Flying Scotsman at NVR
10.45. This is the crossroads of the day. Yesterday I chose to research and write articles, interspersed with reading blogs and replying to comments. A poetry book arrived, which I skimmed and found to be good. I collected Number One Son from the station – we had tea and watched TV and caught up. At midnight I found myself lacking a blog post. Such are the choices we make. However, I did find time to read some articles on writing haibun. I have made notes as part of my new self-education attempt.
Unfortunately Mallard is not at NVR.
Today I have choices to make again. Julia and No 1 Son have gone off to town. They are travelling by steam railway, as the NVR passes within a few hundred yards of the house and goes all the way to Peterborough.
Photograph is borrowed from Country Life magazine website and Courtesy of The Estate of Steve McQueen/ Sotheby’s.
So, do I fritter my time away or do I set to work and produce something useful? Whilst searching for the NVR site I already browsed and found some new information. Checking the link for the book I noted a couple of openings for poetry submissions. Then I noticed that Sotheby’s are holding a sale of important watches. They don’t seem that important, though they are all well beyond my budget. One, worn by Steve McQueen in Le Mans, comes with a filing box of correspondence and provenance and the upper estimate is $1,000,000. That’s a lot of money just to tell the time. And it’s a lot of money for an undeniably ugly watch.
However, as a piece of film history, and part of the story of a 20th Century icon, it is also a priceless relic. Pricing, as we always said in the antiques trade, is as much art as science. Well, I did, I’m not sure about the rest of them.
Give me a million dollars and I’d be happy to go on a round the world cruise with a £10 watch. The cruise would be so much more relaxing if I didn’t have to worry about losing my watch or having it stolen.
The next post of the day will be a haibun on the subject of auction sales. (Sorry, the day got away from me and it was posted in the early hours of toady, which would have been “tomorrow” when I originally posted about “The next post of the day.)
Photograph is borrowed from Country Life magazine website and Courtesy of The Estate of Steve McQueen/ Sotheby’s.
