more than one iron in the fire

The ‘How to be A Success’ book says : Choose just one project – to the exclusion of all others – and see it through to the end. Answer just the three most interesting emails. Trim your weekly social calendar down to the one event you just can’t do without. Do all these things, and you’ll be A Success (my son).

It’s a fascinating prospect – though why should I want to be A Success at the age of 82, I’m not quite sure. Perhaps it’s just the book suggests something I’d not tried before. A novelty.

It began well enough. I was booked to give a talk on a puzzle I still hadn’t solved. I began a complete re-write of the talk I’d given two months before.

Then I bought a new computer – with an operating system I’d never used before. It was complex. Intriguing. I needed a book of words to expose the less obvious facilities. The unfinished text of the talk lay gathering dust in one of the pending trays then indulged in parthenogenesis and grew until the whole caboodle overflowed onto the floor when it immediately began to build a new and unstable pile.

Then I stopped to think.

I’d never been that single-minded. There was always more than one thing on the go. Even in my early schooldays there was piano practice as well as school homework. And piano practice requires taking a number of pieces – a recital programme – and working on all of them until they’re polished and perfect. And even then the process is never completed. Give the same programme to an audience six weeks later and there’s more work to be done to get back up to satisfaction.

Happy is the expert who writes the superb text of a talk, delights an audience, then puts the text away in a drawer until the next time it’s needed. It may never call to be edited again. It’s always there. One item. Complete. Take a break. Do something new. Just one thing until it’s polished and honed to perfection.

At the age of 82 I’m not like that. I never have been. Life’s been too full of half-a-dozen different things going on at once. It’s been fun. It still is.

francis cameron, oxford, 24 april 2010

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