Writing

Y is for You…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

There are very few words in dictionaries beginning with X but here is one you can get your teeth into…

You Make The Difference!

I first got a computer of my own around 1998 and shortly afterwards, I broke my hip and had to spend a year on crutches. But like the present lockdown, being stuck at home gave the opportunity to both develop a business and to explore the internet and how it worked.

What I learned was about the biggest business which sorts out the content of the internet at one end of the scale, and about all the individuals who contribute the content itself at the other end of the scale. At that time, the dot-com bubble had just about burst and like many people, I was wondering how you could make money out of something that was so exciting and full of potential as the internet clearly was. Well, it turned out that Google was the answer to that particular conundrum – it’s incredible power to index content plus the concept of matching advertising to words in emails, searches, etc., was winning combination and one that nobody else has since matched. However, without content, there would be nothing to index (or advertise) and whilst, as the years have passed since then, commercial sites have increased in size and sophistication, so too have the mass of individuals who put up content about their hobbies, hobby horses and interests – not least us bloggers!


When I first went on the internet, I was amazed at how much material was already there as a result of individual effort and passion and what a democratic, leveling process this was. Think of the libraries and encyclopedias and textbooks of the past, produced by professional writers and publishers at great cost and not always great profit. Now Wikipedia demonstrates both the strength and pitfalls of “co-operative” authorship. Tales of editing wars over particular entries are legendary. Nonetheless, it is often our first port of call when researching, doing homework or just filling an idle moment – although, surfing the net generally goes by the maxim that the most interesting items always appear when you are researching under time pressure and not so much when you are footloose and fancy-free…

The A to Z Challenge is an example of this liberal, undirected, fascinatingly varied contribution to the evergrowing internet and those who have laboured for  several hours a day for almost 26 days!  Some 500 blogs on the Master list at 2 hours a day for 26 days, well that is 26,000 hours work! We have seen essential oils, photographs, haiku, incredible quilting, politics, self-development to name but a few and all this has been done by YOU!

Q is for Quality of Life…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

The current crisis has changed the lives of almost every person in the whole world and the following are fictional responses, imagining those changes (albeit with some research) and especially changes, for better or worse, to the quality of life…


Susan, Sex Worker

My working name is Susan and I am a sex worker according to my key worker, a prostitute if you are the pigs, a tart if you are a punter, and I am a drug addict. I got to do heroin because I can’t face working the streets without it and I work the streets because I need to buy heroin. Dealers know this and use it against me and the other girls, they let us have the first score of the night for free but then we have to pay back double plus the next score so we are playing catch up all bloody night. Then when we are ready to finish, they give us some bad shit that makes us feel so ill we need to work again for one more score – bastards.

But things are different now – what with the virus. The week before lockdown, the dealers were selling cheap – afraid they wouldn’t shift their gear – that meant we had an easier week. But when lockdown began the police were all over us girls on the street and we couldn’t go out without risking being locked up properly overnight – not good when you’re dying for a hit. The dealers wouldn’t come out either ‘cos the police were everywhere and stopping cars all the time. Then there was the boyfriend – pimp some would call him, since he was always pushing me out the door to work and score for both of us. After two days without drugs he chipped – not without givin’ me a black eye first – I think he went back to stay at his bro’s so I don’t have to fight with him no more – good riddance!

I can go to the pharmacy in town each day for my methadone but for a few days I was starving for food. I thought about it and then I rang George. George is a punter who I used to visit at home and he is 65 and he give me a home for now and food. Of course we do the business but now I am there all the time, he don’t want too much. Maybe once a week was enuff anyway – I think he is more glad of the company – he can’t go to the pub no more and I don’t mind him neither, an’ he has loads of books which I like. I do the shopping for us – I go out each day for the methadone which I often used to throw up ‘cos I’m bulimic but my life is less stressful than for as long as I can remember so I mostly keep it down.

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 1
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 7 

Freddie, 6 year-old boy

My brother and I live in Stevenage, which is in Hertfordshire, with our parents and during the week, our nanny. Daddy does something with money – I don’t really understand and Mummy is a lawyer but I don’t really understand what that is either. They have explained but I can’t tell them I don’t understand ‘cos then they’ll think I am stupid and they are very strict about being clever at school. Usually, we go to school in the week and our nanny – she is called Jane, she takes us and picks us up and stays with us till Mummy comes home. Jane lets us sing on the way home but we are not allowed to sing at home. We made Rainbow paintings on our last day at school, but we got into trouble because we drew a rainbow on the driveway with chalk, like we saw other children do on the TV. Mummy made us wash it off and Jane and Mummy argued. Jane is fun and now she is teaching us at home because we can’t go to school because of the virus and although Mummy and Daddy are home all the time – they are still working and we mustn’t disturb them. I miss going to school and seeing my friends. We still get to sing when Jane takes us out for exercise – everybody is allowed to go out to exercise for one hour a day. This is the best bit of the day!

