Greetings from sunny Scotland!AllendaleDiary.org was such a large part of our lives from our home in Sparty Lea, and I loved it so much I’ve kept it alive online, thanks to ourBen’s kind hosting. I’ve thought its daily presentation of the…
This diary is of life in 2019 . . .
The last calendar year before lockdown, since Covid struck these shores in March 2020, was an incredibly fortuitous year to have documented. If someone in the future wants to investigate what life was like throughout the East and West Allen…
Apparently, joy is the new bleak
Perhaps we don’t think that writing follows trends, but according to @thebookseller (yes, I’m gradually getting my head around the twittertariat) the zeitgeist is moving towards joy. Agents and publishers are looking for manuscripts that deal with that particular emotion….
Transitions
It seems to have been seamless, the transition of these Allendale Diary pages from a fee-based web hosting service to an independent platform within the family, as it were. The serving of individual pages and everything associated with the online…
More than small beer or potatoes!
May the potatoes rise up to meet you . . . Our potato plants are doing very well this year. It’s hard to believe that it’s been just over two years since I wrote somewhat lyrically about preparation and anticipation…
A series of novels about Allendale
Haddaway man! But, well, aye. Really. There are some parts of village life that a reportorial journal/diary simply cannot reach. So to try to encompass the missing gaps, a series of fictional novels is now live and available on the…
It’s on its way!
Although I’ve been watching the updates on my account with BookPrintingUK.com like a very impatient hawk hovering at the roadside in the afternoon sunshine, I wasn’t quite sure, after the ‘BW Insides Printing’ the ‘Trimming’ and the ‘Quality Control’ notices,…
A timely, contributed poem
I’m so delighted to provide Marjorie Anderson space for her lovely poem, a piece of work that set our Creative Writing class a-tingle last term. This poem, for me, develops the whole sense of the year ahead, and the year…
Proofs accepted; printing in process
Well, let’s see . . . a fair bit of work has gone into the compiling of all the components for the big ‘book of the blog,’ but it’s all finished now, and the proof came back by 1st Class…
New projects for the coming year . . .
There’s a variety of new ideas floating around these valleys, some of which may come to fruition in the new year ahead. If they do, then the work begun this year will have laid the foundation for those projects of…