Category: Challenges
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Bit of a damp squib, here
My chagrin was just about everyone else’s delight, as the expectations of blizzard conditions here in the North Pennines reduced throughout the day yesterday. And now, this morning we have another light covering of what looks like wet, possibly slightly crunchy snow out there. Not a big blizzard blow at all! But the devastation down…
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The painted lady
This month’s visual stimulus at VisualVerse.org (February 2022, or Volume 9 Chapter 4) was very confusing to me, and elicited no response at all from my poetic sensibility, until I remembered a feeling from only a week or so ago. ~So, this short poem is in a classic format: Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, alternate…
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Does abundance of ‘choice’ bring joy?
I have to start this piece with the caveat that I do not know the answer to my question. I only have some examples that have stimulated my musing today. The first example comes from our daily Wordle grappling. We sit opposite each other, first thing in the morning, and try to wrestle our minds…
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An . . .ti . . . ci . . . pa. . . tion
Love ’em or loathe ’em, puzzles and puzzling have a particular niche in people’s minds. We usually try to have a large puzzle ready or even on the go for family Christmases. I’d guess we split fairly evenly between those who become fascinated by the search-and-see approach and those who are only faintly bemused by…
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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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When your children are smarter than you . . .
There’s a special sort of joy in watching your children, and then, if you’re really lucky, theirs, grow up into cleverer clogs than what you yourself are. I don’t know if you’d call it a sort of wry acquiescence to your inevitable destiny, or what, but for me it’s both sweet and kind of bitter.…
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A cheerful tale with a sad ending
A fascinating thing about farmers in these parts is the delight indulged by many of them, in pea fowl. In our own smallholding, up on the high fellside, we took care of a mini-flock for a while, the legacy of Earnest, or maybe it was Percy. But four pea fowl were about four too many,…
Roads to Joy 