I didn’t start writing until after midnight last night. Or, more accurately, I didn’t start writing until after midnight this morning. The second sentence is the more accurate, I think, but it looks wrong.
That was the trouble with the blog post I produced. Something was wrong with it and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It started with words like “vicious cycle” and “good habits” and slid (via an historically inaccurate view of Boadicea with a knife-equipped chariot) into a discussion on the change of Boadicea’s name to Boudicca and how I wouldn’t mind giving monastic life a go if it featured more carpeting. It’s hard to write a blog post based on such stuff. Finally, at 1 am, after several edits, I decided it wasn’t working and binned the lot.
I think what happened was that under the influence of fatigue, the punning part of my brain broke free and started playing with words. It does that sometimes. If you ever happen to be sitting next to me when I start smiling for no discernable reason it’s because two words have just connected in my head and the result has amused me.
I may be doing something like watching TV, listening to a speech or typing a blog post. but my mind is miles away. I may be in a coin shop in Nottingham discussing the price of packaging to Austria, but inside my head I am in Morecambe, or the Karoo or 1642. I have inherited this from my father. He had the ability to hold a conversation on one subject while his brain was engaged in calculating something completely different. That, I think, sums up the similarities and differences between the two of us. We both have the ability to think about two things at the same time, but he would be solving a problem at work, while I just conjure up mental images of a bicycle with knives attached to its wheels.
Meanwhile, I have come up with a photo for my biographical notes. It is reasonably accurate but by using one that already exists I can avoid tidying myself up. It may need some work doing on the size as it seems rather large when you open the page. Meanwhile, I’m tempted by the pink one, but I’m not sure it presents quite the right image. It’s the sort of photo that you get when you leave a camera unattended in a monkey enclosure.
The Pink One