Incidentals

Yesterday I spent another productive three hours in the Mitchell Library getting a lot of incidental stuff from the newspapers.  It's just as well that place doesn't charge admission.  It does charge for photocopies of newspaper articles though.  So far I'm up to twenty quid - but it's all good stuff.

I found out about another funeral which thousands of Glaswegians lined the streets for so I had to do a bit of research.  In 1960 there was a fire in a whisky bond in Cheapside Street, Glasgow and 19 firemen were killed in the line of duty.  Now that I know about these funerals I can use them as a comparrison to Liptons.  This is how things seem to be going at the moment.  I'm finding wee snippets of related information which is giving me more stuff, other than Lipton, to write about.  It's good and I'm enjoying it.  I just hope I'm doing the right thing.

I've decided to do a bit of a post mortem on a great creative non-fiction book, The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins.  I'm going through it and noting everytime he switches narrative positions etc.  He's all over the place - 1st person present to 3rd person past in sometimes a few lines - but it makes it interesting to read.  I'm not going to copy his style but it's good to know it can be done.

Today I think I need to fill in a couple of blanks and then start reading again and sorting out all the information I've gathered.  I've got lots of books about Lipton and I've read most of them but it was a while ago.  I suffer from the same thing as Homer Simpson; when new stuff comes along it pushes all the old stuff out.  So, a few days swotting up will be a good thing.

And by then I'll probably have found something else to research.  Oh well - I suppose I'll just have to back to the Mitchell.