UK – Page 106 – don't confuse the narrator

dewi sant

I’ve been keeping an eye on the daffs outside my window for the last month and wondering if they’d make it out in time.

In the end, despite showing colour for a week now, they haven’t. Perhaps later on today, if the sun keeps shining, they will unfurl their yellow flounces in celebration of St David’s day.

Mind you, they aren’t real daffs, anyway, as they are multi-petalled, double flowers, not the clear bright-trumpeted kind that line the road down to South Wales.

(For information about the wild daffodils of Britain, check out the I Hate Daffodils! website.)
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penny for them

After a fairly miserable weekend weather-wise, Monday dawned bright and sunny and positively spring-like. So I took the opportunity to gather some violets for my desk.

(In the photo they are on the book shelf simply because it’s tidier than the desk.)
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I’m sure I’ve said before that one of the joys of living in Spain is being able to buy quite drinkable wine at ridiculously low prices. (I wonder what would happen if the taxes on alcoholic drinks here were like they are in the UK.)

The list of denominaciones de origen for Spanish wines is long and impressive, featuring such famous names as Rioja, Ribera del Duero, Rueda and Valdepeñas. The label in the photo is not from one of these, though. It’s a wine from la Mancha, and presumably the skinny little figure in red is Don Quijote himself.

There’s a huge difference between un vino de la Mancha and una mancha de vino, of course, but seeing the label made me wonder whether there are any vineyards around Staines.

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”