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 6

James 85 year-old in a Residential Home

I am afraid for my life – more even than during the Blitz. My parents wouldn’t let my sister and I be evacuated as we lived just outside London on the hill above Greenwich and when we came out of our shelter after the all-clear, we could see London burning and once a bomber crashed in the High Street but never was I as afraid as I am now. Last year I had a leg amputated which is why I am in here but I was doing okay till this Covid 19 thing. I needed help going to the toilet and in the shower but the staff at this home were kind and brilliant. Now though, they are doing the best they can but still, 12 people in the home have died of the virus and the staff haven’t got all the equipment they need to keep themselves safe or therefore me. I try to call on them as little as possible but sometimes I have to. I know they always liked to help me before because I don’t have dementia, like lots of the residents, and they could have a proper conversation with me – but now they are stressed and afraid both for themselves and for me. I watch the television and I understand what is going on, I may be 85 but I’m not stupid, and it’s obvious that everyone in residential homes has been abandoned – they are not even counting the deaths in homes – only those who die in hospital. The government says that that is how all countries are measuring the course of the disease but it feels like we just don’t count any which way…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 8
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 2

Glen, 10 year-old boy.

We had to sleep on the street last night because Mum can’t work and the landlord threw us out of our flat – Mum told him the government said he wasn’t allowed to but he told her to fuck off and he nearly hit her. Today we went to a hostel and we have got a place to sleep tonight but it’s horrible and we are not allowed to be there till this evening. We sat in the town centre but the police wouldn’t listen to mum when she said we were homeless and told us to move somewhere else. So we are now sitting by the river where there are no police but people keep giving us funny looks ‘cos of all the bags we have with us. I’m hungry…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 5
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 1

George, 65 year-old

I have been furloughed because of my age and my partner Jane’s age and our health. I am pre-diabetic and she has COPD so we are especially vulnerable to Covid 19. My job is such that there is nothing I can do to work from home and I am unlikely to get paid again till this is over though, and for people our age, self-isolation could go on a long time. In the old days, at 65, I would have been receiving my state pension but now I have to wait until next March. We are saving a lot of money, no commuting costs, no going out costs at weekends (I only worked four days a week anyway so we had long weekends) and we are eating less. Even things we might like to buy, like plants for the allotment we started last year, we cannot, because garden centres are closed. Still, we are lucky, we did equity release recently so we won’t run out of money, whatever happens. Our daughter and grandson do the shopping for us each week which I miss because I like to cook and I like to do the food shopping. Jane likes to shop for clothes – she even bought me some new trousers online because I needed some – at least you can still get some things that way…
We thought it would be really difficult spending all our time together instead of three days and evenings, but it is like both of us are retired now, not just Jane who was already retired and we have proper togetherness most of the time and the time seems to fly by – so much so that it would be hard to keep track of the days if we weren’ keeping a diary. Of course, we have our moments, such as when I spend too much time blogging and not enough talking together, or we just get a bit fed up at the things we miss doing and the people we can’t see. But on the whole, we know we are lucky to be alive and to have each other and our health – fingers crossed…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 8

L is for Love…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Love is in the air
For young lovers in lockdown
While lost loves
Dream of love locked up
Not locked down.

Love is the drug
That takes you to a different place
Consumes you from within
Tricking your cells
To accept false flags
Before breaking your heart.

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Love the time we have
Hate the loss of freedom
Saving money because we can’t spend it
Losing money because we can’t earn it.

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Let me be a survivor
Don’t wanna be a deep-sea diver
Or win a million fivers
Just let me live and love a little longer.

The one who loves you
Hides in plain sight 
You never gonna feel its bite
Covid 19 –
Who loves ya baby…

——————————————————————

Love is in the air
John Paul Young

Love is the drug
Roxy Music

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Annie Lennox

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Juliet Turner

The one who loves you
The Divine Comedy

G is for Grammar

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Frankly my Dear –

Some people make a great fuss about Grammar, in short, they are pedants!
Those of us who write, or speak, in English, know that we can understand the language as it is spoken, no matter how “badly”, with words strung together in almost any old order. Not like the Germans who literally fall over and can’t understand you if you don’t put the verb at the end of the sentence ( I may be exaggerating slightly for comic effect) and what is with all those portmanteau words a sentence long? The French are not much better, they pretend they don’t understand you because of your atrocious accent and despise you even more if you don’t attempt to show yourself up – of course, they may just be (understandably)  miffed because French used to be the official international language unit English superceded it because, I believe of the ease with which you can learn it to the point of being understood. Why am I talking about speech when the subject of this blog is grammar? Well there is much the same ease of communication in written “English” as with speech – that is, it is easy to get to the point of being understood, being perfectly correct in speech or written English is another matter altogether. We have rules of grammar so arcane that they make putting the verb at the end of the sentence look like child’s play. But here is the point, if you can make yourself understood, even speaking or writing in a patois, then that is the most important thing. 

