Tuppence For My Thoughts

Increments. I'm clawing back minutes from  my still overwhelming desire to nap all the time and slowly, very slowly, re-establishing old habits and getting my brain back in writing shape.

I'm not writing for 1.5-2 hours each day before heading off for the Arvo Job (*sigh* those were the days), but I am sitting at the keyboard every morning and doing 30 minutes of work. Slowly, very slowly, one sentence at a time, stories are coming together. My brain is making fewer and fewer grating noises. Soon, I'll try to get up earlier and add another 30 minutes to that workout.

I'm not writing on the train yet, but I'm not snoozing all the way into Melbourne either, which is another minor triumph. I'm retraining my brain to not automatically start dozing as soon as I sit down by reading. Once again, the session lasts a magical 30 minutes, then, so far, no matter how hard I try, I do nod off. It's the same thing on the way home. The books I'm getting through are light and fun tomes that I can sneak in as an acceptable and more interesting alternative to napping, and hopefully I'll be able to extend these reading periods minute by minute, and eventually, when my brain is more limber, switch back to writing on the train. As I said, increments. My brain is like one of those pudgy, down-and-out, Rocky-like characters who slip on their old tracksuits and try to get back in shape so they can once more be contenders.

Anyway, at the moment, my light and easy read is the short story collection Partners in Crime (the cover on my copy is very boring compared with the very Jazz Age, 1929 first edition cover pictured here) one of the Tommy and Tuppence books by Agatha Christie. I read this series many decades ago, and absolutely adored it then, so I knew PiC would be just the ticket. Very light, very easy, very charming and amusing, full of words like 'foozle', expressions like 'old thing', and cases that involve discussions about haughty, titled folk and the likelihood of a hat pin being used as a possible murder weapon in a time when thoroughly modern girls with bobbed hair wear their cloche hats pulled tight down over their heads. Even thought there are corpses a plenty and much mayhem, it's all so good natured and friendly, cosy and reliable that one quickly forgets about the poor victims. Deep these books are not, but certain pertinent social observations are clever and snortingly funny.

The gaiety, the banter, young characters who have experienced the horrors of the Great War and are determined to live life to the full. The dazzling Jazz Age and its bright young children trying hard to forget the darkness and death they knew only too well was still out there waiting for them. T&T got my brain ticking along again in the nicest possible way, and sent me off on tangents about society, wars, permissiveness, and our modern obsession with crowbarring in unrelenting doses of UR ST whenever we have a fictional male-female partnership. One of the best things about the T &T books is that one simply doesn't have to put up with that kind of rot.