself so it does not go. Not writing it down, because I am in the wrong place for that, but carrying it round in my head while pretending to be a normal person buying milk or listening properly or making coffee. I nod at things. I answer. I carry on with whatever I am meant to be doing. Meanwhile, part of my mind is elsewhere, going over the wording, trying not to lose one exact bit of it.
It is not ideal.
This has happened in the middle of conversations, which is not a flattering thing to admit. Not because the conversation was boring, necessarily. Sometimes people say perfectly sensible things, and I am listening, up to a point. However, some phrases come in sideways and half of me is suddenly occupied. I am still there. I can still make the right face. I can still say, ‘Yes, exactly,’ at roughly the right moment. But part of me is trying to hold on to a sentence before it goes.
You begin to see why this could be taken for bad manners.
It probably is bad manners, in fact, though I would like some credit for not having chosen it. I did not sit down years ago and decide that ordinary life needed a running commentary. I would have been better off if I had not. Life is quite enough on its own. It does not need me trying to find the right words for it while it is still happening. That helps nobody. Least of all when somebody is standing in front of me telling me something important, and part of my mind has wandered because they used a word in a way I had not heard before.
Still, this is where the less comforting bit comes in.
It would be easy to leave all this as an interruption, and some of it is. It gets in the way. It arrives badly. It makes simple things less simple. But that is not all of it. Some moments do not feel settled to me until I have found words for them. I do not mean only important moments. Not weddings, funerals or world events. I mean small things as well. A look. A pause. A stupid remark in a queue. Something about the light on the road when I am meant to be paying attention to where I am going.
I can leave those things alone, sometimes.
Not always.
That is the part I mistrust. Because it sounds like observation if you put it nicely, but I am not sure it is always that. Some of it may be control. Some of it may be distance. If I can get hold of a thing in words, it bothers me less. Which is odd, because the writing itself is often what keeps it hanging around. Still, there is a moment, once I have got the sentence right or near enough, when something in me settles. That helps. Whether it is a good habit is another matter.
It means that while life is still going on, part of me may already be half outside it, storing it for later.
I would like to pretend that sounds better than it is. Professional, perhaps. Useful. Something I have got used to. But most of the time, it is just a nuisance. You are in the middle of the day, and the day has barely had a chance to be itself before part of your mind starts turning it into material. That is how my mind works.
This is probably why I am doing this.
Not because I have anything so grand as a message. Not because every passing thought deserves preserving. God knows it does not. Most of them should be allowed to die where they first appeared. But some do not. Some hang on. Some keep asking. Some turn up while I am trying to do something else and do not go until I have at least admitted they were there.
So I tell myself now and then that I ought to leave life alone and simply get on with it.
Then I find I have been holding that sentence in my head for the last ten minutes.