P1000418 smallI have a mini-noticeboard above my desk with interchangeable cards for how I am feeling today. I have attached to the bulldog clip that holds the cards to the wooden frame some homemade oblique strategies cards. The card that comes to the fore when I shuffle them states: Not building a wall but making a brick.

All I have done this week, towards a story I am working on, is to think about replacing ‘rectangle’ with ‘parallelogram’ in the phrase ‘a rectangle of light’. I think this, but don’t write it down. I have been working on this story, on and off, for over two years, adding small bricks, knocking down little walls that don’t belong.

Meanwhile, as I don’t write, I travel around my area, and watch new houses shoot up fast in empty spaces along the side of the road. Elsewhere, an old terrace of flats and houses is flattened. I used to look down on the communal gardens of these dwellings from the train. The plastic toddler cars and sandpits that were scattered about are gone. A giant crane towers over the ground, which is encased by hoardings proclaiming affordable housing to come. Not building a wall, but knocking them down.

Three new houses were topped off not long after we moved into our house in March of this year. I watched from my bedroom window as skips were filled and removed. Carpets were cut on the ground outside, offcuts and cardboard rolls dropped in the skips. It is November now. A billboard still promises three houses to come on the market, but there is no For Sale sign yet. The corrugated fence surrounding the parking spaces at the back and the tree at the front is covered in graffiti, bearing the tag ORES or DRES, and a cartoon of a man’s head. A light burns in one of the windows. No-one has returned to switch it off since the workmen moved out in the summer. I see it when I open my curtains before the winter dawn. Perhaps there are bricks to be made, walls to be built before the people move in. Perhaps, next summer, new owners will be breakfasting on the terraces placed on stilts above the parking spaces.

I watch a documentary on Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers. There are images of people throwing stones and half-bricks at tanks. I have memories of that time, in 1981. Of the hunger strike being debated at the Student Union in the year when I took my finals. I remember standing in the doorway at the back of a crowded hall, listening to the debate. I remember a man I knew when I was growing up. He wore a black beret like the IRA marchers they show in the film. I store these bricks, these connections. They do not fit with the story I am writing. They might fit somewhere else.

I play with my granddaughter, with wooden bricks. She wants to build with only blue ones today. There aren’t enough blue blocks. We add some green ones.

I have not written for a week. I do not sleep well. I worry. My head is full of different bricks: images, memories and connections. Still I do not write. I shuffle the cards and find the one that says: Not building a wall, but making a brick. Then I write.