Status Report: Week Twenty-One

Bit a strange week this week. I broke a tooth at an All You Can Eat Mussels evening at my local French Restaurant (it’s so local, it shares a wall with our flat). Quite how you break a tooth on mussels, without eating the shells, I’m not sure. I think it was the crusty bread that did it, though I didn’t notice till later.

I was already booked in for the dentist at the start of June, but because it will be my first visit, I’m not officially a register patient of that practise, so I can’t jump the queue. There is an emergency dentist, but it’s only a week to go now till my appointment, and it doesn’t hurt. But it’s just strange to have a hole in one of my molars. My tongue keeps forgetting and getting surprised and fascinated by the new topography of my mouth.

Then there’s this weekend, which is a long one thanks to the bank holiday tomorrow. We were supposed to go away, at one stage it was Budapest, then Dublin, then Manchester, but nothing ever panned out and we decided to be tourists from home. So yesterday (Saturday) we went to Rosslyn Chapel, which I had avoided till now because I imagined it would be full of Dan Brown fans. It was actually the urging of my Scottish flatmate that Marisa and I finally caught the bus down there, and he hates Dan Brown. It was interesting for sure, but kind of sad too. The whole chapel is full of sandstone carvings (they make a big deal of the “Bible in Stone” appellation in the brochure and information boards around the chapel) constructed in the 15th Century, but in the 1950s everything was covered in a fine layer of cement to protect the carvings. Apart from the fact it has lessened the detail of the more intricate pieces, and turned the chapel’s interior from pinkish red to dull grey, the cement trapped all the moisture inside the chapel’s walls and in the 80’s it came close to falling down. Steps have been taken to right the mistakes make in the 50’s (the canopy constructed to dry the chapel out comes of in 2 years, then the cement will be removed), but it strikes me as just another well intended fuck-up from the twentieth century.

Sorry, I’ve gone off track a bit.

Today we went to Cramond, which is still pretty much a suburb of Edinburgh, but it’s on the Firth of Forth. We walked out to an island at low tide (there’s a concrete path, but I left it in pursuit of a photo and lost a shoe in the mud), then walked/hobbled along the coast a few miles to Granton, then caught the bus home.

Tomorrow we’re going to St. Andrews.

The upshot of all this travelling from home is that we get see feel touristy and blow out some work-work-work cobwebs, but have the bonus of sleeping in our own bed (and all the money that saves). The bonus-bonus is that I’ve still had a few hours each evening to write. It’s not deficit-decimating, but it’s a damn sight better than the goose eggs I’d be producing in Budapest.

So, prepare yourself for some underwhelming stats…

Week Twenty-One – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 15,935 words (compared to 22,455 words last week)

Average: 2,276 words per day

Most productive day: Friday 23 May, 2,833 words

Least productive day: Monday 19 May, 1,230 words

Year-to-date: 381,475 words (17,432 words behind target)

Adjusted required daily word count: 2,811 (so a slack week has added 16 words per day)

I said at the start it has been a strange week, well, having just compiled the above, I have no recall of Monday and why I only wrote 1,230 words. Sadly, I only noted down “excuses” for that one week last month.

I blame work.