Exciting News!

My thanks to you all! Restoration Day has made it onto the final ballot for the 2019 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel!


And to my great surprise, I have also been nominated for Best New Talent – my thanks to whoever thought that up; you know you you are (even if I don’t).

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I’m A Gnu

I’m knitting socks at the moment, out of a single ball of yarn – knitting the ball at both ends, as one might say. To avoid the awkwardness of having one short sock and one long one, I have both socks underway simultaneously – first foot, second foot, second leg, first leg. Unequal sockage duly avoided.

What I have failed to avoid, however, are the strains of The S-Song of the S-Second S-Sock, floating through my mind. And since that song is set to the tune of The Gnu by Flanders & Swann, I have found myself proclaiming at intervals that I’m a gnu.

Black wildebeest, or white-tailed gnu, Connochaetes gnou at Krugersdorp Game Reserve, Gauteng, South Africa (31233781942)
Gnu waiting for horns to grow long enough to knit with.
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The Problem with Ambidextrosity

(besides the fact that it isn’t really a word.)

Let us suppose for a moment, that, like Horatio Nelson, you lose the use of your dominant hand.

Sir Horatio Nelson when wounded at Teneriffe
Horatio Nelson losing the use of his dominant hand.
You don’t have to be as dramatic about the actual losing of use – though feel free to make up any kind of back-story you like; blood and  gore totally optional – the point at hand (hur hur, sorry) is how one copes with said loss of function. And this is where I am at a loss. Because while I have a reasonably active imagination (Exhibit A), what I do not have is a dominant hand.

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