Tag Archives: Nella Last

Thursday Morning 7.29

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Did it really take an hour and seven minutes to write the previous post? Well, yea and no.

It certainly took that length of time from stating to finishing, but in that time I also attended to a couple of comments, read my emails and searched for photographs that were badly labelled. Or, in truth, not labelled at all. I developed lazy habits early on in my blogging career and regularly waste time as a result.

I also searched for a couple of links and read the review on my poem, rejected a couple of ideas for things to say and rewrote a couple of paragraphs.

Here, halfway through my second blog post of the day, I note that I’m about halfway through and it has only taken six minutes.

My conclusion is that I can still write reasonably quickly, but waste time with all the peripheral activity.

Nella Last with Clifford, the son who went on to be a sculptor

 

Nella Last, or Housewife, 49, of whom I have written more than once, wrote 12 million words in her diaries, including 2 million during the war. If she wrote at 20 words a minute, as I have just (approximately) done, it would have taken her 417 days.

Of course, I doubt that she wrote as fast as that. You don’t do you? There’s thinking time and musing time and simply staring into space time. I’m doing a bit of that now.

I’m on 224 words and have taken sixteen minutes. Several of those have just been spent wondering how to finish this off with a point.

There is no point, simply a reflection on how much “writing time” is spent on things that aren’t really writing. And that’s before you start to consider the endless writing and rewriting involved in writing something decent.

Julia is up now and it’s 7.48. Probably a good time to put the kettle on. But first I have to add tags and photos. At least I don’t need to find a witty title.

 

After doing the links etc it’s now 8.03 and it’s becoming clearer where my day goes. Fifteen minutes just disappeared as I looked for a link to Clifford Last.

Day 89

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So far I have made breakfast, watched TV, done some washing up and looked at some recipes on the web. It is time to start cooking new things. I have not yet done any writing or any planning. Fortunately I have 10 hours left today and 24 more tomorrow. With 34 hours left I don’t need to worry too much. Plenty of time . . .

Julia is out at the moment doing mysterious things. They probably aren’t all that mysterious, and I’m sure that she would tell me what she was doing if I asked. On the other hand, if I do ask she will probably tell me, at great length and probably while I am trying to do something else like watching Pointless.

W had a chat about tofu this morning. She thinks I am missing a nutritious treat but has agreed not to make me eat it any more. This counts as a victory in life’s struggle, and an example of why talking about problems is a good thing to do.

We are still in the middle of a pandemic and WW3 is still on the horizon, but yes, I feel that my dislike of tofu is more worthy of discussion.  If this were the BBC rather than a blog about random events in the life of a nobody, things might be different. It would even be different if I had any ambition to be a heavyweight blogger of international reputation, instead of just a heavyweight blogger. I keep meaning to read the diary of Nella Last and see what she writes about, but so far, apart from watching Victoria Wood on TV, haven’t done anything about it. She wrote 12 million words. I’m just coming up to a million. What a slacker!

Interestingly, her son Clifford, went to Australia after the war and has work displayed in the Art Gallery at Ballarat, a town which sometimes features in the blog Paol Soren. Small world, and all that.

Thoughts of Cheese and Currency

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I started writing yesterday’s post at 4.30pm when I got home, and didn’t manage to finish it by midnight.

Part of the problem was that I was diverted by various other activities – eating, washing up and eBay. Well, mainly by eBay, I will confess.

The writing did not go well, and as the main subject, ironically, was time management I decided to call it a day, throw in the towel and give it up as a bad job.

With hindsight I should have written about cliches.

Tonight I intend doing better as, despite recent events, I really do want to blog every day. Apart from practice and keeping it as a habit, I have a hankering to be a diarist. I’m not going to turn into Samuel Pepys, even with practice, but Nella Last is a definite possibility.

If I am going to become a diarist I’m going to need to do something more interesting. Pepys knew lots of notable people, owned valuable cheese and saw the Great Fire of London. Even Nella Last had World War 2 and a son who became a famous sculptor. I’m not sure what her position on cheese was, but I do know that one of the horrors of WW2 was “National Cheese“. You can still rekindle the Spirit of the Blitz by buying cheap, rubbery supermarket Cheddar if you want.

On the other hand, Pepys’s famous Parmesan still seems valuable today, as this article shows.

As for the day – it’s been a shilling sorting sort of day. We’ve been making up sets of Elizabeth II shillings (1953-66) in both English and Scottish varieties. It’s an interesting coin with a long history. At one time, according to Wikipedia, it was in use on every inhabited continent, being worth 24 cents in the USA, even into the 19th Century.

Believe me, after you’ve sorted 5,000 of them, they aren’t quite as interesting as they were.

 

 

The header picture is the 2016 £2 to commemorate the Great Fire of London in 1666. It’s the nearest I can get to a relevant photo.