After a few days of good weather, the weekend has arrived, along with the rain. Accordingly pottering indoors. At work doing lawyer’s hours trying to finish off a major project before taking any decent leave.
I recently bought Scrivener, basically it is a word processor, but it also has a lot of the document management functionality of products like DevonThink or even Voodoopad. I am fond of these meta word processors that allow you to manipulate and organise text.
The particular angle for Scrivener is that it is designed for writers, mainly fiction writers, but it also has plenty to offer other writers, though they might find other products that are more specifically tailored to their needs. I downloaded the trial, and although the learning curve is pretty steep, it was immediately apparent that if I could master the App then it had a lot a contribute. Although there is a thirty day working trial, I just bought it, and started importing all my various writings into it.
If you are serious about writing, then Scrivener is as serious as you are, and has plenty to offer. Currently I have got a file for the evolving set of short stories that is Losing Definition, one for my old novel The Garbageman, and importing all my blog postings into another file. There is still a novel lurking in a bundle of reporter’s notebooks that I will have to type out. Not sure whether it is any good, but probably worth typing out just to see what I was writing twenty years ago.
Now for some other random jottings, intriguing to see the growing coverage of hoarders being rescued from homes choked with stuff that is usually pretty much worthless. I wonder what it actually says about us, the impulse to compulsive hoarding and clutter is common to us all, are we adrift in a sea of information and strangeness and is keeping familiar items close by a means to try and keep the strangeness at bay?
At the other extreme, for many people material possessions are now being stripped of any sentiment and meaning at all. We do not bother with the dusty shoebox full of photos, the music and dvds are all digital nowadays. The younger generation seem to travel pretty light, they are attached to their technology, but no one would keep an obsolete phone out of sentimental value. There are a few collectors of antique computers and the like, check out the System Folder Blog
I am even considering putting in a bid for an old Braun Calculator.
But this is just a generalised nostalgia for old technology and design, as with my fondness for old Letterpress items and the like. They have no personal history for me, I just like the look of them.
I am not sure that people cherish their IKEA furniture and impart it with great sentimental value. I suppose that there are a few things that I have that remind me of my parents, or relatives, that are of sentimental value to me, but I am not sure how much, if any, of this would transfer down to my children. There are a couple of wind up clocks, I suspect that that will be one for each daughter, but I don’t imagine them filling their house with our old IKEA furniture, Habitat lamps, eighties CDs and redundant videos.
The only people I can think of where there is an intergenerational transfer of material is where father and son are in the same trade, or where it is all attached to a house, some stately pile somewhere.
Otherwise it is all going digital and disposable. With the safety belt that if you miss something from your childhood, or that you wish your father had given you, you can just fire up eBay and order that pocket watch or set of old fishing rods.
Rambling on, there does seem to be a constant nip nip nip at pensions these days. After the debacle of all those endowment policies that turned out to be hopelessly incapable of paying off mortgages, are pensions likewise heading towards being a huge mis-selling scandal or at least a colossal waste of money. There is only so much that you can postpone retirement age before people quite rightly start to think that by the time I am ready to collect I will most likely have died, or be so doddery that frankly it would be pointless stinting today just so that my savings can pay for my care home, when the government is hardly likely to have me put down anyway.
The image for this week is an old ‘footlight’ that I bought on eBay because it is a really funky shape.
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