Monologue for the socially distant blues

So here I am with writing time on my hands and although I've got a major project or two to be getting on with, everyone knows I've got a butterfly mind. I skim through Twitter and the BBC Writersroom looking for opportunities to submit to, a challenge, something to get the brain exercised, and everyone is asking for monologues.

It makes sense, if you think about it - they want to record them quick and stick them on the internet to entertain a bored nation stuck at home, and what with all the actors being stuck at home as well, the best way is to make it short and make it for one person, and they can read it out in their own bedroom and nobody has to meet anyone else. Great, I think, I can do monologues, I've done monologues before, I did the one for the Ilkley Writers river project, I did Viv's 64th that always went down well (I must put a new recording of that up, the Chapel FM one isn't available any more), even Pat's part in Lavender Ink started as a monologue in isolation.

So you'd think, wouldn't you, that with all that experience and a copy of Talking Heads to hand, not to mention the Mslexia guide to Writing for Radio (even though these aren't for radio), I'd be laughing. Slackline Cyberstories even want strong female characters over 35, and anyone who's read The Little Book of Northern Women knows I can write them, I bloody love writing them. But it won't come. I'm sat at the keyboard waiting for an outpouring of monologue in the voice of a northern matriarch, preferably one with some curbed liberties so I can try the Popelei Seed Commission, and all I want to write is scripts full of silliness featuring as many characters as possible. It's no good, I must've got the socially distant blues.