The December/January submissions have been coming in. One interesting poem included the word twitten, which led me to look it up and find it was one of those lovely words for alleyway – like vennel in Scotland and — amazingly — snickelway in Yorkshire. So I started another Wordnik list, after finding other dialect words in Wikipedia, and adding vennel to the Wikipedia page because it wasn’t there. All these things are how I mean to, but don’t, get started in the morning.
Improvements in the new year include a proper digital scale, so I can now weigh parcels properly before covering them with expensive stamps. Before I weighed them on the old pounds and ounces shop scale in the kitchen and did the conversion mentally. Roughly. Not very clever really and meant that I usually put on more stamps than necessary just in case I’d over-estimated.
Submissions always make me think I should rewrite the submissions page, since several people do seem to miss the point. But perhaps they wouldn’t read it anyway. It would be nice to think they’d read one of the HappenStance publications, for example, before applying to join the gang, as it were. Oh well.
I’m working on
- Sphinx 12
- Sphinx online reviews (four more went up last week)
- a prose pamphlet which comprises a long and fascinating conversation Tommy McKean had with Ruth Pitter
- Chapter 4 of the HappenStance Story
- Robin Vaughan-Williams’ grim, funny, haunting, beautiful The Manager
As usual, too many things by half. But at least I can weigh the packets accurately.
- Scales weighing treasure ground in grams