Green lemons

*Dan Arps is a New Zealand artist.

This comic was meant to be longer but the kids’ DVD finished and then they started fighting so I thought I should quit while I was ahead.

I really do get very tetchy at unstructured time. Most public holidays drive me into a grump. I don’t much like lounging about doing nothing – I want to be going somewhere, making something, talking about interesting stuff. I’m sure my friends would recommend mediation to still my monkey mind.

I’ve just finished Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about the nature of biography, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ lives in particular. Malcolm talks about the melancholy boredom that is necessary for creativity, but I don’t think she means the melancholy boredom that is brought on when you’re on your hands and knees pretending to be a mummy llama. I have had some interesting ideas, but I’ve been warned off getting up at 5am to write them down after reading about Sylvia and that oven, those towels to protect the children from the gas, the glasses of milk and sandwiches she prepared for them. But I have so much to do! How am I going to get it done?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps I don’t really need to do all those things I think I do (the chairs in the shed! The peeling paint on the windows! The vegetable garden! The Katherine Mansfield book!) and instead I should enjoy the moment… those endless moments… stretching out for eternity…

Oh, and if my mother is reading this, Violet says I drew you looking too old. You look younger than that.