This week started with my ‘Bog Rocks’ – Big Rock 1 – I visit my mother in the care home. It was exceedingly painful this week because it would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary – something my late dad used to joke about  – having fought in WW 2 that he wouldn’t be able to forget the day. They never envisaged that Mum would develop severe Dementia and Not Remember.

I always drive back along the coast road to get home and en route I stop at Abbotsbury Sub- Tropical Gardens for a coffee and a cake – and I take my sketch kit and my writing note books and have a thorough walk around. I then get engrossed in the changes in the garden or a chat with a stranger and then I feel able to drive home and start the week. This week I was very sad indeed and just couldn’t walk around  so I drove home.

Writing fiction is Big Rock 2.  And that is specifically work on a WIP manuscript – it is not prep or research or filing or any other thing. This week is the first time in many that this has not been achieved. Largely because there were a few things happening on the farm at short notice because there was a break in the wet, soggy weather – so hedges were cut and leaks fixed, and hay delivered in.

I am working on a Non-Fiction project again, and the setup of that has been nagging at me – as ever, I am trying to set up a functional and totally savable cross-platform entity that allows me to load photos and text easily. I am fully aware of the Holy Grail aspect of that but after several weeks of hammering away at the ‘usual suspects’ and ‘old friends’ of tech along with the Usual Gits I have a set-up that mostly works most of the time most of the places I need it to – only hitch is that as I test it out in real-time, I find it is very slow across all the machines for editing. And like an hour or two just to edit a few sentences of typos/ dictation dafties – usually 3 min. But it is all totally savable out of any cloud.

I can tell I am still lost in thought over it, but I am not breaking off trialing it, so something may become obvious or occur to me. Sometimes, the view from where we are is not clear.

I have not been sleeping either, and I have a note on my desk to the effect that if I am sat there at 4 a.m., I am not to tinker with software but to pick up my brushes or pencils and sketch and paint, as then before anything else depresses me, I have a pile of incontrovertible stuff that I made that wasn’t there before. Achievements Anyway…