I always seem to do something different when the weather or other external factors come into play. Remember the Beast From The East? Well when that was on I did an A to Z of Hethersett Graveyard which has proved invaluable. It took three days.
Then when we had virtually total lockdown and could only go out for one piece of exercise a day I started charting all the songs written by Jimmy Webb and who recorded them. Now that's a real anorak thing to do.
So goodness knows what I will do when the temperatures reach 40 apart from sweat and then sweat some more and then sweat some more. I could of course work out how many words I have written in my lifetime.
It would be interesting but impossible to do. The teachers didn't know what they were doing when they taught me to read and write. Mind you a spider has better handwriting than me, but that's not necessarily my fault. At junior school I was put up a class and went from the class that wasn't doing joined up writing to the class that was and so never learned (or learnt as I always say) to join up my letters and so what I come up with now is some kind of hybrid.
Interestingly, during the week we had the latest meeting of Hethersett Writers' Group. This is a select little meeting of people that love writing and sharing their work. Some of our members write in longhand with a pencil or pen and then transfer it to computer. I usually write straight onto computer in what I refer to as a scatterbrain or brain dump manner.
That means I chuck all my thoughts down and then put them into some sort of order. Good for people with butterfly brains who find themselves going all over the place. Anyone who does shorthand will know that unless you transcribe it immediately you cannot read it. So when I have been to interview somebody I just type everything I have down and then go back and put it in order and then cut things out and add other things from memory. It's quite a cathartic experience.
I love listening to real writers and novelists explain how and where they write. Some seem to hate the idea of writing and others love it. Some have set times of the day to write and others just do it when the urge takes them. Some do huge amounts of research and others only a small amount. Some write a few hundred words a day and some write thousands. Some re-write, some don't.
So let's return to my original question. I have no way of knowing how many words I have written for various newspapers and Media outlets over 50 years. Nor do I have any idea about how much I have written as an amusement. I can, however, come up with a vague figure for my blogs and my personal diary.
I am coming up to close to 1,000 blogs. I checked on the word count and found that in the past 23 days I have written 24,000 words which obviously equates to just over 1,000 words a day. So my wordage for blogs must be something along the lines of 1000 x 1000 which is one million. As for my personal diary. I've been writing that for almost 50 years at around 400 words a day which adds up (if my maths is correct) to something like seven million words. So there's eight million just there. To give a comparison the epic novel War and Peace has just under 600,000 words and the Bible has under 800,000. The longest novel ever written is debatable but according to the Guinness Book of Records is A La Recherche du Temps Perdu or Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust which weighs in at around 9.6 million words. I tried to read it once but only got as far as the first 100 pages. Let's say the action happens remarkably slowly.
So put my blogs and my diaries together and you have 13 War and Pieces, 10 Bibles but I haven't completed the Proust yet.
I always like a long book. There's something strangely comforting about having something solid and large in your hand (oh matron). Of course now we have Kindles etc it doesn't have to be that large. The complete works of Shakespeare is no larger than a Mr Man book on the Kindle. That's referring to the physical size of the Kindle of course and not the space it takes up on the hard drive. I do have A La Recherche du Temps Perdu on my Kindle and therefore carry it around with me wherever I go.
Sometimes I read what might be called rubbish when I want something light and frothy and something I don't have to think about - usually a murder mystery or something similar. Then I remember the words of (I think it was) Joan Bakewell who said "there is so much great literature in the world, why would you read rubbish?"
I had a similar comment from a guide on one of our trips. We were in Bavaria and he said to our group: "People say to me you could live somewhere else in the world other than Bavaria but I say why would I?"
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On Friday I popped along to Park Farm Hotel to do a story about six youngsters from Hethersett VC Primary School who are taking over a vegetable garden as part of a community project which is being sponsored by Waitrose.
Had a chat with the six youngsters involved along with staff and took quite a few photos and came back, wrote a piece and sent it over to the local newspapers.
My mind wandered back many years to my close association with the school as a parent, vice-chair of the PTA, a parent governor, a community governor and finally chair of governors.
There are still a couple of office staff there from my days but everything else has changed - not the least of which is the name of the school which, in my day, was Hethersett Middle School. Then it became Hethersett Junior and now Hethersett Primary. I included the VC bit is to differentiate it from Woodside School in the village which is now also a primary. VC stands for Voluntary Controlled. I looked this up on the Internet as I wanted to get the correct definition.
VC essentially indicates that a foundation or trust (usually a Christian denomination) has some form of formal influence in the running of the school. In the case of Hethersett this is the Church of England and the village rector a currently a governor and has been for many decades in the past (not the same one I hasten to add).
One day I will pontificate (!!!!????) on my theory that the day you walk through the exit door you are remembered for little more than a week as the organisation moves on without you. Now I'm scarcely a footnote in the history of Hethersett Primary - but I guess that's just how it is.
I enclose a couple of pictures of the school garden. Tomorrow I will tell you about a less than successful visit to the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment Open Day.