I've been thinking about gongs and noises: do I want something which I can have sitting around which I can use, in times of stress or trouble, to make a large and pleasing noise? You know the sort of idea: an executive toy which against all precedent actually has a use as well as sits there proferring status? I'm beginning to think that actually I do want something just like that: this sitting at a desk and writing for a living just cries out for one to be surronded by such status symbols even if no one ever comes in to see them.

I wonder, actually, whether surrounding myself with such status might not make my writing more pompous: even more so than it already is? Does status work like that, by osmosis? Just sort of leaks through? Anyway, without going into the ins and outs of that in detail I've got my eye on that little meditation gong that you can see pictured above. It's not so much that I do a great deal of meditating per se: but the writer's life does include a great deal of staring out the window and wondering to oneself, what to say next? What's my next subject? Or how to put this half-formed thought in exactly the best manner?

So meditation is part of that life and a meditation gong would seem a useful addition to help me along the way. The idea isn't so much that beating something is cathartic, it's that the clang of the gong helps to clear your mind of the irrelevant and focus upon the important train of thought. That's why its use in meditation itself. Who knows, it might get my prose from workmanlife to Nobel Prize winning…..well, OK, perhaps not, but it might improve it and at this point anything is worth it for that.

On the other hand, perhaps I could train my wife to bring a beaker of something cold and foaming as and when I strike the gong? Not that starting that at 9 am is going to help the writing, but it would be fun, wouldn't it?