Tag Archives: concentration

A Quandary at a Crossroads on the Horns of a Dilemma

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Medallion with box and leaflet

Two days ago, I wrote the beginning of a post, then tried three middles, which all took a turn that I didn’t want to pursue. And suddenly, as so many times, it’s two days later and I’ve written nothing. It’s not like I’ve been idle, but I have managed to stay busy and still accomplish nothing. All my talk of focus and being conscious of the passage of time has, as usual, counted for little.

At the moment I have several choices.  One, I can blog. That, as you can probably guess, is what has happened. Two, I can write a couple of passages of disambiguation for the medallion book I am helping to edit. Three, I can go through the list of Nottinghamshire medallions which will be an appendix to the book. Four, I can write poetry. Five, I can go to Derbyshire  to look for jewellery for Julia’s birthday. And six, I can wait in to see what the conservatory man says about the leaks.

As I have no real choice about number six, I won’t be travelling to Derbyshire today. It’s an hour and a half longer when you start from here than it is from Nottingham, and I wouldn’t be able to get back in time to feel faint at the cost of the job.

And by the time I’ve finished this post I will probably have forgotten about writing poetry.

Death sells tickets for the final voyage

Tomorrow is out for Derbyshire as it’s Julia’s wood turning day. Looks like we  will be going on Wednesday. Of course, that also depends on the weather.  If not, Thursday is available as Friday is cafe day. Things are gathering pace there, with Julia’s policy of writing about people for the newsletter making her a lot of new friends. It’s a good policy. If you can’t have lambs or kittens (or puppies or piglets or poultry) go for people.

That reminds me – seven, discuss the social media strategy for the Numismatic Society. It’s all very well having a selection of interesting numismatic articles, but why are we doing it. With half a dozen regular readers we aren’t spreading numismatic knowledge or increasing our membership so, apart from two of us sharpening our writing style, what are we actually doing it for?

It’s here, by the way. Last week’s Lusitania article might be a bit more interesting than some of the more numismatic bits, if you are inclined to read a bit of history.

The photos are the famous, or infamous, Lusitania medallion. Originally produced by Karl Goetz to ridicule the greed of people who sailed in the face of danger in order to do business, it was adopted by the British, who used the medallion and the error in dates, to make it look like the Germans were congratulating themselves on the success of the attack. I was always told by my parents that propaganda was a Nazi invention for WW2. In fact, Hitler was so convinced that British propaganda had helped win the war that he adopted our methods when he took power in Germany.

And the other side – showing artillery pieces on deck, even though there were none on board.

 

 

The Post That Never Was

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Today’s post is going to be a politically scathing and hilarious look at modern life in the UK. Well, it was this morning when I composed it in my head as I drove to work. I seem to be able to relax and think in the car, which is quite an alarming thought when you think I am in charge of a ton and a half of metal powered by the equivalent of over 120 horses, all of which needs threading through a mass of vehicles driven by people paying even less attention than I do. I may have to reconsider my meditation routine.

Anyway, I won’t be writing that blog post. It’s partly because I’m trying not to do politics. And mainly because by the time I’d got to my computer (I email my notes to my home computer from the shop) I’d forgotten what I was going to write. I find I do that more and more often. I think my brains might have hit the point of no return. In terms of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel I’m at that teetering point just at then top, thinking of mortality and the long fall that is coming . . .

Meanwhile, today’s rant features charitable donations. I already give by standing order. I sometimes give a bit extra. I don’t mind the giving, what I mind is the way people like Amazon and eBay keep asking at check out time. If they want to support charity they can do it out of their massive tax-avoiding profits, not by ambushing me. And Clogau jewellery is even worse. I’ve ordered from them three times recently (I hve a lucky wife) and three times they have added £3.50 for a donation to a charity of their choice – twice for trees and once for something else I can’t remember. I always cancel the donation, but they shouldn’t have added it in the first place. It is very annoying as it makes me feel evil to cancel the donations. Anyway, I already give money to plant trees every year. End of rant.

The Reading Paradox

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If you want to write, you have to read. That’s standard advice whenever you look at anything about how to be a better writer. At the moment, I’m struggling to read. My eyes aren’t as good as they were and I really need to get a decent reading lamp. That has limited my reading over the last year, and since I was ill at the end of summer, I seem to have lost interest and concentration.

I can still read from a screen, but it isn’t really  the same. On top of that I seem to have mislaid my tablet. I had it a few weeks ago, did some tidying, and now can’t find it. That’s the trouble with making electrical gear smaller – it’s easier to lose. I thought it might turn up under a book or something, but so far it has eluded me.

