Is any post better than none? Yes, I triumphantly tell myself having a glass of wine at my side this evening. I wish to record that after three days of intermittently trying to take an agapanthus out of a pot in which its roots had swollen to such a degree that it was about to break the pot, I have succeeded. Carving knife used to cut, gouge, wrench the matted roots away from the side, brute force and without blood spilled. Here are other full pots and the one emptied awaiting something else. Plus the flower which will bloom later in the summer.

That was written in March and has nothing to do with writing. But I think I was equating the task with what I should have been doing with my writing, keeping at it rather than doing anything else. But here we are in May with it un-posted. And nothing else to take its place.

It’s the usual excuse, which I’ve written about before, a feature of writing especially, creating something from thin air. There are all the reasons of busyness; the garden – fighting off slugs with nematodes, grit, copper scourers and a homemade concoction of garlic, onion and cayenne pepper – the latter the most successful! And a lot of reading, essential in choosing the right books for the reading group, but also, mostly, an easy pleasure. From Bee Sting by Paul Murray, enjoyable but too clever by half, to Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck which is brilliant and essential reading especially for anyone, that’s most of us, who is concerned about the ‘refugee crisis’.

No more of that though, as my main purpose is to remind myself and anyone else interested, that the novel will not get written without the effort and time. The crunch is to convince myself that this new, or not so new, venture, needs determination in the same way that I gave to all the other novels I’ve written. And that I approached that agapanthus overcrowding the pot. Get on with it, don’t give up, write, write and edit edit till the whole thing shines like silk.