write up

I have written up the first draft of yesterday's garden visit, and the minutes of the committee meeting, and now it's the turn of the blog.  Doctor Johnson said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, and I am only being paid for the first of the three.  Still, the rewards the committee brings are non-monetary, not least the sheer entertainment value and the piece of cake I ate in yesterday's meeting, and the art lecture and lunch I have been invited to on Thursday, courtesy of a fellow committee member.  The rewards of the blog are practice.  That, and self-expression, self-censored.

I found myself very reluctant to talk about the garden visit until I'd written about it, and the Systems Administrator sensibly didn't ask.  Somehow I instinctively didn't want to say anything about my memories and impressions until I was able to settle down to go through them systematically, focused on the task in hand of turning them into six hundred words or a shade more of fluent descriptive prose.  I think that as soon as you start describing something, you lose the raw data as it begins to turn into a conclusion.  Rather like cooking an egg, the process is irreversible, and I wanted to hang on to my raw thoughts until I was ready to make my omelette.

Words did not come easily, partly because by the time I got in from the concert it was gone half past eleven and I was still tired this morning, but mainly because my cold is back for another stint. I am getting so thoroughly fed up with these colds.  One or the other or both of us have been suffering since early December, and it is now April, and just as I thought I was clear of them here I am snuffling away again, throat slightly sore, and fuzzy mind stumbling over sentence construction instead of the phrases ordering themselves as naturally as walking.  Though it's not just us: the SA had lunch with a former colleague today, who with his wife has had just the same thing over recent months.  In fact, the former colleague wnet one better and contracted a human form of foot and mouth disease, though looking on the bright side his GP prescribed penicillin instead of shooting him and burning his body on a pyre.

It took a long time, but I have the bones of the narrative, and will have another go at smoothing out the syntax later in the week.  It was probably also more difficult to write about than the previous two gardens because it was twice the size, and would have been much easier given twice the word count.  As it was, it was hard to describe the main features and organising principles without lapsing into an estate agent's list of features.  The garden benefits from extensive lawns and herbaceous borders with mature trees, plus a large pond, rose pergola and productive orchard. When what gives the narrative colour is partly being able to include the fact that the owner allows wild ducks to nest in the flower beds.

The minutes seemed to go on interminably, even though I was trying to be crisp and terse, but so did the meeting.  It didn't help that one committee member overslept after an afternoon nap following a busy weekend and arrived twenty minutes late, while another was over an hour late for reasons that were never explained, but then wanted to broaden out the discussion into why the village hall couldn't be expanded.  I didn't include that bit in the minutes.