The other problem is that I have been trying to do so much writing. Or, to put it another way, the writing isn’t flowing like it used to and so it takes more time. This could, of course, be related to me not reading enough, which is where this started. It will be interesting to see if my target of reading 50 books in 2022 helps me out.

However, do I count poetry books as books? And if they do, do journals like The Haibun Journal also count. There are 56 pages of Haibun in the latest issue, and that is longer than some poetry books. I have a few days to think about it before 1st January arrives, and in that time I also have to finish at least two submissions – three if I feel really motivated.

Anyone got any views on the subject?

Reading – not as easy as it used to be

 

Ten Minute Burst

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I’m going to try a Ten Minute Burst (TMB). I just read a few blogs on freshening up my writing, and this is what I came up with. I’ve noticed that I can do a post in a short time if I get my head down, so this is really nothing new, but the idea of actually using it as a writing tool is new. I could do two of them in an hour and I reckon that would produce more than many of the hours I spent looking at a blank screen and filling it word by hard-won word.

I think I may already have failed, as I forgot to note my start time. Plus I don’t actually have much of a plan. “Write” is not, it seems, good enough.

A big problem with this plan is, of course, that I have to prevent myself wandering off on the net. True to form, I have spent most of the last hour doing bits of research and rambling off. It’s been fun, but it’s not been much use from the point of view of working on my Ten Minute Burst technique. Clearly tomorrow will be a sterner test as I have a number of things to rewrite before I submit them. If all goes well I have three or four submissions to make in the next week.

It’s a funny thing – I meant to read up on more writing techniques, but then I started writing so much that I forgot to do it. Just one of life’s many ironies.

Writer’s Log Jam

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The last few days have been crowded with subjects to write about. The trouble is that there is just too much, I am feeling quite tetchy about a lot of it and it’s hard to write a post in those circumstances. It’s the opposite of writer’s block in many ways – plenty to write about, plenty of words coming through, but just so much to say I can’t process it all.

I went to the random subject generator to help me concentrate, and this is what it came back with –

Write about your relationship with food.

You know it isn’t your day when even the random subject generator is having a pop at you.

I carry, as you may have gathered over the years, a few extra pounds. I say “a few” – it might be a bit more than that. In fact I could probably do with losing weight equivalent to the bodyweight of an average jockey.

However, this is supposed to be about my relationship with food, not my relationship with small people who ride horses. I like jockeys, but  couldn’t eat a whole one…

I don’t really have much of a relationship with food; it’s never around long enough for me to get to know it.

When I gave up smoking I did so by telling myself how disgusting it was every time I smelt cigarette smoke. It seems to have worked as, twenty years later, I am still off cigarettes.

I’m not sure it would work as well with food. I’m worried that if I made myself think of food as disgusting I might end up with an eating disorder. To be fair, it would take a few years before the weight loss became a problem, but you have to be careful about these things.

To avoid buying new clothes I could buy braces to keep my trousers up, which is something I’ve been considering anyway – it’s a middle-aged man thing. (That’s suspenders to you Americans, though suspenders are something different to us.) Very different.

I do love the way English differs from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The mental picture of middle-aged American men wearing suspenders is both amusing and horrifying.

I think I’ll leave it there and add some pictures of food.

Oatcakes – Stoke on TrentOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Cheese Scone at the Barn Garden Centre
Scones and Jam – John Lewis

 

Between writing “pictures of food” and actually posting the pictures I managed to fall asleep and wake up just after midnight to find I’d missed a day posting. Just as I thought I was doing so well…

Tolkien’s Banjo

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I’ve just been watching an episode of Lewis on TV. In it, an art student was conducting tours of unknown Oxford, including telling people about a crocodile in the river and that Tolkien was well known for playing the banjo in the pub. However, a brief survey of the internet throws up several crocodile references, including a reference to fossil crocodiles. There is even a serious reference to Tolkien and banjos.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and in this case, though it’s difficult to measure strangeness, it would seem that this might be the case.

It is inevitable that I end up pressing more links once I get going, and as a fan of the Narnia books it seemed in order to search for “C. S. Lewis” and “harmonica”. How many do you think there are? I didn’t think there would be any but it seems there are a lot of religious people on forums who discuss harmonica playing and use quotes from Lewis in their signatures. 187,000 to be precise.

I would have loved to have turned up a reference to the Inklings running musical evenings but it seems I am to be thwarted. Instead I have managed to find that Lewis didn’t think that Pauline Baynes could draw lions, that Baynes learned her map drawing skills with the Admiralty in WW2, and that Kipling wrote a poem about banjos (it’s a long poem, and not one of his best).

As a result of this I searched for some help on concentration skills. I liked this list, and already have the “eat breakfast” and “take breaks” bits covered. That just leaves 14 more to master…