Sunday 13 February 2011

150 up

This is the150th daily post! That is, excluding a couple from Exeter before I started in earnest, but I still quite like those two posts so have let them stand. The 100th passed me and the rest of the world by, as press interest was focused elsewhere at the time.

I am hoping for some alchemy similar to Virginia Woolf's wishes. But I suspect that if I re-read them all, they would coalesce into something more akin to less-than-transparent leaf mould.
"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time."

3 comments:

  1. I read most of your posts at one sitting some time before Christmas and I don't recall any leafmould . . unless that includes the stuff you feed into your boiler . . .

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  2. Perhaps cockney rhyming slang alchemy - leaf mould, g...

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