Hello Again & Happy Christmas!

We all know that one of the definitions of insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results'.  I will understand, therefore, if anyone's tempted to call me insane upon learning that, after a few years' away from it, I'm thinking about giving this blogging lark a bit of a go again.  I, however, remain happily assured of my own sanity since I am, much to my own disappointment, not really expecting different results.  As ever, though, I remain open to the possibility of being pleasantly surprised... ;-)

In keeping with ancient (at least on this blog!) tradition, I am posting a poem for Christmas.  In these turbulent times, this one - in which Longfellow acknowledges the depths of the darkness he sees in the world around him but goes on to speak of the eventual triumph of the light over it - struck a particular chord with me.  I hope you enjoy reading it and I wish you a very Happy Christmas. :-)

CHRISTMAS BELLS

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
 

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

Till ringing, singing on its way,

The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

And in despair I bowed my head;

"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

 

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

 

 

Happy New Year!

At the end of the first full year for both my blog and my website, a quick review of the visitor statistics reveals some rather interesting facts.

The website has been host to visitors from 45 different countries, including Azerbaijan, South Korea and Ukraine! They have been lead there by a wide variety of search terms. The most common of these have all included some variation on my own name or Uncle Alonzo's, but prizes for the most bizarre must surely go to "chocolate fireworks", "Paul Cookson poetry about furniture" and "once again many thanks for the lovely afternoon evenning endeed" (sic)! You can decide for yourself which one deserves first place!

This blog has been visited by the inhabitants of 27 assorted countries, including Croatia, Finland and Taiwan. Among the strangest search terms to bring them here were "shivery chills", "woodlice as medical cure" and "Stacey Farquharson". I assume that the first two searches would have lead to last February's post on Modern Marvels & Curious Cures, while Stacey F would have linked to January's What's in a Name. A rather odd thought, since I employed the two names together in that post specifically because I imagined that no-one else would ever do so! It certainly is a funny old world.

Since I appear to be revisiting old posts with a vengeance today, I'll seize the moment and remind you of just one more: My Child, I Recycled. Once again the Woodland Trust is eager to encourage the recycling of old Christmas cards and the subsequent planting of new trees. Please support them if you can.


And there it was - my first post of 2009. There may have been some (extremely) quiet times, but the blog has survived its first year, which, if I'm honest, is more than I thought it might when I began.

So here's to the next year and to a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2009 for everyone! Cheers!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

When You're Making Other Plans

‘Life is what happens when you’re making other plans’ – that’s what they say, anyway. And it would seem that ‘they’ are right, more often than not.

As clearly stated in my last blog entry, I had planned to finish the first draft of my YA novel by June 17th and decided to observe a self-imposed blog-ban (both writing my own and reading others) until then. All possible distractions and aids to procrastination were to be avoided – on pain of something slightly less drastic than dismemberment. I was determined. I was driven. I was definitely going to make it... I had no idea that the beginning of August would see me still several thousand words from achieving my goal, despite having stuck to my blog-fast with a fanaticism worthy of several great religions.

I have come to the conclusion that there are three main reasons for this state of affairs, each of which also comes with an upside:

1) I had drastically underestimated how much more work I had left to do. I returned to the manuscript to find that I had summarised a number of major scenes and events in a few sentences, e.g. ‘S is captured and taken to C. He attempts to convince her to join him. She will not do so. Her friends rescue her – not sure how yet.’ In my mind, these scenes had been completed long ago – on paper, sadly, it was not so.

Upside: I had also forgotten quite how much I liked some parts of it!


2) The Athlone Trust, a small charity which my father chairs, needed a website built, sponsors found (four runners entered the British 10K Run on the charity’s behalf this year), letters written, envelopes addressed and stuffed, and research done – all at relatively short notice. It’s a great charity and I was very happy to help, but doing so certainly threw my writing schedule into wild disarray!

Upside: The final figures have not yet been worked out but it looks as though we will have raised over £3,000 when all the money is in and counted – half of the Trust’s usual annual budget. Brilliant!


3) Our house and garden have once again been invaded by builders and, having devoted sizeable chunks of last October/November to evacuating and juggling the contents of three upstairs rooms and the landing, I have recently also spent large amounts of time helping to evacuate and juggle the contents of the kitchen, the dining room and the hall. Tomorrow morning the builders will be sealing the kitchen door shut and ripping the whole thing out. RIP, old friend...

Despite having always loved the old room, however, the process of cleaning it out has revealed to me that the kitchen is, in fact, the ROOT OF ALL EVIL. Ours is a hoarding house, filled with junk, piles of ‘stuff I might need at some as yet indefinable future moment’ and paperwork of all kinds, dating back to the Jurassic era and beyond. I now realise that the driving force behind this absurd stockpiling of, well, everything, is the kitchen. Diving headfirst into cupboards of Narnian proportions (though, sadly, without anything as exciting as a snowy world populated by mythical creatures lurking in the back of them – the most interesting things we found were two old fashioned meat grinders, each in three easy-to-assemble parts), I discovered incredible quantities of crockery (Who has this much crockery? Who?!!), the culinary detritus of decades and heaps of assorted junk gathered together like gossipy housewives in all available corners, nooks and crannies. It’s just not normal, I tell you – no one keeps this much stuff!

