Two lives running concurrently

I worked quite hard yesterday, and was surprised to find that I had more energy than you might have expected from someone who only had about 3 hours sleep the previous night.

The nightmare job that should have been done about 9 months ago is now coming to a close, and I feel so confident about this that I have booked the transportation for it to happen in the next two days. I can then get on with the cosy and lightly decorative stuff which will see me through until the other side of Christmas. I am - inexplicably - quite looking forward to it.

The thing about stone-carving is that you have to know exactly what you are doing before you begin, otherwise the whole thing ends up like a pig's arse. Don't believe anyone who tells you that their sculpture just 'grows' organically in an unexpected way from the block. If they are telling the truth, then their sculpture is about as valid as a bit of flotsam picked up from a beach - pretty but meaningless.

So having made all (or most of) the mistakes and all (or most of) the decisions before you go anywhere near the block, your mind is left to play on it's own as you do the work, as during a 'take your child to work' day (thanks to Raf for putting me onto the above image, btw).

Snippets of conversations - both real and imagined - run through your head, and whole tracts of award-winning bloggery are written in a ghost hand, only to disappear in the setting sun - like the life-changing dream you wrote down in the night, only to find it had turned into meaningless nonsense by sunrise.

The opposite can be true too. On more than one occasion, I have been troubled for days by a seemingly insurmountable technical problem at work, only to have the solution presented to me in a deep and (so I thought) dreamless sleep, in the middle of the night. I have sat upright in the darkness until I was sure that this problem was - indeed - solved, then gone back to sleep thinking that it will reveal itself to be nonsense the next day, but no. It was still there in the morning, and put into perfect practice during the rest of the day. No wonder I get so tired at night - I must spend all of it working, which explains why I take so much of the day off.

Power tools make day-dreaming either impossible or downright dangerous. When your thoughts drift away from the business end of a diamond blade rotating at 8000 rpm, then fingers can be lost. Apart from anything else, the noise is enough to drive the demons out of your head, and it's the demons which lead to the most creative thinking.

But the rhythmical tapping of a half-pound dummy-mallet against a quarter-inch chisel makes the demons dance, and the Devil - they say - has all the best tunes.