It's Adult Learners Week in Tasmania and much energy is being expended in trying to winkle oldies out of their chairs and on to their feet. The intention of the exercise is to is to lay out some potential activities or hobbies that bored retirees might see as the solution to their loneliness and that will have a positive effect on the levels of senior mental health and save the government some money in the long term.
Jamie was in the Library the other day and noticed a series of events which they were offering and which he felt might suit us. He's not at the stage yet of arranging stuff for us and expecting us to take part, but he does go out of his way to ensure we don't vegetate in our little cottage, with watching the birds as the highlight of our day.So, if he finds a decent TV program or a community event which might spark our interest, he passes it on.
He suggested Marilyn might like 'Crocheting with Beads' and it would be an opportunity for her and Zenaida, Nera's mum, to take part in it together. And for me, he chose Creative Writing. It was held yesterday. Sadly, only one other person turned up and she was hardly a senior. Toby, the facilitator, told me she was a published author and wrote stuff for Mills and Boon. Praise, indeed! We only had a couple of hours and he wanted to talk about editing our writing.
We had been asked to bring 300 words of something we'd written so I took a poem. Apparently, this exercise doesn't work well with poetry so I scrolled through my iPad to find some prose, in fact a description of the town where I lived in Scotland. The first step was to reduce that 300 words to 250, then 200, then 150, then 100, then 75. It seemed a ridiculous way to tidy up your writing but I went along with it.
My original 300 words which I thought were well-chosen, interesting and informative became a brief, sparse comment about nothing much in particular. All the adjectives were gone, and the interesting and colourful language and the humour ... and the point of writing it in the first place. Still, it was a useful exercise if the problem I was trying to fix is that I was saying too much and needed to reduce the wordage.
The other participant was a youngish woman who had brought a piece of writing on small sheets of paper covered with highlighted sections in two colours. She explained that the original piece was 900 words and the highlights were excised sections to bring it back to 300. It was written in rhyming couplets so she had a terrible job to reduce it further while trying to maintain the rhyming.
However, it has encouraged me to find out more about the techniques of writing and I've been looking at possible on-line study. There's an 8-week course with The Open University, starting on September 9, which might be worthwhile.
I came across a TV series which looked interesting: The World's Most Luxurious Trains. I like trains and luxury is always good so I downloaded the first episode to watch. It was awful. The introduction was not about trains but about the super-rich who demand the very best and why it is important that we provide the luxuries they deserve. It was a paeon of praise for the impeccable taste of the robber barons who have milked the system for years, and for their spoiled children who wallow in inherited wealth, contributing nothing to society. My socialist soul was offended so I ditched the program before it was properly started.
Jamie was in the Library the other day and noticed a series of events which they were offering and which he felt might suit us. He's not at the stage yet of arranging stuff for us and expecting us to take part, but he does go out of his way to ensure we don't vegetate in our little cottage, with watching the birds as the highlight of our day.So, if he finds a decent TV program or a community event which might spark our interest, he passes it on.
He suggested Marilyn might like 'Crocheting with Beads' and it would be an opportunity for her and Zenaida, Nera's mum, to take part in it together. And for me, he chose Creative Writing. It was held yesterday. Sadly, only one other person turned up and she was hardly a senior. Toby, the facilitator, told me she was a published author and wrote stuff for Mills and Boon. Praise, indeed! We only had a couple of hours and he wanted to talk about editing our writing.
We had been asked to bring 300 words of something we'd written so I took a poem. Apparently, this exercise doesn't work well with poetry so I scrolled through my iPad to find some prose, in fact a description of the town where I lived in Scotland. The first step was to reduce that 300 words to 250, then 200, then 150, then 100, then 75. It seemed a ridiculous way to tidy up your writing but I went along with it.
My original 300 words which I thought were well-chosen, interesting and informative became a brief, sparse comment about nothing much in particular. All the adjectives were gone, and the interesting and colourful language and the humour ... and the point of writing it in the first place. Still, it was a useful exercise if the problem I was trying to fix is that I was saying too much and needed to reduce the wordage.
The other participant was a youngish woman who had brought a piece of writing on small sheets of paper covered with highlighted sections in two colours. She explained that the original piece was 900 words and the highlights were excised sections to bring it back to 300. It was written in rhyming couplets so she had a terrible job to reduce it further while trying to maintain the rhyming.
However, it has encouraged me to find out more about the techniques of writing and I've been looking at possible on-line study. There's an 8-week course with The Open University, starting on September 9, which might be worthwhile.
I came across a TV series which looked interesting: The World's Most Luxurious Trains. I like trains and luxury is always good so I downloaded the first episode to watch. It was awful. The introduction was not about trains but about the super-rich who demand the very best and why it is important that we provide the luxuries they deserve. It was a paeon of praise for the impeccable taste of the robber barons who have milked the system for years, and for their spoiled children who wallow in inherited wealth, contributing nothing to society. My socialist soul was offended so I ditched the program before it was properly started.
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