The COVID-19 diaries: work

My garden is definitely beginning to look a bit better under lockdown, but it is still wild. This is the thing with Wellington gardens, on diagonal slopes. It’s quite lush here and the bushes quickly grow out of control and you need an abseiling rope in order to trim them, and strange long clippers operated with cords that are always getting jammed and make your arms ache.

Of course, gardening is not the thing that I’m meant to be doing, and nor is comics, but I always get the most pleasure from the sense that I am bunking off, misusing my time, not working on my most pressing tasks. This impulse also leaves me feeling permanently stressed, as I am always procrastinating. I had told myself that after I published Let Me Be Frank, I’d start that novel.

It’s hard to know what kind of job to get when you also want to make art. Of course, in an ideal world, you would get an income for being an artist. It is, after all, a social service of sorts, and the world would be a poorer place without books to read and music to listen to and pictures and movies and dance to express the strangeness of our circumstances. I am bored in my job and feel as though I should get a more stimulating job, but if it’s too demanding I will have no energy left over for anything else. And yet energy begets energy… it spills over and infuses the art you make…

I guess a lot of you are asking the big questions during this strange pause that we’re having? Oh, and home schooling starts tomorrow…