Tag Archives: quality

24 Posts 26 Days

I suppose the title gives things away. Despite all my good intentions this will be post 24, but it is 26th January. Two days have been swallowed up by that mad whirl of naps, TV and procrastination. I can pull two days back quite easily, so it isn’t a problem for now. Be prepared for two supplementary posts over the coming days.

I had an email from an editor yesterday, two more acceptances, bringing the total for 2025 to 55. I know numbers mean nothing, because it’s about quality. But at the same time it does mean I’ve been applying myself to writing and I carried the plan through.

It’s the same with a blog a day – it doesn’t mean I’m writing better blog posts but it does, I hope, mean that I will improve because of the constant practice.

The same goes for ideas. In the past I have hoarded ideas, ready for the day when I feel that stars have aligned and the day is propitious for one of my great ideas. However, theory, and reality, seem to indicate that the more ideas you use, the more you will generate. It does seem to work.

In other contexts, I don’t consider this a good thing. Every time I think about it I remember being in a meeting once where one aspiring volunteer (or aspiring chair, if the truth is told) said “My strength is having ideas. If anyone needs an idea, just ask.”

What still makes me grit my teeth at this, is that everyone can have ideas, but what you need on a committee is people who will work.

That’s the secret with most things. I can have all the ideas I like, but if I don’t work, nothing happens. That’s why quantity is important, it means you are doing the work which will lead to quality. And if you are doing the work and achieving the quality, you may, with luck, become good.

Sunset at Sherwood

New Year and I’m Already a Day Behind

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Yesterday I avoided the internet as I had pains in my shoulders. I still haven’t set up my workstation as I would like and shoulder pain is often a sign of this. During the day it spread into my arms, forearms, wrists and hands. With rest and a hot water bottle it had receded by bedtime and with a night’s rest I have pain in my left wrist so am attempting some typing. Of course, it may all be down to old age or arthritis, you never know. Maybe it was just my day for pains in the joints and the location was a red-herring.

Feeding tits at Budby Flash

I dismantled a bird feeder yesterday. It was empty and we have made a commitment to good feeder hygiene. Two screws to remove the bottom plate was fine, though I did feel they could have been more substantial. Four perches to twist off – no problem. Getting the collars round the feeding holes was more tricky. Each pair is held together by a small screw. They aren’t good quality screws and I managed to mess one of the heads up, so it no longer works. I could drill out the broken one and replace it, but the metal is poor, accessibility is poor and my ability to carry out simple tasks has always been poor. Any tale I may tell of my adventures with tools often hinges round my lack of dexterity and leads on to a succession of misadventures.

I will find a way of cleaning without dismantling. It will be better in the long run. Meanwhile, the moral is clear – don’t buy medium-priced bird feeders. Anything that is medium-priced is simply a trap for the unwary. It looks like you are buying something good but you aren’t. You are just buying better paintwork at a higher price. The durability and efficiency stay the same.

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We always used to buy cheap feeders, and they worked. This time, as we want the garden to look nice, I went for better looking feeders, with the consequence of paying a higher price. Unfortunately, higher price translates to better looking rather than better quality. I really need to put some thought into future purchases.

The plan is to feed birds in an efficient and healthy manner. If the feeder can’t be cleaned properly, or falls apart, the plan has failed. It’s not quite as profound as Ruskin, but it’s still lesson in life, even if it is delivered by bird feeders rather than a man with a serious Victorian beard.

Great Tit

The Day Part 2

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Sunset, Codnor, Notts

It has not been a wasted day. I have mustered my rejects from the last round of submissions and have improved several of them. I have identified my new list of targets, including one that has resisted me so far.

In non-poetry matters i have cleared a small patch of desk and finished the first draft of an article on medallions. It’s only for the Numismatic Society but it’s a start.

Julia is at the hairdresser so I am now going to make soup and something for the evening meal. This is a twofold win. First it saves her having to cook and second it means the house smells good when she walks in. With any luck I will remember to tell her that her hair looks nice. I have a terrible record of forgetting that.

All that work and it’s only just mid-day.

Sunset and chimney pots

I made soup (sweet potato and chilli) and a mixed vegetable hash (though it could have been stew or more soup). This raises an interesting point bout my cookery. Change a few ingredients and it becomes something else. For a moment I felt guilty at serving general purpose slop over the years, then I realised that Sunday Lunch, roast pork and sausages with roasted veg are all basically the same thing too – just roasted veg with dead animals. Yes, you need Yorkshire pudding for one, apple sauce for another and different flavours of gravy, but they are all pretty much the same too. Having sorted that out in my mind I no longer feel so bad.

