Personal Stuff

Just a Wednesday night – and a picture from France

February 3, 2021 By graham stewart

It’s almost time to put the bins out and I had nothing prepared to post. So, here’s a picture of somewhere that means a lot to Laura and me. We haven’t been there for over a year. I miss it.

I love the mountains and their clear air. I miss sitting in the sun on a cafe terrace adjacent to a snow-covered slope, with the temperature below zero, and feeling warm enough to strip down to a t-shirt.

We’re lucky we found this place and we’ve been going there for over ten years now. It’s a part of France we didn’t know at all before we ended up in Valloire. But our visits there are coming to an end. There are many reasons for this — and Brexit is not really one of them — but, if Covid restrictions are lifted, we’ll make one last trip before the summer to recover some stuff and that will be that.

We’re sad tonight but we have great memories of Valloire. Things change. New circumstances bring new opportunities.

I was never very good on skis anyway.

Being original means being yourself. End of lesson.

February 1, 2021 By graham stewart

There’s a long tradition of proclaiming there is nothing new under the sun. From the seven basic plots from which all stories are built to countless films and TV series whose characters, settings, and storyline seem interchangeable.

It’s enough to make a creative despair. Until, of course, you realise that it is not a new story that makes something unique but the way it is told. No two people are the same. No two people telling the same story will tell it the same way. The originality lies with the teller, not the tale — with apologies to D H Lawrence.

I was reminded of this today when I was looking at coming up with titles and themes for a possible podcast in my Podcasting Workshop. Taking a look at the ideas of the other participants, it would have been easy to waste a lot of energy going “That’s been done,” “Hardly unique”, or “Not interested” to many of them. But just like all other forms of creative enterprise, what’s important in these ideas is how the person behind the podcast will make their podcast unique. Humour, interesting guests, a kookie slant on the topic, or just sheer professionalism.

I have to come up with an idea of my own for tomorrow. I want to find a heady mix of politics and books and create something that will be full of lively and stimulating discussion. Think Our Time but with passion rather than a whiff of the academy. Neglected books, important books, books that have changed the lives of my guests, books that help us make sense of the world, and books that may help us change it for the better.

And with an almost book club sensibility. The discussions will be trailed a month in advance and the audience can read the book in preparation for an in-depth discussion, mailing in question and responses before the episode itself.

I think I’d listen to that. How about a name? And maybe it’s being done elsewhere. That doesn’t matter. My take on it will be slightly different and appeal to different people. That’s the way things work. You can’t find an audience if you don’t put it out there.

I stuck to my resolutions – that’s a first

January 31, 2021 By graham stewart

Here’s a brief report for January:
17600 words of the novel written (at a minimum of 500 words every day)
30 days of yoga
30 days of posts to this site
Books finished (from the list of 10):
• The Case for a Job Guarantee — Tcherneva
• Knife of Dreams — Jordan

That’s an unusually fallow month of reading for me but, because it’s a result of more writing and setting time aside for yoga, I’m prepared to accept it. It’s not the only reading I have been doing but it feels slightly disappointing nevertheless.

And here’s the plan for February:
Inspired by Anne Lamott’s story about the writing of her second novel (Rosie) which she retells in Bird by Bird, I’m using the next month to write a full treatment of the book I’m working on. Part of the problem is that I have been working on it a long time and I have taken breaks and attacked it at different places at different times. It is a bit of a mess and is getting harder and harder to hold complete in my head. Time, therefore, to get the story down and the way the characters change, who they are, why they act like they do, and what happens to them. More or less. I’m aiming for a full forty or fifty pages of treatment in the next 28 days.

I’ve joined the Seth Godin Akimbo Podcast Workshop, which starts tomorrow. I’m looking forward to learning some useful stuff from people also keen to ship a podcast. I joined the workshop rather than some normal hands-off course because a hands-off course would be my first choice. The Akimbo workshop stresses the necessity of joining in, of sharing knowledge, of engaging. I’m not someone who naturally plays well with others. So already I have the chance to learn something over and above whatever technical details I may glean about podcasting.

