A lovely day yesterday with my brother and his family. We went for a walk across the fields and saw in the distance the windmill where Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was filmed, and drove through a nearby village which was where Cruella De Ville lived in 101 dalmations. Almost as exciting, we learnt the rules for Congestion Scrabble where you try and use as few letters as possible in as least space as possible. Can't wait to try that one out. The people in the village my brother lives in are so polite that when I saw some people standing on the doorstep of a house called 'Sarah's Cottage' I went up to them and said over-excitedly that my name was Sarah. 'How nice', they said a bit bemused until they realised I was linking it to the name of their house. They'd thought I'd just been introducing myself.
Today I was sitting in front of the fire today feeling so lethargic I could hardly move when I suddenly thought I didn't want to spend my New Year like this, so I went off to the allotment instead to sort out my raspberry canes. I've entered the heaviest marrow and pumpkin competition in the annual show so I also cleared some ground and spread good thoughts. Whether that's enough, time will tell.
And my writing prompt for today comes from Virginia Woolf's diaries and is a line from her entry of January 3rd, 1933 'This is a little out of place, but then so am I'.
I'm taking comfort from another entry of hers for Tuesday May 11th, 1920. She writes: 'It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I'm a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception. Directly one gets to work one is like a perosn walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. i want to write nothing in this book that I don't enjoy writing. And yet writing is always difficult.'
A site that makes me laugh every time I use it is http://www.thesurrealist.co.uk/sheep - the sheep shift around to make a different poem every time. Do give it a go.
This work by Sarah Salway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
2 comments:
Sounds like such a fun day with the sightseeing. That Virginia Woolf quote is great. Thanks for posting it.
It's reassuring, isn't it? The quote comes from an old copy I have of her Writer's Diary - quite poignant for me because it's dated with my father's signature for 1953, just before the first of us four kids were born, and I do feel guilty he had to give up his dream of becoming a fiction writer to support all of us. Proud too, though - he really is a fantastic writer still, and that encourages me.
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