On Sunday it will be 02/02/2020.
The last palindrome date was over 900 years ago.
Mind you, there’s a church a mile from where I live that was built in the 7th century. It’s still there, they have services every Sunday, so in the scheme of things, nine centuries is not much of a stretch.
It’s the thing.
At night, when an airliner flies low over my house, I think, I hope it doesn’t crash, but I listen for a few minutes, on the off-chance it does.
This year’s drive to edit my back catalogue has been going well. Today I had almost three hours between two tuition sessions so I managed to complete an edit of a galley copy of Shoreline Gold. There were only a couple of obvious typos, but lots of little things that I can do to make the writing smother.
I think the first duty of a writer is to make the work readable.
It’s an ongoing struggle.
Editing Jago and I got to about the 2/3 mark when I realised that at one point the narrative moves too quickly, that it needs a couple of extra chapters to smooth it out. Sometimes putting ‘three months had passed since…’ isn’t quite enough.
bugger.
But never mind, I can find two or three chapters. Got plenty of spare ones I can take a second look at, or I can dream up something entirely new.
The first house I owned didn’t have hot water on tap. You had to heat a boiler. But I was working as a postman at the time, and getting up at 4.20am to leave for work at 4.35 – I had it timed to the second – meant there was no time to heat water. So I got used to getting washed over the sink in cold water, then washing my hair in cold water too.
Every morning at 4.25am I’d have my head in a bowl of cold water. In winter, it was very cold water.
Anyhow, I decided this Christmas that in honour of those long-gone days living in the cold -water 2-up 2-down, I was going to start taking cold showers again. And every day from then I’ve started off with a hot shower then gradually dimmed the temperature until it was running cold.
Been doing this for a month now and today as I stood beneath the cold shower, I thought, why am I doing this? It’s stupid. Why not take luxury when you can get it? I mean, when I used to take a cold shower or even just a cold wash over the bathroom sink, I had no choice,.
Now, I have a choice.
So I thought, bugger this, I’ll take a hot shower from now on, and I turned the water hot again. It was lovely. Why did I spend a month taking cold showers? What on earth was I thinking?
Then I turned it cold again.
I’m used to it.
Doing another edit of Jago. Onto page 144 of 270. I’ll be finished the end of next week.
When I’m finished I’m gong to send it to a friend of mine in America. I need someone to read it who speaks American English.
Someone once said that puritanism is the nagging worry that someone, somewhere, is having fun.
Dunno if that’s always the case, but I do suspect that 100% adherence to any creed is impossible, and that expecting perfection is a fool’s quest.
Watching this movie I saw that, when you’re knocked down, there’s a huge power in just standing up.
More thoughts later.
Laura introduced me to ‘mac n cheese bites’ which are literally deep-fried lumps of macaroni cheese. They are to pasta what chicken nuggets are to poultry.
Irresistible.