Venerable Beads

Chrissy tells me occasionally that I should start blogging again. Who am I to argue? And I suppose, given the fact I haven't written anything in this space in over a year (I was scarred by that macaroon dream, you see), it's fitting that I should write about the Milk Bottle of Motivation.

The Milk Bottle of Motivation sits on my shabby-looking makeshift desk, and when I move back down to Cambridge it will sit on my handmade mahogany desk and be carefully polished by the Boy that all scholars of the college are assigned to see to their every need. It is simply a Dairy Crest milk bottle with the terms of its use written on the outside with a permanent marker. The rules are simple. For every hundred words that I write in a day (excluding filthy filthy degree-related stuff), I put a green glass bead in the bottle. This act is often accompanied by a vague thought of John Ruskin that does nothing to improve my day; it is always accompanied by a pleasing little "plink" noise that improves my day immensely. If I write a thousand words in a day, I get a bonus bead, this time in blue. The bottle slowly fills up until a day comes when I write less than a hundred words, at which point I tip it all out and leave the empty bottle to publicise my shame, except it doesn't publicise it very much because it lives on my makeshift desk and not in the Upper Crust in Birmingham New Street.

Now, a hundred words is really nothing; you can bash that out in a few minutes. It's very difficult not to feel silly rewarding yourself for such a paltry achievement. That's why the Milk Bottle of Motivation is serving me so well. It's so easy to pull a hundred words out of whatever part of your anatomy seems most appropriate that there's never any excuse for having to tip out those beads. And while there are often days when I sit down planning nothing more than to knock out a quick century to cling on to my hard-earned bottle filler, most of the time I end up writing substantially more than that. The first hundred is enough to get you sat down putting words together; moreover, because a hundred words is so tiny, by the time I finish the thought I started with I'm usually well into the next beadsworth. And you wouldn't want to waste those words, would you? Not when the next "plink" is so close...