I’ll Be Back

I just wanted to nip in quickly to apologize… I didn’t mean to go quiet as long as I did, but life caught up with me! First of all we went on holiday for the first time in years, which really interrupted my blogging and correspondence, and when I came home there was lots of paperwork, file reorganization and other loose ends to deal with. There are still some things I need to do, but the worst project for taking up time this month is NaNoWriMo!

That sounds a grudging thing for me to say about something so important from a ‘life experience’ point of view. It’s amazing that I’m finally writing some sort of book, even if it’s more of a ‘practice book’ than anything else.

Anyway, I am well behind… there’s a minimum word count I’m supposed to have achieved by the end of each day. That took a nose-dive on Day 3 when (1) I found myself sorting out someone’s laptop; (2) noticing things in the story that didn’t make sense. It was enough to make me stop short and think. I know we’re supposed to just write and write, and then maybe the ideas will come, but I only typed about 13 pages using that method, then ran into a wall. I couldn’t make my fingers keep on typing.

At one point I wrote about ‘an unmended fence’, and noticed the wavery red line under ‘unmended’. One online dictionary and my Microsoft Works dictionary told me that though ‘untended’ is acceptable, ‘unmended’ isn’t even a word. Yet it’s everywhere on the internet… nobody says it’s wrong, and it feels normal enough. Odd. I suppose I could change it to ‘a broken-down fence’, but the whole point I’m trying to make is that it’s neglected and nobody has repaired it. I could always add a bit saying “it looked as though it had been broken for a while and nobody had been round to fix it(!)” which would add a little padding to my word count! But it seems a bit of a palaver to go to just to explain something that the nice simple word ‘unmended’ would at least imply.

Similar niggles aside, I took a printout of my outline and other notes to bed with me (that’s where I do most of my best thinking!) and after scribbling and plotting and brainstorming, had fresh ideas for the plot… what I’ve written so far is already being turned inside out. There are two or three characters I may even have to erase. But for now maybe I’ll just move things around and add bits and keep writing, and then I can do some of the serious cutting and rewriting after making my final word count at the end of the month. Fingers crossed. I do feel better now that I worked things out a bit more.

Meanwhile I thought it would be unfair to go silent for a whole extra month without letting you know… I’ve been missing you all, and I’ll be back.

Flooding Burn

Sorry, I was away from my blog for a while. We went for a holiday in York, and that was the week it flooded! Miraculously, our main road out of town was cleared hours before our departure, but we passed a couple of drowned fields on the way. The tops of the hedgerows barely cleared the water.

Now there are floods where we are, including the little burn out the back. It overflowed across the path, but has receded now, touch wood. I’m beginning to feel chased around by these muddy rushing rivers…

Hope to get myself sorted out soon, then I’ll get back to responding to blog comments.

The burn seen from our back gate.

Ask Me No Questions

or

Hail Fellow Ill Met

 
A few weeks ago:

When we were going home on the bus, I was writing a message to Mum on our conversation notepad. An elderly man got on the bus and stood for a while, tucking his ticket away. I felt his eyes on me and looked up, and smiled. Then I went back to the message I was writing. Mum jerked her head towards him suddenly, and gestured apologetically, with a half-turn of her head towards me. I could imagine her saying, “I’m sorry, she can’t hear you.” He sat down across from us, where I couldn’t see him, and for the rest of the journey they talked politely, their voices lost in the roar of the bus. After a while I put my conversation notepad away, my message unread.

When we reached our stop and Mum moved towards the exit, I glanced at the man, intending to say goodbye. But he sat with his head turned away, so I said nothing. I didn’t ask Mum who he was or what they were talking about, and she didn’t mention him… he was just a passing ship.

 
Two days ago:

We were walking in single file along a narrow footpath, when we came across a bearded man on a ladder who was preparing to trim a hedge. He and Mum exchanged jolly-sounding greetings. Powered by her presence, I breezed past in my turn with a cheery smile. But I thought about how, on my own, I would either not look at him, or would raise my hand in a polite salute.

A little way further along, when we came onto the road, another man stood nearby. Again he and Mum made friendly noises. “People are so kind!” said Mum, as we passed on.

 
Yesterday:

We went into Costa’s for coffee, but it was quite busy. All that was left for us was a small round table for two, wedged between a lady in the corner (reading a newspaper) and two gossiping boys. The woman looked up and smiled, and she and Mum talked for a little… I wondered if they knew each other. Then the lady went back to her newspaper, and Mum and I wrote to each other in our conversation notepad.

“It’s hotter than I thought,” said Mum. “Have you noticed that the students get younger every year?”

“I never looked,” I said.

Mum rolled her eyes good-naturedly, while I thought about the old man on the bus, along with years and years of students passing me by, unseen.

