I'm turning my study upside-down but I still can't find my dictionary of quotations. It's starting to obsess me: if can't find my dictionary of quotations I can't write the blog post I want to write, and I've been putting it off for far too long.

The quote is about procrastination. It's from Macbeth, and I know it begins "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow", but I can't remember the rest, and I really want it for a pithy opening to my latest post, which is three months overdue. I don't normally like being ostentatiously post-modern in style, but I've got to break this drought. Forgive me blogosphere for I have sinned; it's been eighty-seven days since my last post. And counting.

I try one of the filing cabinet drawers I never visit, but all I get is a needlessly mocking puff of dust.

I don't know why this winter has found me unable to complete the simplest chore, yet here I am at the desk, looking at the big orange square for the first time in twelve weeks. Or I should say, there I was, because now I'm in the kitchen, and I know I don't keep my dictionaries in the kitchen, but I do keep the kettle there, and the tea.

And the things to spend forty minutes making sandwiches with.

Outside the window, through the girlie grey steam, the autumn weeds are waving in a distinctly springish wind. I think I could almost qualify as a perpetual motion machine, infinitely running a distracted loop between the untended garden and the untended computer, if it weren't for the midpoint between the two, which is the television and which is being tended just fine.

I stopped doing creative things three months ago. What happened?

It's got a sort of light blue cover. It's got to be around here somewhere.

To be continued...