I am starting better – sitting down sooner and doing planned work rather than just browsing – but by the end of he day I am faced with the fact that I really haven’t produced any writing worth doing. This quality concern applies to both quantity and quality.
Today I got up a touch after seven, brushed my teeth and sat down to do comments and check emails. It’s not onerous but it seems to suck time in and it is now 8.20. I have dipped into the internet, looking for a recipe for damper, It comes as part of the discussion of soda bread, and doesn’t seem that much different. I first read about damper in a book called From Anzac to Buckingham Palace. It was a stirring patriotic tale of an Australian lad who joined up and won a VC. Published 1917, with what I later learned were inaccurate pictures, it seemed like an exotic book from a far off time. It would, in fact, be less than 50 years old at that point. That is strange. It means that as a child, in around 1965, I was less than fifty years from the Great War. I am now more than 50 years from that point in time. I don’t know what that proves, but it does make me feel a bit of a dinosaur. This is a feeling further enhanced by Julia’s new habit of referring to my T-Rex arms. She is of course, making fun of the way I hold my arms when they ache after a hard day typing. It’s fair enough, I suppose, as I did refer to her as a grumpy bear yesterday. I did not, however, develop any more metaphors around the phrase “a bit dense towards the bottom”, which I could have done.
Anyway – back to the point. At the time I read the book, I didn’t realise that ANZAC referred to a soldier of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. I thought it was a place. They ate damper, which they cooked in a camp fire.
I have said before that I learned to read too soon and read a large number of books I didn’t really understand – children’s editions of the classics are a good example. I read them, didn’t understand them and, for the rest of my life, avoided them. I still can’t settle with the Brontës, Dickens or Austen. It’s a chicken and egg situation, particularly in those pre-internet days. You had to read to learn, but you had to know things already to get the benefit of the reading you were doing. In the end I suppose it didn’t do me any real harm.
It was just a short step from there to the books of my youth and a few minutes spent amongst devotees of Biggles has left me recharged and ready for the day ahead. On the way to that conclusion I think I may have found out where all those missing minutes go.
