The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.
Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.
Continue reading “scheduled water fights”
I don’t have many more shooting stars poems to post on the blog, but there are other things being celebrated this weekend, as well as the perseids.
It’s been several years since I’ve spent August in Spain, as I’ve attended the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School, both as participant and as course leader, since I first won a place some years ago.
Before that, though, I was living in Madrid, and August was important en mi barrio for la fiesta de la Paloma. This year, Monday 15th August will be a fiesta nacional (la Asunción de la Virgen), and in her honour I have dug out this old poem. It was first published in the New Entertainer, I think, when I was writing my Capital Letters column:
Continue reading “stars and doves”
Last time I was in the UK I noticed a copy of the magazine Practical Reptile Keeping in W H Smiths. I’m not sure whether the reptile in the picture is practical, but I made no attempt to keep him other than as a photograph.
The photo is for anyone who thought it a pity that yesterday’s lizard came to such a dusty end. (If the cats found this one after the photo session, ‘dusty’ won’t have described the ending.)
I remember a summer evening
when you brought me roses,
full-blown, blowzy,
stolen from a neighbour’s garden.I laughed,
and listened to your promises
as you crushed the falling petals
underfoot.
Originally published in The Coffee House, Issue 10, 2003.
The old poem is included mainly as accompaniment to the photo, which I wanted to include to add some colour to the page after a number of fairly wordy posts. However, now I’m here and on the subject of roses…
Continue reading “roses”
In a story on 20 Minutos, the on-line version of one of Spain’s free newspapers, The Secretary of the Real Academia Española, Darío Villanueva is quoted as having said:
“El Diccionario no puede ser políticamente correcto porque la lengua sirve para amar, pero también para insultar. No podemos suprimir las palabras que usamos cuando nos enfadamos o cuando somos injustos, arbitrarios o canallas.” *
I find this odd, as I thought the whole point of the RAE was prescription not description.
Continue reading “contradictionary”
don't confuse the narrator 