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.