Writer's block

Just before Easter I spent three weeks in a cottage on the west coast of England. I stayed there to recover from burn-out and writer's block. Actually, I don't think there is such a thing as writer's block.

Can you imagine a plumber waking up and saying, "I've got plumber's block. I don't want to go to work today. I don't ever want to unblock anything ever again." It would only take a matter of seconds before his wife kicked him out of bed. "Get up, you lazy plumber, you," she would say, or words to that effect.

Yet writers are allowed to have this convenient condition, so I wandered off into the country, with my block, to seek the muses.

The therapy for this condition is pretty gruelling. You take about four to six books that you have been meaning to read for the last two years. The day starts by waking up at about 9 am and reading in bed till noon. You then get up and have a scratch, wander around and put some toast in the toaster and make a cup of coffee. You actually have time to smell the coffee - delicious.

The afternoon offers a choice between watching British television, which is a series of inane shows with falsely cheerful presenters shouting at you, or going out for a walk in the countryside. Actually it is more of a shuffle as the British seem to have given up walking in their country lanes - I hardly came across anyone.

The real therapy starts in the evening and involves a trip down to the pubs to check on the natives. My survey included (but was not limited by) the Quay Inn and the Boathouse at Instow, the Swan and the White Hart at Bideford, the Hunter's Arms at Frithestock, and the gloriously named Ye Salutation Arms.

My last therapy session was at the Coach and Horses at Buckland Brewer, which is a thatched, 13th century inn. A word of warning here. Try to avoid 13th century inns in small hamlets. The rooms are usually small and the ceilings are low with beams, so that if you are over five foot eight inches tall (which must have been the height of Englishmen in the 13th century), then you are continually knocking yourself out on the beams.

I don't think the scene can have changed much over the subsequent 10 centuries either. The fellow opposite me was propping up a vertical oak pillar and was the statutory five foot eight inches tall, which is a height limited, I assume, by some form of genetic engineering that has taken place over the centuries to allow the village inhabitants to get into the pub. He also appeared to be about five foot eight inches wide.

He had a fascinating capacity of drinking a pint of bitter ale in two gulps. I was captivated. He would then spend some time sadly looking into the bottom of the empty glass, almost in amazement, obviously wondering where it had all gone.

My time was taken up watching the progress of my fellow leaning on the pillar and eavesdropping on the pub conversation. It had taken me up until then to realise that there are two main pastimes in the British pub. Firstly, it is to see who can talk the greatest amount of crap, and secondly, and this is a team effort, is to see how quickly they can all generate a fug of asphyxiating proportions, which cuts off further oxygen to the brain. To achieve this, they pack themselves in, shoulder to shoulder and start talking a lot of hot air, light up the large fireplace and pull out their pipes and start a simulation of a teargas crowd dispersal effect.

With the watering eyes and sporadic coughing and the slow cut-off of oxygen to the brains of the inhabitants, the quality of the crap being talked deteriorates even more. The number one subject of conversation is, of course, the weather. The sequence seems to be that the first customer leaning up against the bar would make an acute and authoritative observation of meteorological profundity. This would be repeated by the barman and then it would be repeated again by the customer leaning alongside the first one. They would then all fall into a period of silent consideration of the impact of their deliberations. One expects this conversation to take a dive as the evening goes on but I was rather taken aback with a new arrival.

The day had started with heavy rain and bitterly cold driving squalls of wind, and had remained miserable until the late afternoon, when the rain stopped and the wind had died down. There was heavy cloud and not a ray of sunshine all day and it was still bitterly cold.

The newcomer hailed us with the greeting, "turned out lovely then, didn't it?"

There's really no answer to that, is there?

·  Chris Ellis is a city GP and author.

Publish Date: 17 June 2004