Tag Archives: emails

Pruning Emails and Eating Salmon

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Sorry, I have been neglecting my readers. If it helps, I have also been neglecting myself and all sorts of things I should have been doing. Two days ago I deleted 31 emails. and left another six to be looked at later. I have just done 33 more and this evening I will no doubt get a few more. How many do you get?

Over the years I’ve whittled things down so I don’t get many, and I will be looking at them critically in the next few weeks to cut more out. Same goes for my postal deliveries – there are things that need to be stopped, and now that we are moving this seems like a good time to do it.

I’ve intermittently sent money to disasters and such, and bought via mail order, and some people just never seem to give up. I don’t mind helping people who are in trouble, in the short term, but it isn’t my responsibility to finance refugee camps in the long term. If governments can afford the bombs to create refugees they should be made to finance the care of the refugees they create. I have supported two charities for children for the last 20 or 25 years. I pay by direct debit and I pay whether I am in work or out of it. It’s not a great deal, but it has seemed quite a lot at times when business has been bad. Once I went to the shop and was paid a reliable wage, I was able to manage it quite comfortably. Even things I am interested in often go unread. I’m interested in nature but, to be frank, I’m less enthralled by details of the AGM or the latest request for extra money.

Fortunately spam filters have got better over the years, because things seemed to be a lot worse when you look back. I had a bad patch a few years ago when I went on a South African genealogy site. I had months of spam emails and pop-ups, presumably because my filters had to educate themselves about South African spam sites. The email box on the farm used to have frequent requests for help from the widows of African politicians. I presume, as with all things, there is a science behind spam and it is probably big business.

This isn’t the worst of the job. I have emails in my inbox which date back to 2011. I’m currently going through them at the rate of a couple of hundred a day to get rid of them. They relate to junior rugby and various similar things and most were kept as an archive in case I needed to refer back. Of course, you rarely do, and at the end of the season you can’t be bothered. Suddenly you have a few thousand surplus emails and you lose the will to do anything about them . . .

The sifting process is a mixed blessing. Some good times to remember, some low points to forget and a lot of things and people I have forgotten, or never thought about, in the last 13 years.

Modern life, eh?

The pictures are baked salmon with broccoli and asparagus. And mangetout peas and red peppers, soy sauce and sesame seed oil. Healthy oily fish with veg and a lack of carbs. It’s sort of a recipe from the internet. The salmon, broccoli and asparagus were bought specially but the rest was adjusted based on what was already in the fridge. It worked and it was easy, so I will probably do it again next week, or something similar.

By my standards, I find this quite impressive. It would, of course, be better with chips , or when battered into a chunky soup, but sometimes you have to make concessions to elegance.

Ducks and Stuff

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Mandarin Duck – Arnot Hill Park

I’ve just been tidying up my email box. Deleting 100 emails on top of the hundreds that I do as they come in, makes me realise how many I get and how much I have let things get out of hand. Recently I red how part of you can be contained in another person (the example in my case being that without Julia I would lose all memory of family addresses and dates. It’s a bit like that with emails. Much of my life is contained within the email system and if I lost access to that I would find aspects of my personality disappearing too.

But enough philosophical rambling . . .

I’m just about to start writing poetry again (having been derailed by my recent arthritis outbreak), and I was looking up an email from an editor. I wanted information about the next submission period but was hooked by his comments on rejecting my previous submission. I thought I had passed the point of being annoyed by rejection, but it appears I’m not. I don’t want to give too much information because it’s not fair to discuss editorial comments in public, but he editor in question said that the poem didn’t make sense on a literal basis.

Duck – Arnot Hill Park

If I was aiming for writing that made sense on a literal basis i would write travel guides or text books. I’d actually have a chance of making money if I did that. But I write poetry, which is supposed to be full of imagination, allusion and layers of meaning. I don’t recall ever reading that it had to make sense. It’s hard enough to write as it is, without needing it to make sense too.

That email is stored two spaces below another that complains the haiku in one of the haibun I submitted “isn’t a haiku at all”. When I look back at it, I see his point. It was written in haste as I struggled to make a deadline and I wasn’t as sharp at editing as I should have been. This comment I have no problem with, just in case you were thinking I was being unfair to editors. It is, after all, the job of the writer to write poetry of such stunning beauty that an editor cannot resist it.

And with that in mind, I am off to write a poem about ducks. I like ducks and they are fun to feed. They aren’t quite as multi-faceted as swans, but if you are writing limericks they are easier to rhyme.

Floating Feathers – Arnot Hill Park

Emails, Memories and my First Haibun

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I’ve been searching in my emails. I have a lot of them, dating back to, 2010. They hold details of junior rugby fixtures, excuses from parents and troubles with booking referees. I kept some because they were important at the time, or because I was annoyed by them or, in most cases, because I have always been too lazy to keep control of my emails. There are mails from people who are now dead, people who I didn’t like, and people I don’t remember. Which, I wonder, is better – dead, disliked, forgotten? I don’t know why I still keep them. Last night I have dumped over 300, It is going to be a long job . . .

As I sort, memories return. Pompous nonentities carving out an empire when they should have been helping the kids, excuses for failing to help with catering, complaints about team selection. Even now, my head is filling with the discussions we used to have and all the old frustrations are starting to rise to the surface. Some of the memories are as irksome and stressful as the actual events were at the time and I am amazed at my capacity to harbour resentment.

I note the way the emails change from rugby to the farm, to poetry as my life progresses. I was looking for a poetry email, and after finding that I went on to browse. I found, to my amazement, that it is five years this month that I sent off my first Haibun to an online journal. Time soon passes.

It’s a hornet-mimicking hoverfly – Volucella inanis. To be fair, it’s more like a wasp. Common name is Wasp Plumehorn but a lot of people stick with the Latin.

So much has changed. I used to keep a folder of all my successes, a trick I learned from my father-in-law. I still have it somewhere but once acceptance becomes a regular thing you don’t need the folder to boost your confidence. In my case I still worry about becoming an overnight failure, but the submission process has become automatic, regardless of success or failure. I can still be cast down by  rejection, but it only lasts ten minutes these days. The imposter syndrome, however, persists. Michael Parkinson suffered from it too. It doesn’t get mentioned in his obituary  but his son has mentioned it in recent interviews. That tends to put things into perspective.

The folder of published work is something I must start doing again, as I have lost track of some things, as I said a few days ago.

Always more admin . . .

Late Summer is a time for Wasps