under another sun

What with it being the last day of June, a steady rain in Brighton. I stayed in all day, and worked through my list of things I didn't particularly want to do, such as making a osteopath appointment, a doctor's appointment about the wretched ears, uploaded a tiny YouTube video of Someone else's patch  in my Little Horrors collection which I recorded several weeks ago. Also wrote to Jane and Richard, from whom I got a lovely email back, wrote to Tess Jolly about the uncanny, and took a photo of a snail, whose people were busy chomping through everything in the garden. I cooked a bean jar today. The smell permeated through the house all day, and was pretty tasty. It was a beef one, it is the only thing I cook with beef, with herbs from the garden, eaten with chewy brown loaf was rather delicious. Chatting to Mum this afternoon, who was heroically filling in tax forms. The revenue normally sends someone around to help, but... plague etc. Lorraine home this evening, tir...

A poor night's sleep. Lorraine sleepless and the alarm went off at six, getting back into the old routine  at school, with year 6 now attending, as well as the children of key workers. It went well apparently, but Lorraine was tired when she got home, showering and putting all her school clothes to be washed at 60C. I am very proud of my wife, it has been a gruelling time with lots of responsibilities, and she has done very well. I spoke to Pat today for almost an hour. He was telling me about his brush with COVID-19 and being in hospital for a week. Luckily he didn't have to be intubated, but he was on the maximum dose of 10L of oxygen for a while. This was March, and he is still recovering slowly now. It was a bit of a brush with death, and he told me he had a conversation with one of the doctors who told him he was not out of the woods. Pat said, 'are we talking Wimbledon Common or the Amazon?' It was an ordeal, but he is resilient and now very pleased to be stea...

Up and refining the short story Little Horrors, which I have decided to rename The Bestie . Little Horrors is a name I will hang onto though. A good title for a collection methinks. One of my faults in writing prose is overuse of a word. For example part of this story is set in a University, and I used the word University too many times, which gets a bit tedious, but is one of those things that it easy to overlook even when you read a MS several times. Found a website called Word Frequency Counter , which you can paste a whole document into and it will tell you how many times every single word crops up. Obviously words like I and You and lots of conjunctions crop up as most heavily used, but an offending overly repeated word, such as the eight times I used University, becomes extremely easy to spot, and thin out. An interlude this afternoon walking in woods around Hollingbury Hillfort and the golf course. The weather is cool and fresh at the moment. If you are prepared to double back...

Up early and reviewing the story I had written yesterday, called Little Horrors , which I am very pleased with. I think this story, and the one I wrote immediately before it called The Dream Home are the best short stories I have written. I feel as if I have made a breakthrough. They are both very short, just a thousand and a half words each, but there's a lot in them. Otherwise a day at home, working on bits and pieces. In the afternoon a jaunt into town. Had some coffee and worked on my pad making lists and prioritising stuff. Then home via Sainsbury's and made some food for Lorraine when she got back home. Below , I read something online about how quickly the world would return to something like normal if all humans suddenly vanished. I have long enjoyed this fantasy, and seen glimpses of this otherworld in tumbled overgrown greenhouses in Guernsey. A derelict building at the bottom of Preston Park gave me another couple of snaps to add to this thought.