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# Liked: The Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson shows her characters social distancing - BBC News...

I love this!

I've long been a fan of The Gruffalo and think this is wonderful:

# Today marks the 12th anniversary of this site - the first post was actually a re-post from the old blog but you've got to start somewhere.

To date there are 1929 posts, plus pages and the muse-letter, with somewhere between 430,000 and half a million words depending on what word count plugin you believe; personally I don't believe any of them.

It would have been considerably more had I not taken the breaks that I have or written elsewhere for a while but, as I mentioned before, I probably needed the change to help me realise what I was doing with all of the this.

# Sameer wrote a wonderfully contemplative and meditative post about "The sounds of the tea kettle" as it boils, realising that he emulates its behaviour -"simmering, and then roiling ... releasing a whistle of emotion before I grumble and sigh back to some kind of stasis" and so needs to rebuild his patience.

Let's face it, we're all a bit stressed and anxious right now.

It wasn't this that really caught my attention, however, it was this link to a piece about writing in the margins of books or otherwise marking them up as "an expression of hope for the future" or "a message for future readers, or for future versions of yourself."

I've never really been one to "read with a pen" - on the rare occasions that I do it's also with a notebook so that I can scribble my thoughts separately. I know why, it's because I went for so long without writing anything by hand, everything was done directly on my phone. Even now when I want to highlight a passage in a book I will, more often than not, take a photo of the page (or relevant section) for referral later.

Old habits die hard.

# There's something a bit strange about watching your wife trying to "make" you in the Sims.