tuesday sub-mania

When my wife is away there is always a noticeable change of pace. Sometimes I can become lethargic and only wish to curl up on the couch and read. At other times I get a burst of sometimes quite useful activity.

Yesterday passed in an almost dizzying whirl of activity. In the morning I drove to a nearby town to speak to an old friend about an incident in his younger life. I told him I was going to try and obtain as much information about the incident as possible and then possibly make a short story out of it. He was perfectly happy about this and we chatted for nearly 2 hours; me taking notes in longhand. I hope I will be able to read them afterwards, because I got gold, more than enough to make a passable story I think.

After lunch I bumped into an old friend I normally only see on rare occasions, when he has been able to secure certain precious cargo for us. But on an impulse I invited him round to my house for a couple of hours. The guy is so computer-terrified he has virtually no knowledge of what they do at all. Now believe me, I am not one to try to convert him to the ways of enlightenment. For one thing my own skills are non too sophisticated, reaching about to the lofty heights of being able to change my profile picture on Facebook.

But during the course of the afternoon he asked me how well I knew Kipling's poem "If". Reasonably well was my response, though I wouldn't claim to be capable of reciting it verbatim.
"You know, I'd love to see the full written text somehow"
I assured him, despite his incredulity that it would be childsplay even for me to conjure this out of the ether pronto, which I duly did. I then went over to me printer and blasted him off a hard copy, right there. As I put it in his hands, mere moments after he had been idly speculating about the possibility, it had become fact right before his eyes. His face sort of filled out with wonder as he read the text of the great poem.

At 4 o'clock I went back to my FiL's place to finish off the job of retrieving and bagging all those discarded plastic milk cartons. I say retrieve, because for some reason, they had all been placed behind the small shed in the back yard. I should probably have photographed it really. In the 6" or so space between the shed walls and the dividing walls, hundreds and hundreds of empty cartons had been stuffed in, presumably over a pretty extended period. I counted, in the event 212. It took over an hour to pull them all out of their cranny, using as a hook a battered old 5 iron.

In the evening I settled down to do the re-work on my story "A Killer Holiday", post my first writing lesson with Richard. He sort of liked it a bit, I think; there were several ticks on to indicate his approval. But he felt there was something important missing (oh no!) and of course deep down I had known it all the time but was reluctant to admit it to myself. Now I have, I am re-working it at a rate of knots. I wrote 3085 words in about 3 hours last night and hope to do more tonight.

Please see tomorrow's blog for my March book and film review. You can't afford to miss it!