27/07/21 21:08

Well, I’m starting my new, blue, bought through Etsy, specially made for this project notebook, today.  Along with a new fountain pen and “writer’s blood” ink.  The pen’s short, black plastic barrel leads nicely to the gold screw thread where the golden ridged cap would ordinarily sit.  But for now, she rests atop the wooden barrel, pleased to not be of any use except for the weighting of the now lengthy implement of word writing.

I’m sat on a wooden chair, resting my (monogrammed) brown leather notebook holder on a table of the same colour whilst the sun sets on a Tuesday Cumbrian evening.  That’s right, I’m not in London.  Neither am I in Paris.  I’m on a well-deserved holiday with my two boys, enjoying the privileged solitude of anonymity in an area that is of unnatural natural beauty. 

I can fully understand how poets and writers, like Wordsworth and Ransome, found their inspiration from here.  The surrounding serenity (aside from my boys playing cricket, frisbee or swords) is calming to the soul.  It is here that creativity is not forced.  The green of the trees, more shades than the Dulux range, supply the much-needed fresh air.  The birds, perched, sing of their chirpy happiness throughout the day, not just at silly o’clock as the golden sunlight bursts through the curtained morning.

Can I compare the countryside to the seaside for writing motivation?  Absolutely not.  It’s like asking if you prefer strawberries or jigsaws.  It is all dependant on mood.  Both have advantages, both have their merits.  However, you can’t eat strawberries with an elastic band and you can’t do a jigsaw on a trampoline. 

The sun setting in Ibiza calls for beat-heavy bass music whilst the glowing sun metamorphoses from the burning ball of gas to the golden light of The Hesperides.  As the evening draws in, the Lake District air chills, the breeze drops and clouds silently pass overhead as the moon provides her bathing light in the clear blackness of the night sky.

Yet Paris, well, Paris is different.  Paris is a city.  Although that is almost a derogatory term.  She is more than that.  She is my muse.  I have still so much more to discover about her.  She has still so much more to offer me. 

Come night-time in Paris, the city opens her arms to the multitude of denizens that have become enamoured with her encapsulating cosmopolitan personas.  The hoi polloi and the bourgeoisie, the aristocrat and the artist, the hedonist and the hermit, the surrealist and the sophisticate, the bohemian and all the ones in between.  The magic she supplies is only conjured by those who visit and is limited by nothing.

I can fully understand how writers like Hemingway and Stein were captured by her charms and held steadfast in her embrace, much the same way that poets accept the greenery of nature.