Greetings!
This post will be a bit shorter than the average ‘Start the Week’ for one simple reason: I’m knackered. I will explain why in a moment. I’m feeling rather pleased because after a complete washout of a day last Monday as far as writing is concerned (see below), yesterday I wrote two and a half book reviews and two articles. Yes, the Freedman Work Factory has been cranked back up to normal levels.
I forgot to include something when I wrote this (never write when you’re cold, tired and hungry, that’s what I always say). The updated bit is under the heading “Update”, logically enough.
But enough of this persiflage. On with the newsletter!
Cycling
Today (Sunday) was the annual Ride London event, in which the roads in central London are closed to all vehicles except bikes. There was a real carnival atmosphere, and I’d have liked to have captured some of it on video but the truth of the matter is that my glasses were so dar I could hardly see the phone screen. I did manage to take a couple of pics though:
While we were cruising along, trying to avoid kamikaze pedestrians and children on bikes who act like molecules (they whizz all over the place and then either stop or fall off), a lady on a bike addressed me:
Lady: Excuse me.
Me: Yes?
Lady: What’s going on? We were on our bikes anyway, and we saw this huge crowd so we thought we’d join you all. But what is it?
I have to say that made me laugh.
Another lady: You’re a superstar.
Me: Who, me?
Another lady: Well, yes, but I was specifically addressing that little girl.
Along some of the route there were loudspeakers belting out disco music at about a million decibels, which kept us all going.
The worst part of it was when we stopped to allow C, who had come with us, to catch up after he’d been part of a crowd that was stopped in order to allow people to cross the road. He went whizzing past us, so I belted after him. I did finally catch up with him after reaching 18.6 mph. He’d assumed we’d gone on ahead and was cycling frantically to catch up with us!
We had a mini-break sitting on a sculpture featuring Oscar Wilde and a quotation of his:
Humour
This might make you laugh. It’s a six minute slot by a one-liner comedian. Some of his jokes you can see coming a mile away, but I think he’s got great timing.
Just so you know, in UK schools we refer to “Grades” as “Years”. Thus Year 7 is roughly equivalent to Grade 7. Also, Tesco is a supermarket chain.
An unintended non-writing day
Last Monday was somewhat disastrous from a writing point of view. I went into a college for a literature class, and took a laptop with me so that I could bash out craft Start the week #23. I thought I’d charged the laptop, but I hadn’t, so I went to the college’s library. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember my student password because we all had to change it recently. It took me forty minutes to get into the system when I’d finally managed to discover my new login details. I couldn’t believe my eyes when, five minutes’-worth of whirring, clicking and steam emissions later the computer displayed the message: “Sorry, this computer is for use by administrators only.”
Well thanks a bunch. Why couldn’t there have been a notice on the computer itself?
At this point I was starting to think that the gods didn’t actually want me to write anything that day, but I mentally shouted, mentally shaking my fist at the heavens at the same time, “Oh yeah?”. (“That’ll learn ‘em”, I thought to myself.)
“I know!”, I thought. “I’ll go to a library I belong to in London, where they have a writers’ room with computers.”
Bah! When I arrived there, the room had been cleared out and set up for a meeting and drinks. (Memo to self: in future read the library newsletter when it arrives.)
And that is the story of why everything last week was at least a day late. It was Fate wot did it. In other words, I didn’t have writer’s block, I had Fate block.
And there is little that we mere mortals can do about that.
Update
I forgot to mention that after discovering that the Writers’ room was no longer a de facto writing room, I decided to pop along to the new books section to see if there was anything which demanded to be borrowed. I came across a tome called A Writer’s Diary, by Toby Litt.
I turned to the first entry, which I’ve scanned and plonked below. Have a look at the penultimate line.
In other words, the gods were not just messing with me, they were having a lot of fun doing so. I can still hear them laughing. Thus I was not so much a victim of what Dornford Yates referred to as a Malignant Fate, as a victim of a Practical Joking Fate.
Further reading
Here are a few referral links to newsletter directories. If you click through and sign up to these services, you’ll be sent links to other newsletters you might be interested in. And the people who run these services will promote this one too. So it’s a potential win-win-win situation.
I find this one especially useful for discovering newsletters and articles concerning leadership matters, which I’m quite interested in.
I very much like the variety served up. I receive one suggestion a day, and have subscribed to a few of them.
This has links to long reads. I haven’t really explored it yet, but it seems quite interesting. If you sign up using that link apparently I’ll get $4 credit towards an advertisement. I’ve no idea how much an advert costs though.
Finally…
Your call to action is to subscribe to this newsletter if you don’t already, and to share it if you do.
If you value my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which is currently just $45 a year (aka under 87c a week) or $5 a month.
Or share this newsletter, so that more people let to hear about it.
Or recommend it, to make yourself feel good and to build up a stock of good Karmic points (not guaranteed, I’m afraid: you could be a mass murderer for all I know).
Or buy me a cup of tea. (It all helps. I frequently write in a cafe, to escape from the cats, and the coffee ain’t cheap!)
Deadpan delivery spot-on there. You can just tell what's coming by the way he approaches the mic.
Thanks for some early Wednesday morning laughs, Terry.
Bike ride sounds a bit hectic with all those people, though I imagine the atmosphere might be fun.
Enjoy the week. May there be more fruitful and less technology-inhibiting writing days ahead.
That sculpture of Oscar Wilde is fab, isn't it? You probably already know that it's by Maggi Hambling. I love her work.