Friday 17 May 2013

Wasting Time

What's your favourite way of wasting time?
This leads me to a list of things, such as walking on crisp autumn leaves in the green spring woods with bluebells on one side and starry white garlic flowers on the other, or lying on the sofa watching the clouds drift by my window. Soft fluffy white clouds, and big dark grey thunder clouds, all billowing into weird shapes or wisping into nothingness as the suns heats the water vapour.

Others will say playing with Facebook and Twitter, watching tv, reading a book. Heavens! When did reading a book become a time-wasting exercise? In fact, none of these things are really time-wasting. Walking outdoors activates the blood, muscles and wakes the aesthetic sense of pleasure at the beauty of nature. Watching clouds relaxes the tired mind, and then begins to wake the creative part of the brain as the clouds morph into white rabbits or sailing ships. Facebook - it's rare I use Facebook and fail to discover at least one item of interest among all the dross. (Personally I wish people wouldn't put up pictures of food because so often they look like something the dog's brought up. Yes, I know, I put two pictures of food up last summer - but the food did not look like the dog's dinner! A French chef cannot possibly - no, scratch that, I have seen French chefs produce something  that reminded me of the proverbial.....)

Twitter is the same as FB. There's always at least one snippet that catches my interest and leads me onto to whole articles I enjoy. What frustrates me about Twitter is the snippets of interesting conversation between people I don't know - so I never discover the beginning, or sometimes the end, of the conversation. I'm left full of curiosity!

As a writer, (OK, an aspiring writer) I don't think time is ever wasted. Standing around watching other people can be rewarding even if you do get seriously cold feet, as I did yesterday watching more confident people harness Sparky and Bumper. To be truthful, my feet were the only warm part of me, thanks to my trusty Scarpa hiking boots and thick socks. The rest of me was freezing, but the interplay of action was interesting and will no doubt be transferred into a book somewhere down the line. That's the thing with authors - everything, absolutely everything, can be used at some point in a novel. so there's no such thing as wasting time.


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