Month: August 2022
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A summer break . . .
After three years participating in Writers Groups, one learns that the craft of writing is an end in itself. That’s meant, in my case, that I was not prepared, emotionally, to have a submission of my poetic efforts accepted by an editorial team in Cheltenham. At Wildfire Words, my three pieces, text and audio, joined…
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Is ‘laughing at yourself’ a kind of joy?
So I was doing a decent job on the shower cleaning, and I let the chlorine-based anti-mould application sit for thirty minutes to bleach the black fungus stains off the white grout, as you do. So far so good. I prepared to rinse the product off the tiles. Whoops! Turned the shower tap in the…
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Drudgery is a fact of life . . .
I remember so well, back in the day, thinking about why I loved research. In so many ways it was the physical experience of planning, and then setting the experiment up, so that the waiting could begin. Anticipation and wonder were all very lovely, but it was actually the joy of asking the question that…
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Solace of a morning mist
The unconscionable challenges of the Barnvelder cockerel were incessant, this morning, so that by 5:55 we turned around and agreed that we might as well get up. My awaking duty is to get the water on for the tea. I might not have noticed, in my own sleepy haze, that the mist had settled across…
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The soft twilight . . .
I awakened early this morning with a persistent toothache. And it’s weeks before I can see a dentist. I felt a bit sorry for myself, until I looked up and saw the softness of the early morning light. Outside, it was soft, so soft, in the cool glow of morning twilight. The full moon (or…
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Shared thoughts . . .
Never mind the mirror neurons today. I’m feeling blue for folks who have not had, or are losing, the opportunity to share old age with each other. After say forty or fifty years together, I suspect that most thoughts are exchanged between ageing partners in a process of mutual osmosis, a kind of seepage from…
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The joy of directed exercise
I’ve always been a kind of get-up-and-go sort of person. Never thinking about stretching exercises, or anything that healthy, but rather just getting on with life, doing activities. Until I couldn’t, after an injury to my left hamstring, which grew progressively worse the more I walked about, the more I tried to ignore it. After…
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Learning how magical realism works
Into each life, some sprinkles of magic faery dust sometimes fall. It’s all part of our story-telling sensibility, I reckon, these magical moments of understanding. I think, as resonant as metaphor, as compelling as an epiphany, these moments are also a big part of what makes us human. I’ve used magical realism with conscious effort…
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Rediscovering the recent past . . .
I’ve had the unexpected privilege of a lovely writing job: in celebration of the upcoming twenty year anniversary of the Allendale Lions Club, my proposal for yet another blog, this time documenting recent social history, was taken up and now I’m plunged deep into the recent past. I may already have mentioned this role in…
Roads to Joy 