Given the fairly dreadful weather over the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to track down a half-remembered quotation to the effect that the worst winter ever was one summer in England.
In fact, I’ve found that the actual wording is, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” – a quotation often misattributed to Mark Twain – which doesn’t really fit the bill.
Continue reading “seasons in the sun”
I’ve mentioned before the need for more ‘poetry listenings‘ rather than poetry readings, but I went to an open mike event last night and I think it’s a topic that is worth returning to.
Although most of the readers and the rest of the audience had been milling around for half an hour or more, the event was late starting. As there weren’t many of us there, this wasn’t a problem: there would be plenty of time for everyone. But as soon as the girl presenting the event had said it was time to begin and sat down to play at the piano, the chap in front of me started to fuss and fidget.
Continue reading “sound and fury”
I try not to walk around while looking at my phone, after all, there are already far too many ‘candid’ videos online of people walking into glass doors, lamp posts and fountains while checking their emails and text messages. But when I am trying to find a meeting location in an unfamiliar place, I admit I am sometimes guilty of paying less attention to my surroundings than to the smart phone maps.
Although it meant I missed getting a better photo, I think I am probably glad the seagull in the photo was more alert than I was and quickly dragged his meal out of my way before I could fall over it or him.
It seems that it’s a bird-eat-bird world out there.
The tagline on this blog describes it as “(mostly) first person poetry, prose & opinion” but in reality the main topic seems to be a repeated complaint that I don’t know what to write about. I think the secondary topic is probably another complaint – that I’m too busy to write very much.
Then there are the fairly repetitive floral photographs and the re-posts of old poetry.
Continue reading “creature of habit”
Wondering what to write – and, indeed, wondering whether I actually would manage to get whatever I wrote posted as the phone company have let me down – I remembered the “Thing That Must Not Happen” as described in Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise:
Now, when you see in a newspaper a blank white space, bearing the legend: “THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR SO-AND-SO LTD.,” it may mean nothing very much to you, but to those who know anything of the working of advertising agencies, those words carry the ultimate, ignominious brand of incompetency and failure. So-and-so’s agents have fallen down on their job; nothing can be alleged in mitigation. It is the Thing That Must Not Happen.
don't confuse the narrator 