Great block-out of 2009… 18.09.09
I DON'T know if I’ve ever
had writers block before. That’s possibly because I
guess I’m not really a writer as such. Still I was
wondering if the absence of ideas for a column this week
fell in the category of writer’s block.
Or perhaps it’s due to a lack of caffeine. Having
exhausted the last dregs of coffee from the jar on a
hectic Monday last week, it was only when I came back to
the office that I realised my dilemma.
And the dilemma was quite simply - did I leave the
office and take a walk to the shop and buy coffee, or
did I try to see it through the day with tea instead?
Two mugs of tea later and I’m not sure if I made the
right decision. And that’s especially since it’s not
even raining and a walk to the shops might have been
just exactly what I needed to get my head into gear. |
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Instead I took the option
of trying to see it through the day with just tea and
about four paragraphs into this column I’ve still not
managed to come up with any semblance of a theme to
write about.
That’s a bad thing, because I do have to manage to
scrape out at least another dozen or more paragraphs
before I can fill the space allocated to me on a page
every week.
I might need to see if there is a way that I can get
that space reduced for weeks like this.
Years ago when I started this column I thought it would
be easy to just keep writing nonsense about things that
happened during the course of my normal week.
And, at the start it was easy enough, so I more or less
just kept on going from there. Until this week, which is
why the whole writer’s block thingy came into play.
And the coffee thing.
In an effort to try and jog my memory of the many topics
I had covered in my column I looked back on some of the
old pieces and I was amazed at how many references I
have made to coffee.
In fact I’d safely say that coffee has featured in at
least a quarter of all the columns I’ve written, which
folks, is quite a lot. But then I wondered, what do I
know about this little bean that gives such comfort to
people like me?
And the answer was - well, not a lot really. I mean I
know that yer man out of the New Avengers was able to
conjure up some beans in his hand in some kind of magic
trick.
And yes I knew a few other bits and pieces that I saw in
adverts - but really useful information…well I knew
nothing.
That meant of course a trip to the Google to see what I
could find out. Not surprisingly - since it was coffee -
the google trip turned out to be very stimulating
indeed.
For instance I wasn’t all that surprised to discover
that coffee is one of the most popular beverages
worldwide.
But that wasn’t the kind of stuff, I wanted to read. Not
that or the history or the number of types of coffee
beans you could get or how they could be roasted.
I didn’t even want to read about cappuchinos or
espressos - I wanted to scroll down and see if there was
any truth to the rumours about the health side-effects
of coffee.
You see many people have told me before that coffee is
bad for your health - or should that be - bad for my
health.
Anyway, apparently it’s not good, or so I was told, but
when I eventually set about carrying out the research, I
found that this was not actually true. |
Instead I discovered that
the findings into research into whether coffee
consumption is good or bad for health, are at best,
contradictory. What I did find interesting though was
the suggestion that some studies say drinking coffee may
have a mixed effect on short term memory.
That study showed that apparently coffee helped improve
short-term memory when the information to be recalled is
related to the current train of thought, but makes it
more difficult to recall unrelated information.
I forget what any of this has to do with writer’s block,
but hey at least I think I’ll remember to buy more
coffee for the office tomorrow. |
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A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
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