Category: UK

“just one more”

It’s 4 a.m. and you stand on the lawn,
knees slightly bent, head back, facing
infinity, scanning for meteors. Come on;
it’s time for bed, I Zebedee, but you beg,
Just one more. And so I watch you
watching for falling stars, diamond scatter
from the Milky Way, and think of the tip-tilt,
star-gazey hare in the moon. There! look!
You point skywards, but the pointing finger
roots me firmly to the earth. Come on,
I say, but you are galaxies away, determined
to wait for Just one more.

 
It’s that time of year again: time for the Perseids, which I saw for the first time lying in Battersea Park two day’s after I had my wisdom teeth out. Although I was with a couple of radio hams who assured me they were ‘meteor scatter’, even some thirty years later I still wish when I see a shooting star.

it’s not unusual

I suppose it’s difficult for journalists to maintain the momentum of a story that continues for months without very much actually happening. Which presumably accounts for the Evening Standard story headlined:

Assange ‘acts like a moody teenager and is hunted by women’

I thought teenagers were mostly moody due to a lack of attention from the opposite sex, but I guess it’s been a long time since my adolescence.
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results round-up

I made a concerted effort to send out some poetry competition entries earlier in the year. I haven’t had the success I’d have liked, but there have been a few short-listings and commendeds.

I received a copy of the adjudicator’s report for the Southport Writers’ Circle International Poetry Competition a few days ago and was delighted by the fact that my piece Neighbours (I) was commended for “its use of everyday language to express an horrific scene.” (The fact that it’s called Neighbours (I) might reasonably lead you to think there are other neighbours. There are, and they are mostly quite nasty, too.)
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‘a tower to the sun’

castle and palm trees

castillos en el aire – ilusiones lisonjeras con poco o ningún fundamento

I wonder how many Spaniards realise that as well as building castles in the air, English speakers also build castles in Spain.

Perhaps more to the point, I wonder why we do.

Brewer tells me that

[…] air-castles were called by the French Châteaux d’Espagne because Spain has no châteaux.

I wonder who told him that yarn.
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the value of good writing

There’s a story up on the BBC website at the moment that quotes Charles Duncombe, “an online entrepreneur”, as saying that a single spelling mistake on a website can cut online sales in half. (For Spanish readers of the blog, there’s a Spanish version of the article available on “BBC Mundo”.)

Duncombe is apparently “shocked” at the poor quality of written English of staff recruited by his companies.

Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.

Continue reading “the value of good writing”