Words are very unnecessary?

Danny Dyer, the best thing in Severance after Laura Harris

Writers should not be short on words. Yet I am. I come to the blog over the last few days and the best I can give are the words of other people or a snapshot of my own. Fortunately, no one has complained yet, or picketed my house demanding a return to the old content, although this could be of course, because they have stopped reading altogether!

I'll hope not.

Over the last week, my creative work has taken the famous long walk off the infamous short pier and when I haven't been struggling over a blank page, I've been struggling over a blank blog screen! The only place I can work well at present is the Ministry and that work - whilst also of enormous and unquantifiable benefit to the residents for whom I pledged to serve - has been a welcome escape into professional research and writing.

Creatively, though, I believe more firmly in denial than I do in writer's block (writer's of unusual wordlessness? - I don't think they exist). My struggle with the blank pages is more to do with not knowing what to say than it is with not having anything to say. The blog has been neglected over this week, but sometimes, just sometimes, mind, other things are more important.

My addiction to YouTube, Spaced and all things Shaun of the Dead lives on, though today my sister and I lived through a movie double bill of Severance - which was surprisingly impressive and funny, and which introduced us to a new sweet London face, Danny Dyer - and the terrible, funny-in-all-the-wrong-ways Wicker Man remake with Nicholas Cage, which really shouldn't have got that far. What is Hollywood's obsession with remaking films that were better the first time round?

Later, I watched a film very like the soon to be released, The Illusionist, with a very bearded and attractive Edward Norton - he was in the film, I wasn't watching it with him, I watched it with my brother and the Bean. This was a beautifully filmed story teller of a film. I'd recommend. I also recommend the Hot Fuzz website as a place to relax and unwind with your favourite British celebrities, or my favourite, to be precise.

And in case you're missing your daily dose of culture, here's Plath with some loneliness and fury:

Monologue at 3am, Sylvia Plath

Better that every fiber crack
and fury make head,
blood drenching vivid
couch, carpet, floor
and the snake-figured almanac
vouching you are
a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so
under prickling stars,
with stare, with curse
blackening the time
goodbyes were said, trains let go,
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from
my one kingdom.