It’s not “chicken liver parfait, with pear chutney, pickled cranberry ketchup, chicken skin & toasted sourdough” as offered by one of our local restaurants, but it ill do. Incidentally, if I could be bothered I would definitely book a meal here – even at £45 per person for three courses it looks good compared to ringing Just Eat and ordering second class food to be delivered lukewarm. I suspect that one of my faults over the years has been that I have settled for second best. I like fried chicken, burgers and generic curry but “pork tenderloin with sticky miso glazed cheek, apple & BBQ hispi cabbage” sounds so much nicer. Maybe I should have valued myself more highly.

(And yes, I did remember to mention that Julia’s hair looked nice.)

Sunset, Langley Mill by-pass

A Million Words

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I’m sorry if this is old news to you, but I’ve only just found this concept whilst poking around on the internet. It seems that you need to write a million words before you are any good at it.

At 999,999 you are writing unpublishable gibberish then at 1,000,001 publishers will form an orderly queue and start waving cheques at you.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be reflected in reality.

It’s similar to the 10,000 hour rule, where you are judged to need 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something. In terms of napping and procrastination, I have put the groundwork in and can claim to be proficient at them. Of course, whether I’m good at napping because I’ve practised, or have merely accumulated the hours because I was born good at napping, is a moot point.

As I recall the concept from the times when I was coaching the kids. it has to be focussed practice, so just dropping off in front of the TV may not count.

Similarly, despite my 10,000 hours of procrastination, there is a lingering doubt in my mind. If I was really good at procrastination, wouldn’t I still be meaning to get round to it?

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

And if I were any good at writing I wouldn’t just have spent ten minutes reminding myself about the subjunctive mood. It’s something that I’ve managed to do without over the last twenty or thirty years, but am having to relearn after an editor picked me up on it last year.

I’ve done about 1961 posts, and those posts have been about 350 words long. That’s near enough 686,000 words. It has, to be honest, seemed like more. That leaves me with 314,000 words to go, and I am sure I must have written them in the last sixty years, so that means I should be ready to start some serious writing.

Again, at the back of my mind is the idea that I really should have had more focus in my blog writing. I have gained fluency and a certain amount of discipline, which will come in handy, though I’m not sure it’s done me a lot of good in terms of quality writing. I have really let things get a bit slapdash over the years and need to get a grip.

Talking of getting a grip, I just wrote a post pretending to be a knitted bear – I think that lockdown is getting to me.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

500 Words a Day

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I don’t always write 500 words, though I do normally find no difficulty in the 250 I set myself as a minimum for posting. Most of the time I could write more, but I try to have some consideration for the reader (that’s you) as a thousand words of me moaning about modern life would be too much, even for the most determined curmudgeon.

The germ of this post developed from reading about Philip Larkin, which took me on to read about Kingsley Amis. It appears that Amis gained his reputation for having a prodigious output by writing 500 words a day. This does not seem many. He also, it seems, had iron self-discipline, and would always write his 500 words in the morning before devoting the rest of the day to drinking and adultery. I’m not saying I like him, or have liked any of his books in the past, but you have to admire a man who knows his own mind.

I’m not being dismissive about 500 words a day, or 250 or 1,000, which have all been named as a daily target by various people. It’s not easy. It’s particularly not easy to write 500 useful words.

Here are some figures.

3,000 words a day: Anne Rice, Trollope, Conan Doyle, Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Forsythe.

1,000 words a day: J G Ballard, Sarah Waters, Sebastian Faulks, Somerset Maugham.

500 words a day: Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis.

There’s something there for everyone, and if you want to see more you can look here. The highest target I can find 10,000 words a day, from R F Delderfield and Michael Crichton.

That brings me up to 262 words. It’s ironic that I’m struggling to get the words done for a blog post about daily word targets.

If I was a proper writer I would have to plough on until 500, or 1,000 or even 10,000 words. On the other hand, if I was a proper writer I’d be getting paid for this. I either need to get a grip or re-title the post ‘333 Words a Day’.

The photos for today’s post are part of the series ‘Things I’ve Photographed Whilst Sitting in my Chair in Front of the TV’. It’s one of the easier series of photographs I’ve done as it requires no travel, little thought and no duck food.

