Month: January 2022
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Humoresque
Our task this past week in Writing Group has been to grapple with the sonnet form. What goes around comes around, and I was reminded of an early attempt I made to create a Pushkin sonnet. Now that’s a fiendishly difficult form, with its ‘feminine’ and contrasting ‘masculine’ rhyme scheme. Looking back on my effort,…
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Persevering with Amelia and Amelio
A by-product of the pandemic lockdown, we grew our little flock from fertilised eggs acquired through the post and hatched in a smart incubator. We now have a breeding pair of Buff Orpingtons, two White Cochin hens, and a harem of three Barnvelder egg-layers watched over by a handsome cockerel. It’s taken a considerable investment…
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What’s a ‘puddock’ when it’s at home, then?
I was so confused, listening to our grandson declaim the John M Caie poem, The Puddock, as to what a puddock actually is. I thought it must be a smarmy fish, but nae man, turns out it’s a warty auld toad! Still a tasty snack for the lurking heron, I guess. Delighting in the creation…
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Halfway point or . . .
I think this is a ‘glass half full or half empty?’ kind of musing, today. Last winter, when the bubbled family got together, our grandson and I went out on a trek through the snow with his LEGO mini-figs. I think his ambition was to create a LEGO type storyboard through a variety of scenes…
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Itchy, antsy feet
Our connection for the morning’s ferry was crucial, that day we left North Uist for Harris. We had to dash on up through the Outer Hebrides to Stornoway on Lewis for the second ferry back to the mainland in Ullapool. It was to meet a sad, but not unexpected date for a family funeral. Still,…
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Reaching ‘The Sweet Spot’ through adversity
A professor from Yale University has written a book titled ‘The Sweet Spot,’ so coming along just after I published my own little ‘sweet spot’ poem, his long piece is timely in terms of these Roads To Joy musings. He suggests that it’s only by experiencing pain and suffering that we can find meaning, and…
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The sweet spot
Someone @AltonAlbanyBB recently tweeted a view of Ailsa Craig off the Isle of Arran, from the South Ayrshire coast, and I was reminded of this poem I wrote in response to the theme: A Sense of Place. Not, apparently, what the competition promoters had in mind! The Sweet Spot No I am not a sportsman,…
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Otterly wonderful
Today’s entry in these Roads to Joy musings, memoirs, poems and stories may seem to be about animals, but in fact it’s really about the timeless truth: there’s no place like home. Ain’t it the truth, ain’t it the truth! So click your ruby slippers, Dorothy, and let’s begin. This story began, as many of…
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It feels so good . . .
I felt a bit sorry for the woodpecker, checking out the swing support. I didn’t think he’d find any nice grubs in there. But he made a circuit of the garden and stopped off at the bird feeder. He didn’t seem to find anything to suit his fancy there either, and I wondered if a…
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From Plough, potatoes!
This is not really supposed to be an animal-centric blog! So I really could have put up an image of a pile of pretty potatoes, or even a tall tower of tasty taties as we might call them in these parts. But to be honest, they’re not particularly photogenic, are they? And this tale really…
Roads to Joy 