I created a new writing challenge yesterday, twenty randomly generated words, each one to be used in a piece of writing. I immediately spotted a problem – I’d only got nineteen on the list, well, that could be easily remedied. Then I noticed that several of the words were so common that it wouldn’t really be a great challenge to use them – unlike my original challenge which had a mainly interesting selection, some of which needed some pondering on. Even that list had a few which were challenging in the fact that they were probably on a list of most used words. The final word – which I have yet to include in a piece, is “one” – hmmm.
I have another list of things I’ve read/seen/heard/overhead/randomly come across which have caught my interest and which I jotted down with the idea of using them as an inspiration in some way. On this list is Denver – which I mentioned a couple of blogs ago as it’s the place I knew of as a child, and not the Denver in Colorado. I knew of it as a sluice on the River Great Ouse. When I was young, my friend had a canoe and we spent much of our free time on the River Cam which took us north-east, heading towards the Wash. We obviously never went that far – that would have been very dangerous, however good at swimming we were. I must have been so fit and strong as a child – cycling four miles to school every day, swimming training nearly every day of the week, and canoeing of course. Things have changed somewhat on the fitness front now!!
What I didn’t realise about Denver until I looked it up last week when I first mentioned it, was that it’s a small village to the west of Norwich, and these days it has a population of about nine hundred, no doubt more than when I was a girl canoeing towards it with my friend. This is what Wikipedia tells us about it:
Denver’s name is of Anglo-Saxon origin and derives from the Old English for a passage or crossing used by the
Danes.Alternatively, the den element may represent the Old English word denu in its older sense of ‘low, flat place’, in which case the placename might mean ‘place of difficult passage across the marshes’.
I was further interested in the comment about ‘den’ possibly coming from ‘denu’ being a low flat area, as of course part of my unusual surname has that part in it. I’ve learned that Elsden might mean Elly’s dun or homestead – but supposing it means Elly’s denu – a low flat area belonging to Elly? Our family has always been in East Anglia – so who knows!!
Finding this out has certainly given me quite a few new and different ideas about new writing challenge #1 Denver, I can definitely feel a story coming on, rather than a factual piece I had rather enthusiastically been mulling over. I must do some more research, finish the final challenge word on my first list, then head towards writing challenge #2!
Lois Elsden 