Blog of First Pages

What is this?

The first page of a new piece of writing that floated into my head in the early hours today. I have written so many first pages of novels that never got finished that once in a  desperate moment to get published I thought I would put them altogether and make a book out of them and call it simply ‘First Pages’.

What is this first page? Well it could be as GK Chesterton once said “The finest book I never wrote.”

***

The day was lost. Even in the morning in the broad golden sunlight something good, almost imperceptibly, was slipping away from me. Like a strange cat that pausing silently on its way across the lawn for a brief moment stays its progress to look in your direction then carelessly moves away disappearing into the thick foliage of a bush on the margins.

I stood at the window staring aimlessly out at the world. I pulled the net curtain aside to see more clearly. I could see alright but my mind was still hurting from the last night’s alcohol. The night before was a raw dim memory and all that mattered now was how best to forget. How best to move forward. A forlorn hope of days now spread out before me, a bridge to the next weekend.

My life had become a slow painful graduation from cork to empty bottle. Sometimes I spent my last dollar on some cheap whiskey from the supermarket and sat alone in the dark watching the shadows move in and out of my mind and around the silent room, thinking of nothing at all. Or I was at so and so’s party drinking other people’s booze. The guilt was theirs not mine. All I had to do was be sociable until the fog descended in my head and the bass throaty blast of a horn interrupted my lucid thoughts. Seemingly endless pain followed. The headache of a fool. The clang of a bell and the distant horn still blowing somewhere in my head and pieces of my burdened soul being wrecked again on the jagged rocks.

It wasn’t always like this.