There is another reason I have talked about speech in a piece on grammar, and that is because, when I am writing, especially in a blog, which to my mind should sound, inside the reader’s head, as if you are talking to them, then grammar is there to help the reader to achieve that feat. Nowadays I use Grammarly, an app which is far more than a spell-checker, it spots extra spaces, offers fairly basic grammar suggestions and even assesses the tone of your writing, mine comes out, disappointingly, as “Formal” given that I strive for relative informality…

I am sure you will be glad that this is not the sort of blog where the writer offers compendious coverage of their chosen topic – the internet is there for that sort of thing if you really want the nitty-gritty of grammar but I hope you understand why I began with the quote “Frankly my Dear – I don’t give a damn…” If I can understand and be understood, I will not judge and I hope will not be judged on some pedantic point of grammatical correctness. 

I will, however, talk briefly about three things which I use a great deal, which the grammar police would probably disapprove of. Firstly, as in the “Gone with the Wind” quotation above I often use a hyphen rather than a comma when I want to indicate a slightly longer rpause than I feel a coma suggests. Likewise, at the end of the quotation, I have put there dots, the proper name of which is,  an ellipsis and the proper definition of which is “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.” Now I think you can see what I mean about obscure rules… What I mean when I finish a sentence with three dots, is that I want to leave the sentence idea hanging in the air and not terminated by the finality of a full stop.

Lastly, I want to mention the Oxford comma. This is the sort of rule that divides even the pedants of English grammar… In brief, I was taught at the age of seven or eight, and I actually remember the very lesson – that you should NEVER put a comma before an and. Now the strange thing, is that I grew up in, and received this lesson in Oxford, and though I have been using the Oxford comma, the breaking of this rule for a long time. I use it because it reads better as if spoken. An example is the comma after the word Oxford (first instance) in the preceding sentence. In the following sentence you would not use the Oxford comma ” My favourite puddings in order are Bread and Butter Pudding, Apple Crumble, Peaches and Cream.” But in this sentence you would – “The ingredients required are Flour, Sugar, Peaches, and Cream”. Makes it read right…

 So there it is, ignore the rules as long as you are understood and to my mind, what makes writing sound like speech is what works best…

I Don’t Give a Damn…

E is for Editing…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Editing do you love to hate it?

Does anybody love editing as much as writing the first draft? I have had to train myself not to push the “Publish” button as soon as I have finished writing a blog because past experience has taught me that there are always mistakes.

Novels, (two on the go for longer than I can bear to declare) are different – you fully expect there to be many drafts – not least because – if it is your first novel and it’s taken a very long time, then your skill as a writer not to mention your ideas, will have changed by the time you are xxx% of the way through.

I like to write in longhand because it stops the temptation to edit as you go along which slows the flow but also because I can write faster than I can type which also holds back the creativity. Then the only problem is typing up because then I will edit as I go along so it is VERY SLOW.

One thing that has become easier in this digital age, is spell-checking. If using a word-processing programme, I like to have the Paragraph button active because it then shows all the extra spaces and the difference between paragraphs and line returns, but using some apps like Blogger, this button is not there. I also use Grammarly which not only spellcheck but checks grammar as well. In fact, Grammarly also asses your writing style which, annoyingly, always marks me as “Formal”.

With Blogger, I have to remember to add all the Tags which means at least one read-through but I do realize that waiting ten minutes and reading it through a couple of times does give the chance to remember those bits I thought of lying awake in the early morning planning the next post.

Blogging is not the throwaway smatterings of Twitter, birdshit on the bonnet of life – here today, washed off tomorrow (sorry if Twitter is your thing though you are here on a blog site!). Blogging offers a place to be more thoughtful, to develop and launch ideas out into the world, so it demands a little more attention to detail, a little more of the polishing which is editing…

A Writer is someone who writes…

humanist55
A blogger on my reading list has thrown down a challenge that chimes with a decision I had already arrived at, namely that I must write more and set myself some specific challenges. Over on “Off go the Panties”, Panty Parade has posted the “The Stop Whining Twelve Step, Twelve Week Challenge” to all recalcitrant writers claiming to be blocked, too busy yada, yada, yada. 

