Tag Archives: Sunday

Sunday Night Already

Where’s it all gone?

A certain amount of it was lost to sleep because I worked into the early hours setting up a plan for submissions. If you go to bed three hours late, you may as well get up three hours late on Sunday morning. Or, I suppose, you could just leave the planning for the morning. I’ve never worked out the best way to do it.

Late night is better for concentration, as there is nobody about to ask me to do other things, but it’s not so good for being alert and getting up next morning.

In the early hours I feel more like a writer. In the morning I feel more like an accountant.

From sleep we burst into action with laundry and shopping, then home for brunch. I did some writing and some work on my talk (it’s only four months away!) then watched TV, had a roast dinner cooked by Julia, who also made crumble. Number Two son served it. Looks like the Old Man has been left to wash up.

Watched some cricket. Then back to the writing.

When I say writing I also mean on-line Scrabble, reading comments on WordPress, playing Othello and trying to read a few WordPress posts, though I’m still very bad at this. Sorry to everyone I’ve been neglecting. Playing Scrabble hasn’t really increased my facility with anagrams, which I’ve never been good with, but it has enlarged my repertoire of games and increased my capacity for wasting time. To be fair, it has also increased my vocabulary of two letter words, but that’s not terribly useful.

I’m going to have to get a grip of my time.

Even if I merely stop discussing my talent for wasting time I’d save several hours a week.

1994 22 carat gold 50p

The coin I’ve pictured today is a 22 carat gold 50p piece – one of only 2,500 made in gold. It is a rare coin compared to the normal cupro-nickel one, but the collectors are also rare. It weighs 26.32 grams, which is the same as about three and a quarter sovereigns. The cheapest currently on eBay is £1,099.

People with £1,099 don’t visit the shop every day, and don’t often want a modern coin like this.

Gold 50p 1994 D-Day

All’s Right With the World

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Having gone to bed just before midnight, I found myself awake and ready to creak into action just before 7am. There’s something inevitable about it. As a result, I will potter about until mid-afternoon. If I make the mistake of sitting down in front of TV I will then sleep. I don’t know why, but 3pm on a Sunday just seems to be made for sleeping.

It is now 8am and, having just discovered that I’ve left my camera at the shop, I am muttering at the computer screen and using this quiet sliver of time to blog.

Julia has had her weekly lie-in (she calls it that to make me feel guilty about my sluggardly habits) and is moving around upstairs.

She will be down soon, disturbing my day by pressing cups of tea on me and asking if I would like her to wash my shirts. She means well but seems unable to understand that a creative artist needs time and space in which to write.

I do need tea and clean shirts, but I want them to appear magically rather than have to answer questions about them when I’m pursuing my career as a 21st century Samuel Pepys.

At this time of the week I like to mull over events and draw lessons from them.

In this case the events of the week were uneventful and I learned that I didn’t know much.

I did manage to work the word “skullduggery” into an eBay description, the first time I’ve used it in writing in my life, though I’m still deciding how to spell it. There are choices. This might be the first time I’ve used the word “orthography” in writing too. I don’t recall using it before, but why would you, when “spelling” is just as good for most purposes?

It cropped up in something I was reading during the week and I thought, “I’ve never used the word “orthography” in writing.” Now I’ve used it twice.

I read it in a book about Shakespeare. I doubt that he ever used it, but if he did it would have been ironic, in that he would probably have spelt it in several different ways. The Elizabethans did that, and Shakespeare was hard pressed to spell his own name the same way twice.

Just some old photos again, due to lack of camera. The title comes from the fact that, miserable as I am, there can’t be much wrong with life when Julia is making cups of tea and I still have new words to use.

Even if I only have a picture of a cup of coffee.

Help, get me out of here!

Sunday…

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Apart from the fact that it was Father’s Day, yesterday followed the same format as most Sundays. Started with laundry, then off to the garage to fuel the car and watch a lady hoovering her car. After I watched her hoovering I was able to watch her inflating her tyres, including the spare. After that I was able to do my own tyres.

The design of the bay could do with some improvement, like having the air-line accessible while the hoover is in use.

After being beaten by my Dad and wife at Snakes and Ladders, my sister proceeded to win three of the five games of dominoes. Dad won just one and Julia took the other.

By a process of elimination I’m sure you can see who didn’t win anything. Not that it bothers me, I’m used to be being beaten by an elderly man with dementia, a sister who claims she’s trying to let Dad win, and my wife. It’s our 30^th wedding anniversary this year and I’m fully resigned to life under the thumb.

I did get messages from the kids for Father’s Day, though this was probably due to Julia reminding them, rather than any actual filial feelings.

Number One son has taken up bird watching again, and is enjoying the birding in New Zealand. Number Two son, despite hating the hotel job when doing it in the UK, has taken to hotel work in Canada and is enjoying life in Toronto. This isn’t setting the bar particularly high; he’d enjoy life anywhere that showed sport on TV in a bar.

And that, in brief, was Sunday.

After returning home we had the remains of the vegetable curry from Saturday, watched Gentleman Jack, which has a story line that moves so slowly that glaciers look sprightly by comparison, browsed eBay and fell asleep in the chair.

How different from the evenings of fine food and witty conversation I used to imagine for myself in middle-age…

Fortunately, I have WordPress for that.

