Category: Creativity
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Theatres . . . great joys from past to present
Snapshots from the past are often very evocative, and our January visit to Taormina, thirteen years ago now, hoves back into the present as my mobile phone reminds me. Those days seem like a lifetime ago, but then life has a way of crescendoing into its climactic periods before or after it’s been more of…
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In and of itself: the joy of creation
I was reading, just the other day, how a television series might be suddenly abandoned, after one or two seasons. The creator is cast adrift, and the article provided some evidence of their chagrin, their tristesse. Apparently this process happens much more often than one might think. I thought, as I read the piece, ‘Ah…
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The joy of collections . . .
I’ve been thinking about collections, lately, but more precisely, collections of poems. Small collections of poems are often collated by the poet into small leaflets, or the so-called ‘chapbook’ format. Not a book, more a small collection of a few poems loosely grouped into some sort of theme. I was prompted the other day by…
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Looking back, looking forward . . .
After a rush of busy, just at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, the doldrums of mid-January are beginning to bite. I rushed around tidying up my workspace in the shed. I got my new Christmas present, a 3D printer, configured and making useful things. I replaced a faulty shower valve, and…
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Joys of the unexpected
In mid-October, after a bout of heavy frost, so heavy there was thick morning ice on the windscreen of the little Fiat Panda, I’d have thought the bees would be safely ensconced in their hives for the duration. Not a bit of it: come the warm mid-day sun, and the Mahonia, rampant in our front…
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The joy of challenges resolved
Life has felt rather fraught, over these past two months, and joys have mostly been subsumed in fretting. So it’s a delight, finally, to share some resolutions to some of these infrastructural, if prosaic, challenges, and to be looking forward to new creative projects. Considering that the ancient Romans had wonderful spas, indoor plumbing, and…
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A new language
This is fun! After a somewhat restless sleep, spent half-awake, half-dreaming about a persistent problem with some web pages I’m sharing responsibility for, I awoke with a simple idea. Why not use emojis as the icons to indicate the various types of files I wish to serve from within cells of a table? They’re small…
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Intensity, and passion
I’ve been doing a small, daily gesture for our neighbour, which involves opening a dodgy greenhouse door in the morning as the sun begins to heat the air inside, and then closing it again, with gentle care, as the cool of late afternoon returns. One plant in full blossom, must be an azalea, has been…
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Serendipity, and the restless search for creativity
I’m a great fan of serendipity, of synchronicity less so. Serendipity, it seems to me, implies a grasp of something that can be used creatively, while synchronicity is more of a retrospective observation of a chance encounter. So when we remark on something that has happened that seems so, well, remarkable, in fact what we’re…
Roads to Joy 