I’m in!

I started or rather re-started writing creatively a few years back when I lived in Co. Sligo, Ireland – a place steeped in the likes of WB Yeats and soused with a barful of contemporary writers. The vicissitudes of schooling had meant giving up anything but criticising other people’s writing at an early age and I had forgotten the pleasure of setting sail down an open page…

I progressed from short pieces generated in a writing group to a novel that now stands at some 40 thousand words and which I have added to in the last few years in a desultory fashion – but now the time has come to knuckle down and finish it. So below I will list some goals and seek a mentor as per the challenge but first let me share an insight.

On Sunday mornings my parents, and by custom, us children too, had a lie in. My father would switch on a small radio on the landing and we would all hear “Songs form the Little Chapel in the Valley”, “The Archers” Omnibus edition and Alastair Cooke’s “Letter from America” and it came to me suddenly the other day that my blogging style owes much to Mr Cooke’s wonderful rambles that would start and return to some key observation on American life by way of several other fascinating stories. Blogs are like a diary and all diaries are addressed to some future audience whatever anyone says and Alastair Cooke was definitely and directly addressing the British audience with his observations softly dropped into our Sunday morning ears. So perhaps he was the prototypical blogger from before the internet was born. I wonder how many others had their writing sensibilities subtle shaped by the wonderful Mr Cooke.

Back to the challenge…

Goals:-

1. What kind of writer am I (and what programme of writing will suit me)?
I am a morning person by choice and I can get out of bed and write before I have even had a cup of tea and if I can do this regularly it suits me and I will steadily increase the words in my novel. I have thought enough about the novel I have plenty that just needs to get out. 

2. I also like blogging and besides this one which takes me when I feel inspired, I also started a new one dealing with my relationship to photography. This is partly an excuse to get my brain in gear in another way so although it might seem counter-productive to finishing the novel. I also commit to posting at least once a week both here and there.

3. I am going to seek a mentor for the novel writing and by way of a fishing trip, I include a fragment below and to anyone who cares to read more I will send 2 chapters of what is a sub-plot of the book. As a result of any comments I receive back, I may request a mentor.

There are other goals to the challenge but I will return to them in later posts.
Any other stalled writers out there? Take the challenge…

The novel – a fragment…

As the Dublin coach made it ‘s way along the banks of the Liffey, through the evening rush hour traffic, a pedestrian with more than a little “drink taken”, lurched off the pavement. The jolt of brakes applied suddenly together with the driver’s curses brought Margaret out of the trance she had been in for the whole journey. The same song had been going round and round in her head without registering but now she realised with a certain amount of chagrin, it was The Beatles “She’s Leaving Home”. Before the words could unfold their story again, at this moment too painfully close to her own home, Margaret switched her attention to the river running alongside The Quays. In the Margaret of all previous journeys heading into Dublin along the Liffey had always produced a barely suppressed excitement. A teacher had once told her class how every breath you take contains a molecule of air expelled by Julius Caesar in his dying breath. Peering down into the green walled channel, the water always at a different height depending on the state of the tide, Margaret had thenceforth imagined the Liffey as a lung for Dublin – breathing it’s slow, twice daily intake of water that might have come from anywhere in the world. What foreign ports had breathed in this water before and where would it waft to next? Further down The Quays, you could see the ships moored that went to other countries and as a child she had pictured herself on board some vessel, swimming out the river, through the sea and up some other river in “foreign parts. Tonight, the dream would become reality, she would change at Bus Aras an head out to the North Wall and board the night ferry to Holyhead, not the most exotic destination possible but a gateway to a new life nevertheless. She would take the train to London and do a little sight seeing but she wouldn’t stay there in case she was followed – no, she would move on somewhere else, somewhere less obvious, somewhere special. Exactly where she wasn’t sure, but it would come to her, or rather shewould come to it.

The Blog Title

humanist55

I should explain the title of this blog it is from a Haiku I made up as part of an artwork I created some years back

” How would you know it was just a dream if you don’t know you’re asleep!”

I was pretty pleased with it as it is not just the 17 syllable rule that make it a Haiku but there has to be some reference to time or seasons passing. I hope the shift in tense between would and don’t, imply the difference between a waking and sleeping state hence the passage of time.
Even without the time reference, I still love John Cooper Clarke, the Punk Poet’s skit of a Haiku

“Writing a poem in seventeen syllables is very dific”

Any favourites?