travel – Page 19 – don't confuse the narrator

more home thoughts

tree with hanging roots, Alicante — putting down roots?

The topics of home and place cropped up several times during my brief trip south.

As I said yesterday, for me – and for several other writers there – “Where is home?” isn’t an easy question to answer.

In the discussion, someone rephrased it as, “Where would you want to be when you die?”. But, apart from the obvious suggestion of “somewhere else”, I can’t really see that it matters.

This is not meant to be a blog about me, so it seems slightly strange to be talking about personal information; I’m including it, though, because ‘place’ is very important to a lot of my writing, and the phrase poetry of place is one that crops up a lot on writing workshop and course listings.
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the green, green grass of home

Since I’ve lived in Spain, one of the joys of visiting the UK has been the glorious green of the countryside. This picture was taken yesterday from the top of Brecon Cathedral tower.

Brecon beacons from Brecon cathedral tower

They say if you can see the mountains it’s going to rain, and if you can’t see them it’s already raining.
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omnibus edition

More thoughts and words on buses. Starting with my own:

Estación de autobuses

The bus belches, wheezes, shifts
on its haunches and sighs: tired
of waiting for the passengers. They
kick their heels, scuff gravel, grind
cigarette stubs into the ground: tired
of waiting for the bus. The driver
toma su café; se toma
su tiempo.

But, as Flanders and Swann sang, “We like to drive in conveys, we’re most gregarious,” so to make this a proper omnibus edition it seems appropriate to add a few more links.
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nothing new

I haven’t written anything new for a while, but am pleased to have polished some old poems and I actually sent off a competition entry today, which is the first I’ve managed in many months. I’ve also recently applied for a place on a course, and offered a workshop for another course, so it’s not that I’m not thinking about poetry, just that I don’t seem to have any new ideas.

So, I was wondering what I could post, and glancing back over the recent blog entries I saw the one about el conductor que más habla del mundo. Continue reading “nothing new”

reunited!

A full two weeks after it went missing, my suitcase has been returned to me and I have been reunited with my dirty washing.

I have no idea where the case went in the meantime, although at one point I was told that they were looking for it “in eight different airports”. I think it must have gone a long way away, though, as the baggage tag labelled “RUSH” is dated the 7th of December and today is the 15th.

When it first went missing, I started to compile a list of the contents in a spreadsheet in case I needed to claim for them. When I’d reached some hundred items, I began to wonder whether it was all so densely packed that it had caused a singularity in the space time continuum and the case had imploded under its own gravitational pull like a black hole. It was, after all, only a small case.
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