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"Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the last fifty-seven years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played pingpong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession to myself and to anyone who may read this book that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work."

Leonard Woolf, from The Journey Not the Arrival Matters.

 

This is the Marrian web site. Sad to relate Mrs Marrian wants nothing to do with it. Her watercolours are beautiful but she's shy. She has many talents but she's still shy. She can't get away from the brilliance of her school though

I'm asked: why do you want the world to read about you? I'm even asked this by people with Facebook pages and lots of friends. It's a good question and I sometimes wonder myself. With social networking sites, you can control who partakes of your offerings; here you can't. But, I don't want to select who might or might not read these pages. The world is full of unknown people. There is stuff here; admittedly, it is my stuff or assembled by me but some of it might be helpful to somebody, or of interest. This is how I communicate. I don't like socialising; I'm no good at it; never was one of the boys. I used to like listening to the grown-ups talk; still do; just listening, not talking. The fact is, though, that nobody reads these pages; that's what the stats tell me; it's not that they come here and never return; they just never come here; it's the serendipity of it that I like. But most of all, I'm open to the world because it disciplines me; the writing, such as it is, is more considered, more thoughtful and better for that. It is cathartic. It is not for nothing that every page has at the top "include yourself amongst those you love". I must learn to love myself and being proud of what I write helps me to do that