Category: From Despair
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The ‘whew!’ of a successful road test (MOT)
The MOT inspector followed me and Harry Hymer into the inspection bay. ‘That’s an immediate fail,’ he opined, as matter-of-fact as you please. ‘Your brake light’s off.’ I know Harry’s been through the wars, and this particular side end has had an unfortunate encounter with our own little Fiat Panda as it scraped out around…
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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 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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Tearing Apart and Tidying
These days, as we’ve been dealing with all the ramifications of major kitchen renovation, we’ve been veering between delight and despair. Sometimes you have to catch the smallest possible unit of hope, in these times, and that’s what I’m trying to do just now as I contemplate the demolished, flattened and neatly stacked set of…
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Advice that makes sense . . .
I’ve borrowed a clipart image from the blog of fellow Canadian Mobashar Qureshi, who relates that two salient words of advice have kept him going: Keep Writing. Indeed. Through all the tribulations of searching for an agent, hunting down independent publishers, after having ventured into the murky realm of self-publishing on the big platforms (Amazon/KDP), and then…
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Sighs of relief . . . it’s fixable!
Our Harry Hymer, beloved classic Hymermobile of 1997 vintage, went in for its MOT last week, and failed. The issue was the accumulating rust around both front jack points, indicated on a 2020 model above. The integrity of the support structure was totally compromised, and it was not at all out of the realm of possibility that…
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Not only, but also . . . looking ahead while looking back
Both perspectives, it seems, are golden: the golden years we may have experienced, and the golden future we might hope to inhabit. Today I’m musing on the simultaneity of the visions; though we often think of looking back at the year gone by, or looking forward to the new year coming, I think I tend to discount…
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In the face of death . . .
I was going to sit here, after our festive lights have come on in the dark late afternoon, and write about the joy of singing. Or the joy of participation — we’ve got tickets for the annual pantomime put on by the Youth Players at the CatStrand Arts Centre, just down the High Street from…
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But if it is broke . . .
I’ve often had cause to remember the adage, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! But sometimes, as with our beloved Harry Hymer’s side front bumper, it is most definitely broke! It was a disagreement with the gate as we tried to squeeze through the narrow passage beside our new-to-us house. That altercation didn’t slow…
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Wisps of sphagnum moss . . .
As age creeps up on us, it can get harder to deal with rejections, failures, lack of success, whatever you might feel despondent over, but on the other hand perhaps one’s skin gets tougher too. Strategies for coping might have been developed, and these in turn can contribute to continued productivity. When we took our…
Roads to Joy 