Category: Musings
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Emergence . . .
You can’t under-estimate the joys of emergence, in my book. We began chitting our potatoes shortly after they arrived from the seed company, early March. Today, in early May, the first signs of real growth could be seen coming out through the holes in the black weed cover. Hurrah! But that doesn’t mean the weeds…
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Succession joys and worries
But what about generational succession? Google is full of references to the HBO television series Succession, which is certainly rife with intrigue. I’m musing this morning on generational succession because of a particularly proud moment for my brother’s family in Philadelphia, as our niece graduates with top honours from her journalism/political science degree course. As…
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Social joy of a community garden . . .
We decided to take a little drive over to the community garden, being developed from an ageing walled garden on the Garroch Hall Estate, to see how the extensive volunteer effort, coordinated and funded by Local Initiatives in New Galloway (LING) was doing. It took a bit of finding but we got there in the…
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An entire world, enclosed
Somewhere out there lies the rest of the valley, but as far as you can see, we’re completely isolated here on the high fellside above Sparty Lea. It’s no wonder I came up with the idea of an isolated world, for my science fiction trilogy. A world isolated but otherwise exactly familiar. This is a…
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Some tasks are guaranteed to provide joy
My professional days were spent, mostly, chasing needles in haystacks, and never being sure, from the outset of any given project until perhaps half-way through the contract, that the needle would be found. Sometimes it wasn’t, towards the end, and so my professional days were numbered. Writing novels is not entirely dissimilar, I’m finding. You…
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The joy of reading
Too often, in the grand scale of things, I’m obsessed with doing, creating, achieving, finishing. So much so that when otherwise idle, as I’ve felt over the past day or so, and when challenged to ‘read a book,’ I find myself explaining, ‘but that’s not really doing anything!” Err, apparently, wrong! There are four books,…
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Family fun . . .
I’m beginning to think that families exist to keep us safely grounded. Besides the obvious, I mean. We stick with families because sometimes we need to be teased! Well, perhaps the teasing turns merciless, and that’s not good. But good-natured and with love, that sort of teasing, that feels healthy and perceptive. I was on…
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The joy of persistence
Halfway through my editing odyssey, I know it’s not really Homeric, but it does feel like I shall have to begin again when I reach the end. After all, my first novelistic attempt went through seven drafts, while my second became a rather convoluted series of fragments searching for a story. This third novel feels…
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Can pretend joys become real ones?
When lonely Geppetto carved out a wooden boy to keep him company, he didn’t realise that the magic of creation might reveal a hidden side. But perhaps his effort was an early manifestation of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, the work of imagining a better way, rather than letting the negative ruminations overwhelm. I do not like…
Roads to Joy 