My newsletter should have gone out this morning (and two weeks before that)* and yet it is not this morning, and my newsletter is still here, unformed and mostly in my head. I can’t believe it’s half past October.
The reason, mostly, was because through circumstances outside of my control, my son has gone off to boarding school this year; the boarding school I live on, but he has his own room and I don’t get to see much of him and I have been sulking, for want of a better word. Of course, now it is the half term holidays I can’t write because there are people in my house and I lack the necessary stillness to gather my thoughts. I can’t win.
To keep myself occupied I started on this monstrosity, the carving of which kept me occupied for a solid week. The first block, that is. There are two others but they were easy to carve. Not only did it take a long time to carve but I had to order in various bits and pieces and then wait for them to arrive, because I’m neither competent or organised enough to order everything I need at the beginning.
I’m at the point now where I could print it. Here’s the pre proof I inked up in random versafine inkpad colours (versafine is an amazing inkpad to have around for quick registration checks if you are lazy and don’t want to do much clean up after)
The colours are not right, and it’s missing one block, so I’m not going to show this on instagram, but you, my loyal three readers, you can see the potential, I’m sure, so you are allowed the first glimpse. I mean, it looks terrible but the registration is really good, isn’t it?
I’m so tantalising close to getting this done, I can almost taste it; and I want to see it so very badly, but I’m not going to print it for a couple of weeks. I’m going to wait until the house is quiet again before attempting that. I’ve got a couple of small blocks to carve and keep me amused in the meantime. I can’t explain the need for quietness in order to do complex work, not the just the work itself but the need to create a mental space, a calm, before starting the work. There are already many variables that can go wrong, and mistakes are costly; a bad mood is one variable I can control, so I’m on a snake break till November.
Sorry for the inevitable typos and worse, there’s no time to proofread as I’m two weeks and five hours overdue? If you spot any, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.
*I wrote and thought I sent this last week, but somehow didn’t. Apart from getting through about five prime ministers in the last week I think everything is pretty much the same so I’m sending it out now. I’ve not done any snake work. I’ve been to Cornwall.