Haiku, clerihu and an idle moment

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I’ve successfully procrastinated the morning away since dropping Julia at work. I blogged, I slept, I composed twelve haiku on modern subjects, I reflected on Clerihews and their superiority to haiku and I replied to a few comments. I even read one post from someone else. It was fascinating, though it didn’t seem promising at first. Try Repro Arts of Great Yarmouth. It’s a print shop, but one that has made at least one fascinating blog post. I say “at least” because I have not yet read any of the others. They may all be fascinating, but in line with my theme for the morning, I’m going to read the rest later.

I recently invented a new poetic form – the haiklerihew. So far the world’s stock of haiklerihews is one. It’s probably all we need. I’m thinking I might have a crack at the clerihu next, though amalgamating a four line humorous poem nobody values with a three line nature poem that people are very serious about could take some doing.

from ancient Japan we have Basho

who never has gone out of fashion

deep in the woodlands

a nature cliche gestates

serious poem

I’ve amalgamated the first two lines of the clerihew, with the name, then added a haiku underneath. Clerihews, for those of you who have missed previous efforts, are allowed to be bad in terms of rhyme and scansion. I think I have achieved that here.

The haiku is a bit unkind, but some of them are a bit cliched in terms of the nature reference – I know mine are. I’ve used the 5-7-5 syllable format which is now seen as a bit old-fashioned – that way you can tell it’s a haiku. I had to change woods to woodlands to get the five in the first line, which is in the bad poetry tradition of the Clerihew.

All in all, a satisfactory poetic form, and much better than the haiklerihew.

I’m now going to brace myself for death threats from haiku poets.

Writers of Clerihews are much more laid back.

I Invent a New Poetic Form

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Well, it’s been a thought-provoking day.

It started when I wrenched myself from bed and took Julia to work. The mornings are already significantly darker than they were a month ago. By 6.15 I was taking photographs by the roadside and at 6.30 arrived at the services ready to collect Number Two Son. He was supposed to be off shift at 7.00 but nobody turned up. Eventually he was relieved at 8.15 after ringing round.

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I tried to pass my time profitably, by writing haiku and watching people. The people-watching didn’t go well as there was nobody interesting to watch, apart from a hairy middle-aged man wearing only shorts and flip-flops. Even that wasn’t really interesting, just an anthropological footnote.

The haiku? They soon degenerated into my favoured format – the clerihew. I didn’t produce any of note this morning but this one has been hanging round in the drafts for a while. It features a Japanese word so it’s a hybrid form I just invented, the haiklerihew.

Martin van Buren,

was au fait with shitsuren,

and, stressing ideology over personality,

opened an era of boring banality

It’s a niche market and I can’t help feeling I may have written more haiklerihews than the world needs.

Now I just need to use canicular.

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Sunset – Trent Valley

Then I did laundry, shopped, snoozed and picked Julia up from work. We had salad for tea. We were going to have roast vegetables and belly pork but I fell asleep in front of the TV and it was a bit late to start cooking.

I can’t help feeling I’m not using Sunday to its full potential.

Strange clouds over the Trent Valley

Should I Read or Should I Write? (2)

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Well, I tried to do both, whilst humming a song by The Clash.

After an hour and a half of reading, which leaves me not quite caught up, I decided to write a quick post and go washing, in order to keep to the plan.

When I came to publish, WordPress was playing up and I couldn’t enter a category or tag. I pressed “Publish” anyway and can’t see the post on the blog, even though it appears on the list to link to.

Ah! I just linked it in and had a look. seems to be a page. I’ll have to sort it out later. It looks like I must have pressed page instead of post when I started it.

So WordPress isn’t playing up. I am.

What an idiot.

More haste, less speed…

Here is the original. As you can see, it’s more or less the same. This loss of a post, and subsequent loss, may qualify as an epic senior moment.

Should I Read or Should I write?

I decided to read, and I’m nowhere near catching up after over an hour of reading and commenting.

I was going to post a link to Should I Stay or Should I Go by the Clash to mirror the title but I can’t switch the audio on the computer and don’t like posting links to clips I can’t hear myself.

It looks like bits are dropping off the computer all over the place. It’s a feeling I know only too well.

WordPress seems to be playing up too, but I’m going to publish and see what happens.

Time to get the washing done now if I’m going to stick to my plan.

See you all later.

A Pale Rainbow

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First of all – a correction. I cooked the chicken and vegetables in the oven, not on the hob, so it was actually a casserole and not a stew as I stated in a previous post. It’s a small point but important if you value accuracy.

Apart from that, there’s been drizzle, a poor attempt at a rainbow and cheesecake to follow the casserole. (We bought it on the way back from the leisure centre, my cheesecakes are better than bought ones, but tend to be runnier and crumblier and harder to eat with panache.) Though it’s tangy and lemony, and makes you tabs laugh, as they say round here, it does tend to get spread down your shirt, in your beard and on the table.

Casserole – before

Casserole – after

You may be wondering why I’m posting three times today, when the first was sufficient. The truth is that it helps me avoid hoovering, and gives me an excuse to use some of the photos I took this afternoon.

My latest way of improving my life is to take photographs every day, declutter every day (even if it’s only a small amount) and to write every day. That means you have to look at photos of a drizzly day, but I’m sure there are worse things.

Pale Rainbow over Mapperley

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Life after the Care Farm