Tag Archives: Hemingway

Eating Like a King

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It’s Monday, it’s 13.50 and I am feeling peckish. So far I have got up, typed, had breakfast, read three auction catalogues, sent in two bids for later in the week, had coffee, chatted to Julia, read two contributions I made to newsletter/Facebook pages, considered the end of the world, done my data entries for the Garden Birdwatch and Blackbird survey (we have a sad lack of blackbirds) and wondered where all the time has gone.

In a moment I am going to make a salad for lunch and moan to Julia that my time just seems to melt away.

And an hour later, I am back. I ended up with a cheese and pickle sandwich and some coleslaw. Not as healthy as it might have been, but in nutritional terms, I’ve had worse. I genuinely have had so much salad recently that I couldn’t face more than a moderate portion of coleslaw.

Last night we had mushroom biriyani. I managed to get mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, peas and onions into it and served it with a side salad of cucumber salad. For lunch we had leek and potato and cauliflower soup (it evolved rather than was cooked – as I added surplus roasted cauliflower to the remains of a previously made leek and potato soup) and for breakfast we had banana and blueberries with our virtuous Weetabix style biscuits. I think that’s ten fruit and veg, which explains why I am full of vitamins and fibre, smug, and overweight.

I’m thinking of adopting the dietary regime of King Charles who, he tells us, has two meat-free days a week, one dairy-free day and banned pate de foie gras from all palace menus. I’m way ahead of him on at least one of those and probably up with him on the meat free days. I don’t really take note of meat free days anymore, just plan to include a number of meat-free evening meals into the week. I probably should plan better.

As for the non-dairy, we’ve discussed it and we are going to try oat milk, though we aren’t allowed to call it that – it’s a drink, because it is of non-animal origin. In the USA it can be called milk because the courts decided that Americans are far too intelligent to confuse the different products.

You know that old Hemingway quote about 7/8 of an iceberg being below the surface? Ring any bells?

Writing Like Hemingway

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Bangor Pier

I’ve spent ages reflecting on the words of JD Vance yesterday. I’m not sure if I’ve ever used the word contemptible in a blog before, so I’m grateful to Mr Vance for giving me the chance.

I’ve decided, for the rest of my comments, to follow Hemingway’s advice and just write one eighth of what I think, possibly even less. You will, I’m sure, be able to fill in the rest for yourself.

It’s not that I want to be political in the blog, as politics seems to attract idiots to leave comments, but I keep thinking that if a research student accesses my blog in a hundred years, I don’t want them to think that I knew nothing of world politics. So I have left a note to show that I did notice some historical events before I go back to my hatred of modern life and my obsession with soup.

Jellyfish at Bangor

In case you aren’t familiar with it, here is Hemingway’s quote:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

The rest of the day has been pretty dull, and never really got going. Part of the problem is that I wrote into the early hours of the morning, when I really should have been asleep.

Beaumaris Lifeboat

 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), spam and me

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I thought about using the title “What Hemingway taught me about Blogging” but it probably wouldn’t do my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) much good. (Note how I managed to slip the bulk of the title into the first line. Get used to it, you’ll be seeing it several more times before you get to the end of the page. That’s SEO for you.)

On top of that, he didn’t actually teach me anything about blogging. He taught me lessons about writing, bullfighting and firearms safety, but he’s useless on blogging. Not his fault of course, as it didn’t exist in his day. Even Nostradamus is strangely silent on SEO, despite his claims to see into the future.

My spell-checker just picked up Nostradamus and suggested Stradivarius. I can’t help thinking that the world of violins would be a different place if spell-checkers ran the world.

So, in my customary bumbling way I will now shelve the Hemingway reference for later use (it was going to be a post about land ownership) and move on to SEO.

It’s a rare day when I turn on the computer at work, read the spam, and don’t find at least one offer to improve my place in Google’s rankings by someone claiming to be (a) highly effective and (b) reasonably priced.  I’d take them more seriously if most of them could actually write grammatical English. Call me old-fashioned and curmudgeonly if you want, but if someone is asking for money to improve my written work (albeit by merely inserting key words and links) I’d like to think that they are reasonably competent.

While I’m struggling to work out whether “optimisation” or “optimization” is going to bring better results they are serving up gems of jargon and sentences that look like they’ve used a translation service.

Kindly revert back if you are interested, then we can send you more detail about package/action with special Offer. I look forward to your positive mail.

Still, they write better than the representative of the Libyan Government who got in touch this morning to offer me…

…I suppose he really was from the Libyan Government, and not just spam, I mean he said he was, but the fact he used a gmail account makes me slightly suspicious that he might not be telling the truth.