But that can lead to conflict. Sometimes I want to be kinder, sometimes I want to be more of an extrovert, sometimes I don't want to be so loud, sometimes I want to be more friendly, sometimes I want to have more time to myself, sometimes I want to give more to others, sometimes I want to join more groups and organisations, sometimes I want to cut back on my involvement, sometimes I want to go on more holidays and trips, sometimes I want to spend more time at home, sometimes I want to spend more time in the garden but sometimes I don't want to go outside, sometimes I want to spend more time playing the piano and reading but sometimes I can't be bothered. Sometimes I want to have a senile afternoon snooze but sometimes I want to stay awake because sleeping wastes time. Sometimes I want to play very loud rock music, sometimes I want to play soft tuneful classical and sometimes I want complete silence. Sometimes on a walk I will listen to music and other times on a walk I will want to be silent with my thoughts. Sometimes I feel strong and energised but at other times I'm tired and sluggish. Sometimes I feel I want to go out and run 5k and other times I just can't get out of the armchair.
People have said that I seem to have a view on everything and I'm not sure whether that's a compliment or not. I can't remember where this side of my character comes from but I can't do anything or see anything without analysing it. Do I have any readers with the same problem? It probably comes from years of reviewing concerts/books and many other things. It forces you to be opinionated.
Sometimes I feel confident and feel that I can achieve anything but at others I feel frail and useless and struggle to find motivation. I think nothing of giving a presentation talk to 100 people but run a mile if I seem trapped in a karaoke session.
It was Winston Churchill who used the phrase: "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." He was speaking about Russia, but he could just as easily have been talking about human beings. We are at heart complex souls and this can be both a good and a bad thing.
Essentially all we can do is accept and try to understand our frailties and become the best kind of person we can.
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I write too much - I know that I do. That's because I have an obsession for writing. Something makes me get up in the morning and spend most of the day writing. I'm lucky (or unlucky depending on how you view things) to have outlets for my writing. There's the freelance work I do for the local media covering our village, there's my monthly Hethersett Herald e-magazine which is approaching seven years and counting, there's the Norfolk Ancestor which is the quarterly magazine of the Norfolk Family History Society, and now there's the village magazine Good News which comes out monthly and for which I have just taken on the role of editor.
When I was approached to take on Good News I had to have a long and hard think about it. It would be adding to my voluntary workload but on the flip side it is something I have been looking at for sometime and running it hand in hand with my Herald seemed to be a great way of getting the maximum coverage of the village to the maximum number of people. So I said yes and my first edition is about to hit the streets (well doormats). I like to think I have made some good changes, but not too many as to make it unrecognisable.
Good News is church based, so there's plenty in there about the three churches in the Hethersett Benefice. I am trying to bring more news content to a publication that this year is remarkably celebrating 150 years in existence.
There was some suggestion that when the previous editor announced that she was giving up and moving from Norfolk, Good News might have to cease publication. This would have been a tragedy and one of the reasons I decided to take the workload on. For me you cannot stop 150 years of history just like that. You have to do your best to keep it going, although of course in our modern world eventually we might have to go digital. That certainly isn't the plan at the moment as I'm always aware that we have a number of more elderly readers who do not use social media or the internet.
You can't go too modern without thinking about the consequences. Take the village archive for instance. It's currently housed in a room in our village hall and village archivist Gary Wyatt uses it for a series of talks to various groups in the village.
The archive has thousands of paper records including well over 1,000 copies of the Good News magazine. I believe there are other records kept on USB sticks , CDs and floppy discs as well and therein is the problem. It's all very well having digitised records but what good is something on a floppy disc now? Digital media comes and goes. Who uses CDs for storage? So ultimately we get back to keeping archives in folders and paper format. That way only fire and flood can destroy them and folders don't go out of date.
One of my pet hates is the destruction of history and this really follows on from what I have written above. Something can be in existence for hundreds of years but then gets pulled down or destroyed. This has happened with buildings. Modernisation has all too often ripped down history. In Norwich we have a very historic cobbled street named Elm Hill. A number of years ago there were plans to pull this down and replace it with a swimming pool of all things. Thankfully the vote by city councillors went narrowly to keeping the street. People don't know just how close they were to losing a huge chunk of Norwich history.
I worked for a number of years on the Norwich Mercury newspaper. There is a blue plaque in Norwich to this newspaper. It states:
First Provincial Newspaper. The Norwich Post, the first provincial newspaper was first printed on this site in 1701. The city also claims the record for the longest continuously printed local newspaper, the Norwich Mercury founded in 1714."
hat newspaper had been in existence for almost 300 years when it was stopped overnight. The Norwich Mercury no longer exists despite its place in the history of journalism. That's 300 years of newspaper history wiped out overnight. I know copies still exist in archives but the Norwich Mercury as an entity doesn't.
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The strange thing about today's blog is I sat at the computer with a blank piece of paper (or a blank screen) and then the words and ideas just flowed leading from one subject to another. That to me is the art of writing and I guess one of the few skills that I possess.
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Quite a difference in coverage of the future of the prime minister on Anglia TV News today proving once again that you can fit anything into the slant of a story that you want to.
On the local news they were obviously pro-Johnson but on the national news anti-Johnson.
This is why many of these news bulletins aren't worth the paper they are printed on (or in this case the camera they are shown on).
So you go out and interview 20 people in a town. Thirteen of them are anti-Johnson and seven are pro. So the reality of that is that 65% are against him. But you want your programme to support him so you just show the seven on camera making it look as if that specific town is 100% behind the prime minister.
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Crystal Palace manager Patrick Viera must be quaking in his boots (ok shoes as he's retired from playing). When Norwich beat Everton their manager was sacked the following day. Norwich then went on to beat Watford and the next day their manager bit the dust. As they say things come in threes and Norwich's next match is against Crystal Palace. I don't think Viera has to worry though. He's not ripe for the chop. But it does appear that the inference is that all teams should hammer Norwich and defeat against them is unforgiveable.