I’m fired up to write about lace! I was going to write a History Elf item today about an unknown commoner who became de facto leader of Flanders centuries before the phenomenon of Oliver Cromwell in England, but Artevelde has been pipped today by lace.
Marlow Museum put on a concert last night with some readings, poetry and a performance by two of the top names in English folk music. Alas, my hearing aids are not nuanced enough to enable me to appreciate a concert where the words to songs matter, but I did get some of it. The event itself, and the accompanying exhibition at the museum, reminded me that many of my ancestors were lacemakers locally, and I ought to honour their toil.
I’m not usually spontaneous. There are lists all over the apartment – things that need doing. I am easily distracted from them, but not always in a positive way. It is a weird feeling when a piece of writing forces itself out. A couple of weeks’ ago, I had a plan for the day, but I just had to write Swansong. That saga had been rumbling around in my sub-conscious ever since my cousin told me about the observations of swan behavior at her local pond, which was about two years ago.
It’s not necessarily pleasant when something bursts through into your conscious mind and your brain starts urging your fingers to do something, but the outcome is usually rewarding. There are other days when the brain feels empty and I try to force some ideas through. I am fortunate in that I studied idea generation as a a project within my MBA, wrote “Creating Product Strategies” some years later and delivered some workshops about it for companies. So, I can do things like – list random words, force unlikely combinations, start crafting a deliberately bad idea and reversing it to make a good one.
I know that so many writers set themselves targets. I think that George Bernard Shaw went for 1,000 words a day. On an uninspired day, the words produced might need a lot of editing at a later date, but anything is better than a blank screen!
So, I have earned my moral “right to write” this morning by doing some housework. Time to get busy. Ironically, thinking of the deft handicraft of my lacemaking ancestors, one of the things that I am putting off doing is patching my cargo pants. My mother could knit and make things, but she was first and foremost a highly skilled typist. At age 8, my “toy” typewriter sat beside her forbidding Imperial 66. Needles of any size are not friends to me, but I couldn’t live without a QWERTY keyboard…
