Accidents and Dilemmas and Sunflowers Begone!

 This week, I have sustained: eight insect bites, two bruises, one blistery burn and a sharp poke in the eye from a grapevine. I have, as they say, been a bit in the wars. I have survived, of course, which is testament to my upbringing by a mother who did not recognise illness and trained us children not to put plasters on any injuries because she’d only rip them off at the first opportunity to ‘let the air get to the skin.’ And the lessons I have taken from this catalogue of accidents are: remember to spray myself with one of my many insect deterrents, be careful when folding stiff cardboard, buy a pair of longer oven gloves and look where I’m going when in the vicinity of the grape vine. 

In other news, this morning I took fifty sunflower plants to the village coffee morning ‘n’ plant ‘n’ cake sale…

…and we made a grand total of £500.24 for Dementia UK which was AMAZING! It has buoyed up the village social committee enormously and we are now planning towards holding a village fete in the middle of July. I was so invigorated by the experience that I came home, had a quick cup of tea and spot of lunch then it was straight out into the garden to plant out loads of flowers and do some weeding so I could install two of the five honeysuckles I bought last week. 

Lord Malarkey and I have also been chatting about his plan to take semi-retirement in the next few months. He’s been in consultation with a pension adviser chap and all looks ticketty boo and ready to go. Part of the discussion was about things that will take the place of being at work - hobbies and the such like; Andy has started setting up an Etsy shop for his artwork - and I happened to mention that I had decided to give up writing. 

‘But you enjoy writing,’ said Lord M. 

‘I do,’ said I. ‘When I say ‘give up’ I mean I am giving up any aspirations I had of being a properly published novelist. I shall carry on tiddling around with writing for my own entertainment, just lower my professional sights to somewhere near zero.’ 

Lord M said he had every faith in my writing and that if I ever wanted to self-publish any of my novels and put them on Amazon or Lulu or suchlike in the hope someone might see them and think, ‘That looks entertaining, I’ll give it a go,’ or some serendipitous proper publishing event might be triggered, then he would facilitate the uploading himself. Which was nice given I hate anything technological like that. And then he said, ‘Of course, the biggest problem with our creative work is our inability to promote ourselves as artist and writer,’ and this is true. Neither of us are good at blowing our own trumpets. As Edmund Blackadder might say, ‘You might have at least said you HAD a trumpet.’ 

One of the things that holds me back from self-promotion is that it’s all done these days on social media. If you want to be ‘me, me, look at me!’ you have to be on Instagram, X (what a STUPID name…honestly…🙄), TikTok, Facebook etc etc blah blah blah and I am on none of these because I made the decision a loooooooong time ago to stay away from them and live in the real world. But if I really wanted to promote my writing, I’d have to go back to them, and that’s where the dilemma lies. 

I could manage them all right. That’s not the issue. I can weed out the weirdos, I can ignore the stupid or nasty comments. I’ve got a pretty good spam radar. I don’t think I’d be sucked into any sort of doom scrolling behaviour because I’d be strict about being on social media as a writing promotion only exercise, you know, half an hour to update posts here and there, then ignore for the rest of the time. 

I’m reluctant to give away my data but I guess that could be limited to a certain extent and I could regard it as some sort of investment, couldn’t I? I don’t like what social media is doing to young people but I’m not a young person. I know I have a bigger life outside the Internet than I do in it, and that is good. 

And by participating in social media, would I be contributing to the greater evil that, ironically, is actually destroying society? Or am I just over-thinking the whole hoo-ha, and should I just get a grip and look at the potential benefits i.e getting my writing out there? 

Oh, it’s all too much to think about any more today. 

I shall, instead, think about how pretty the garden is looking at the moment and the great vibe that was created at the fund-raiser this morning. That’s the sort of thing that really matters.