Sunday, 24 May
This morning I struggled through about half of “Investment Management in the UK 2018-2019”, the Investment Association’s Annual Survey. It’s a struggle because I’d much rather be learning Bengali or learning more about Dorset but I want to know what’s going on in the UK, especially to understand why parts of the financial sector made such a hash of defending their interests in the Brexit process (or to understand their interests better). Every time I find a concept that I don’t know, I look it up. It’s slow progress but still progress but my spirits cringe as I find money rather dull.
I rewarded myself by making a start on another project that’s been in abeyance for a while.
I’ve downloaded and printed over 90 pictures of St Jerome, the patron saint of translators. My next aim is to find out more about the artists and hopefully sharpen my eye by comparing different treatments of the same theme. It’s very lush and I feel content to float around in the mediaeval world after my struggling with active and passive management of assets and annualisation. I’d eventually like to put the pics of St Jerome somewhere but am not quite sure where in my 45 square metre flat or how I could best do it without damaging the photos. It wouldn’t be bad to have them on the ceiling like the Sistine Chapel but my flat probably looks eccentric enough already and the pics are a bit too small.
Starting or rather renewing work on a project made me think of my Corona Plan that I drew up at the beginning of my social isolation in March. Altogether I established about 20 project areas, including Anglia organization (my company), Anglo-Saxon, Art (St Jerome), Bengali, Contract Law, Dorset Churches, Family History, Flat Organization, French, Friends and Relatives, German, Health and Nutrition, Latin, Music, News and Orientation, State of the UK, Technical, Uppsala and Writing, I have fulfilled my interim goals in 14 of these areas (although I’ve taken much longer than the two-week period I originally envisaged).
The areas I haven’t made a start on are Contract Law. This project stems from a session I was going to hold at ATA’s Washington conference some years ago. I had to pull out because of lack of clarity about my health insurance but I’ve retained the plan of studying contract law as part of my own further training. And I haven’t read a newspaper article every day in German as I had planned to do. I have worked regularly on my French so I’ve partly fulfilled my goals there but haven’t read Robinson Crusoe in Provencal as I had planned (I’m interested in the history of the French language and would like to look more at differences between the two major branches of the French language to obtain a more precise idea of the influence of the Franks).
I have wanted to study music for some time to get a better idea of the construction of classical music that I listen to but this hasn’t happened yet. I’ve done what I planned to do in the Technical area apart from checking whether it’s possible to teach Alexa, my AI assistant, to sing (sounds jokey but as a way in of understanding better how it works so that our communication is not limited to me asking what day it is). I’m very satisfied about the progress in some areas, in particular, I have got to grips with exploring Uppsala and reading about the county, I’ve organized a lot of paper but that has been swilling around me for decades and the Bengali alphabet seems less impenetrable than it once did.
I’m too tired today to draw up a new plan but I will do tomorrow as it looks as Corona (covid-19) is going to be with us for a while yet.