Hawkesbury Life - Debbie Young's Writing Life

East, West, Our Village Show’s Best

Posted on August 28, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

2,300 miles in 4 weeks: that’s one way of summing our family holiday in France this year. For the first time in my life, I am in the fortunate position of being able to take 4 weeks off work. To make the most of it, we hit the road in our camper van.

Normally it’s a fortnight’s tour of Scotland, but as Laura always says “You don’t go to Scotland for the weather”. I’ve never been further south in France than Paris, so armed with a French atlas and a satnav, we hit the road.

We are not disappointed. Our scenic route from takes us through Picardy and Paris before trickling south alongside the Loire and the Rhone. A week’s tour of Provence includes extraordinary ancient Roman remains and UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Then it’s back up north via the Ardeche mountains and the Auvergne’s volcanoes. Sometimes things get surreal. Canoeing under an ancient Roman aqueduct, we find ourselves surrounded by French holidaymakers who have turned the riverbank into a beach. At Avignon, our campervan floor fills with Italian children contentedly drawing and colouring, while Laura goes off to play with her new French friend Sybillia. For a writer, the trip is a rich resource, and all the way I’m scribbling away in my notebook, banking ideas for withdrawal at home.

By the time we’re driving north, I’m saturated with new experiences – but for Laura, there’s just one thing on her mind. She shares it from the back seat.

“How many days till the Village Show, Mummy?”

“I’m just SO excited about the Village Show.”

“I can’t wait for it to be Show Day on Saturday.”

“I’m so glad we’re going to be home in time for the Show.”

And do you know what? I think she’s right. No matter how far we travel, I’m sure we’ll never find another sight to match the Hawkesbury Village Show. UNESCO, please take note.

(This post was originally written for the Hawkesbury Parish Magazine – September 2011 Village Show Special Edition!)

Writing

Never Too Late

Posted on July 26, 2011March 9, 2013 by Debbie Young

Mr. Micawber on Happiness — Image by Terry McCombs via Flickr

Do you fight a constant battle to fit more chores into the day than the hours and the laws of physics will allow? I reckon multi-tasking is the scourge of the modern world.

Mr Micawber famously observed that having slightly more income than expenditure is the recipe for happiness, while the opposite leads to misery. I’m sure the same applies to time and tasks.

So I welcome any new idea that will help me make better use of my time. And this month I find a new ally. It’s a handy gadget on my new mobile phone. A “Lists & Things” button allows me to compile any number of action lists with deadlines. I can colour code tasks according to priority and hide or reveal items as I see fit. I can even get the phone to play a tune to remind me when a task is due for completion. I need never miss a deadline again.

Equipped with this app and a phone-based calendar, I decide to do away with my printed diary. (Frankly, I could do with the extra space in my handbag.) From now on, my phone will be all I need.

So I set about inputting appointments, tasks and deadlines. Some have very clear time constraints – dental appointments, print deadlines, term dates.

Having input all these, I start on the tasks for which I can set my own deadlines: when to write my next online blog entry, when to complete the first draft of that book… Scrolling down the screen to set the date for the first of these items, my finger slips and I find myself accidentally advancing the year instead of the day of the month.

And so I discover a major difference between this and my old printed diary: the phone version doesn’t end on 31st December 2011. I scroll down the years – 2012, 2013, 2014… A few moments later, I’m still going: 2087, 2088, 2089. Why was I so worried? There’s still plenty of time to fit everything in. The only problem will be if I lose my phone in the meantime.

This post was originally written for the Hawkesbury Parish Magazine, August 2011 edition.

Personal life

Rain Starts Play

Posted on June 28, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Last weekend torrential rain provided me with a welcome excuse to ignore the laundry (no chance of drying it in this weather) and to disregard the garden (unless I was to take up growing rice). I decided to do some work.

Talk about lack of resolve! Only the day before, I’d vowed to stop working at weekends. When you work from home, it’s too easy to switch on the laptop to check a few emails and end up lured into other, more time-consuming tasks. One thing leads to another – and before you know it, the day is gone.

