The Neverending Story

In the north of the kingdom, there lived a working man.

His name was not known to many, for not many need know the names of working men. But nevertheless, for years he played his own insignificant part in the running of the kingdom, pausing from work only to frequent diverse taverns in the locale, and of course, to daydream. He was a champion daydreamer, and had woolgathered at a semi-professional level.

Sometimes his daydreams took the form of music. More often they were written words. His frivolous timewasting rarely encompassed the things he saw around him. But all of that was to change one rainy summer day, when a salesman chanced to offer him a magic box.

Mindful of what had happened when he'd bought a jar of magic beans the month before, he was initially wary of the small box. But, to his delight, he discovered that it recorded pictures at the push of a button! He threw a fistful of money at the salesman, and, with tremendous excitement, rushed off to experiment with his newfound toy.

Friends soon got used to the sight of the magic box being pointed at them, with the resulting images duly being tagged in The Book of Faces. But after a while, our hero began to feel mildly dissatisfied with the amount of daydreaming the magic box allowed him to do.

And he decided: what he needed was a challenge.

So it was that on another summer day, some four years after his purchase of the magic box, our hero first resolved to take a picture on every single day of the year. It seemed like a simple proposition at first. Little did he know how tricky it could be when the days came thick and fast, and desperation set in. Many was the time he was reduced to taking pictures of cats, or raindrops, or cats and raindrops at the same time. Some might say there were a few too many sunsets nestled among the collection, and how on earth a fridge became a regular fixture in the journal is anyone's guess.

Nevertheless, somehow he managed to string together 300 consecutive journal entries, with no signs of stopping. Through rain and shine, through joy and despair, in the hills and in the cities, he faithfully documented his life, such as it was.

He was never exactly the Venerable Bede or Samuel Pepys; just a working man in the north of the kingdom. But he'd like to thank you for having taken the time to daydream along with him these last three hundred days.