Some days a pondering is burning to get out but perhaps doesn’t quite have the legs to fulfill enough interest. Today is one of those days. A pondering that has been poddling about in my brain for days runs headlong into another pondering and boof!! They find they have something in common and off they run onto the blog taking some nice images with them to expose themselves on a Saturday. The 10 on the header image is the common link and it is superimposed on Seaton Beach where we harvested some more vitamin D.

This morning Google maps showed me all the locations I visited in 2020. Thank goodness there has been no major crimes on the M4/ M5 corridor last year. I do not have an alibi or a distant location to hide behind. The point of putting this in the blog is that I’ve worked out the last time I had such limited travel was the year I turned 10!

The age of 10 is also the last time I wrote down the word ‘ ornery’ until PP#347

As mentioned in previous blogs my life as an only child was filled with reading. I got ‘ornery’ from Mark Twain and Brer Rabbit. It, the word, lives mainly in my head as a fairly regular descriptive of certain people.

PP#347 was possibly the first time I have written it down since I was 10. I’m not sure if shame, indignation or fury has stopped me using it.

At age 10 I threw it into a composition during an English class at my primary school, soon after I was marched to the headmistresses office. In terms understandable to a child I was told that I must not copy other authors sentences into my essays. Apparently my sentence construction was too good to have come from my own skillset and imagination.

The Headmistress and my form teacher were unmoved by my referencing to the stories of Brer Rabbit and I was warned never to copy again. Ornery has remained a word for private usage until this week. I was seething. So seething that when I read a glowing obituary of that particular Headmistress in Other Lives in the Guardian Newspaper I could not contain my irritation as I remembered that and another misjudgement of my character.

Lockdown reading has brought me to this book just this week. In the very first chapter Claudia uses the word ‘ornery’ and boasts that she knows how to use it correctly. No marching off to the headmistress for a published author!

Liberated! The minute I felt slightly dyspeptic, crotchety or even waspish about President Trumps’ shenanigans this week I whipped out ‘ornery’, if Claudia can use it in public without humiliation then so can I!

So there we have it. Pondering around the theme of 10. While taking in Vitamin D on Seaton Beach.