Category: Perseverance
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Resilience: the gift that keeps giving . . .
I don’t know how a parent teaches resilience to their children, except by some sort of example. We’re pretty sure that ours have seen enough situations where we’re down, struggling, and have somehow managed to get back up on our feet and try again. Let’s say rather that we’ve certainly felt we’ve had our share […]
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The accumulated joy of small steps . . .
We were just chatting this morning, waking up with our daily word games, about the joys of a daily activity, whether that little step is poetic, journal, memoir, or something more physical like a small knitted square or another sorting exercise. One of us has been a fan of Brian Bilston‘s daily poems for some […]
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The strangely compelling world of writing competitions
I participated in an annual competition, at the end of my first year in our local writing group. I entered a piece in every one of the 10 categories proffered by the National Association of Writers and Groups. I worked hard to hone each piece, to adhere to the rules, and to submit my entries […]
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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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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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A slight discombobulation . . . perhaps a good stimulus
So I began the day on a different schedule: quick coffee, then a dash to the dump (aka Household Waste Recycling Centre) in Allendale so as to get back for my beloved to have time to return to the village for choir practice and the knitter-knatter group. But the rain was pouring down, and it […]
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The joy of clearing
Today I shall extract the remaining bits and pieces from the loft room that you enter as you climb the steps. Our hedgerow wine bottles will be slowly consumed, or divested, thereafter. Although I don’t really have any idea where the last of this first stuff will go, when it all comes down, I can […]
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The spider’s tale
Spiders are perhaps most often associated with perseverance; the story of Robert the Bruce’s eventual victory over the English king at Bannockburn is probably apocryphal, but salutary all the same. If the Scottish laird was indeed holed up in a cave on the Isle of Arran, watching a spider trying, over and over again, to […]
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Indolence, indulgence and/or perseverance
Sometimes Kali cat is happy to rest on our laps, of an evening, when she’s fully fed and replete, warm and cosy with the fire blazing, and we’re quiet ourselves. She still hunts for small creatures, and gobbles them whole, all except the guts. But mostly she perseveres with her importunings: feed me; feed me […]
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Camaraderie in commiseration
It’s not often, we find, that we meet someone who’s had a similar catering experience to the years in the hospitality sector that we’ve had. But yesterday we were privileged to chat with the owner of a local cake shop which had become what she called ‘a destination tea room’ to which people from a […]
Roads to Joy 