Writing about writing

Now that the pandemic has been kept us away from other people and other places for a whole year, it's just as well to have a compulsive occupation, even if I never get paid for it. 

I finished another article for the Lowertown Echo this week, this one about the eco-friendly, ethical coffee shops in our neighbourhood; my article about Shopping Locally appeared in the last issue. The background for the coffee article was fun to research, because sampling the different products gave me the excuse to walk from place after place, scribbling notes wherever I stopped, playing at being a journalist.

Last week I watched a touching Netflix film about a man who falls in love with a short-lived octopus: My Octopus Teacher. At one point he exclaims, "She's only a mollusc!" but even so. Karen, leader of the movie-going group, selected that film for us this month, and now we have to send in reviews. We were lavish with our comments about Karen's previous choice, American Factory. I led a discussion about that documentary that followed the progress of a management team from China employing blue-collar auto-workers in Ohio. At least four of us in the discussion meeting had been in China, with different opinions about the experience; mine was the most positive. Susan, like me, had visited Hangzhou, but that was in the 1980s, before its boom in commerce, construction and tourism, when the city was very different.

I might be getting an introduction to Nonviolent Communications from Susan. From what I've heard so far this is largely to do with the words one chooses. I wonder how much will seem new to me, not a lot, perhaps. I was a regular attender of Friends' Meetings at one time; Quakers began to speak about nonviolent communications in the 17th century and still do, in the pauses between their deep silences.

I promised to describe a presentation last week by two CW4WAfghan speakers about the state of the current "peace" negotiations in Doha and what the consequences will be for women and children if the Taliban are allowed too many concessions. This is a hard report to write, but the people struggling to make a difference need to be acknowledged. My recent blogpost about supporting the Afghan girls, including that photo of the exam candidates in the snow, prompted me to share the image with my MP as well. She is a Minister in the Cabinet so if she was touched by this, one never knows, she might bring some influence to bear on the government's foreign policy ... just a hope. I Bcc'd some of my friends and the letter's being shared further.

Every week I write to my Konversationsgruppe in German; in those messages I aim to sound cheerful, looking forward to whatever's coming next. The emails that require the most concentration are the ones expressing sympathy and condolences, especially if I have to write those in German or French. I refer to linguee.de and linguee.fr for help, most days, for one piece of writing or another. Opening Facebook and Twitter is a writing exercise too; I'm the sort of person who can spend ten minutes composing one tweet.

When I was very young, my father made me write essays for him to mark, telling me in no uncertain terms when they were unsatisfactory, and my nervous fear of upsetting people with an inadequate choice of words is still chronic. My father was a compulsive writer himself and my mother was still trying to jot down her deepest thoughts in a notebook at the end of her life when she was nearly blind, in a dementia care home.