Welcome to my 38th Pangolin. Last month we delighted in the wonders of the blue-rayed limpet. This month features the cupboard under the stairs, much favoured in games of ‘sardines.’ Did you play sardines in your childhood? It’s like hide and seek, but only one person hides and everyone else looks. When you find the hidden person, you hide alongside. When a few are squished together, the remaining seekers usually find them by listening for the giggles.

Thanks to our solar panels and electric car-charging circuit, we have more than our fair share of meters. Last week, a business called Magnum added a Smart Meter. No, my mindful soulmate informs me, the engineer did not have a luxuriant moustache a la Tom Selleck. ‘Scuse me, David, what has this got to do with writing – we are already halfway through the second paragraph.’ I am not going to use the complex circuitry as a plot analogy (see Pangolin 4 for a better one) but this photo does make me think that most of those boxes measure the use of power coming in and only one, the export meter, records our output. Is it stretching it too far to say that’s a bit like writing, lots of different inputs needed to generate some output? Probably a bit stretchy that one.

The best hiding places in the game of sardines are the most original. Small people have a considerable advantage, which makes it such a favourite with children. If, as I remember from my own childhood, you find a really good place to hide, everyone else either gives up and moves on to something else unless there happens to be a responsible grown-up around, who starts to worry that you might have fallen asleep/defenestrated/suffocated depending on how much of a catastrophist they are. There is perhaps a sweet spot for writers where our work is neither so obscure that nobody ever finds it (my first novel perhaps) or it is so obvious that all you hear is the giggles (celebrity fiction).

My writing month has seen another fruitful session on the Comma Press short story course with SJ Bradley. This time we studied In the Cemetery where Al Jonson is Buried by Amy Hempel – a brilliant piece of writing. I’m also reading Overstory by Richard Powers and, in total contrast, A Slip of a Fish by Amy Arnold. My e-application for Cinnamon Pencil mentoring for Novel 2 winged its way to Ffestiniog, via Budapest apparently.  I finalised my short story for homework on SJ’s course and entered it for the Leeds Writers Circle competition judged by Martyn Bedford. However, the main achievement of last weekend was to progress beyond 50k words with Novel 2. Chapter 24 finds Freya, my main character, on the coast from Formby to Crosby in a desperate search for her suicidal lover.  The current back-cover blurb for this work in progress is: Freya has spent most of her life trying to forget. In a tale of power, inheritance and leeches how far will she go to seek justice?

My next pangolin comes out on January 6th. Let’s hope there will be more justice for the real pangolins during 2019.