Month: November 2022
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Joys of Writers Groups
Today I’m hymning the praises of writers groups; that is, groups of writers who have a common interest in becoming better writers. I’ve participated in four (no, wait a moment, five) groups of writers now, in addition to a writers retreat under the auspices of the Arvon Foundation, at Lumb Bank, Ted Hughes’ home. The…
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Too busy to muse . . .
We must have planted the Viburnum in the corner of our front garden some years ago and then left it to its own devices. My iPlant app tells us that this lovely plant decides to bloom in late autumn and then continues on into early spring. But we’d never been aware of its blossom until…
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Joys of written records . . .
Every few days, it seems, I trawl back through my adventures in daily diarising to retrieve some tidbit of information about this particular patch in the North Pennines. Although I know the diary inside and out, it’s useful to have some tangible pointer for illustration, when I’m relating this or that bit of relevant factoid.…
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Where we belong . . .
I’ve been flummoxed for a week, trying to figure out a fictional response to a WriteOn Galloway task. Finally I ventured into our own lives to create a kind of story-memoir piece about our travels. The challenge of the task was to create the story without revealing the author’s/narrator’s own take on the personal passion.…
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A walk in the sunshine
We ambled forth this morning, delighted to be catching the sunshine. I was that pleased to walk without hamstring twinges, though I could feel the strain, just not the pain. The breeze was brisk, however, and it didn’t pay to stop too long, or the chill might have felt more onerous. The little bit of…
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Washing-up service . . .
The joys of humble service have been a part of my life ever since my first detail attending to the outside pit toilets at summer camp. Talk about mundanity, but at the other end of the food cycle, I quite enjoy a spot of washing-up, or doing the dishes as folks might say on the…
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Clearances . . .
I’ve spent the past afternoon and again this morning clearing up my laptop’s desktop. Not only does the struggling machine, uncluttered, work much faster now that all the accumulated images are whisked away, but the space is neat, tidy, and restful for my busy mind. The extended display is open for new material, while a…
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Delight of a new story
It’s been a while, it feels like, since I tried to create a story out of nothing but my imagination. And yesterday was no exception, because in fact the reality of the lived experience was still so vivid that I could re-create it from real life, and cast it into story mode. So I did.…
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Measurement, a never-ending joy
I made a little investment, a year or so ago, in a small measuring wheel. Its first use was, finally, to measure within a meter or so how long our track is from the road. Turns out to be 495 meters, half a kilometer in other words, which makes us quite happily isolated from any…
Roads to Joy 