Here comes the mirror man.

I've been painting and drawing recently. I think I'm in retreat from the horrors of endless re-writing, but equally I think there's something rather desperate about it. It's like I'm gathering up my waning powers as I approach my significant birthday. During the day I sit in my office and look out into the garden at the bird table, watching the dramas enacted by those feathered thesps and their grudging turf war over meal worms and millet. I am a genuine fan of starlings these days: they're a speckled tag-team: always one on guard, one stabbing the fat ball and splintering off chunks for his mate on the ground. It's a slick operation. But I've lost all respect for fat idiot pigeons, and robins are just psychos. 

That's the daytime. In the sunshine. 

At night the window is a black mirror and the ghostly smear of my face stares back at me, like the Abyss in specs. I'm the man who continues to haunt himself, even though neither of us are really into it. Once again I am reminded of ancient deaf Goya, sat in his black walled dining room, slurping his soup under paintings of Saturn devouring his son and Judith topping Holofernes like a boiled egg. And here I am in my blackened room, drinking black coffee and staring at my pale refection in its black shirt, my white hair pluming over my head like the smoke from Ivor the Engine's chimney. Pwew Pwew. 

Yesterday, I did a pen and ink self portrait. I was drawing both members of the pop band Blasted Heath and Ben, who does the bits I don't do, looked saturnine and slightly bum-nosed, but basically a cool, pretty together guy. 

And I looked like a frightened tramp. Or like Tony Hancock, either just prior to or just after the suicide. But that is what I look like. When did that happen? This is why I've never managed to get the easy banter going with the staff in my local Winemark - I look like a warning from history. I look like someone who has their poster up behind the counter with a big red X next to it. And I barely drink these days! Well, weekends. That's normal isn't it? Its practically abnormal in a pandemic. 

So, I have been marshaling my skills. It's like gathering my children about me. I've been recording music. I have done some acrylic painting and some watercolour painting. I have done some drawing. I have done some screen-writing, some short story writing and some playwrighting. And then I find I have reached the end of my skill-set. I used to be a rather good dancer but no more. The hips dont lie but they do complain, loudly. I do these things and feel that if I'd practiced I might have been good at some of them, but I'm approaching a significant birthday and really, where has the time gone?

The time has come to do the things I can do well. With deep middle-age comes not stamina but patience. I can and will finish things. I will spend the appropriate time. I will finesse and I will know when to stop. And that's not wisdom, that's practice. And its earned. Like a face.