Writing en famille, or, how can I make your tea when I am being her cat?

You may be asking yourselves where the heck I’ve been. If you find out, do tell; I’d quite like to know myself.

[Is that it? I thought you had some profound point or other to share - Ed]

Oh very well. I’ve been staying with my parents. The menage includes an assortment of siblingery, cousinage, nuncleness and auntification, and a toddler, of whom I am the proud aunt. And as a proud aunt, I of course spent thundering great chunks of the week on hands and knees pretending to be a cat visiting a post office.

[Adorable. Now, about that point?]

The cat thing was relevant. [To whom?] To my point. This profound point you want me to write about. [Get on with it then]

Fine. I was getting on with it, thank you.

Anything to add? No?

As I was intending to say, I discovered that creative writing Does Not Happen in the presence of large quantities of family (or in the presence of Inner Editors. [I am still here, you know]). Especially family that photographed you in nappies, flicking porridge across the walls, grinning from ear to ear and squeaking ‘fuck!’ in two-year-old glee. Or family that has just seen you scampering up and down the hall on hands and knees that very morning, twittering ‘miaow miaow, I’ve got a letter!’ to what you thought was a highly appreciative audience of only one. There were a couple of quiet evenings, with no guests to be polite to. I had planned on borrowing a smidgeon of my mother’s broadband and feeding the blog therewith. Somehow, I cooked dinner. Oddly enough, I ended up watching movies with a bunch of morosely giggling teenagers (how do they do it? How on earth can one creature be morose and giggly at the same time? Is it hormones? Is it drugs?) because the computer and the TV share a room. I finally got to the computer and midnight found me playing Tetris and discussing the family’s current crop of bellyflopping marriages with my mother. I even tried to explain about the blog, but my mother was far more interested in my week in the office. In which I merely disembowelled photocopiers and accidentally [why, do people normally do this on purpose?] glued my hair to a copy of Virgil’s Eclogues.

At the end of the visit, I realised I hadn’t written a damn thing. Not so much as a To-Do list.

Now, I wanted to make a deep and poignant point about the self-consciousness our families wittingly or unwittingly inflict on us. I wanted to discuss the impossibility of taking myself seriously when surrounded by people who still have that (short) poem about furry bumblebees I wrote age seven. How can I give your time and attention to, of all things, writing? My sister has been telling me how pretentious I am since I was eleven. My mother thinks I am fuzzy-wuzzy-stripy-buzzy adorable. My aunt reminds me of my childhood chronic inability to spell ‘whether’. And obviously, being pretentious, adorable and stupid as a bucket of pig-nuts, how could I possibly think I could write? I wanted to make quite a big deal of the emotional scarring this extensive lack of faith in my abilities has had on me. I wanted to weep, and announce that they had all given me Writer’s Block, and quote Douglas Adams*.

But the truth is, really, that when you come right down to it, I am a lazy cow. Watching the Matrix (again. Crush on Hugo Weaving. Sorry) and gossiping won.

Sorry.

*I paraphrase, but he used to describe the work of a writer as “staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank screen until your forehead starts to bleed.”