‘Confusticate and bebother these doctors’ as Bilbo might have said. Today I have to waste an hour of my precious retirement time visiting a redheaded twelve year old who will undoubtedly tell me I need to take more tablets to propitiate the drug companies. I hate having to upset him but he has still to learn how stubborn and opinionated old ladies can be and how much they like to be respected.

   Later: He’s a god! I love him like a son. My tests showed almost normal sugar levels over the last three months; doctor all smiles and relief at not having to goad me on, and I’m let off both taking more medication and testing with one of those nasty jabby things. 

I went for a walk to celebrate then, less wisely, bought an almond croissant to eat with my coffee. I will do penance for that for a week.

Back to the original subject - time and how it is spent. Protecting mine has become a bit of an obsession. Which meant I could understand the heroine of Sue Townsend's latest, ‘The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year’ (but that didn’t mean I enjoyed the book). As the mother of twins the eponymous heroine suffered post natal sleep deprivation times two; then there came years of thankless domestic slog until her twins turned into brilliant but autistic, antisocial, cuckoos and finally left home. This was the signal for her to fulfil the promise she made herself during the aeons of exhaustion. I have a feeling I made the same promise to myself when, with three babes under three, I forgot what a whole night’s sleep was like for many years. As time went by the pressure of being responsible for the scene-shifting, driving, housework, providing food and comfort, in short playing the complex archetypal role of parent for them, crowded out my own identity. That’s how it felt at the time.

I promised myself I would get back to myself. Now I suspect there wasn’t a self to get back to. I was always just me. This is it. Get on with it. 

When I sit down to write each day, getting progressively more depressed with what comes out, I remember Agatha Christie who had to clear a corner of the kitchen table surrounded by family detritus, to write the novels that earned her a living. You just haven’t got what it takes Carol!

To rub this in I’ve started rereading Agatha again and am, as ever, impressed by the tightness of her plots; the speed of the action and the absence of anything extraneous. Good as modern crime writers are we have come to expect some side-tracking from the procedure, rambles into the ids, egos and Weltanschauung of the chief protagonist, and often the killer. The closest AC comes to giving us this is a dip into Miss Marple’s past to see the tragic loss of her lover in the Great War. Otherwise the plot and the characters driven by it stick closely to the storyline with only the most essential fleshing out of personality. Every word counts as a clue or a red herring. It’s what makes for such good TV. Virtually no piece of dialogue is without significance. She is admirable.

Since my ritual re-reading of Harry Potter over Christmas I can’t find attraction in any book. I tried reading the last of the Lewis Trilogy by Peter May which has just come out. I was annoyed by its frequent clumsiness of style (who am I to criticise? At least he has written something readable; chosen for publication.  But there, I do.) I think he wrote it in a hurry and forgot to go back over it to polish the rough edges.

After that I tried ‘The Woman who...’ I don’t think I like humorous books much. The deifying of the heroine was a predictable outcome which anyway has been done before.  (I wonder if Julian of Norwich wasn’t just trying to get a bit of peace and quiet.) Before the end I was cross with the woman for her selfishness and irritated by the whole thing. The only bit that made me smile was the Holy Chapati. 

Maybe I was in a grumpy mood. I tested myself by trying a book that has been sitting unopened on my shelves for a long time (I think someone gave it to me) Thorne Smith’s ‘Topper.’ Got five pages in and gave up. Hardly cracked the spine. No, I don’t like books that set out to be humorous. I wasn’t keen on Bertie Worcester and Blandings although that might have been because I read most of them when I had a temperature of 105 F (viral pneumonia).