Blockage

Outside our house there's a storm drain. Two or three times a year I have to remember to lift the little grate, and with a plastic bag up to my elbow, scoop out the evil-smelling black gunge that has settled there. It's just nature's debris - rotting leaves and twigs and suchlike. Lord knows why it stinks so much but once or twice I have managed to get this sludge on my hands only to find that the pong remains even when I've washed up thoroughly. Yeuurghh!

If only it was so easy to cure "writer's block" or "blogger's block" - lift a little lid on top of your head and scoop out the blockage, allowing the ideas and the words to flow freely again. Some blogs I have enjoyed reading have occasionally ground to a halt, including some of those listed in my Planet Blog. I'm wondering if Kara, author of "Hanging Hope on a Heads Up 1973 Penny" has been kidnapped by aliens as she hasn't blogged since early July. My fellow atheist Krip ("Aaargh! Stop the World I Want to Get Off!") and even Vlad the Gorilla, Madame Friday and Arthur Clueless have all suffered from blogger's block.

So I came to this keyboard tonight after the latest episode of "EastEnders" - come on Jake! - and I'm ready to tap away at the keyboard but there's nothing to say. It's like there's a big doo-doo in my head and it won't flush away. So I'm left rambling on about blockages.

I had part of a letter printed in the Sheffield "Star" this evening. It was in response to Saturday's front page story about a ten year old boy who "found" a workman's tools in his school. The mother was incensed - not bothering to consider her son's thievery but instead blaming the contractor who had left his tool box in a cordoned off part of the school. Apparently she was so mad that as she drove her sweet little darling home, she threw a knife he'd "found" out of the window.

I can't understand why they edited out my description of this lad as an "Artful Dodger" or why they missed out the bit about the bad example his mother was setting by throwing things out of her car window - especially knives dammit!

Ah well... those last two paragraphs helped to unblock the pipes. Maybe October in the northern hemisphere is to blame for blogger's block. Summer's gone and ahead are dark nights, frosts, clothes on the radiators, the cat miaowing to come in rather than to go out. It could make you feel a little depressed if you let it.