After a while I said, “You know why I don’t look at people? I don’t want them to think they can speak to me just because I smiled.”

Mum laughed and shook her head at me. “They don’t always — and don’t smile,” she said. “Just observe.”

 
A small mystery cleared up:

When we left, the woman reading the newspaper didn’t speak to us again — she was a stranger after all. But Mum later volunteered the information that she’d told us (when we came in looking for somewhere to sit) she’d been watching a single student taking up a table meant for four.

Oh, I so know the feeling! Especially when we are meeting my sister, and the three of us have to huddle (with two shopping trolleys) round a tiny table for two, while a skinny kid stretches out blissfully in a tasty piece of café ‘real estate’… and stays there forever.

Lady next to us — I share your frustration.

In Our Lighter Moments

Just like Ms Jolly Blogger (my jolly tagger!) I used to enjoy these games — they gave me something to write about! This one was a lot of fun, and I kept two of her questions for others to answer. I decided not to tag anyone, but people can answer if they would like to.

The game of Blog Tag works like this: Once you are tagged, you must follow these simple rules:

1. You must post the rules. (These are THE RULES.)
2. Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post.
3. Create eight new questions to ask the people you’ve tagged.
4. Tag eight people with a link to your post.
5. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

**Here are the questions by my tagger:**

1. If you could be any character from a movie, who would it be and why?

Scary things happen to characters, even in happy movies, so I don’t know who I would opt to be. It’s also hard to imagine being someone other than myself… I would bring something completely different to the movie and would probably ruin the plot.

I found myself thinking I would quite like to be the mother in Mamma Mia!… living in bright sunshine with happy, cheerful friends. I have old flames that my movie daughter could invite, including a song-writing guitar player with long hair. And I like Abba!

2. What do you miss most about being a kid?

That one’s easy… all of my family being there. Proper Christmases with six people at the table.

3. What’s the best present you’ve ever received? Given?

Received? A pink mouse.

Given? For the sake of conversation (though I doubt if it’s true), a Mozart bear who plays Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

4. Name your favourite book.

Ah, that would depend on my mood! Light option: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. Heavier option: Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian.

5. It’s your last meal ever.  What are you eating?

Rich pea and ham soup, followed by hot BBQ chicken with soft white crusty bread, followed by a good quality chocolate sundae with whipped cream. A nice sweet white wine along with the main meal. And then coffee, with a square of good Scottish tablet. Make that the whole packet of tablet, if it has to be my last…

6. What song(s) would you include in the Soundtrack of Your Life?

Eleven songs, placed in approximate chronological order of my life events.

Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight / Mbube) I still love this video!
Isn’t it Amazing (Hothouse Flowers)
Dreaming (OMD)
Same Old Scene (Roxy Music)
Heart on My Sleeve (Gallagher and Lyle)
The Sound of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel)
This Land is Mine (Dido)
Dream a Lie (UB40)
New World in the Morning (Roger Whittaker)
Going Home (Runrig)
She’s Leaving (OMD).

Notes on my choices:

(a) My sister and I were brought up on Wimoweh!

(b) People interpret The Sound of Silence in different ways. I believe Paul Simon himself suggested that it was just a bit of teenage angst about the young being ignored by society. That’s what I read into it myself, though I feel it can speak for many others who aren’t teenagers.

7. What last experience did you have that made you a stronger person?

Books are nothing new, but the Kindle itself might count as a recent experience, or discovery? It helps me tap into the world of books without filling our rooms from floor to ceiling. Books of all kinds have gone a long way to making me what I am, good or bad.

8.  Favourite season of the year and why?

Summer… I’m a hot weather chick. I was born in a hot weather country… I don’t like being cold, and I don’t like it when it’s dark and wet. Though sometimes I’m in the mood for the first signs of spring, violent storms, golden leaves and Halloween, Christmas, pine trees, snow… and Moomin dreams.

**Now here are my questions for the Tagees:**

1. If you could be any character from a movie, who would it be and why?
2. What do you like best about your hobbies?
3. Do you feel that reading other blogs changes or shapes your attitude to life?
4. What is your favourite cake?
5. If you ever had to leave your current continent and live in another, where would you go?
6. What was your first ever favourite song?
7. Do you have any bad habits that you don’t regret?
8.  What song(s) would you include in the Soundtrack of Your Life?

A Few of My Favourite Things

A WordPress weekly writing challenge.

Lemon Drizzle

Mum buys home-baking from local coffee mornings, and one of our favourites is Lemon Drizzle. It is moist and sweet without being too sweet. We fell in love with it, and I always make room for it in my daily calorie allocation. (I still manage to lose weight, and it makes me happy, so it’s not a problem)!

