Thursday 17 September 2026: Going the right way

Today’s image is another from our campsite 2 weeks ago, the last one I’ll be using this week.

We slept in again on Wednesday. You can’t half tell someone isn’t at work at the moment! It was the same time as the day before, though, so no additional time lost. We just need to try harder as the days progress.

There was already a wash load to go out on the line so, once again, I hung that out while another load went through. I didn’t have to feed the birds, but I did feed the dog. And meanwhile, the poet drove up to the doctor’s to see if his ‘fitness note’ was ready. It wasn’t, but it was on the doc’s to-do list. All the info was there, the GP just had to rubber stamp it. They promised again that they’d text him when it was ready, but they’d said that on Monday, also saying if it wasn’t with him by the end of the day it would be ready ‘tomorrow’, which was Tuesday. They have half a day on Wednesday, but the text still didn’t arrive.

Ah well, at least it wasn’t urgent, eh? Our old GP surgery would have delivered it when they said they would, and probably sooner. But the catchment area is slightly bigger for our new GP.

When he got back, he trimmed his hair, then fitted new knobs on the cupboards we inherited and kept in the bedroom…still ‘taking it easy’…not. But at least he sat down in front of the telly for the rest of the day.

My first job was rejigging the schedule a bit. Since the heatwave, the dog walk has been after work, but on the schedule it’s still at 11am. For the rest of British Summer Time (BST. GMT+1), it’s now booked in at 6pm, which means my working day also finishes at 6pm now instead of 7pm. When the clocks go back, I’ve moved it up to 2:30pm, so my working day finishes at 7pm again. When the clocks go forward again, at the end of March, I’ll look at moving it back to 6pm, but it will be after 9pm if we have another heatwave next year.

When the clocks go back it will be dark at 4pm, so 2:30pm makes more sense and it still gives me time to get back into work after my 3:30pm meal break. If the poet’s here and doesn’t have any meetings, he can still come with us.

Next job was republishing Wordsworth Short #17, It Wasn’t Me. When that was everywhere it needed to be, the job after that was republishing Wordsworth Short #18, The Easter Egg Hunt.

I had a bit of a break and shared my Gumroad store on Facebook and on BlueSky. Now it has some content on there, it’s worth sharing. I rejigged it, so the Collections section is at the top and the Wordsworth Shorts section is beneath it. I only have one book in the Collections section, but as it’s a collection of Wordsworth Shorts 1 – 10, I thought it should go at the top as it’s far better value anyway.

And then I started to republish Wordsworth Short #19, A Stranger At Eight. I checked to see if the old versions of these books were all delisted on Draft2Digital, but they’re still hanging around in two of the libraries, so I couldn’t delete them completely yet.

I kept half an eye on the sky as it looked like rain and I had a line full of washing out. We didn’t have rain forecast, but it does take us by surprise. If I don’t have washing out, I don’t mind.

At 3:30pm the poet made us our dinner, and then it was back to work but this time back to the editing job. I sent the client a quick email to let her know about the ‘issues’ I’m facing this time, and I responded to another email she’d sent earlier in the day with an update on a previous job I did for her.

For the rest of the day I removed hard carriage returns…I got to p. 100, and had managed to bring down the overall page count to 211. Those numbers are both going in the right direction.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.