What to write, what to write.

It is Sunday and I have been insanely busy. Wait, make that just plain insane.

I cooked Sunday lunch for six, tramped to church and back, sat Maddie down to do her work, helped cleared up a cats doings, which were done where no cat should do them.

But this is my couch. I don’t bring the world into this little room. This is where I ponder and muse and try on wit for size.

Occasionally, when this big white screen beams at me, I do experience the faintest of hesitation.

Not because I am lost for words: that would be absurd. No-one who sits with me over a cup of tea in the staff room, or across my kitchen table, would ever countenance that.

More, really, for want of a theme. And just occasionally I set out to write, without any theme whatsoever. It feels like setting foot on the water of a round and fathomless lake, and heading for the middle.

And as I walk on that dark, limpid water, the Theme falls into step beside me, and we begin by strolling towards the middle, two friends talking companionably.

Conversing, ambling, we become more engrossed in our conversation. By the time we reach the middle I know my Theme well: we stand for a second, with our backs to the centre, and take in the view from the centre of that very lovely lake.

I can hear the air in the surrounding trees, and I can see the cold blue sky, and everyone and everything except my friend the Theme is utterly obliterated.

We meet each other’s eyes, and know it is time to head back for shore. There is a pull, an impetus, a growing urgency. Because the Theme’s friend is standing by the shore.

The Conclusion awaits.

This definite, charismatic individual seems to have all the answers. He arrives often without warning, occasionally when I insist the Theme and I have further business.

Today, I note with satisfaction, he is still six hundred and sixty words away. I love him, and he is always right, but he can be an awful party pooper.

Lakes carry such innate mystery, don’t they? The middle of the lake is a way of expressing yearning in so many stories.

About half an hour’s drive away, just outside Guildford, is the Silent Pool.

It sits, ethereal, at the foot on the North Downs, and because they are made of chalk, the water is filtered and emerges there, a deep and timeless blue-green water as clear as tinted crystal.

It has caused amazement for hundreds of years; and there is speculation that it has a much longer history. Springs were very often places where man in prehistory gathered to worship.

Of course, those 19th century romantics couldn’t keep away from this.In 1858,a gentleman called Martin Tupper , who lived nearby the pool in the village of Aldbury, wove a tale around the waters.

He chose dastardly King John as his bad guy, and an innocent beautiful maiden for his tragic heroine.

Apparently she was bathing in the pool, keeping herself to herself, when the King and his courtiers appeared on horseback.

Did they apologise profusely and withdraw? They did not: in fact, the villains advanced, relates the florid Tupper. She backed further into the pool, and had never learnt to swim. You can infer the rest.

Now her beautiful ghost haunts the pool.

I grew up near a deep, wide, dark pool.

I have seen it in every season, with or without ducks. I have followed the soap opera of the Very Big Pike which lurks in its depths, and occasionally comes up to snap up a duckling.

I have walked dogs around it who are now long gone, bought penny sweets and chewed them all the way round, soothed babies in pushchairs with its calm changelessness.

One episode does stand out from others, though.

Auntie Joan lived in the corner of our close, and we were the only children amoungst its ten houses. Her husband decided one day to make a stupendous bequest to the four of us.

For some time, now, he had been working on a detailed, two-foot model of what I seem to remember was a battleship.

It must have taken months of meticulous care to put it together. It had all those really important bits blokes care so much about: guns in the right place, lifeboats, foc’sle, poop deck, the lot. It was a quality job.

It also had a motor. This ship could be switched on and – even in those distant halcyon days of the seventies- could be controlled remotely.

If theory and practical held, it should be possible to steer this boat serenely out into a lake, turn it, and bring it safely back to port.

Imagine our eyes as wide as saucers when we were offered this technological jewel. It caused the most enormous stir.

My Dad- he of the comments – marshalled us all solemnly.

We trooped off, my father a modern-day Peter Pan trailing four gleeful lost boys. Unacountably, my mother chose to stay behind.

Later, we were to salute her wisdom.

There was a special platform built for fishermen who used to sit like garden gnomes and scowl at passers by. It was free today: we had found our dock ready for the launch.

Dad put it in the shallows to see how it would fare. We were almost apopleptic with excitement: the launch was so close, and we had never ever been able to access that yearning place, the middle of the lake.

It behaved. It did not sink. It thrummed quietly in answer to its little control box. We were Go For Launch.

With not a little theatre, Dad launched the boat and sent it, bold and unafraid, in a straight line for the very centre of the lake.

All was fine for about ten seconds. And then we watched, aghast, as it slipped, like a tramp who has had his final cooking sherry of the day, down beneath the mysterious waters.

And there it lies, to this day.