There are lots of recipes for Lemon Loaf online — I compared several before settling for this one from Daily Mail Online: Crunchy Lemon Cake.

It tastes very like the coffee morning cake, though I learned not to use a small food-processor for the batter! There isn’t enough room. Next time I’ll just use big mixing bowls and a hand blender.

Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)

I love my Kindle, but it would be nothing without the books.

One Kindle feature is that I can rate each book after finishing it. I keep a personal database of Kindle books (mostly so I can keep tabs on which books in a series I haven’t got) but I also note down the scores I give each book.

According to my database, the top scoring book on my Kindle is Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart — I gave it 45 points out of a possible 50. So far it’s the only book on the Kindle that I’ve given five stars.

I was interested in the ‘big brother’ aspect of the story (the scary thing is, I can imagine life turning into that). I liked the fact that the main character had a diary and was wrestling with issues similar to mine (logging the nice stuff and avoiding the bad)…. it just tickled my funny bone.

Although he begins by sounding like somebody you’d prefer to have nothing to do with, you can’t help feeling fascinated by his whole way of life… and you get very fond of him by the end. In fact he’s the most decent man in his social group.

Main characters in books don’t have to be young, beautiful, strong, clever, and sociable… in fact none of these qualities are necessary. They have to seem real and be vulnerable, have to have experienced things I recognize from my own life… and they have to be trying to be good rather than bad.

Perfection is not required in a human being, unless true perfection is having the right balance of imperfections! I think it may have been achieved in this book.

Piggin

…just because everybody needs Piggin Friends!

This boyo here has his own box of trinkets. The bigger and bulkier the trinket, the more he loves it. You don’t leave anything sparkly lying around, because it will disappear into Piggin’s treasure chest.

He has even snatched costume jewellery from beneath other customers’ noses. Mum bought a string of cheap bulky beads from a stall, and another lady said, “Oh, you beat me to it! That’s just the kind of thing I love!”

I said, “I don’t suppose you told her it was going to be worn by a Piggin?”

“No,” she said.

Good call.

Kindle Waffle

We meant to go to the supermarket this morning, but the car refused to start. Mum says the battery has gone flat (again). We don’t use it enough!

When I was glancing at my list of old Kindle purchases on Amazon, it said there was an update available for one of the ebooks. Any notes and highlights I made on that particular book would be wiped out… but I don’t care about that. I can always put them back in!

I’ve seen people saying on a Kindle forum that they are sometimes offered these ebook upgrades… but I don’t think I was notified about mine by email. I should check the full list of purchases in case there are other offers!

Mum has apparently been going crazy watching me share many happy hours with my Kindle, because she suddenly announced that she wanted one too. Instead of sitting around waiting for one to arrive through the post, she bought a Kindle Touch from Argos. (Reminds me of the Argos advert… she’ll be the one darting brightly through the door with Argos bags, while my house of cards tumbles down about my ears).

She wanted to make the font larger, as she can’t read very well in bed. It took us both a little time to find out where Amazon had put the font sizes… it’s right there on mine, but harder to find on hers.  Anyway, it’s all sorted now.

She seems to be reading Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Maybe I should do all the cooking for a while…

Season of Fruitlessness

I’m more ‘creative’ (Photoshop, Bryce 3D etc) when it’s summer and the days are brighter and warmer. In winter I spend less time in such projects… and it’s happening again now. Halloween is not all that far off… the days are cold and rainy, and my room is chilly and dark. It is driving me back downstairs to read a book!

People are affected differently by the seasons, but perhaps I would feel more creative at this time of year if we were living in a hot country or a brighter, warmer house.

I’m in more of a ‘blogging’ frame of mind than I’ve been all year, though. I suspect other interests have shifted, leaving more room for that. I’ve been looking around  and reading more; wondering more about other bloggers. I doubt if I will be here every day, especially if I’m so cold that I’ve taken refuge downstairs… but I have more appetite for it.

Sometimes I miss being young… I used to feel there was no limit to what you could do or write about. To think of something was to write, and I didn’t worry about originality as such… if it came from me and wasn’t a repeat of something I remembered reading or hearing somewhere else, then it was original. I wasn’t stupid — I realized that true originality is rare… ideas are derivative and people often think the same thoughts independently. But the world seemed big enough and diverse enough to bear it.

The reason I miss my naivety is that my world seems to have shrunk… I have fewer options and less faith that I will write about the right things in the right way. I’m no longer some carefree child leaping off the plank at the deep end, sure that I will swim, and swim well.

I wonder if the internet has added to this over-flowing cup? My pictures are the same as everybody else’s, and there is nothing new under the sun. Some articles, discussions and reviews are repeated word-for-word on different sites, and it doesn’t matter how hard you try at something, there’s always someone else who does it better.

