I’ve received a very encouraging email about my present writing project from one of my distant cousins, a mutual descendant of the family who exchanged newsletters throughout the Second World War.
His grandmother Grace Werner, my father’s first cousin, was one of the contributors.
If you have any wartime memories – your own or those of a member of your family – do write to me.
susie@aliveinww2.com
This is my fourth post. I’m getting more familiar with manipulating the wordpress site and I think I’ve set up a form that will suit me. That’s static content on the pages in the menu on the top right of the home page, and a non-static home page on which I can blog away like this.
The last time I wrote in a free-flowing manner was in the late 1970s when Peter and I were going through emotional turmoil, sorting out the midlife crisis of our marriage. I wrote masses each day. When we had come through the crisis and had moved house, I had a big bonfire of all the outpourings – rather regretful of losing some of the better expressions of feelings and thoughts but not wanting to share them with anyone beyond the original reader, Peter.
In normal circumstances I’m a very fiddly writer, going over and over each sentence to see that I’ve said absolutely exactly what I intended to say. I’m never satisfied. I daren’t re-read my published work because, if I did, I’d be miserable I couldn’t make it better.
The site’s new page (which I hope will appear in the menu today) is a work in progress: a description of my present writing project, the Cousins’ Chronicle. I re-write it every time I look at it. Anyone who reads this and likes writing too, do tell me your writing habits. I believe there are some people who can write quickly and perfectly without any need for tidying up as they go along. I’m not one of them.
Calm morning, Parrett estuary, oil
I was glad that this oil painting in Peter’s recent exhibition didn’t sell. I’ve just rung through from my study to his studio to check, with the idea that we might get it framed and hung in the house. I like it so much. But Donner und Blitzen – someone bought it at another, more recent exhibition! Don’t worry, said Peter, I’ll paint you another one.
The benefits of having an artist you admire as husband.
I have a friend (Hi, Christine!) who never fills in the subject line on emails. How sensible of her. Thinking what the subject is before you write your message can be hard. When the subject you’ve chosen leads to a long chain, it can be confusingly out of date by the time of the last addition. Imagine. Subject heading: many congrats. An email chain that ends a month later with the message So sorry you didn’t get your new job. I chose “Seconded” as title for this second post, thinking of committee meetings; someone proposes a motion and it gets seconded. I’ve spent the morning working out whether a post is a blog. The word blog makes me think of muddy footprints. I can hear a cry go up: “Look what you’ve done. Blogs all over my clean kitchen floor”. Possibly, and possibly not, the first page of the Alive in WW2 website will show my muddy footprints as I make them. Will they then get posted onto another page of the site. And will they ever get read?
This second post invites the comment “Seconded!”
This is my first entry on the website I’m setting up – a steep learning curve. My aim in starting this blog is to make contact with people of my generation and in fact any other readers who could be interested in my latest writing project: “The Cousins’ Chronicle, 1939-1945 and 2015-2016”. It’s a present-day chronicle and memoir woven around extracts from family newsletters exchanged during the Second World War. More about this later. It’s enough to learn how to write posts on a website in the making, without having to worry about what to write.
I spent a good part of this morning worrying about passwords and email addresses and whether to link to existing ones or make new ones. Finally, I may have got a new email address configured (there’s a word) on my new smartphone, a new gobbledygook password for my aliveinww2 site, access to my btopenworld email, and – swank warning – a link to the website I set up some time ago, mainly for Peter.
http://www.barrett-art-writing.co.uk