But this time, it wasn’t to be. I started tapping away at the keyboard, but the screen would barely respond. That irritating on-screen egg-timer kept popping up, slowing down my progress down to a snail’s pace (albeit a snail with touch-typing skills).

It wasn’t my computer that was at fault, unlike my husband’s laptop. He’d immobilised it the night before in an unscheduled scientific experiment. He proved conclusively that a keyboard and a glass of wine don’t mix. It’s still drying out in the conservatory.

To rest my eyes from staring at the locked screen, I gazed out of the window at the hammering rain. And then it struck me: the weather was slowing down the internet. The local weather report revealed 97% humidity. With that much rain in the air, no wonder the signals couldn’t get through.

I logged into Facebook (slowly) to ask whether any of my friends were having the same problem. Eventually, some answers crawled back to me: y…e….s, w…e a…r…e.

Well, no more work for me then. I declared I’d take the rest of the day off. What a welcome change from the usual English summertime cry of “rain stops play”. In my case, rain was stopping work.

And then I realised why the weather was quite so bad: it’s only a week till the start of Wimbledon.

(This post was originally published in Hawkesbury Parish News, July 2011).

Personal life

I’ll Never Leave…

Posted on May 30, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Spring may be a traditional time to put your house on the market, but suddenly it’s getting out of hand. “For Sale” signs are popping up all over the village. By the time you’re reading this, even the house next door to me will have fallen under the auctioneer’s hammer for the first time in two generations.

Is it time to take down the famous boundary sign at the Monument end of the village that says “Hawkesbury Upton – You’ll Never Leave”? (I’m never sure whether this is a threat or a promise.) Or is it all a grand game of musical chairs? Maybe the sellers are just changing places within the village. In the last few years, three families in my street have moved only a few doors down.

I for one intend never to move house again – and not just because my daughter’s got dibs on the house when I die. (Even the kindest children can be chillingly matter-of-fact about death. She asked Grandma the other day to leave her a particular handtowel in her will.) What really puts me off moving is the thought of having to pack. I’d need to wade through so much paper to decide what to keep and what to chuck – boxes of letters from family and friends, piles of magazines from my journalist years, brochures and newsletters that I wrote in my days as a PR, not to mention the odd half-novel tucked away here and there. Oh well, at least Laura will have plenty of material to light the woodburner with when I’m gone……

(This post originally appeared in the Hawkesbury Parish News, June 2011)

Personal life, Writing

Writing On The Run

Posted on April 27, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

somerset monument, hawkesbury upton, glouceste... — Image by Synwell via Flickr

Sending a text on my mobile as I jogged past Hawkesbury Monument the other day, it occurred to me that I was only a stone’s throw from writing my blog on the run. So many of my friends update their Facebook status from iPhones and Blackberries that I’d been thinking about investing in a smart phone myself, so that I could post to my online blog while away on holiday.

It’s not the first time I’ve hankered after equipment to help me write while travelling. Years ago, long before the rise of the internet or the miniatiurisation of the mobile phone, there was a clever little gadget on the market. A bit like a miniature version of the shorthand machines used by courtroom stenographers, it was like a tiny typewriter but with just four keys, one for each finger of one hand. You tapped the keys in a different combination for each letter of the alphabet. Even in a shaky commuter train, you’d be able to write legibly, because when you got home, the machine would spool out what you’d typed in normal letters. One of these devices would have made my daily commute across London suburbia more productive, but my salary as a lowly editorial assistant wouldn’t stretch to one.

Another reason I wanted it is that I’d never learned shorthand. Several times in my teens I had bought teach-yourself books, but even with daily practice, I knew that it would take a long time to master. With the short-termism of the typical teenager, I couldn’t make the commitment. Every year or two after, I would think to myself “If only I’d stuck at it, my shorthand would be fluent by now”.

So if I do write my column on the run, I’ll have to use an even more old-fashioned device to record it – my brain. I just wish my head had a USB port so that I could back it up with a memory stick.

(This article originally appeared in the Hawkesbury Parish Magazine, May 2011.)