SMILE OF THE DAY - make it YOUR smile.

DAY ELEVEN Monday 11^th January 2021:

SMILE OF THE DAY: When you have a friend who check on you and wants nothing but the best for you, without motives. Keep them dear such souls are rare.

Waking at 4am, I wish I could postpone my daily brainstorm by two or three hours, I tried to calculate how many Smile cards, quiz sheets and stickers we sent out last week. SMILES went to the police, three hospitals, fifty Dreamsai food boxes to vulnerable people – I think it runs to about two thousand.

Monday and the start of a new week, time to prepare for more Smiles. Smile cards and our NHS fun quiz this week will go to Great Ormond Street Hospital. In Dreamsai’s food boxes at the week-end will be our Animal Crackers quiz, Smilie stickers and a Smile card.

I have been working on something for NHS staff who are suffering under the stress and demands in their work. I have a little fin sheet inviting our NHS friends to take a few seconds mental break every hour to think about all those who are loving them. Today in my 4am moment I came up with an idea SEND A HUG TO OUR NHS where people

can write messages of love on the back of our Smile Cards and we will send them out to doctors and nurses. Got to think that through a bit then will be looking to you to help me make it happen.

ONE MILLION WORDS: I penned 3,205 words yesterday in my world record attempt bring the total written since 1^st January to 161,902. Do then maths – simple = 16,190 as a daily average. Multiply by 365 and that comes to 5,909,350 words. Smash the world record. However, I’ll not be able to keep all that up until 31^st December but the one million target is looking like a piece of cake. He he !

Four e-books so far published on Amazon against the twenty-four target. Today I will submit number five. POETRY FOR TEENAGERS. First I need to check the text. Given under normal circumstanced a Microthick (soft) stupid spellchecker leave a lot to be desired, using it to check poetry just will not work. I am not looking forward to doing this but I will have to go through each and every word carefully before I can submit the e-book for

publication.

Book sales on Amazon since 1^st January now stand at seventy-nine. THANK YOU. All money from sales will expand the number of Smile we can share.

POETRY FOR TEENAGERS and JUKEBOX JURY are written as e-books for teenagers. Let me make a promise, Jukebox Jury will be finished and published by the end of tomorrow. I can then pick up on my crime story BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.   What’s special about that ?  I’ll tell you in a bit but right now:

ON THIS DAY Within this area each day I go back in history only as far as 1950, the year when I joined this world. Not a lot happening actually.

11^th January 1972 East Pakistan renames itself Bangladesh. I do remember that so clearly.

FIGURES Yesterday another fifty-four thousand nine hundred and forty new cases o china

virus. Yesterday five hundred and sixty-three more people died. It is so easy to roll off the numbers as do politicians and the media then add a few words of condolence at the end. It is so easy to say there are real people and leave it there. NO. As I type these words families are grieving, lives torn apart and in agony. People today who are not smiling. Some people who never smile again. It is hard to comprehend how these real peoples are feeling, hard and perhaps impossible but that does not mean we should not try. Every new case, every death puts strain on our NHS but not just a corporate institution but strain on the doctors and nurses working with the patient. Our NHS does not treat patients, it CARES for them. Because staff CARE and their work is more than a job it is inevitable stress will be orbiting every person in the NHS every day.

I have been wondering is memorials will be set up around the country once this is all over. A celebrated World War One poet was against memorials, he said that servicemen who had died needed to be remembered in peoples’ hearts and not carved into a wall of

stone. I agree with him and I disagree with him. Speaking as he was in the 1920’s that was probably right but now more than one hundred years later we need those names carved on memorials.

Every evening I watch the TV news and note down the figures to write on this diary page each day. I am going to continue to do that but in addition, and I would ask you to do the same, as I lay down to sleep at night I to spend a moment thinking of those who are contained within the figures, taking them into my heart and wrapping them in love.

To support in love all who are being destroyed within these figures is so important.

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG. My Dad who will be celebrating his ninety-fifth birthday in ren days time asked me in a recent phone call if I was familiar with that phrase. Dad was a signaller in Palestine at the time the State of Israel was being created. That phrase – The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog was used to train morse operators, it contains every letter of the alphabet.

My e-books: Jukebox Jury and Poetry For Teenagers are deliberately e-books. My two granddaughters are six and eight years old, I am making some fun worksheets and quizzes to supplement their home schooling. At this time I am working on something about RIVERS – LAKES & BRIDGES. Their Dad, my son, has asked me to write something about parts of speech and the use of words in writing. That I am going to set around our brown fox and lazy dog. I was not thinking to make this a part of the one million word challenge but if I produced a series of fun learning topics for younger children it may help to put Smiles on their faces. This would not work as an e-book, it would have to be a printed

book so that means a minimum of one hundred and twenty pages. I think I would like to give it a go.

Before then I have the job of checking POETRY FOR TEENAGERS. That is going to be a chore. Send me a Smile please to help me through.

Speak again tomorrow

Dave