My plan was to begin doing layouts on the new Boys' World book on Monday. I managed to scan two pictures. But that frustration was balanced out by the arrival of some key information that sent me scurrying around trying to dig out old interviews, trawling books for dates and thoroughly revising my timeline for events that led up to the creation of the paper. Once all this new information was assimilated, I was able to start on the second draft of the introduction with a lot more confidence and one or two gaps I had been forced to leave could now be plugged.
So that's shaping up nicely now and I should have the second draft finished this weekend. Certainly it will be complete enough for me to (finally) start roughly laying out the pages. Oh, joy... I'll be doing huge amounts of scanning during the hottest part of the year. At least I'll be able to listen to the stack of radio shows I've allowed to build up while I've been writing. I can't listen to drama while I'm writing because both rely on the same bit of the brain; I once listened to a whole hour and a half Agatha Christie murder mystery while I was working on something and found, at the end, that I have a clue who the victim had been, let alone the murderer. If I'm writing, I listen to albums I've heard a million times or soundtracks which tinkle away in the background like aural wallpaper. Once I get into the scanning and cleaning up artwork phase I can listen to the latest batch of Martin Beck mysteries, the new Paul Temple series and a few other things I have clogging up my hard drive.
More balance in the Universe: our water bill seemed unexpectedly high considering this was the first we had received since our new boiler was installed and we no longer suffered from the tank overspilling. It could be some seasonal variation or maybe it was measured over a slightly longer period. But while I was scratching my head over that one, the electricity bill arrived and they owed us money! Not only that, but they had enclosed a cheque. We're five quid richer!
I shall celebrate with something greasy and fattening. And for those of you following the occasional mentions of my health, you'll be pleased to hear that at my last weigh-in I'd lost another couple of pounds. According to my Body Mass Index I'm still classified as "Obese Class II (Severely obese)"—one of the reasons I started thinking seriously about my lifestyle and health—but I'm slowly slipping down towards "Obese Class I (Moderately obese)", dropping from 37.59 to 35.88 over the past couple of months. I'm using the NHS healthy weight calculator if you'd like to compare your BMI to mine. Although the tiny weight loss hasn't done much for my oversized tummy, walking three miles a day (up from 2 1/2 a few weeks back) is doing wonders for my bad back.
Today's random scan is from Malcolm Edwards, who was able to briefly visit the auction of Peter Haining's books at Cheffins in Cambridge on 11 July. Haining's books and old pulps appeared to have been gathered up by the armful and dumped into boxes without a great deal of thought to separating out the scarce titles from the more common. A lot of choice items had already been sold earlier this year but the auction still realised a good few thousands of pounds.
Crime and Money was a collection of true stories by R. Thurston Hopkins published by Worlds Work in 1936. 128 pages, priced 1/- and not a common item. This is the first time I've seen it and, after a bit of Photoshop magic, you can now see it, too.
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What Would YOU Do? There is only one thing the fighter pilot can do. Sweeping down out of his dive he flies alongside the V.1. maintaining the same speed. Then, he gently manoeuvres his wing-tip under the wing of the deadly bomb. With a gentle pull on his stick, he turns his plane away, his wing whipping the V.1. over. Its delicate gyro-compass thrown off-course, the bomb hurtles earthwards, to explode harmlessly in open countryside.
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