I am starting better – sitting down sooner and doing planned work rather than just browsing – but by the end of he day I am faced with the fact that I really haven’t produced any writing worth doing. This quality concern applies to both quantity and quality.
Today I got up a touch after seven, brushed my teeth and sat down to do comments and check emails. It’s not onerous but it seems to suck time in and it is now 8.20. I have dipped into the internet, looking for a recipe for damper, It comes as part of the discussion of soda bread, and doesn’t seem that much different. I first read about damper in a book called From Anzac to Buckingham Palace. It was a stirring patriotic tale of an Australian lad who joined up and won a VC. Published 1917, with what I later learned were inaccurate pictures, it seemed like an exotic book from a far off time. It would, in fact, be less than 50 years old at that point. That is strange. It means that as a child, in around 1965, I was less than fifty years from the Great War. I am now more than 50 years from that point in time. I don’t know what that proves, but it does make me feel a bit of a dinosaur. This is a feeling further enhanced by Julia’s new habit of referring to my T-Rex arms. She is of course, making fun of the way I hold my arms when they ache after a hard day typing. It’s fair enough, I suppose, as I did refer to her as a grumpy bear yesterday. I did not, however, develop any more metaphors around the phrase “a bit dense towards the bottom”, which I could have done.
Anyway – back to the point. At the time I read the book, I didn’t realise that ANZAC referred to a soldier of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. I thought it was a place. They ate damper, which they cooked in a camp fire.
I have said before that I learned to read too soon and read a large number of books I didn’t really understand – children’s editions of the classics are a good example. I read them, didn’t understand them and, for the rest of my life, avoided them. I still can’t settle with the Brontës, Dickens or Austen. It’s a chicken and egg situation, particularly in those pre-internet days. You had to read to learn, but you had to know things already to get the benefit of the reading you were doing. In the end I suppose it didn’t do me any real harm.
It was just a short step from there to the books of my youth and a few minutes spent amongst devotees of Biggles has left me recharged and ready for the day ahead. On the way to that conclusion I think I may have found out where all those missing minutes go.
They are never really missed
To be honest, there are few better ways to spend my time. 🙂
Damper sounds like interesting bread, especially whole wheat version of it. Rick found a recipe for Zarzuela (a seafood stew) from reading one of James Michener’s books, I forget which one. He came up with his own recipe based on the description.
I tend to treat recipes as guides. I have bought special ingredients too many times and found myself not using them again. I looked up Zarzuela and cannot believe that Catalonian mothers will have all those ingredients available all the time. It does sound delicious but I’m sure your altered version will also be delicious.
My only reservation is cookery sites where people tell you how many changes they made then have the cheek to say the recipe doesn’t work. 🙂
Ah, Biggles. Now you’re talking. Did you ever read G A Henty?
I don’t think so. I did manage Haggard, Maryatt and Treece but Henty seems to have passed me by.
I got a liking for historical novels from him which lasted a long time. I don’t know how he would read these days.
It’s always tricky looking back and trying to equate it to today’s values. Last night we watched an episode of QI that was big on mocking foreign accents – or casual racism as we would now call it. The people who were doing it last night would, I suspect, be big on condemning it now, or virtue signalling and re-writing history as we now call it. Strange world.
No Austen? Nooooooooo
It is the price I have paid for learning to read too soon . . .
Alas….
I saw some Biggles books in a bookshop the other. If I had kept the first editions of some that I was given for birthdays and Christmas I would have a fortune. But I gave them to my little brother and he drew pictures all over them and that tended to lower the resale value quite a lot.
A sad story, but a bit like mine with the shabby dustjackets – better they were well read/used/played with than kept on a shelf.