Thursday extracts: More Sea Views

My narrator waxed a little lyrical yesterday. I think he might be doing that a lot over the next six days!

Of course they’ve been saying for years that a trip to the seaside does you good. They used to recommend a sea retreat for most things that ailed historic folks. All kinds of people were sent here for the good of their health back in Victorian times – the graveyard’s full of them. You think I’m joking don’t you, but I’m not. Just take a stroll up to the parish church and check out their inscribed list of renowned residents. Writers, musicians, people who were famous just for being famous, seems all very familiar really. These days they end up on a reality TV programme when their careers are dying; back then the less-than-great and not very good were sent away for a coastal sojourn when they were fading.

Some of them took the waters, as they used to say. That meant they draped themselves over plush couches in ornate halls and drank glasses of smelly stuff dripping out of a cracked cliff. They got around to putting a tap on eventually so it appeared more official but however you market the stuff you can’t alter the fact that it’s little better than untreated sewage. You can even try the cure today if you like, the tap’s still working, though no-one makes ludicrous claims about it any more. Those Victorians believed spa water would solve everything from a hangnail to the Black Death but the only thing it actually affects is your digestive system. The quacks and sawbones thought bloodletting and extracting other bodily fluids improved your chances, so they probably believed in beneficial effects of the water. It certainly clears out your system. I tried once. That was quite enough.
 
They didn’t just drink grimy fluids, though, they bathed in them as well. Doctors told people their ailments would improve if they just lowered themselves up to their waists in ocean water; cold ocean water. Can you imagine suffering from consumption and coughing your lung linings out while you stood shivering in your undies and the tide lapped in around your personal bits? Gives you the creeps if you think too hard, how all those sickly types came for their treatments but never went home. Kill or cure must have proved fatal much more often than it offered a reprieve. I think we probably have the healthiest bunch of historic corpses in any cemetery up and down the country.

Sunday 160

Still dragging out the NaNo extracts!  It's for Monkey Man, as usual. And it's heavily edited from its original to make it 160 characters. But here you are:

Ted Mathews believed he was a big fish in a small pool. The fact that he was actually small fry did not detract from his inflated opinion of his own importance.

FFF55. All aboard. More from my NaNo novel.

OK - you all know what's going on by now so I'm not going to explain.Here's 55 words for the G-Man's weekly challenge, that tell you a little bit more about my novel's narrator, who was sent off to boarding school at an early age.

There were a number who enrolled at the same time, all very young, and dumped on the teachers and domestic staff for a variety of reasons.  A few of the lads came from places where their parents genuinely could not look after them, but most of us shared the dubious honour of being simply unwanted.

Thursday extracts. A bit of history from my NaNo novel

Too busy to hunt for something else for you again. So here's a bit of history from the NaNo novel.

Crowds that turn up at the seaside these days aren’t the same as back in the old times. When I first started touring the coast doing summer seasons all you saw were families. Mum and dad and a couple of kids who spent their time on the beach doing innocent things like building sandcastles and shrimping in the rock pools and playing on the penny slot machines on wet days. It wasn’t until the nineteen sixties that you ever saw groups of young people out by themselves. You won’t remember because you’re far too young but there used to be gangs of lads called Mods and Rockers and they would arrive at the coast on a sunny day and turn the beach into a battleground. You could easily tell them apart so they all knew who to fight: the Mods were on scooters that had a hundred more mirrors than they ever needed to see behind them, and the Rockers were on motorbikes that were polished up so much you’d wonder that they hadn’t rubbed the chrome off. On the worst days the lot of them were armed with knives and happy to kill each other if they had the chance.

NaNoWriMo half way point.

If I'm going to make it to the end of the month with 50,000 words I should be half way there by the end of today.  I'm pleased to say that I'm 1,538 ahead of that, which is almost a whole day's worth. (you do the long division)

I've been feeling off colour for a couple of days though. I can't promise to be on target for long.

Good luck fellow NaNoers.

A quick break

ghoti

NaNo aside, I thought I'd give you something a little different this morning, though a lot of you might know it. Can you read that word above? It demonstrates one of the challenges that people learning English can face.

Think gh as in 'enough', o as in 'women' and ti as in 'nation'.  And what do you get?