Had the central heating boiler serviced yesterday. What joy, knowing that it is there, ready, at the touch of a button to keep at bay the chilly winds of Autumn. Obviously Mike has a rule that it can’t go on until October, regardless!!! Only this morning we discovered a leak in one of the pipes leading up to or away from the boiler itself. And there is very little space under the pipe to put something to catch the water. So until someone comes to sort us out, every 20 minutes or so I will be clambering into the loft to empty the tray into a bucket! I feel there is something deep and meaningful about having a drip that you can’t do much about.
I could wax lyrical about drips of water eroding rock over the centuries. That a single drop of water is held in shape by the surface tension – La Place’s law. Or simply that had we not noticed the drip, the ceiling might have eventually come down!
And you know exactly what I’m going to say now… that drip of water is just like the writing process. You have to believe that everyday you are moving forward just a little bit. That perhaps one more person has ordered the book, someone else has read the blog, looked at the instagram post, that one more person knows that you exist. You have to believe that. You do! There is a process, not quite as inevitable as the ceiling coming down, but perhaps just as miraculous as someone going into the loft the day after the leak began. Progress is being made, hardback, ebook, paperback possibly quite soon, it’s just quite slow – drip, drip, drip!
