Well, yesterday was a fun and busy day. I took the whole day off, as you may have noticed, and spent it firstly at home doing little but unwrapping a very special gift (a Bluetooth speaker) and signing up for Spotify so I can use it. Then, the afternoon with the boys and their mum on their terrace where the being spoilt continued with much fun and laughter, not to mention food and two cakes. Thank you to everyone who sent birthday wishes and for those who, on reading that, thought, ‘I didn’t know!’ And that was followed by an evening making travel arrangements for our trip at Christmas.
On the way there, we passed the bakery where, it seems, not everyone had been in time to collect their bread order, so it was left, named, on the door ready for collection. You can still do that kind of thing around here; no-one is going to take it.
I also celebrated yesterday, because I had my annual payment from the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society, an organisation that, like the PRS, arranges payments to authors when their work is used on other people’s websites, in academic papers, and so on. I still don’t 100% understand how they do this wonderful work, but it slightly makes up for the intellectual theft of 14 of my books by Meta, who have used them (and millions of others) to inform and train their AI so a machine can write books, so humans don’t have to, and all without the permission of the authors. It actually makes me more than nauseous to think of people making money out of having a computer write something in their name, lay it out, bang up a cover and even upload it to Amazon, then generate sales from doing bugger all with no creativity or thought, but don’t get me started on that, because this genuine work of fiction has just come out in paperback…
The only other things to mention before I head off into the day is that we are again covered in dust from the Sahara, and it is meant to be raining on Saturday, which will bring it down and cover every, so bring your washing in… …and, to add, that I shan’t be here tomorrow as we are off to Rhodes again for the day. So, I’ll see you on Monday.
