But I still have to fill it with over 12 hours of “doing something” and sometimes that can mean “doing anything” but “doing.”
Sit around doing nothing and depression can set in. I find this on holiday. With the best intentions I might start by staring into space on a lounger whilst occasionally having a read. A couple of hours of that and I want to be out with my camera making memories.
That’s what life is about – making memories.
As Andrew Lloyd Webber once said.
“I can smile at the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember
The time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again.”
Although of course Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t write the words to that song, just the music. Trevor Nunn wrote the lyrics. I have been playing bits from Phantom of the Opera on the piano recently and long held the idea that the lyrics were written by Tim Rice, but they weren’t. They were written by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe.
Whatever happened to Richard Stilgoe? He used to pop up on television regularly and I can picture him now sitting at the piano with a pointy beard. That’s him with a pointy beard and not the piano.
So, I Googled him and was surprised to find that he has been knighted for his services to charity and been involved in many good deeds. He has a web site if you want to find out more. I will add him to my list of “good eggs”, people I admire. It usually includes lots of people with pointy beards like Charles Dickens and Guy Fawkes (ok perhaps not Guy Fawkes but you get the idea.)
I have been listening to a lovely album by Judy Collins entitled “Spellbound”. I wondered how old Judy Collins is as I last saw her in a concert in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk and she was pretty old then. She is now 85 which doesn’t seem possible. Isn’t it frightening when your heroes become that old. John Lennon of course would now be 83 going on 84. Like me he was born on October 9th but not in the same year. I was born on a Thursday and he was born on a Wednesday. You need to remember that for a little further on in this blog.
It’s good to live in the past for a while but it shouldn’t be our main reason for existing. We have to also live in the present and live in a future that seems to be getting smaller and smaller.
This has been one of my more philosophical twitterings. When I start with a blank page, I’m never quite sure what I am going to write. Sometimes words come easily, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they come out as something serious, like today, and sometimes they come out annoyingly silly, like earlier this week.
I never know what will cascade from my brain. I can write silly blogs when I’m feeling serious and write serious blogs when I’m feeling silly. Sometimes I think somebody else is working me whilst I’m writing.
Sometimes I get heartily sick of writing about myself and then I realise that it’s my blog and at times I have to write about myself. People have commented that I post hundreds of photographs but very rarely appear in them. That’s not because I’m camera shy, but because I am the person behind the camera trying to record just what I see.
And whilst on the subject of writing. This morning the latest Good News magazine came through my door. I always like to pretend it’s a surprise but as I edit and design the magazine, I’ve already read the contents at least three times and so there can be no surprise in what’s inside. Occasionally there is a surprise as I find a typo or error that got through. This isn’t a good surprise and I find myself saying “I hope nobody notices that.
And there’s certainly one of those in the latest edition and I wasn’t sure when it was pointed out to me whether to be annoyed that I had missed it or amused. I do have an apology to make to Hethersett Women’s Institute which was referred to as Hethersett Women’s Institution. I did think I had a good relationship with the WI but maybe not so now!
Yesterday I also put the June edition of Hethersett Herald online. If you haven’t seen this publication, please do give it a look and tell me what you think of it. I would value the comments from people who don’t live in Hethersett as well as comments from those that do. You can find the latest edition on www.hethersettherald.weebly.com. There you will also find all 104 editions. I sometimes wonder how long I will continue with the publication. At times I feel like giving up when the workload feels too great and then I think “well I’ve come this far so a few more won’t hurt.” Some months I struggle to get it done on time through outside influences such as family and holidays. At others it goes quite smoothly. The latest edition comes in the latter category because, despite being away for some time, I have been able to get it finished and published ahead of time.
I did note that this edition is about 70 pages whilst that for June last year was 135 but that’s the beauty of publishing on the internet. One month it can run to over 100 pages and another struggle along at around 60. It all depends on what is happening in the village, how many events I can cover and how much I have to write about and also how much is submitted. It really does vary greatly from one month to the next. I think it peaked at 150 pages for one edition, but it has never fallen to less than 60 (apart from in the really early days when it started off with about eight pages). It’s now an ingrained part of my life and one that would be hard to give up, although if I did, I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone who would want to take it on. It’s a lot of work every month but really is a labour of love. With no payment involved it has to be.
How fast can you type I hear you ask. Well yesterday morning thanks to the clock on the wall I decided to take a random minute and check. Yesterday I put the clock forward an hour. I have a preponderance to be lazy and not bother, safe in the knowledge that in a few months the time will be correct again. Changing it means jumping onto my desk, although it’s not so much a jump now as an amble.
A minute to see just how many words I could type. I had the idea of sixty or so in my mind. This was a pretty futile exercise, but it gives you the opportunity to be impressed by my keyboard skills. Can you guess how many words I actually did? It’s like one of those quiz shows where you get three alternatives. So was it 20, 60 or 100? Well, I actually spoilt that by telling you that my guess would be 60 and actually I was almost spot on as it was 61 which proves absolutely nothing other than the fact that I’m obsessed by numbers and can type at 60 words a minute which works out at one a second or an impressive 3,600 words an hour, although that doesn’t take into account the need for the loo or a break for a cup of tea etc.
Here’s a rather convoluted trick that you can have some fun with and amaze your friends. I can tell what day of the week any date was (I know you are now saying – but why would I want to do that, and I can look it up on the internet anyway, but it’s a good party piece) and it’s also a piece of maths and you know how much I love that kind of thing.
So here goes.
Take a random date – let’s say 15th August, 2012.
Follow the following:
1/ Take the last two digits of the year = 12
2/ Add one quarter ignoring any remainders = 3
3/ Add the date in the month = 15
4/ Add the following – January 1 (or 0 in a leap year), February 4 (or 3 in a leap year), March 4, April 0, May 2, June 5, July 0, August 3, September 6, October 1, November 4 and December 6. So in our example = 3
5/ If the date is in the 18th century add 4, if in the 19th century add 2, if the 20th century add 0, if 21st century add 6. For our example = 6
Add the total together which in our case will be 39 and divide this by 7 and this time take the remainder. So 39 divided by 7 = 5 with four left over.
Take the remainder and 1= Sunday, 2=Monday, 3= Tuesday, 4= Wednesday, 5= Thursday, 6= Friday and 7= Saturday.
So 15th August was a Wednesday.
Now this is all very well but who on earth worked that out in the first place? Can’t believe it was trial and error.
And that’s about it for today. Thank you everyone for sticking with my blog journey over the past four or five years and here’ to a blogging future. I’m off to work out how to grow a pointy beard.
Just one final thought. Why is it that everything I need is always nicely filed away so that it can’t be found but stuff that I don’t need is always readily at hand? I suspect that’s a comment that a lot of people can understand.