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