Month: April 2022
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Well hello there!
We’re just casual observers of things, as we amble along. I’m not sophisticated enough in the natural history side of things to even begin to attempt a Guardian Country Diary piece. As we walked beside the River Ken in the direction of the Ken Bridge, and the Ken Bridge Hotel where we started our reconnoitring…
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Frankly, the joy of writing
So the new task for Writing Group this coming week is to write something about ‘walls, frontiers, margins.’ Could be poetry, fiction, or even creative non-fiction in the form of memoir. Pace John Irving, who wants us to believe that his creativity is so much more than reality, but I suspect that novels are a…
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Looking ahead . . .
You never really know what’s ahead, but it’s got to be better to be looking forward than to be becalmed with nothing to be stimulated by. I’ve felt too becalmed these last few days, but today I’ll be listening in on a new Writers Group. Got my assignment ready, looked over the submissions from four…
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An entire world, enclosed
Somewhere out there lies the rest of the valley, but as far as you can see, we’re completely isolated here on the high fellside above Sparty Lea. It’s no wonder I came up with the idea of an isolated world, for my science fiction trilogy. A world isolated but otherwise exactly familiar. This is a…
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Smallholding love . . .
I have the distinct sense that our picnic table is becoming an iconic image in this blog. But this smallholding is still home, whether or not we retreat with increasing regularity or frequency to our tiny bungalow up in Scotland. And yesterday I was able, thanks to the relative dryness of the growing lawn, to…
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Earth Day assessment . . .
Yesterday, the 22nd of April, was Earth Day, and I was intrigued to revisit a poem I’d written a couple of years ago about tree planting and recycling. It might be worthwhile to assess just how well these projects are going, but first, the recycled poem: Stewardship in a Smallholding Surrounded by grazed fellsides, meadows…
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Some tasks are guaranteed to provide joy
My professional days were spent, mostly, chasing needles in haystacks, and never being sure, from the outset of any given project until perhaps half-way through the contract, that the needle would be found. Sometimes it wasn’t, towards the end, and so my professional days were numbered. Writing novels is not entirely dissimilar, I’m finding. You…
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A walk in the sunshine
We finally made a circuit of the dyke walk that extends through marshland in the Upper Ken, on the border of the Galloway Forest. There we watched a crow/jackdaw/raven dive-bombing a red kite, over and over again. Eventually, it seemed that the red kite agreed to divert its soaring flight away from the black bird’s…
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But tasks make a joyful punctuation . . .
I have delved deep into the first of the four novels I mean to read over the next few days and weeks. I have begun. It’s lovely, and I’m away with the faeries into another land and another time, but the present also makes a welcome intrusion. Today we’re expecting a delivery of two big…
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The joy of reading
Too often, in the grand scale of things, I’m obsessed with doing, creating, achieving, finishing. So much so that when otherwise idle, as I’ve felt over the past day or so, and when challenged to ‘read a book,’ I find myself explaining, ‘but that’s not really doing anything!” Err, apparently, wrong! There are four books,…
Roads to Joy 