The night elves are here

It is now 4am and I can hear the birds outside. The streets are otherwise quiet, the drunks have gone, the buses less regular. This time is a no-time. It is the time that sleep carves out for itself, a beautiful hollow cave where nothing much happens.

It is also the time when the writing elves come out. They dance on my desk and present me with small boxes of metaphors and similies. Some of the boxes are a disappointment, they contain rotten vegetables of metaphors -  the man looked like a giant fish - other's are alive. When I open them they explode at me like jack-in-the-boxes and continue to spring up and down on the page for a while after I have written them down.

This time of night is also when the critic is asleep. That shadowy figure that follows me almost continuosly saying: 'they won't like that  Martin' 'why are you even listening to yourself like this, you are so vain' 'the reason you listen to this critic is beacuse you doubt yourself, and the reason you doubt yourself is because you are crap'.

The critic is asleep now - over there. When he sleeps he does so heavily and without dreams. And he is very much a 'he'. He is older than me and more forceful, more confident, but he has no face. He smells a little too. My personal critic has not washed in a long while. My personal critic where oversized underpants that are encrusted. Shhhh...no laughter now, we might wake him. The critic will not tolerate laughter.

I have found that I can only write well, or do anything very creative at all, between 10pm and 6am. It's a tricky one for the social diary but I can't do much about it. I can come back early on a friday night from a few pints in the pub and start work happily at 10pm and finish at 5am. Or I can work - badly - for 12 hours in the day and then start fresh at midnight. But the mornings are a waste - quite literally. I wake to the sounds of the dustbin men and their large grinding lorries - not only outside my window but also in my mind. They arrive to clear away the leftovers of my dreams, bags of busy thoughts, a grinding noise from the terrible recycling of stagnant ideas and feelings. The best I can do is open and answer emails at my morning desk, then have a shower, and vigrously scrub at the doubt that seems to have covered me in the night. For most of the rest of the morning I'm crowded by mental to-do lists, bullet points flying about my head like...bullets. All is logical, judged, specific and throughout it all the clock ticks: get it done, get it done.  People are going to work, the tubes are running, parliament is sitting, lunch is approaching, meetings are happening, decisions being made, tick tock tick tock....

The deep of night has no time.

I can write at night. I can dream when I am awake. As the world sleeps no one can see you move down the streets, the shop windows are full but they don't ask you to go in,  you can even meet the BFG blowing dreams into children's bedrooms.

The night is an open space and I find it very beautiful indeed.