A lot of you asked if I would publish that story in my blog and I agreed to do so once we had heard back about our entry.
Unfortunately Poppy's story didn't get past the first round. So here it is. Please remember when reading it that she is only eight. I doubt that I would have been able to write something like this when I was eight. I certainly wouldn't have known what the collective name for a group of zebras was.
"Once there was a dazzle of Zebras living in the fields. They were extremely fast and enjoyed eating grass despite other animals regularly stealing their food. One day another zebra who was a stranger to them came to be part of the Dazzle. They watched him running around and felt that it looked strange, but they couldn’t work out why.
"This new Zebra looked just like them and had the same stripes but there was something different about him. Suddenly, he hopped through the fields. This was most amusing to the zebras, but they were jealous and wanted to be able to hop as well. So, they all tried and many of them fell down and they had to call the zebra ambulance. Many were taken to zebra hospital.
"So, the new Zebra who wasn’t really a zebra visited them in hospital and stole their chocolate Brownies which they had been given as a special treat to make them feel better. So, they called him Brownie. But Brownie was different as he was a zebra mixed with a rabbit which is why he could hop. In fact, Brownie is a Zebbit.
"When all of them got better they returned to their home in the fields and asked Brownie if he would teach them to hop. Being the only Zebbit in the world, Brownie had never taught anyone to hop before. In fact, Brownie had never taught anyone anything.
"Being a clever animal, Brownie liked watching television and was a big fan of Strictly Come Prancing. He was also a friend of Anton Du Beak the duck who is the main judge. So, he contacted Anton the Duck to help him to teach the zebras to hop.
"Anton Du Beak explained how Brownie could teach the zebras the bunny hop, the Lindy Hop and Hip Hop. So, they set off to work. Anton said they needed the right kind of music for each dance and Brownie should hop to it.
"Brownie pointed out that he needed to teach the zebras to hop and not dance. So, Anton and Brownie started teaching the other zebras how to hop by introducing them to the zebratrot. He got each of the zebras to pick a partner while singing the words “hop hoppity hop, we all love the zebratrot.”
"And as we all know if you put your mind to do something you will soon be able to do it. Slowly and surely the zebras learned how to hop.
"All the other animals in the grassland were invited to the grassland television studios to a competition where the judges included Brownie and Anton Du Beak along with Simon the Cow, Shirley Sloth and Craig Revel Bearwood, who annoyed all the animals by making piggy comments.
"And that is how the zebras really learnt to dazzle and, of course, to hop. You may not come across real zebras, but you can always just do a zebratrot when you go over a zebra crossing."
- * *
Now I think granddaughter Poppy's much better than AI as I had another go at an AI story, asking the computer to write me a piece about Hethersett. It came back with:
"Once upon a time, in the village of Hethersett, there lived a young girl named Lily. She was a curious and adventurous girl who loved to explore the countryside around her village. One day, while wandering through the woods, she stumbled upon an old, abandoned cottage. It was a small, cozy place, with a thatched roof and a garden full of wildflowers.
"Lily was fascinated by the cottage and decided to explore it further. As she walked around the garden, she noticed a small, hidden door at the back of the cottage. She pushed it open and found herself in a tiny room filled with old books and maps. She spent hours poring over the books, learning about the history of Hethersett and the surrounding villages.
"As she read, she discovered that Hethersett had a rich and fascinating history. From the Domesday Book account of 1086, which described the village as having “perhaps 400 people in the parish,” to the famous event in Hethersett’s history when Robert Kett and his men tore down John Flowerdew’s hedges on Hethersett common in 1549, the village had seen its fair share of triumphs and tragedies.
"Lily was so inspired by what she had learned that she decided to write a book about the history of Hethersett. She spent months researching and writing, and finally, her book was published. It became a bestseller, and people from all over the world came to Hethersett to learn about its fascinating past.
"And so, thanks to Lily’s curiosity and love of adventure, the history of Hethersett was preserved for generations to come."
A group of people did write a book about the history of Hethersett and I wrote a chapter on education in the village. This book often pops up on e-bay etc. I can't say it became a best seller and neither did it bring thousands to the village. Somehow I don't think the AI story is a winner or very realistic.
Which takes me onto the latest musings. On Tuesday night whilst I was watching Sports Personality of the Year on the BBC, I decided to flick through my blogs of the past and found that I have been writing a daily blog for three years and nine months. That's an awful lot of blogs and there they were running down and down and down the page for seemingly forever. "How on earth did I write this much," I said to myself before realising that I still am writing this much. On 12th September 2020 I told everyone that it would be my last blog to appear on Facebook and in future the blogs would appear on my personal website.
Not sure what happened to that thought as a few days later I launched my daily blog page on Facebook and have been at it ever since. I must be mad. Please tell me that I'm mad.
I had a look through the blogs I had written for Christmas Days and they were mainly reminiscences of the past. Christmas is always a time for reflection anyhow. This Christmas we have a new granddaughter who we are hoping to see in the not too distant future. So something really to look forward to, that's if the damn trains are running. We now mainly take the train when we go to Eastbourne. By and large it's less stressful than driving down the M11 and round the M25 which can be hideous. Our journey is a relatively easy one. We take the train from Wymondham to Cambridge, then from Cambridge to Gatwick Airport and then Gatwick Airport to Eastbourne. We get a bus close to the station and, after a 15 minute ride, have just a five minute walk to our destination.
As for New Year's Resolutions. I prefer to call them New Year's intentions and they have to be reasonable and even a continuation of what's already happening as in:
To write and publish 366 daily blogs (it is a leap year) and write 366 daily diary entries. Now this is easily achievable because its two things I do automatically every day anyway but at least it's committing to something.
Other intentions include:
To have our book on Le Paradis published - again this is almost a certainty as we have an important meeting about printing it in early January.
To finish and publish my autobiography. I was making good progress with the editing of this until other things like Good News magazine, Hethersett Herald magazine, daily blogs and life in general got in the way. But I'm determined to get this out by Spring.
To finish and publish my book on the first year of blogs. This is far too long so needs some serious editing. I'm not great at editing my own work as I never want to take anything out but there are plenty of things in those early blogs that won't be of great interest now.
Now those are just a few of my intentions that I'm determined to achieve.
Others are a bit more low key like sorting and tidying the back garden. It's in good shape but I want to get it in better shape.
I'm sure there are plenty of other intentions and they will crop up between now and goodness knows when. One would probably be to cut back on the amount I write for my daily blog but that's one I'm going to break immediately and it isn't even new year yet.
See you all tomorrow.