Tag Archives: immortality

What a Difference a “T” Makes

14 Replies

Reflecting on immortality this morning, I couldn’t help wondering what the difference is between immortality and immorality. One letter and fifty years, I decided. Even if I were single I wouldn’t have the energy for chasing women these days and nights of beer and curry are restricted by my digestion and fear of hangovers. I am not the man I was.

A mixture of books

I would like to achieve immortality through my writing, though I doubt that this will happen. The best I can hope for is that I actually get round to producing a book of poetry and that I get myself organised enough to fulfill my legal requirements, someone may dust my book off in a couple of centuries and cite it in their thesis on whatever they are doing – average poetry, vanity publishing or analysis of paper types.

Legal requirements? That’s right,  books published in the UK should be sent to the following Legal Deposit libraries – the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales. the Libraries of the University of Oxford, Cambridge University and the Library of Trinity College Dublin. It’s a strange list and one I’m not particularly happy with as Scotland, Wales and Ireland are always critical of England and Oxford and Cambridge can afford to buy their own books.

However, it’s nice to know that it will be available, whether it’s for a future scholar, a survivor of WW3 looking for toilet paper or a monkey dressed in leather armour. Or anybody dressed in leather armour, for that matter. Why, in all these fantasy and post-apocalyptic films do they never invent the printing press or a system of proportional representation, but they always manage to rivet bits of leather together?

That’s my thought for the day.

The Gardening Section

We all have Two Deaths

19 Replies

I just had a comment on an old post from 2017. It was about a visit I made to a childhood haunt and two brothers that drowned there. Since then I have had two comments from people who also knew them, one of whom I also knew.

This got me thinking about the old saying about us all dying twice, once when we stop breathing and  once when people forget us. It’s slightly more complex than that, as mot people die for the second time when the last person who knew them dies.

Others, such as Marilyn Monroe (to pick one at random) will not die as long as films are shown and Hollywood legends persist. Nor, you hope, will Shakespeare. What of Newton and Einstein? They are well known and legendary, but do we really know them in the same way we know an actor or a playwright?

And how about the bloggers? Laurie will be about for a while because of her books. The rest of us, I feel, are slightly less immortal, though we are likely to persist longer than non-bloggers, though only as pixelated phantoms, until Microsoft withdraws support from the internet and relaunches it as  a pay-per-view service on its latest “new and improved” (sic) version of whatever it is working on at the time. They may, by this time, be pushing for the beatification of Bill Gates, though my enthusiasm for making him eternal ends at contributing to a project to have him stuffed and mounted.

So, what do you think about immortality.

Or having Bill Gates stuffed? He could join Lenin and Jeremy Bentham as part of a triumvirate of strange funereal practices.

 

I chose swans because the post on Orton Mere used a swan picture (the one at the bottom of this post, to be precise, and because of the connotation of “swan song”.

 

Starts with Soup and ends with Poetry

22 Replies

I’m writing this in the last hour of 1st December, and will post it minutes after midnight to make sure i get something written for what is currently “tomorrow”.

Soup first. I was wrong about the quantity. We had it for lunch then used the remains in the vegetable stew and dumplings we had for tea. I had mine with lashings of brown sauce, so it wasn’t as healthy as it could have been.

The green soup turned out brown, which turned to an off-putting greenish khaki once I applied the blender. I’m not sure which I prefer. It has a distinct salty taste, turning to broccoli. I’m not sure why as I only used one stock cube and no other seasoning. Apart from that, it’s OK. The colour, I think, can be traced back to me softening the onions until they turned brown – heat too high and concentration not switched on. It should be good for three days, and it might take me two of those days to work up the enthusiasm to eat it. I have seen that6 colour before and it is not usually associated with pleasant things.

Writing next. I had two poems accepted by Obsessed with Pipework. It’s a mixed blessing. I’m glad to have the poems accepted but it means that I now have nothing out with editors. This is a situation I feel I should remedy but it’s also a weight off my shoulders.

Marmalade Hoverfly

Marmalade Hoverfly

Over the last couple of years I have allowed my writing to reflect the editors I send it to, rather than what I want to write. That’s a good thing to do if you want to make a living as a freelance writer but I’ve left it a bit late for that and I really write for pleasure and relaxation.  I have proved to myself that I can write to an acceptable standard and I have proved that I can bounce back from rejection.

If I now change down a gear, it’s because I want to, not because I’m making excuses. Yes, at the back of my mind I do have an ambition to see my name on the spine of a poetry collection (or maybe more than one) but that is not as important as the pleasure I get from writing.

It’s an ego thing. Is my poetry really that good that it justifies cutting down a tree? Probably not. (I added the “probably” to give me an escape route if I ever succumb and do publish one). I don’t, to be honest, work hard enough to be able to produce a book and admire people who do.

This is very much in the area of “Writer Biographies” and blogs. A lot of them list the author’s educational achievements from forty years ago, their glittering careers and a long list of publications. It’s very dull and it isn’t really a picture of who they are (unless they really are  a pompous dullard).  I, as you know, am not overly burdened by education, achievement or success so  I couldn’t compete with them if I wanted to, but I promise you that if I could compete with them, I wouldn’t. What I have been gives some insight into what I am today, but what I am really concerned with is what I will be tomorrow. Same with my writing. Everything I have published is faulty and my ambition is to publish something tomorrow that is less faulty.

Lake District – a better photographer would have noted which bit . . .

The photos are a pork pie, a hoverfly on a poppy and a load of hills next to a lake. That’s just to remind myself that lots of things are (a) more important than poetry and (b) will still be around long after I have gone.