● Lady Percy moves me - might she move you? CLICK TO FIND OUT
● Plus my novels, stories, verse, vulgar interests, apologies, and singing.
● Most posts are 300 words. I respond to all comments/re-comments.
● See Tone Deaf in New blogger.


Thursday 15 November 2018

Something new

This was the style of sandal but mine were always brown, always on their last legs
My blogging (first in Works Well then in Tone Deaf) started on May 4, 2008: I've done 1463 posts in 3600 days, ignoring leap years and assuming all months have 30 days. One post every 2.46 days.

Sounds reasonable. But not when compared with my lifespan of 30,370 days. One post every 20.76 days.

These figures are of course a nonsense - blogging as such didn't start until 1997. But the figures represent a personal criterion. Surely 30,000-plus days of observation and experience should be enough to ensure I haven't repeated myself in those 1463 posts. Alas, the archives reveal sad truths. All those subjects I've mined and re-mined: gross failures at school, journalism, life in the USA, novel writing. I'm no more original than a clanging bell in an RC church, bidding the faithful to Mass over a century or more.

Question: Is it possible to fashion an entirely new post without cross-referencing any post that went before? Perhaps.

I'm standing in Sherborne Road which feeds the terrace in which I live. My socks are down at my ankles, they have holes at the heel. I wear sandals because they accommodate my growing feet better than shoes. My knitted shirt/pullover has holes at the elbow. I wipe my nose with a hankie that has never been washed and may never be washed. There's a hissing/whirring as an electric vehicle passes on the main road. A thousand miles south men are killing each other in Normandy but I'm unaware of this.

I'm looking for a friend but hear no high-pitched voices. I'm lonely and almost certainly hungry. Thinking about the teacher with dyed blonde hair who lives next door, I experience sensations I cannot give a name to.

I am now very close to my 300-word limit.

2 comments:

  1. Original, dirigible!

    When are we ever original? Even when the first writer wrote the first time about the thing of first importance, he (probably a He) he was stuck with the things of this world. Which he did not invent. Could not so much as make a leaf.

    p. s. For some reason, you went to the Gulf of Spam on my blog, but I have clambered down into the deep ravines and toted you out. Sorry about that, and glad you were not eaten by wandering Balrogs from some old Tolkien movie set.

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  2. Marly: It's a qualified form of originality (ie, without cross-referencing any post that went before) and there are some immediate and obvious exceptions. Straight off, it's about me, second it's about my youth - both previously covered to excess. But the clothing is mentioned for the first time, as is my state of mind at the time, as is my contemporary ignorance of the war, as is my awakening though as-yet undefined sense of sexual appeal.

    Then there is the style. Basically the post is a list. How does one impose style on a list without getting tortuous? I think I managed this, others may differ.

    Thanks for rescuing me from the trash-bin.

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