Busy-ness
Mrs Fox sat at her writing desk. She was quite a-quiver. The days of her confinement (her French students had informed her that it was not isolation, merely confinement) had seemed to be stretching endlessly ahead a few weeks ago. Now? Now, there were simply not enough hours each day to do all of the things, thought Mrs Fox.
She smiled at the thanks in the email just arrived from Ms Mouse, having yesterday enjoyed the latest version of a charming short story shared for comment by her friend. So many lovely people, thought Mrs Fox, so very many lovely people.
Tonight, the wonderful Foxes’ Retreat Writers’ Group would meet again, online. She was so looking forward to seeing their smiling faces on her tiny screen again!
Mrs Fox had prepared a writing game for them, to be a little more interactive, she thought. The instructions had been posted. An empty mug, and a full mug, and a favourite pen, and some scrap paper were to be on hand. She had carefully prepared something a little different, with more pressure and pace, to release some of the tension that she was sure they were all feeling.
The other pressing matter was that of her own writing. Her paws had been too slack lately, to tend to her sprouting novel. Tilly glared at her angrily from the timeline, her feeling of neglect evident in her stance. And, to add to the all too frequently avoided looks, Mrs Fox was on rota for tonight to share some of her own writing with the group… and she so wanted to show them something worth sharing… she flicked through files, tidied here, tidied there, sighed long sighs… it was so hard to strike a note, she thought to herself.
Finally, she settled on the ridiculous. A short piece she had written, to get herself writing again, earlier in the year. It contained a sense of a time before now, a time of relative freedom in travel and thought. It noted the chaotic thought flow of this particular Fox.
Perhaps this was a way of avoiding sharing any more of the novel, she thought, but she felt that she needed a different tone tonight, and so went ahead and pressed send.
“The page was printed,” said Ted Hughes’ Thought Fox, a rather close friend of Mrs Fox for many years.
Feeling much calmer, Mrs Fox hastened on to the rest of her activities:
- a writing class to prepare for her wonderful friends in the Cat Family, and their mutual friend, Ms Mouse
- an online language class to prepare for her usual summer French young visitors
- preparing to hold that calm and allowing therapeutic space for her kind clients, all working so hard on themselves during this difficult time
- her own wellbeing with her yoga and pilates work
- Mr Fox’s wellbeing with soup and cake
- time for the animals, confused at the change in routine
- Tilly to tend to, for the present being trapped in 1888… a difficult time for Annie Bryant, not to mention the White Chapel Murderer’s victims, and not yet aware of the Spanish flu and the National Strikes ahead of her and her friends