The new blood sample is given, the shopping delivery is confirmed. I have also pulled three poems out of long term storage ( it’s the file next to oblivion) and polished them up. I have also lined up another six which need a bit of editing. Once that is all done, I will have the nine I need for this month. Then I will need to find a few more for the month after, but sufficient to the day is the evil thereof as the King James Version tells us. Or in other words, I will worry about that as the time approaches. By that time I will probably have had at least six of this months submissions returned and they will be ready to go again.
Writing poetry is probably one of the more sustainable hobbies – nearly as ecological as composting and a lot better for the environment than rally driving. many of my poems are accepted on te second or third try, one on the fourth, as I recall. After that I tend to lose interest in them. I once had one returned for the second time, sent it off immediately, and had it accepted within days. It’s true what they say about rejection, it’s how it fits with one particular editor on one specific day.
Medals of Superintendent A W Tacey of Nottingham City Police – I will be photographing some of his old addresses before the talk. He had a less exciting life that Colonel Brighten (see below) but wsa arguably a much better citizen. When tacey was awarded his Silver Jubilee Medal (the fourth one in the group) brighten was probably still incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs.
Nothing much else happened. I’ve done bit more towards the September presentation, and it is starting to take shape, but it still feels a long way from coming together. That’s top of my list for next week. I don’t expect that I will come close to finishing it, but I’d like to think I get most of the slides roughed out and in the right order. If I’m honest, I can take it from there without doing much more – most of my presentations are not properly finished and rely on my memory rather than a script.
The problem with this one is that it’s an introduction to the history of miniature medals, with some anecdotes about collecting and a number of stories stories I have discovered in the course of researching. I could easily do 100 slides for it, which will be far too long and will send people cross-eyes. Forty five minutes is my target, about 50 slides, and leave them wanting more.
The medals here and in the header picture, for instance, is the group of medals which belonged to a solicitor and war hero. A solicitor, he had a distinguished war, awarded the Distinguished Service Order twice, mentioned in dispatches three times and given two Belgian medals. In WW2 he commanded a Home Guard District and was awarded an OBE. Between the wars he was caught up in a couple of news stories and in 1932 he was struck off and imprisoned for fraud. He bought a department store in 1952 and was killed in a motor accident in 1954 at the age of 64 – a packed and interesting life.
