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Pushed on with the book today. It's getting close to 60,000 words now, but I've more or less told the story. Which is good because I also wanted to make it have some material about testicle history and the ways that they've been viewed in culture (or thought of - not so much how people got to see them).
I got the woodburner going and sat in the living room for most of the day. And if you're worried about that seeming environmentally unfriendly I was having a go at burning
coffee logs. They burn well and do give out more heat than wood. They don't seem to last as long as the website claims, even with the wood burner controls turned right down and it's hard to work out how economic they are compared to burning wood (I guess they would get cheaper if more people used them), but it's good to see imaginative use of waste (I saw a news report about nappies being used in road making now, which is a great use of an otherwise very wasteful product). It's good that coffee gets a chance to warm you twice. I'll give these things another go.
I know woodburners are pretty bad news in general, but it's a good way of heating one room in the house and turning off the central heating everywhere else and we've got a fairly new one, so it's pretty efficient. Our old house is very difficult to heat, especially the nearly always chilly living room (which is nice in the summer).
Luckily the prospect of nuclear war at least means we don't have to worry about saving the planet any more.
I spent so much of the 80s in fear of nuclear Apocalypse - I thought every aeroplane trail I saw might be a missile on its way to destroy us, so it's weird to be back in a place where nuclear war is in the realms of possibility. This time I don't really think it's a realistic outcome or at least am attempting to blot out the idea that it is. Of course it could happen and (if I think logically) it seems bound to happen at some point - you must need someone mental enough to start it off and we're not short of people like that at the moment. But it seems unthinkable that the human race would willingly destroy itself in this way or that my family and I might be caught up in it. Of course, it's perfectly likely and just because I've never lived through a time when it was likely that my house would end up in the middle of a war zone, doesn't mean that things can't change pretty quickly.
But for the moment, I'm just getting on with my life in the assumption that tomorrow will come and that I won't be suddenly evaporated (or worse, not evaporated) and so plodded on with a book that no one might ever read.
Though to be fair, that's still a possibility if there isn't a world war.
Good luck everyone.
