From the archive: Blog Written With A Terrible Cold

I’ve got a terrible cold. Having come out the other side of the sore throat>sneezing>coughing thing, I spent a wonderful day in the woods, writing words with autumn leaves. The day after that, the sore throat returned and now, well, round I go again.

Meanwhile, I’m extending my ideas on re-wilding: our self, and our words. As my cold is so central to my world at the moment, perhaps it’s no surprise that that has crept in to my writing. To get a flavour of the writing, and to understand the human cold a little better, here’s an extract.

‘…If fear was the real problem, then all those things that I’d been told were wrong with my writing must surely just be symptoms of that deeper issue. To use a metaphor, they were the sneeze and the cough, but they weren’t the cold virus itself. With a cold, the sneeze and the cough are your body’s efforts to get rid of the virus. They are symptoms, but they are also strategies, an action plan that your body embarks on when threatened. Perhaps my caged writing was the same. The restriction, the words that didn’t work, might be my body and mind’s strategy for avoiding what it feared. The strategies had been put into operation unconsciously. But that wasn’t so surprising. Only 7% of what happens is conscious, the remaining 93% is unconscious. If the issues on the page were strategies, then surely they were keeping me safe. They were a cage that although it restricted me, also protected me. Given that vital role, it was no wonder they were hard to address…’

This article was first published on December 7th 2012

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.