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News tinnitus, status quo bias, writer's block and fear of failure.

I had rationalised my writer's block as simply the world being too absurd to comment upon. You'll be familiar with the old story that, when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace price, the satirist Tom Lehrer retired, as satire couldn't compete with reality. So it's been with me, in retreat from the sheer insanity of modern political discourse I felt no urge to comment upon it, felt rather that a period of looking the other way was in order. And is so often the way with me, withdrawal from one part of the writing process lead to complete withdrawal from all of it. Plus I was too busy at work, it's not fair on the family for me to be locked away with a computer, I need some time doing nothing. Many reasons.

Well, that's what I told myself, anyway.

Then I read an interesting piece by Oliver Burkeman. Now, I've never been much of a one for self help and analysis, I think mentally I've lumped it all in the bin marked "hippy bollocks" along with crystals, hypnosis and all the other crap all the superannuated lovechildren in Boscastle cooed about. Everything I left behind without a backward glance. The good and the bad. I'd snort at the idea of therapy, nothing in life that can't be cured by going for a run, or, if that fails, getting drunk. But something in this piece struck a chord, I mmd at it, and went about my day.

I am right, by the way, that most things can be cured by going for a run for, as is so often the case with me, it was on a run that this piece then dropped into my brain, which had obviously been performing a number of subroutines as the miles wore on. One of those things you're thinking about without realising you're thinking about it. Click, click, click, oh of course.

It suddenly became clear that my semi-retirement from writing was due to not really seeing myself as one any more. I was keeping the status quo going, chef, businessman, husband, father. Writer was falling further and further down the list due to my inertia. Due to being afraid of considering myself a writer. Fear of failure, fear of rejection.

It was around about the eighth kilometre that I thought right, okay. Be a writer. So I am.

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