Month: May 2022
-
The feeling of being needed
I often feel that I’m not needed, and that can be hard to bear, after insinuating myself into a variety of positions where it seemed only I could facilitate. We set up a robust swing for the grands, a decade ago, but found that a garden bench swing was also needed for ourselves. We did…
-
Oh, joy of genres
Today I’m penning a paean to variety. I’ve written in quite a few genres, in my time, and that’s been a continuing joy. In my childhood, I was intrigued by the rhythm of poetry (thanks Robert Service!). Then as an adolescent I became enamoured with the stylistic strictures of scientific papers. In university I branched…
-
A slight act of selflessness . . .
I wondered why the marjoram label was regularly covered with compost. We noticed it buried again as we went out for a short walking interval between rainy spells. I moved to clear it off, but my hand froze mid-air. The cat droppings were a good clue. We made our progression around a new-to-us circuit, on…
-
Petal confetti, horse-tail alley and a flight of swans
We must be getting fitter; we traversed the circular route around the marsh dyke to the River Ken, and back through the fields to home, in just about an hour of ambling, looking and listening. Along the way we invented descriptive words for the natural sights: a tapestry of stichwort; a serried rank of Jacob’s…
-
Blowing the cobwebs out . . .
Our coastal adventure was an easy reconnoitre, for sure. Just along the road beyond Gatehouse of Fleet, at the protected bay, deep in the recesses of the Solway Firth, we stopped at the tiny public car park and walked through the gorse bushes to the beach. It was so bracing to enjoy the fresh air…
-
Adventures near and far . . .
I asked my beloved, why is this flowering tree used in May Day festivals when as we see it’s only in full bloom two weeks into May? Because we’re farther north than you might have realised, she replied. And of course I had to agree. So that was our little near-to-us adventure, and another fillip…
-
Rewards of a hillside amble
I was beginning to think that it was nearly impossible to capture, succinctly, something of the intense purplish-blue of the bluebell woods in full bloom. But then the sun, dappling out between huge puffy white clouds, created a sensational spotlight, leaving the bank of bluebells before us in immediate shade. So it was worth the…
-
Random blossoms of loveliness
Sometimes the smallest things evoke the greatest joy. I decided to take a quick snapshot this morning of the flowers that bedeck the short board fence around the front garden here in New Galloway. We’ve been admiring the multiplying bloom for days now; the plant seems to be exalted in its presentation of itself. More…
-
Emergence . . .
You can’t under-estimate the joys of emergence, in my book. We began chitting our potatoes shortly after they arrived from the seed company, early March. Today, in early May, the first signs of real growth could be seen coming out through the holes in the black weed cover. Hurrah! But that doesn’t mean the weeds…
-
The joys of language
For reasons that are entirely obscure, I chose to respond to this week’s Writers Group task by composing a poem in the Geordie dialect. Unfortunately, my ears have been corrupted by years of Robbie Burns Nights and Scottish idiomatic turns of phrase, and so my first effort was an unwieldy mishmash of sounds pulled out…
Roads to Joy 