Friday's Foibles

What year are you in at the moment? 

“I try to leave out the parts people skip” ~ Elmore Leonard

It is my intention this autumn and winter (but please may we have a summer first) to work on the book I have written.  It is a murder mystery set in Victorian England. I have concluded that it is too long and my objective will be to substantially prune it. (Oops – split infinitive – that should read “to prune it substantially”.)  I know where I went wrong in writing it – I tried to be too clever. Instead of concentrating on the story I threw in all the odd bits of information about Victorian England that I find interesting.  I was just showing off.  There’s no doubt that they are interesting to most readers of historical novels but at the same time they slow the pace of the story down.  So once again Partner-who-loves-tea can be expected to be sitting opposite me in the conservatory, as I stare glassy-eyed out of the window, and she will ask “What year are you in at the moment?” as she constantly did twelve months ago when I was writing it.

How old are you?

It occurred to me after I had written Wednesday’s post that I had mentioned the age of Daughter-who-takes-photos.  My Mother would have been horrified.  It was bad enough mentioning a man’s age but one certainly never mentioned a lady’s age.  A similar comment was made by a friend of mine who recently had her eightieth birthday.  Knowing she had fairly old-fashioned views I sent her a card with 80 on it and said I hoped that prior to 21 and after 80 it was allowable to mention a girl’s age.   She appreciated the card and said that was fine but she didn’t want another one mentioning her age for the next ten years!  

Last year we had a discussion about this on Lewis where the first thing a person asks is another’s age.  It was explained to me that in a reasonably closed community the objective was to be able to place when a person was at school and therefore which of one’s other friends they would know.  The concept that it was in any way improper to ask a person’s age just never occurred to an islander!

Pictures of London

Would you like to see the best pictures of London that I have ever seen?  Then click here and go either forwards or backwards (it matters little, they’re all good).  The photographer is Kayode Okeyode.

Blog Off

Is it just me or is Blogger having a total nervous breakdown.  I am getting so fed up of being unable to leave comments because it won’t go to the comments page from people’s blogs. And when it does I type a comment only to find it then won’t load again so I lose the comment.  I can’t be bothered putting every comment into a word document so in the end I may just stop bothering altogether.  And the blogs themselves are often taking an age to download.  One kind soul suggested I clear out my cookies to see if that sorted the issue but it didn’t (though it did help with Typepad comments a few weeks ago).  If it were not for the disruption to my followers and the hassle of setting up a whole new blog I would move my blog to Tumblr.  I’m not having any problems with other sites or blogs so it’s definitely only Blogger that is the problem.  I want to scream….