Tag Archives: childhood memory

Slight change of plan and thoughts about the nature of words

#Letter365 No98 gets posted in the gloaming
No98 gets posted near dark

Again I could have posted this earlier, but having already missed the post I decided to do some drawing before I went to the post box. Of course the later it got the less enthusiasm I had for writing this. Now it is late and I am struggling a bit.

The slight change of plan refers to a committment I made to myself a while back about these pieces, and I found that I no longer wanted to try to develop that idea – at least not today – as it was stifling my creativity at the expense of my obsessiveness. I made a slight change and I’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow and decide then how I move forward with it.

The thing about words is because I love words and words like “steadfast”, “staunch”, “resolute” and “endurance” take me back to reading an old copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships (falling apart and covered with brown paper) that we had when I was a child. Repulse, Renown, Relentless, Dreadnought, Stalwart, Staunch, Indefatigable and Bulwark are names that hold so much power and strength yet as mostly unused in our common language these days. As a child, even with an explanation, it was a long time before I could comprehend the concept of an “iron-clad” vessel: somehow I thought the buoyancy of a wooden ship came from the fact that wood floats and that the weight of metal would cancel it out. I had no problem, however, with the concept of an all metal hull. I probably only have this memory because of the taunts and barbs of my eldest brother at my inability to understand.

The back of #Letter365 No98
The back of No98