Great white dark

     Between the idea

     And the reality

     Between the motion

     And the act

     Falls the shadow

     It happened, as so many things in my life do, as a result of a glass of wine. Curled up on the sofa late one night, laptop on lap, glass of wine in hand… Several hours later, I woke up, smashed glass on floor, laptop on floor. Shit. I mopped up as best I could, checked laptop for signs of damage, heaved a sigh of relief when nothing obvious seemed to be wrong, and took my stupid arse up to bed.

     Next morning, everything seemed fine. But. Two days later, strange streaks of colour began appearing on the screen. Weird splodges of red and orange, like when you rub your eyes too hard. Eeek. Everything still worked fine, but it was becoming impossible to visually verify this. And then, four days after the Stupid Incident Of The Glass In The Night Time… The screen went black. Fuck.

     I panicked a bit, then finally fessed up to Alistair, who shook his head more in sorrow than in anger and applied his tech skills. The screen didn’t appear to be salvageable, so instead, laptop was hooked up to a standalone monitor and all was well. The Girl drew me a picture to put on The Black Screen Of Wine Death, and off I went, merrily tapping away like Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

     Then for reasons unknown, a few weeks ago, Alistair decided to cannibalise another non-functioning laptop in the house (trust me, we’ve hammered the crap out of plenty), and managed to transplant that screen onto my laptop A working laptop, mobile once more! Huzzah!

     And… I can’t write on it. For some reason, staring directly at a screen in front of me, instead of one slightly higher up and off to the left terrifies me.

     Thing was, with The Girl’s Ed Balls screensaver, I used to prop my notebook on the Screen Of Death, and type from that, not looking at the screen, but a t my handwritten scrawl instead. And now that tiny adjustment has been made, what I find is that the glaring white page of a word document or new email composition is like a great big bastard, staring me in the face, fists on hips, lips curled contemptuously, saying ‘Yeah? You got something to write? Well, make it good, pal.’ My instinctive reaction is to jut my chin back at it, try staring it out… and then scuttle away, saying ‘NoSir,SorryIBotheredYouWon’tDoThatAgain!’ over my shoulder as I flee.

     It’s completely inhibiting me. Emails I haven’t replied to, idea for things to write about, blogposts, just getting on with so many other things I need to write… All there, in my head. But not making it out of the half life of not being sent. Instead, lurking in the shadows of my mind, there, but not there, flattened, crushed, and intimidated by the great white dark.