DAY THIRTY-TWO: Monday  1st February 2021:

Good morning, welcome to a new week, welcome to a new month, welcome to a new edition of Dave’s Diary but above all welcome to a NEW OPPORTUNITY.

In their opera Pirates of Penzance William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan described February as a BEASTLY MONTH. Don’t know about you but I plan to prove these geniuses of giggle opera to be wrong !

The January edition of Dave’s Diary is now available on Amazon as a kindle e-book. Fantastic but this I will not be promoting in the hope of becoming a best selling author, it has a deeper role to play. These daily diary pages, today being my 32nd, are building up a cyber time capsule. I have decided I am going to also, across the year 2021, build a literal time capsule. This I will hide away on Saturday 1st January 2022 with strict instructions it is not to be opened until 1st January 2122. I am using a work book of scribble, a doings list with a page for each day of my writing and will be including all four in the time capsule. I am also going to include anything special, month by month, which will have a story to tell to those opening the capsule in one hundred years time. For January 2021 I am including my NHS letter inviting me to my vaccination on Thursday.

SMILE OF THE DAY:

Don’t tell someone to get over it. Help them to get through it.

Each day I send an e-mail to various areas of the media SMILE of the day. Does the media smile ? Some do, most don’t. Obviously the media I am daily contacting does not smile. Oh dear, what a shame, never mind, forget it, they are a waste of space !

I want now to send a SMILE of thanks to AMAZON HOME DELIVERY. What an amazing job Amazon and its team are doing. If Amazon does not sell it then it does not exist. AMAZON = low prices, fast delivery, utterly brilliant customer service.  AH, I hear you saying. AH, I can see the media vultures circling. What about the packaging ? The excess of packaging ? Isn’t there now a shortage of cardboard which is down to home delivery and Amazon ?

OPEN YOUR EYES MEDIA !  If Amazon sell it all of the packaging can be recycled. Go to a shop and pick at random ten packaged items off the shelf. Can this be recycled ? Who knows. Labelling is unclear and utterly confusing. Every shop, every supermarket needs to adopt a policy of if you can’t recycle it then we won’t sell it ! Is that going to happen ?  Don’t be silly ! We need all to follow Amazon’s example.

As for giant shopping centres with their hideous carbon footprints, DON’T get me started there.

Let’s check out ON THIS DAY: Praise where praise is due – A MEGA BIG THANK YOU TO WIKIPEDIA for every day helping me with this part of my diary. When it comes to the use of the internet this platform is zillions of miles ahead of the rest.

1st February 1960: Four black students stage a lunch counter protest in North Carolina. SIXTY YEARS and the world led by USA still has not got its act together when it comes to the colour of a person’s skin.

1st February 1964: The Beatles have their first USA number one hit with I Want To Hold Your Hand.

1st February 2013: The Shard, the tallest building in the UK, opens to the public. I have been to the top – scary or what !

As it is everyday. Within Wiki’s list of people born on this day, I have not heard of a single one of them !

1st February 2019: Desmond Carrington – Broadcaster, born 1926, died.

On this day yesterday another 21,088 people fell sick with china virus and another 587 died. Are these figures accurate ? The number crunchers do not work full time and more as do our beautiful front-line NHS staff so over the week-end who know what they were doing. Death does not stop for the week-end. Sorrow does not stop for the week-end, love does not stop for the week-end.

In my home town of Milton Keynes there were no deaths in hospital but there were another ninety new cases.

PLEASE wrap your arms of love around these figures and try to understand what each figure represents.

I have praised Amazon Home Delivery and now I want to THANK Amazon Kindle Publishing.


Another two books added to my bookshelf yesterday: MILTON KEYNES A DISCO FOR A NEW CITY and DAVE’S DIARY JANUARY 2021. That brings my 2021 total number of books published to seven. I have two more with Amazon in draft format which I need to get my pandemic bottom into gear and sort to bring the January total to nine. Yesterday I wrote 4,114 words which means I start February 2021 off with 264,466 words. How many words have I written so far in today’s diary page ?  Let’s check. 859.

Let me tell you about yesterday’s writing.

Life is a typo – if you do not make any you are not living it fast enough. WELL ahead of publishing MILTON KEYNES A DISCO FOR A NEW CITY I found a hideous typo listing the tracks to play, that took me a couple of hours to put right.

Within THE SECRET DIARY OF AN OLD MAN AGED THIRTEEN AND THREE QUARTERS 

I have gone back in time to 1899 to be, as a 13 ¾ teenager with my 9 year old grandfather. What I was writing did not work so I stopped after four hundred and fifty four words. My grandfather died when my own father was a small boy so I never knew him. I have photographs, know his story and have many items he once owned but I never knew him. In this part of the story I want to get to know him. Yesterday this was not happening within the words but today I am going to come at the story from another angle and hopefully get things right.

I am so getting into BEHIND THE NOOSE and yesterday could not stop writing. I concluded the chapter about the wrongful execution of Timothy Evans and began writing about the real killer and could not stop.  That real killer was Reginald Christie, my father knew and I met the judge who sentenced Christie to hang.

The work began as a study of serial killers but behind it I find myself explaining the way the police operated in the 1950’s. The justice system was

failing in the 1950’s and it is still failing today. However, in 2021 we have an amazing institution within our police service which those in officer in 1950 would not recognise and those serving today would be ashamed of what happened  seventy years ago.

Amazon again !  On Saturday I ordered a DVD of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady’s murders. I want to watch this as I write their chapter in my book. Ordered Saturday and Delivered Sunday by amazing Amazon.

What time is it ? 8.26am.  I need to bring today’s page to an end. Doggie Jake has a vet appointment and I need to take this week’s SMILE cards to Dreamsai to put in their boxes of food for the vulnerable. I have quiz sheets and SMILE cards to post to our Hospital Of the Week which is Addenbrooks in Cambridge and to residents at Flowers Care Home.

Sorry Gilbert and Sullivan, I love your giggle opera and Pirates of Penzance is my favourite but you got it wrong. February is not a beastly month. It is a SMILING month.

SMILE OF THE DAY:

Don’t tell someone to get over it. Help them to get through it.

GET THROUGH IT BY SMILING.



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