Hold the phone!

Hold the Phone!

Everybody's doing it these days!

Not in the way it originally came to be.

It goes back to the days when reporters phoned in their copy.

Stop, wait, hang on a minute.

A sign that something new is coming, a new twist on an news item, or bigger, a Stop Press.

Not really have anything to stop the press with, except a reflection. 

The last post was World Book Night, back in April, 23rd.

With the best intentions I hoped to settle into regular blogging, every couple of weeks.

Life, it has a habit of fouling up plans. The days of lockdown drawing to a close with promises of Freedom Day (1, and 2, and we all know how that turned out).

April slid into June, July and August

Bank Holiday. The last blast before the schools and Universities start the new academic year. Now September is careering along.

To get back on track, the best of intentions hit the brick wall of reality, and important things needed my attention. So now, no promises.

The post will go up when it's ready unfettered by a timetable or calendar, unless the calendar kick starts an idea.

In the meantime, stay well, stay safe, and good luck.

Martyn

World Book Night '21

Coming around, going around, with a Shakespearean twist of calling on a triumvirate for inspiration, courage and resolve through difficult times and challenges. World Book night, the Feast of St George and the birth (and death) day of Wiliam Shakespeare.

I hesitate to mention Shakespeare, a name like that can be a block on what follows. It is here because today is his birthday, and curiously the day he died. The birthdate appears to be tradition, rather than substantiated, various sources give his date of baptism as the 26th of April. The 23rd may not be wide of the mark, infant baptism is an ancient tradition in English culture and provided for in the Books of Common Prayer, initially in 1549 and the book which accompanied the authorisation of the King James Bible. 

Concerns about the health and well being of the child would have prompted the familiy to baptise quickly and for many, like William, the baptism would be a default record of the birth, without recoding the actual date.

Records of the day would be penned into a convenient book. Baptism, marriage and burial listed chronologically until the system became more organised and separate books were required, and onwards to the present system where the records are pro forma. Date of birth included.

Greater changes were under way in Shakespeare's lifetime, in his late teens, the process began to switch Europe from the Julian to the Gregorian calender.

France, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain changed in 1582, Austria and the Catholic German states in 1583.  Ten days were removed from the calendar. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Canada and the colonies (including the American Colonies) finally made the switch in 1752, and lost 11 days.

The  change over took almost three hundred years, Turkey being the last country to change in 1926/27, and 13 days dropped off the calendar.

The intricacies are fascinating, and the oddities, Sweden and Finland celebrated a 30 day February in 1712 with a double leap year.  Sweden's calendar had dropped the leapday in 1700, and an additional day in 1712 brought them back in line with the Julian calendar. They made the switch to the Gregorian calendar a year after the United Kingdom.

Life must have been interesting in Germany with the Protestant and Catholic areas working with different calendars within the same country, for decades at a time!

Consolation? Whatever is happening with the current state of lockdown, or whatever the current regulations permit, there is only one calendar, however disconnected I might feel from it!

If you have the time, check out what's on offer on World Book night, or maybe plunge into Shakespeare?

Stay safe

Martyn

Going Live

Ebook week's alive. 

Reminds me of Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon,  with his famous exclamation at the durability of the eponymous Hero.

"Gordon's alive!"

It's with us again, Read an Ebook Week is upon us, check out the offerings at Smashwords or your favourite ebook distibutor.

Open the door, have fun

Martyn

World Book Day

 A quick one today,  check it out and enjoy, find a challenge, a delight, an old favourite or a new treasure. World Book Day is with us again. I'm investigating with Poirot, digitally. E book on Aldiko from Project Gutenberg.

Have fun

Martyn

Notebook, not E Book

Here we are again, standing on thr brink of Read an E book week. The calendar flagged up the notification, 7th to 13th March, 2021. Annually, the first full week of March.

Twelve months ago, I posted about it, gave a heads up for the links to Smashwords, and the dedicated page on the site. 

I'm a fan of digital, as much as the traditional, hard copy format of the book.

The technical advantages of the ebook are balanced by the aesthetic of the paper version. Softback, hardback, whatever the actual size and format the physical aspects possess what the virtual can never hold. 

The image at the head of this post captures something of the last year, and gave me the answer to a question. the series of posts exploring the notebook, with emphasis on the traveller's notebook and it's lookalikes. I knew the answer, sort of. The timing was curious. The picture of the eReader tucked neatly into the pocket, and the hardcopy struggling to fit caught the mood of the day.

Digital, everything has taken a digital angle in the last twelve months, working from home, and Zoom, or Teams, Hookups, Whatsapp, etc.

Life traded the physical for the virtual, and is poorer for it. Arguably necessary, under the circumstances, but poorer nonetheless.

Sight and hearing have been overloaded, sated beyond their normal capapcity, yet smell, taste and touch have suffered neglect.

The confinement brought out a strain of creativity to satisfy the needs. Baking, gardening, art, anything that can be touched, smelt, tasted.

The notebook, the trigger, brought with it the unmistakable characteristics of real leather. Following the process to completion was a balm. A confirmation, of a primal urge, to touch, to explore the texture of an object.

An idea, drawn from the virtual into the real world.

Suppressed by lockdowns and social distance the primal urge, expressed by a fingerprint on recently dried paint, the irresistible desire to touch found an outlet.

So here's mine, all my own work, including the Inserts, with a bought clip and the ubiquitous Jotter pen.

Have fun with whatever you're doing.

Martyn

Merry Christmas

  

 

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Martyn

The Quest Continues

No longer for perfection, but for the one, the fittest.

Not the grandest, the strongest or the like. The one most suited to me, which fits me the best of all.

A bit Darwinian, a process of natural selection?

Who is selecting whom, me or the notebook?

It comes down to sensing the aura, the Zen of the book

Taking the Zen thing a bit further, it's not how do you feel about the book, how does the book feel about you?

It's the strange feeling, the sensation of losing touch with something.

Pick the book, whatever it is, take it down from the shelf. You sense something, a sympathetic resonance perhaps? You replace the book on the shelf and continue browsing, and end up where you started with the first book you lifted from the shelf.

You take it to the till, pay the cashier, and away you go. The book arrives home and its not the same, strange but it happens.

I remarked in an earlier post about my first encounter with the Moleskine brand and how I felt it necessary to find the right instrument to make the first mark.

I admit, I fell for the romance of the history described in the pamphlet that comes with each one. I bought the book and the story and it took me a while to get over it.

It was the day my brain clicked into gear and did the arithmetic. I checked the figures. Page for page the three pack of the pocket sized cahiers with the soft cover was equal to a hardcover notebook of the same size, and roughly half the price.

I made the switch and awaited an introduction to the Fauxdori, the Traveler's notebook lookalikes.

That introduction stared a whole new journey that brought me to here, now.

An odd side effect has been to bring to mind all the different notebooks I've used over the years, and decades and attempts at homemade notebooks.

Armed with a printer, photographs and a comb binder, assorted papers and a laminator. The research, documents downloaded and printed out would be comb bound for future reference.

Now I'm on the handmade notebooks, cut and trimmed to size and bound by a pamphlet stitch. A new expression of life with a notebook, springing from a superbly matched surprise gift. The Fittest gift I've received in a long time.

Christmas is around the corner, and this year there is a sense of anticipation of what it will bring.

Only a few more sleeps and we've notched up snow already this month. The bookies adjusted the odds for a white one.

Let the dreaming begin!

Martyn

(Image, December 2010)