Upside: Hmm, I’m struggling with this one. I suppose it’s that the sparkly new kitchen should look lovely when the builders finally unseal the door and let us back in some weeks from now... :-)



P.S: It’s some time ago now, but wasn’t this year’s Wimbledon final fantastic? I was rooting for Federer so that he could make history – how long will we have to wait before someone else has the talent and the opportunity to win the Men’s Singles title at Wimbledon six times in succession? – but Nadal was certainly a very worthy winner. Tennis fans are extremely lucky to have two such talented and courteous champions at the top of the game – each as gracious in victory as in defeat. It’s only a shame that at the end of such a bravura performance, one of them had to lose.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Lately, there’s been a lot of all three around. I’m not going to dwell on the usual newspaper fodder – crazy weather, annoying (possibly corrupt) politicians, shamefully mistreated military personnel, crime, violence, binge drinking and mind-bendingly dull ‘celebrities’. I’m sure you already know all you ever wanted to (and probably quite a bit more) about those subjects. Instead, I offer you just a few examples of each from my own recent experience:

The Good:

1. The members of lovely online writing community WriteWords have been enjoying a lot of success lately. Recently published books include Mothernight by Sarah Stovell, A Vengeful Longing by Roger Morris, Chips, Beans and Limousines by Leila Rasheed, Thorn in the Flesh by Anne Brooke, Split by a Kiss by Luisa Plaja, and Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls - also the well-deserved winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

2. I have discovered (via a WW tip) The Big Green Bookshop blog – it’s always been a secret (or perhaps not so secret) ambition of mine to open my own bookshop at some time in the future, and reading about how these guys have done just that is really inspiring. I wish them the very best of luck!

3. Having wanted a fob watch for ages – and more specifically for Shadow Road’s Christmas production a few months ago – but not having any money to spend on a ‘proper’ one, I stumbled across an attractive faux-silver one at my nearest tube station the other day. At a mere £6 for the watch, chain and a spare battery, I thought it was something of a bargain!


The Bad:

1. My excellent ‘Leg Master’ exercise machine has just broken down. Just as I’ve worked my way up to 1,500 repetitions in a day – I kid you not, people, I’ve (almost) sweated blood to get here – the cursed thing has given up the ghost and John Lewis have sold out of replacements. Grrr!

2. Public transport in London – crowded, expensive, dirty, slow, and, depending on whom you end up travelling alongside, occasionally dangerous. And this is what people are supposed to leave their cars behind for?

3. My inability to maintain a regular posting schedule on this blog. It isn’t that I forget to write anything, nor that I can’t be bothered, it’s more that I don’t feel I ought to post unless I’ve got something worth saying. And then I remember that just because I think a thing is worth saying, it doesn’t follow that anyone else will necessarily agree with me. *Sigh* I suspect I may take myself – and this blog – a little too seriously. I am determined to be more trivial (and talkative) in future... ;-)


And The Ugly:


I am reliably informed that this is a sculpture of a ‘Lion Dog’. Hmm, I may still resent the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me have a puppy when I was little, but I don’t think even I would have wanted to go ‘walkies’ with one of these.

Any good, bad or ugly things happening in your life at the moment? If so, feel free to share...

What Am I Doing Here?

Honestly? I've got no idea. First Facebook, and now this. I think I might be possessed or something (crack out the Yellow Pages, someone, and start searching under 'E' for 'Exorcist'). God knows, I should have had enough technological inadequacies, privacy issues and correspondence deficiencies to keep me away from Facebook until at least half-past the Apocalypse. And as for an actual blog, well, suffice it to say that you're reading the words of someone who's never managed to keep any kind of diary or journal going for longer than two weeks at a time, even during the whole angsty teenage phase, when a good number of those around me were churning out epics to rival War and Peace.

Truth be told, I held out on both fronts for as long as I could, but I finally needed to copy some photos from one friend and get hold of another, who appeared to be otherwise un-contactable. Registering on (or 'with'? Who knows?) Facebook was the only answer, so I took a firm grip of myself, filled in as few boxes as humanly possible and got the job done. I certainly wasn't planning to stay, though. I mean, as I may have mentioned once or twice already, I am a confirmed technological incompetent, and I quickly found myself adrift in a sea of incomprehensible technical terms and Facebook-style vernacular ('Poke'? 'Wall'? 'Free Gifts'? In the name of sanity...), so why on earth would I? And yet, despite all this, I find that I have still not got around to deleting my account as originally intended - there may not be much there, but 'there' it still remains...

And this blog? My first children's book, Uncle Alonzo's Beard, was published at the end of May 2007. I've always considered myself a writer, but in May it seemed that I finally became a 'Writer' - a difference which tends to become especially apparent in the company of the kind of people whose opening conversational gambit is always something along the lines of "And what is it that you do?" Anyway, as everyone (apparently) knows, a Writer needs a Website. Hmm. I sensed a problem looming. Luckily, it was one I was able to solve with the aid of a gloriously idiot-proof Mr Site box, and it wasn't too long before http://www.emma-king-farlow.com/ was up and running.

A few seminars and talks later, however, and I had been instructed, more than once, that a Website was no longer enough - at least, not unless it was a seriously interactive one, which mine is not. No, now a Writer needs a Blog, as well as a Website.

I thought about this for a while. I skipped gaily around cyberspace, peeking at other blogs and considering how my as-yet-nonexistent one might compare. There were a few that gave me hope (surely anything I might produce had a fairly good chance of being both less rambling and more involving than some of these?), but there were many, many more - witty, erudite, informative and interesting - that made me wonder what on earth I thought I had to add to the already crowded and obviously talent-rich blogosphere. And so I held off for several months.

But now, my friends, the time has come. It's a new year, the air is humming with shiny, new-born resolutions, and one of mine is being brought to life on the screen in front of you. Can I maintain this blog, as I never could my diaries? Will I write anything interesting enough to tempt anyone other than my parents to read it? Will I even manage to transfer this first post from my computer to the Internet in the first place? Who knows? I certainly don't. But, you know what? I think it might be fun to find out...

Happy New Year!