Five days into August

The usual distractions are still nowhere to be seen. Sunshine, the pull of Lyme Regis or Beer Beach, Dartmoor, or the Brecons…the outdoor life anyway…all are relegated to the imagination. Wet July, sadly, has decided to stick around in August.

My shorts, sandals, and t-shirt are gathering dust whilst I make my way with an umbrella, waterproof jacket, thick jumper, and laptop stuffed in a rucksack to another Coffee#1, this time in Shaftesbury High Street, to ponder.

In other words, an ideal writing day.

Some will already know that I set aside August as a ‘Return to Writing’ month having taken a break to revise for, and pass, hopefully, A-Level English Literature. Results day is less than a fortnight away, it all seems rather surreal.

Reality though is a flat white and a wobbly table and that slight anxiety I have nothing for my slot on the ACW blog, but here goes.

I heard a sermon years ago that, I don’t know, made sense, created faith, and has borne fruit not only in the sense of measurable outcomes but inward peace. I shall try and invoke all those précis skills practiced at school aeons ago to summarise.

Moses on the Mountain collects the tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments engraved by God but, in a rage upon seeing the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, he smashes the tablet. But God calls him back up the mountain. On the way up he has to walk past the broken tablets before carving the same Ten Commandments into a fresh pair of stone tablets in God’s presence. And Israel is not derailed.

He had to walk past his previous mistake, his failure, his sin; past his anger spread out on the hillside, to return to God who renewed his calling, and got him back on the right path.

I have had to walk past some failures in life. I will share one that is more for illustrative amusement rather than too personal for a Monday morning.

It’s June 1974. Of all the O-Levels I was sitting that year, English Literature was a cert. Despite my lifelong pursuit of science, and chemistry in particular, the only O-Level subject I was supremely confident of achieving an A-grade was Eng Lit. On the way out of the exam, a friend mentioned the tough compulsory question. I looked at him quizzically. ‘Compulsory question?’ I said, slowly. I had missed not only the compulsory question but half of one printed on the final sheet. Grade F. Doh! 

Walking past my previous failure is not the only reason for studying A-Level Eng Lit almost 50 years later, but it’s tucked in there somewhere, with that peace I mentioned, not striving but thanking God for how He works in our lives. It’s been a joy, if hard work for someone steeped in the interaction of molecules. The other reason is that studying the masters of literature, top authors, playwrights, and poets, can’t harm, and may improve, my attempts to sew together words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, create some tension in a novel or two, and memorable characters for others to enjoy. And poems to explore the paradoxes that seem to rule the roost. 

So, flat white nearly done, it’s time to get back to my firsts: a first historical novel set in England and France in 1799 and a children’s adventure story set in land further than far away.