Experimenting With Myself

The bowl cut.

The idea of a useful limit is - as well as something I blather on about a lot - the idea that sitting down to write can sometimes feel too vast and overwhelming a landscape to stare down, and so fencing off some of that landscape can help direct our writing. The example I've used in the past is Casa Levene.

An architect bought a plot of land with a lot of mature trees that he later found out were protected. So he decided to design the house around the trees - they were his useful limit when it came to getting creative. The result is a gorgeous, sinuous house with trees poking up here, there and everywhere - surely more beautiful and interesting for the unplanned restriction:

Casa Levene

In the ‘Hit Submit in 3 Hours (And a Bit!)’ workshop I ran in January, I used the idea of limiting ourselves in a writing exercise. Yet, I haven't really experimented with limits that much in my own writing. However, right now, at this exact moment in time, I find myself with nothing in particular to write about (though I'm due a post/article) looking out of a hotel window at the lights along the Júcar river gorge that forms the rocky border of Cuenca. Making it into a bowl of sorts. And I’ve decided to use my own writing exercise on myself.

Here are my fences, my trees: write something, anything, on my phone because I don’t have my laptop, in the next hour sitting in the hotel bar. The clock will pause for the time it takes to get the attention of the camarero and order wine. This post will be replete with errors.

Tick tock…

I've been to Cuenca twice before. Both times I remember feeling despondent. I only think that now, though, looking back. At the time I wasn't naming the feelings, I was just trying to survive them.

Cuenca is pretty.

On the first visit, my parents had just moved to Spain. Cuenca is halfway between Madrid and where they were staying at the time, so we met for a weekend. I remember a depressing, brown-coloured hotel. I remember feeling lonely. I was possibly in the middle of some doomed love affair because I remember looking at my phone a lot, willing it to vibrate or give some other sign of life. Possibly I was wondering what on earth I was doing in this weird halfway point, so distant from any iteration of what I might have then called home. That is about all I remember.

On the second visit, I was again meeting my parents. This time my sister came along too, with her boyfriend. It was our dad's birthday. When I went over to Amy's apartment to pick her up, she told me she had just peed on a stick and the stick told her she was pregnant. I was happy for her, but also sensed how I was now moving further down the list of her priorities and this made me despondent too.

We stayed a little way out of the city the second time. At a place next to La Ciudad Encantada:

Isn't it mad looking?!

Many years later, I wrote this about the trip (screenshots are from the document I managed to find on my phone, I'm sticking to the rules):

And, a bit further on:

Yeah, pretty despondent.

Here I am, on visit three and I promise I'm cheerful this time. I am pretty obsessed with Spain's chain of government-run hotels called the Paradores. The public company was set up in 1928 to protect buildings of particular historic, cultural or artistic interest, and to support local economies and the environment by restoring and running them as hotels. I find this idea very cool - buildings that would otherwise have been left to ruin, given a new life and a new identity. They are also great places to get away and write. But that isn't what I'm doing here this time. I'm here because I love them so much that I accumulated so many points via their loyalty scheme that I was offered a free night, as long as it was in February. I chose to stay in Cuenca because I have always wanted to, but it it usually too expensive.

I caught the bus from Madrid this morning and walked through the old town to the hotel. I was too early to check in so I had a coffee in the bar and cracked open Margaret Atwood's memoir, where she describes how she was described by the press in the early days and one of the words she records is ‘man-knackering’, which I guffawed at and accidentally got the attention of the camarero who thought I wanted something, which I didn't, but now that I do, he is ignoring me.

Later I went for a walk and grew hungry. Everywhere was closed and there were no supermarkets in the historic old town, which I applaud, though I really was very hungry. I turned one last twisty corner and found the only place open in this whole bowl of a city and it was a vegan bakery. Cake for dinner. More reasons to no longer be despondent.

And just now the wine has arrived.

Stop the clock.

There you have it. The idea of a useful limit: the bowl cut.