I said yesterday, not for the first time, that I’m not writing as much as I used to. I still jot down notes on scraps of paper or in notebooks, but I don’t seem to sit over them and nag at them like I did.
I used to find train and bus journeys a perfect opportunity to stare out of the window for inspiration, to worry at words, sketching out alternatives, scratching out false starts, mentally running through phonemes trying to find a rhyme or a word or phrase with just the right shape and sound. Continue reading “too much information”
Whatever program(s) I’m using on my computer, there is almost always a narrow strip of another window showing on the left hand side where I can see if I have new emails. (Yes, I’m sure I could set up an audio alert, but we all have our idiosyncracies.) Not only do I see when new messages arrive, but I also see the little green lights flicker and I know when contacts around the world log on and off.
Perhaps the “g” in gmail stands for Gatsby.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And then one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I’m not sure where “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” fits into things, but I can see my attempts to keep up with everything that’s happening on the web mirrored in that quote.
Tomorrow we will read faster, scroll down the page farther…
And so we click on, surfing against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the ether.
It’s autumn, and cool enough, at last, to think about putting the oven on and preparing something other than salad for lunch.
Looking for inspiration, I ended up on the BBC GoodFood site. Immediately, an alert box appeared on the screen:
Sadly, although it’s a recipe website and claims to use cookies to provide “the best user experience”, we clearly don’t have the same idea of how cookies could improve my internet browsing: they don’t send out samples to frequent visitors.
I don’t have many relations. Certainly not many I am on speaking terms with. But some of those I do speak to, probably count as ‘serious’ people.
I was pleased, then, to find this advert brought up on my gmail account recently:I’m sure that if I were to want to give any of my serious relations an Asian beauty as a gift, they would rather the lady were verified than not.
But what should I get for the more light-hearted members of my family?
I’ve been in the south of Spain for a couple of days, and have been talking to other writers down here.
It’s natural to want to put other people into some kind of context, so I wasn’t surprised when, shortly after I met her, one woman asked me “Where is home?”
Without much thought, I answered, “Spain.”
Then that began to rankle. It simply didn’t feel like the right answer.
Home. It’s not simply where you live, is it? It has to do with family and friends and a sense of belonging. Continue reading “home thoughts”
