Ha, the mystery is solved.

I mean the mystery about the notes I thought I’d taken while watching my play performed, four years ago – and couldn’t find anymore. Or at least, not in the quantity I remember…

Did my storytelling mind make up all the note-taking because it was nice and writerly – the Playwright At Work?

Well, the answer is Yes – and No.

And it went like this: yesterday morning I woke up with a hazy notion that perhaps I had made notes on a printed copy of the play… I went on a safari – a slow one, because I’m still all knackered, thanks to the flu – and, after some slow, slow, slow searching through bookshelves and drawers, guess what I found? A printed copy of the play. marked in green. Not quite notes – much less pages and pages of them – but many speeches were marked, underscored, partly crossed through… Something to work with.

And, even better, when I opened my old 2P file to begin to work, I found a version of the play last edited a week after the end of the run. It wasn’t a new version, in the end – but there, at last, were all the notes I remembered taking.

Or perhaps not quite those notes – since it seems that yes, my storytelling mind did make up at least most of the moleskine-scribbling-in-the-half-darkness – but the notes I needed so very much.

So, in the end, all this little drama ended well in three different ways.

Firstly, it’s now obvious beyond doubt that I am a little off-kilter, but not terribly so. After all, the notes exist. I’d only… er, reimagined them a little?

Secondly, after comparing markings and actual notes, I’m ready to begin the new Of Men and Poets this afternoon.

And thirdly, I’ve gone through a heap of old notebooks searching for the missing notes. Of course I didn’t find them, for the very good reason that they weren’t there at all – but I came across a lot of old notes, some of them definitely interesting, including an idea that might very well become a play, one of these days. Who knows, perhaps I would never have found it again, if not for the missing notes… Don’t you love serendipity?