" That 3 a.m. ‘tribunal’ "

~ Kate Chisholm - The Spectator ~

Wonderful quote winkled out by The Speccie's ace Radio reviewer, the incisive, Kate Chisholm.

Well placed there by her masters: one dribbles ones eye past that dead wet loss Deborah Ross and her self-referential twittering about 'cinema' - God, she gives editorial patronage a bad name - and is just about to cancel the subscription when the real writers reappear and stay ones hand for one more, final issue.

KC comments on the interview with AL Kennedy with this wonderful para:

"When committed to a novel, she writes through the night, because, she says, it’s ‘the proper time for dreaming’. It’s made her ill, the constant lack of sleep, but still she does it, in her desire ‘to make something mildly dramatic out of endless typing’ — an apt description of why writers persist with the often tiresome business of writing."

And then comes the money line, what we've all experienced but not all verbalised so superbly:

"Everyone, though, not just writers, will at some time or other have experienced that 3 a.m. ‘tribunal’ when the mind keeps going over and over the catalogue of ‘mistakes made and damages received’, ‘of threats that are more or less credible, but all insist on being heard’. We all at some time will have felt ‘what a terrible place the edge of sleep can be’.

That’s perhaps why, says A.L. Kennedy, when we care about someone we so often ask,

‘How did you sleep?’ "