I want to complete more books from the list of ten. (I had thought I was going to add Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune as a replacement for the Tcherneva but my wife has convinced me to start Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and, after 90 pages, I’m hooked. Sorry, Olivia.)

I’m going to continue with yoga. This month, though, I’m going to watch and follow a session for complete beginners every day until the moves and poses and flows become second nature — and I can feel myself improving. Still with Adriene, though. Given that the month of ‘lessons’ I just did with her is free, I thought it was only fair to download her FWFG app and subscribe to her channel. It still comes in at a ridiculously reasonable price — far cheaper than a class a week at a local yoga studio, were such things still open.

I’m also going to add some weight training this month. The combination of yoga and refraining from sugar in all the most obvious forms has had some impact on my weight and my BMI but I want to add a bit of additional strength and tone where yoga may take a bit of time getting there.

So, that’s the month ahead. I’m looking forward to it.

A pre-update update

January 30, 2021 By graham stewart

Getting ready for tomorrow

Just a water buffalo with closed eyes: Photo by Alex Parkes on Unsplash

On the 16th of January I wrote a post about the things I have committed to this month. I promised to give an update at the end of the month. That’s tomorrow. I’ll roll in an update about books read and bought, too.

Today’s post is a little preparation. It’s Saturday evening and I want to post this too my personal blog because I want to post something and I have little to say. What I have noticed this month is that I have read a lot less than usual. In addition to my book reading, I usually get through the TLS, Private Eye, and the LRB.

I also subscribe to print versions of Red Pepper and Tribune. At the moment, my in-tray is piling up with back issues of all of those. Not good. It makes me unhappy. Or stressed. One of the two. I hate skipping articles, essays, or reviews in these magazines because it gives me a bad case of FOMO. I really do fear I shall miss something important if I don’t read everything. Interesting, at least. Or useful. Not healthy.

After taking stick of what this month has given me — or taken from me in the case of reading — I will make some resolutions for February. I don’t know yet myself what I’m going to decide. That will have to wait until I’m typing tomorrow.

And on that note … until tomorrow.

Is it me or just the weather?

January 28, 2021 By graham stewart

OK, it’s the weather

It may be wishful thinking — or some misplaced arrogance — but I think I notice the small, weird changes in the weather that creep up on us. Mostly, this is down to my age, of course, and the fact that I have memories of a time when weather patterns seemed to be content to fit more neatly inside their allotted seasons. In my Edinburgh childhood, for instance, winter meant snow and sledging on the steep slope from the second green on my local golf course. Every winter.

I have never taken my children sledging in this country. That’s not because I am a horrible, kill-joy father. Lack of snow had a lot to do with it.

On Sunday we had snow. Not for long and it lay around for only a few hours before getting bored and melting away for the most part. Some hardy iced clumps hung about for another day but it went from pristine layer of white to messy clumps of brown-stained ice in no time. The temperature for most of Monday and Tuesday was close to freezing.

Yesterday, still cold. Then it rained in the evening. I slept poorly and heard the rain whenever I woke during the night. My usual waking time of 5am arrived and I got up.

The first think I do most mornings when I get into my office is to slam on the electric heater while the central heating gears up to a decent temperature. This morning I came into the office and thought I must have left the heater on all night. But when I checked it, it was cold. The rain had stopped. I looked at my phone and the weather widget told me the temperature outside was 11 degrees. At 5am on a January morning.

Not normal. So not normal that I have thought about most of the day and finally got it out of my system by writing about it here.

This is another post that I won’t be sharing on Medium. Here’s a final image for you: I’m sitting writing this in bare feet. Again, in January. In a Victorian house that is not easy to heat, I might add. I have single-glazed windows in my office. But bare feet are OK this evening.