What I keep meaning to do

No. 1: write fewer lists. Meanwhile I must

- get down to the beach. It's only five minutes' walk away, for heaven's sake, and there have been days - today was one - when the sun shone and if I hadn't had to go to work and do some shopping on the way back so's to have something to eat in the house (and toilet paper) for the weekend and if I hadn't been hungry when I got in and had to make a ham and cheese sandwich and read the paper I'd have got there, really I would, only after I'd eaten the sandwich and drunk a couple of glasses of wine I was feeling so so tired (on account of having woken up at just gone five this morning and not been able to get back to sleep) that I had to go to bed for a couple of hours and by the time I surfaced it was just starting to rain and I had to dash to get the washing in that had been out since yesterday

- get down to the beach. Tomorrow - today now - the forecast is for warm sunshine. I've been reading Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries this week (in between Coal: a human history, Disobedience and a book about how to discover my inner artist), in which he spends a lot of time sitting watching people here and abroad and writing about who he imagines them to be and what he sees and hears and is reminded of. I could do that, I think. Except I don't know the Harold Pinters or have a past that anybody could possibly want to know about . . .

- get down to the beach. I had the whole thing planned out yesterday - down to the pencil I was going to take with me and the book I was going to write in and exactly where I was going to park the car and how the stones would feel under my bottom until I'd smoothed out a place for it to sit with my back against the sea wall and feel the sun on my face, but now I can't quite remember where yesterday went and why I didn't do it

- get down to the beach.