Urging you all to take a look and another few bits and bobs

I’ve just posted the latest entry on my Hemingway project website. Getting there if you’re interested, though sadly few are: I keep an eye on the stats as to visits and there are some though my Hemingway site (and what I have to say doesn’t seem likely to set the world alight for another few hundred years. But for what it’s worth, take a look. 

Apart from that, what’s new? Not a lot. Like everyone else, I’m now getting a little ticked off ‘the lockdown’, although as someone suggested it might be as much the cold and miserable weather we are having and will have now for at least another 11 weeks. Not for us Brits the glories of vistas of pristine snow and mountains, with lovable St Bernard dogs dispensing brandy from cute little barrels hanging from their necks. (And where did that one start? Probably in some addled advertising agency copywriters brain).

As for covid there’s only one point I’d like to make: the Thirty Years War lasted — you’ve way ahead of me — 30 years. I’m not saying it’s all doom, doom, doom. What I’m saying is: take nothing for granted. And I say that because we do, all of us, even smug ol’ me writing this. We assume ‘it will all work out’. Well, it doesn’t always, does it? Here in Britain the government is being cheerily upbeat and repeating ‘well, we’ve got a vaccine now, two in fact’, but were it that simple.

For one thing we, as has every other country, have our gangs or morons who are all insisting ‘covid is all just a hoax to take away our civil liberties’, although as far as I know no one has yet even tried to explain just why ‘they’ are so keen to take away our civil liberties and to what end. I mean, if they are, surely there’s some ‘plan’? But I shan’t be trying to find out: long ago I learned the truth of the useful advice ‘never get into a debate with a moron’. I mean would you really bother to try to set straight some bod who insisted that ‘the Moon is mad of cheese’? If so, you deserve all the grief you will get.

. . . 

Might as well fill you in on some news. My stepmother died at the end of last July, and I inherited her cottage. There then followed a laborious three or four weeks as I cleared the house of all the shite that has been accumulating over the years. Every room also needed a new lick of paint, so my wife got down to business. That was not to help me, mind, or save me money, but because I offered to allow my daughter and husband and child to live there rent-free so they can save up for a home of their own.

I was going to put the extra money I would have had as income towards doing a bit of travelling — I’ve always wanted to spend a month or two mooching around the US as so much of our culture comes from there — but that is now all on hold. And what with covid, which I suspect will be around in one way or another for pretty much the rest of 2021, not having the spare moolah for jaunts around the world is not such a pain.

That’s about it, really. Not a lot of news. I’m now keen to get this Hemingway bollocks out of the way and I am getting there, so I can get on with other things. So all I’ll do now is to wish you all a happy New Year and hope this virus crap ends sooner rather than later.

Pip, pip.