Holy Cow. It's my birthday in something like 15 days. I must make my annual pilgrimage to the list previously known as 101 things to do in 1001 days (which is now known as 101 things to do in 3001 days due to time not being what it was back when I originally made the list). It obviously needs an update though I guess if I had actually done the 101 things in the 1001 days allotted to it, I wouldn't have lost interest in some of them. Maybe I will press the reset button on the whole damn thing, make the list public and work my way through it. A public list? That sounds dangerous. "45. Spend a week in Copenhagen writing" doesn't sound very interesting to anybody else, but then again, it is to me... so you're going to have to put up with it - at the very least, reading about it when it happens.
Look, I've changed my mind already. This isn't going to be a public list at all. It's going to be a very private list. I think I'll publish the list when I've done them all and then (it's easy to say this three years before you have to) simply start a new list.
The original website that inspired me to start this has gone through some changes since I first found it but it's still here at Day Zero Project. Not quite so organic as it once was but what is any more on the web?
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In a totally not related to anything kind of way, I stumbled upon this hotel earlier on today and think I might like to stay there for no other reason than because it exists - maybe do a weeks worth of writing there as well. Perhaps I should add it to the list. Perhaps I should just add lots of places I'd like to go for no reason and say that I'll write when I get there. This one looks like there might not be not much else to do except write actually.
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Hector is tapping into any reading time I actually had but I'm making good headway with Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield - it's a damn fine book and will make an end of the year top ten list if I can be bothered to do one. There's a section of it where Bellman is busy cramming as much into his day as he can with all the efficiency of a machine. The paragraph that follows goes like this:
"But what he really felt about the matter was that he had discovered - or been given - the key to chronometry. He could open up the case of time when he chose, apply weight to the pendulum and slow its movement. He could take the hours apart, find the extra minutes that were going to waste in them, make them his own."
Which makes it sound a little like a time travel novel, but it's not - it's about a kid that accidentally kills a rook when he was a kid, a mill and an awful lot of dead people. Check it out here.
I like this idea of chronometry. Does such a thing exist or did she make it up - it does indeed exist but reading about it gives me a headache. Still, I suspect it's worth having a closer look at it. No matter how busy you are, there are always dead minutes in any given hour - if you can find a way to collect them all together and make a new hour... well, that's magic in its purest form.