Roses in close up

The roses are from Monday’s expedition to Aldi and are a delicate pink with a hint of lavender, or mauve. I’m not quite clear about the colours in that range.

I did do some research on the subject, but it ran to 200 words of gobbledygook and left me none the wiser. Bored, confused and none the wiser, to be honest, so I exercised my power to delete.

That, I suppose, leaves us with an important question.Would you rather have 500 words of Greene or Hemingway or 10,000 words of Delderfield or Crichton. There’s no right answer, of course, as I suspect Crichton has outsold all the others combined. It may not be a judgement on the quality of writing, but what’s the point in being the best writer in the world if nobody reads your writing?

That’s 511. It’s quite enough.

The final photo is not a jar of Marmite, it’s a novelty egg cup. When you go to a charity shop with books, it sometimes happens that you buy something…

Marmite – novelty egg cup

Crossing Off Another Day

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I have packed parcels, as usual. I have drunk coffee, despite my preference for tea (because I am offered coffee and am too lazy to make my own drinks). And I have eaten my sandwiches.

It has not been a day of high excitement or great drama. We have been using the internet as a displacement activity, and to inform ourselves so we now know that Doctor Ferdinand Porsche was chauffeur to Archduke Franz Ferdinand during his National Service. This reminds me that although I know the names of the Archduke and the assassin, the name of the 1914 chauffeur seems to be absent from the records.

I also now know that Nickola Tesla was a Serbian, liked pigeons, liked walking and didn’t like paying his bills.

I then moved on to eBay, selling gold-plated coins with pictures stuck on the back.

They are not quality coins, but if you buy them from us they are reasonably priced. Buy them from the manufacturer and they will cost you a lot more.

I’m seriously thinking of applying for a job copywriting for the manufacturers, using words like sumptuous and avoiding words like value for money. Today I managed to get the word “skullduggery” in, so sumptuous should be easy.

That’s why I’m going to be nice about the makers of crap coins. Well, maybe not nice, but possibly neutral. If they find the blog I don’t want to put them off by being honest about the expensive tawdry garbage they market so aggressively.

Tactful silence…

I finished off the day with coins which have been made into jewellery. The best bit is this 1676 Half Crown.

Half crown of Charles II

It’s not the prettiest coin, it’s been made into a brooch, and someone has started to make a hole at the top, but it has seen some history in its life.

When it was minted Charles had only been back on the throne 16 years and Cromwell’s head was still on a spike above Westminster Hall. It probably circulated during some of the wars with Holland, Monmouth’s Rebellion and the South Sea Bubble. It might have been handled by Prince Rupert, Sir Isaac Newton or Sir Henry Morgan.

You never know, it might even have still been in circulation when America declared its independence.

That’s a lot of history for one small coin.

Half crown of Charles II

History and Heroes

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I like medallions.

I particularly like well-made Victorian medallions in their original boxes, but that’s just another case of me having champagne tastes and a beer income.

So here are some medallions we put on eBay this week.

First up is Canterbury Cathedral, a well-struck high relief medallion with lots of detail. It’s not the most inspiring subject but it’s done well and there’s an aura of quality hanging round it. This aura obviously communicates itself electronically as it has already sold.

Canterbury Cathedral 1840s

Canterbury Cathedral 1840s – detail of medallist

Canterbury Cathedral 1840s – The Nave

Canterbury Cathedral 1840s – in original box

The next one commemorates 21 years of the Volunteer Movement. Founded in 1860 as a reaction to political tensions with the French, the Volunteers built on the tradition of local units raised in Napoleonic times. After nearly 50 years they became the Territorial Force in 1908 and they are now known as the Army Reserve. Each incarnation has seen them become more serious and slightly more removed from the local community. I suppose that’s progress.

Still in the original box after 140 years

It really is excellent detailing

St Michael protects us in allegorical fashion

Queen Victoria looks unamused

It is an extremely well-struck medal and this particular example has traces of original lustre and the box of issue. The box has seen some wear over the years but retains its original velvet and silk lining.

On the reverse, St Michael guards a woman an children, supported by three warriors representing England, Scotland and Ireland. You can tell this from the rose, thistle and shamrock on their shields.

The final medal was produced by the Royal Mint in 1990. It’s good for a modern medal, but still suffers by comparison to proper, old medallions. It commemorates 200 years of lifeboat design. I like it because it has an interesting historical subject and it’s treated with enthusiasm (even if it does have a dull, low-relief reverse).