Tag Archives: could do better

Day 83

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Who would have thought that I would have managed a post roughly every 24 hours for 83 days. And who would have believed that Day 83 would seem so much worse than 24th March? It does though, doesn’t it?

We put an engraved American coin up for auction last week and someone wrote to ask if we would accept £40. It was tempting, but would have been unfair on people who had viewed it and were wanting to bid. It made £9.99 so we lost £30. However, we retained our integrity, and I feel better about that than I would about taking £40.

Blossom is out and I am still having trouble sleeping properly.

Looks like this is just becoming a random load of thoughts. I admit that my posts are seldom well-crafted pieces of tight writing with a unifying thread and a satisfactory conclusion (apart from it being satisfactory that it has ended), but this is disjointed even by my standards.

I just had a letter from an editor. I submitted seven pieces. Three were accepted. Neither of the two I thought were my “best” work made the grade.

Last night I read a haiku magazine and I reckon that fully 50% of them fail to be good haiku according to generally accepted guidelines. This shows the flexibility of guidelines, the capriciousness of editorial opinion, and how bad mine must be if I can’t even get one in to a magazine where half of them are flawed.

When I get cremated I want them to stencil “Could do better” on my coffin. Those words accompanied each school report I ever had, and continue to follow me to this day.

The pictures of blossom are from a few years ago, and probably in April, not March.

I just found that you can search your photos by subject, if you’ve titled the pictures – an area in which I am deficient. It’s taken me over 2,600 posts to find that out.

Blossom at Wilford

 

 

Oooops!

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I’ve done it again. Not long to midnight and I started reading instead of writing. At school, they said I could do better. That is the one thing I have preserved from youth, I still could do better. Actually, as the promised Limerick will show, I have also preserved my love of a smutty joke.

Last week  . . . something happened. Unfortunately, as I wrote “Last week” I forgot what it was. I don’t usually lose my thread when I’m sitting at the computer, so I am clearly losing my marbles at an increasing rate.

Give it a few more years at this rate and I’ll have to tie an address label to my wrist so kindly strangers can return me to Julia when I forget where I live. The only problem with that system is that it’s open to manipulation if she puts someone else’s address on the label . . .

I have 102 words left before I hit my self-imposed minimum target, though I usually find that mentioning it is good for  another twenty or thirty.

The major discussion at work today was over the question of when W. H. Smith, the well known stationers, became WHSmith. The decline of punctuation in High Street chains (and I’ve certainly covered it before in relation to Bettys Tearoom (sic) ) is mirrored by a continuing decline in standards in public life. That’s why we now do our online cake shopping at Mrs Botham’s – if she has a proper regard for apostrophes, I feel she can be trusted in the matter of comestibles.

If you can’t trust therm with punctuation, what can you trust them with?