I’m never sure of the value of, and always quite uneasy about, routine. Another Saturday morning in the window, typing away on this battered laptop, which is little more than a portable electronic typewriter now, and not very portable at that, since the battery’s ka-put. I’ve “spruce up” the flat, washed up, showered, dressed, tidied away the work bag and drawn up a list of stuff I need to go and get from town when I’ve finished this. When I get home, I’ll do a bit of work on “the book”, sort out some emails and get in touch with some friends until, around 2.15ish, I’ll expect a text from SD saying that the train has just left Smithy Bridge, or maybe Littleborough, and I’ll check the time and leave the flat and head up to the station to he meet him. We’ll sit in the window then, for most the afternoon, he’ll smoke and we’ll talk about what we’ll eat for dinner. I’ll make a special do about the last episode of Doctor Who, we’ll eat, drink red wine and watch the glad-rags of Todmorden totter up Water Street as another night descends. Candles will be lit. Music played.

I shrink back in some ways, chew my lower lip and think – is this it? No wild adventures in Canada to look forward to? No drunken bawdiness in a Manchester nightclub? I picked up some leaflets from the bus station yesterday, amused to see that GMPTE have published a visitors guide to Rochdale (and just beside the covered shopping market you can see two crack heads beat the shit out of an old woman), then, having opened it, I got excited by the fact that it has an art gallery and a museum I knew nothing about. I did have to stop to wonder if I shouldn’t get out more.

But, it’s in the quieter moments of life that my creativity starts to jump and bubble and fizz. Just finished the first volume of Woolf’s diaries – rich in quotes and things to muse over – one of which: “when things are happening, one never writes”. And so conversely I find in these pauses, during these long summer days, when friends are away at weekends, it starts to happen… little “moments of being” twinkle away in unexpected corners of the week and, despite the struggle to drag myself to the keys, words do start to come out in a way that doesn’t feel as forced as when they are written when I’m weary from a hangover in the morning and thinking of what I’m going to wear that night.

I suppose part of the fear is to do with being complacent – taking it all for granted. Especially where SD is concerned. There would be nothing worse than to have weekend after weekend of sitting here, as afternoon turned to evening, scrabbling around for things to say to one another, just because we felt somehow duty bound to repeat the same action week in and week out. Like those couples you sometimes see in restaurants, who sit there looking at anything but one another, the silence between them almost sickening to experience, even from another table – not the angry silence after an argument; the dead, empty silence of two people who have exhausted everything they have to say to one another and have nothing more to offer, but who persist in sitting there, together, in this silence, in this terror, because to not do so seems even more terrible to them.

They, that couple in the restaurant, have forgotten, or maybe never knew, that it’s not enough to just be together. They need to learn to live together, not in a domestic way, but to really live. To do the things they do, or did, with friends, or do alone, that make these hours, days, weeks pass. I met up with SD on Thursday after work and he helped me out with “the book” – throwing scraps of social history my way, to add flesh to the bones of my characters, and asking me questions about them which forced them still further in to focus. To talk about these things while we were eating felt odd at first, like I was letting him in on a secret part of my life, or that we had strayed somehow from the path of what a “proper relationship” should be about. Now I laugh at myself for only just realising that you can’t spend lots of time with someone and expect the initial “getting to know you” period to last forever. At some point you have to get back on with living the life you were living before worlds collided. That’s the real test. I suppose that’s why so many of my past relationships have withered after a few months, so many relationships my friends have had too.

I spend a lot of time wishing for space. Then when I get it, I feel uncomfortable in it. Now, having got up early, I’ve got hours to myself and am looking forward to getting out, haunting some dusty second hand bookshops and browsing CDs in the library. Again, it’s the writing of this that has helped clear the fog, just a few paragraphs down and the original theme of my blog dissolves away in the morning sun – for now I’m completely happy with the routine of the day ahead and wouldn’t have it any other way.