Head up

I knew I'd hit a wall when I woke up this Monday morning with stomach cramps. Stomach cramps are what happen when all is not well. And they only serve to make things worse: it's hard to be bursting with remedial energy when your abdomen hurts. Or to hit the gym and kick in the adrenalin and feel-good hormones.

As I suspected, when I sat down at my laptop at 6am to continue with the (tight) schedule to complete my book - where every day counts - I felt that familiar sag. Disintegration of the will. Motivational droop. That stretched-across-the-ground-feeling I used to get when teachers at school burdened us with a particularly tiresome and timeconsuming assignment - you yawn to yourself inside, and wish you were elsewhere.

After regular 5am wakeups eagerly brushing the sleep from my eyes in front of a sparkling computer, the weedling thought that I'd prefer to be back under the covers in oblivion only jabbed to smart my annoyance further. The screen glowered. I shut it almost with a snap.

To be honest, my Sony Vaio's got a big part in this. My husband and I had been competing to work on the machine for the whole weekend (early wake-ups and late nights, that is.) Needless to say, it's the wrong type of marital stimulation. He lugged home a castoff CPU from work on Friday (victim of financial layoffs - the box, not he thank God), all excited to assemble it privately upstairs - only to find it was still password locked and inaccessible. Then we had a row. After which, we grudgingly had to communicate to try and schedule who would work on "my" laptop, and when (it had been a birthday present, but becomes "ours" when things swing that way). The rest of the weekend was spent in grunts. Actually the argument was all about perception: how I perceive him to be unfriendly and moody, when he is sure that he's not. Considering he's not friendly or fun or light-hearted at these times, I'm not sure where perception ends and reality begins.

I'd hoped that driving my son to a birthday party might ring a change: empty road, invigoratingly loud music, whoosh of freedom and all that...but the spanking Jaguar in front with the personalised number-plate "P E 5 I M S T" didn't help. Considering those cost at least 20,000 pounds (on top of the car, of course!) I wondered if the guy was taking the proverbial, if you know what I mean. Normally I would have chuckled and saved up the gem to tell my husband. Instead I predicted his grunt - and wrote on Twitter instead.

On the way back, I fixed the damp shine on the roads with moroseness as the evening shrouded the air, winter's 5pm. The tyres spluttered through the dirt-laden London rain, the dull leftover dribbles of Sunday and a stray Tesco bag wretched and ragged on a naked branch at the corner of my vision as I waited with resigned frustration at a red light that seemed to be fixed at red forever. Christ. Not even my favourite musical porn, Enrique Iglesias, lifted my sodden mood. The ballad surges irritated me and I clicked to off.

However the way to force through the blockages (mental, physical, you name it) is to create a surge. I've got to fall in love with my book again, with the process of tapping it into existence even when words don't come easy. And fall in love with my husband again even when words don't come easy. And fall in love with life again even if I don't have a Jag with a personalised number plate telling the world to fuck off (sorry!) - or maybe fall in love with life specifically because I don't.

Then again, at least I'm not Tiger Woods. Or anyone else: things could be worse.

No, head up! Forge on. Credit crunch, marital crunch, lack of inspiration, you name it. It's the ability to break through the barriers of pain, fear, uncertainty or even plain boredom that is the mark of success. Maybe I'll have a Jag one day. It'll have a plate stating: O P 7 I M S T.