Anyway, when the weather takes a nose-dive, so does my mood. Perhaps switching off and reading a book is not such a bad idea!

A Nothing Day

Totally lacking energy right now…  nothing to say. Try to do things and they don’t work. Write a blog post and there’s nothing to blog about. Read a book and it’s full of dry bits. Friends and family on Facebook no closer than they were. Makes you wonder what Facebook is for.

I prefer quiet conversations with just one person at a time.

Sometimes feels as though life is something you are forced to do when you would rather keep out of it! There is no way you can say “I don’t want to do this, thanks…. I don’t have the right kind of brain.” I always wanted my life to be a book I could learn from without being hurt in any way.

I’m the heroine of my own story, and I don’t like it at all. I’d much rather read about it.

At the end of the novel I would turn round and be at home with my family. No other kind of existence is imaginable.

But for now the book is still open…. the next chapter could be filled with masked highwaymen (or did we just have that one?) Or howling wolves in a cold Scottish forest (think I’ve done that one as well). Or a shipwreck, and pirate’s treasure. Or there’ll be a hobbit and a gold ring.

Is that all just wistful thinking?

Courtesy is Dead

Woke around five a.m. and read my Kindle… Alfred Tennyson by Andrew Lang.

I liked the following…  it reminds me of modern TV:

“The brief life of the Ideal has burned itself out, as the year, in its vernal beauty when Arthur came, is burning out in autumn. The poem is purposely autumnal, with the autumn, not of mellow fruitfulness, but of the “flying gold of the ruined woodlands” and the dank odours of decay. In that miserable season is held the Tourney of the Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the “smart” and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace.”

All this talk about flying gold, ruined woodlands and dank decay reminds me of a perfume I like… Calvin Klein’s Secret Obsession. Moss, wet earth and cool, damp leaves… beautiful. Perhaps the courtiers were wearing it at their Tourney.

There were words concerning women trying unsuccessfully to be like men (rather dubious, I thought!) and although I couldn’t find online commentary on the subject, I saw he had written a letter to Jane Austen in Letters to Dead Authors. I downloaded 10 or more Kindle books by Andrew Lang, including Letters to Dead Authors and Letters on Literature. I also found A Collection of Ballads, A Short History of Scotland, Tales of Troy and Greece and New Collected Rhymes.

A reviewer for The Book of Dreams and Ghosts said if anyone understood it enough to get more than 40% of the way through it, they were ‘ratty and silly’. Eight people out of eight said the review wasn’t helpful.

My Kindle was running out of power, so I connected it to the computer to recharge, washed a splash of coffee from its pink Shocksock and hung it up to dry. Then I went back to bed, as it was still quite early.

Had a horrible dream about a friend I fell out with…

In the dream I was happy and excited, telling her how I could visit a site of hers any time to see what she was saying and how she was getting along. It was like being subscribed to somebody’s blog, and there was nothing wrong with it. I thought she would be chuffed, but she told me that my frequent visits were causing problems on her site, and I shouldn’t be online so much, as it led to system overload.

She said I should unplug everything and stay offline. She didn’t say “check a few times to see how I’m doing!” or anything else nice; she gave the impression she wouldn’t care if I never went online again.

Obediently, I unplugged everything and thought, “well, I can do a little housework now.” I stared through a window at the garden. The day was slowly darkening, and shadows stretched across the lawn. The leaves stirred restlessly in the encroaching chill. I could hear my friend in the next room… she was clacking eagerly around her kitchen, talking to her husband. She had forgotten I was there, and was telling him that now they were free to do whatever they wanted, and she had lots of plans for the two of them.

I woke up again, depressed, and discovered I had slept so long it was lunchtime! The song Vienna by Ultravox was in my head.

The feeling has gone, only you and I,
It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me…….

The Three I Remember Best

Somehow I couldn’t get interested in the Olympics this year, but I suppose I never could, no matter where they were held! I don’t think this is any kind of contrariness, as I’ve never been particularly interested in sports. I liked show jumping, but that was all. My three favourite show jumpers (from the 70s and 80s) were Ryan’s Son, Claret, and Hydrophane Coldstream.

I was amazed to find the following YouTube videos of them, and got horribly nostalgic…

Ryan’s Son: the handsome one with wide blaze and exuberant buck.

Claret: the beautiful little horse with rapid style.

Hydrophane Coldstream: the brilliant one.

I’ve mentioned all three of them before on this blog: 20 Things Meme. I called myself a negative wood snake (always felt like one!) Some things never change… Anyway, if you like memes or answering questions, you’re welcome to take that one up on your own blog.