Clumsily slopping her seventh mug of Yorkshire Tea over her left leg and lived-in settee, Lintelblossom slumps into position. Not settled exactly, but resigned to a familiar discomfort. The blank page before her feeding back what she fears most, and what she knows all too well. The page is a mirror. The page tells all. Stark silence, without comfort. Not the soft white of snow drifts; no billowing clouds; no whispers on the wind. No beginning.
- yet

The intense quiet intensifies her own disquiet. Tension heightens, as if in preparation. Still, nothing comes. She picks at the quick of her idle fingers, her mind finding 'Thumb Stump' and recollections of a Christmas Day kitchen sink drama: Hysteria, and a bloodied tea towel.


Casting her eye over the layers of her life, accumulated, like dropped things; like a series of accidents never fully recovered from; like lost selves waiting for reanimation - these fragments I have shored against my ruins - something in her hardens. Regarding the tide of detritus as if through thick glass, she maintains a detachment of sorts from the things she cannot let go, cannot truthfully look at; the push and pull giving rise to that sea sick swell, the beginnings of a vertiginous panic, which she knows cannot be permitted to spill out. The need for continual containment, for keeping these tides apart, drives her on. The effort depletes her. The extraordinary effort, the constant keening pitch of noise determinedly refused a place. The dizzying dynamics behind apparent inertia. What tension in stasis!