writing and writers – Page 130 – don't confuse the narrator

the muse bemused

Yesterday, I said that my muse seems to have gone off on holiday.

After reading this story on the BBC website this morning, I wonder if she’s travelling by train, and in particular if she’s travelling with Chiltern Railways. The headline reads

Chiltern Railways toilets become ‘inspiration stations’

and the story tells how the train toilets are being transformed with floor-to-ceiling vinyl images based on “attractions” along the Birmingham to London route. The only example cited is Compton Verney, an 18th Century country mansion in Warwickshire.
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on holiday

Last weekend, the pueblo celebrated the fiestas of the local Virgin. (Not the summer fiestas – those were at the end of August, and not the fiestas for the patron saint – that’s next month: the Spanish are always happy to take days off work and chase bulls through the streets or set off firecrackers.)

Fireworks, Arenas de San Pedro, fiestas de la Virgen del Pilar

Now there is a lull in the village as the locals close up their shops to go and join the vendimia or take advantage of end-of-season offers to take their own holidays.
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armies of the dead

Some years ago I was in the south of France at this time of year. Everywhere we went there were fields of dead sunflowers lined up like troops deployed to watch the roads.

Instead of the open faces and bright golden helms and plumes of summer knights, these figures had heavy dark heads set precariously on bony stalks that were slowly bleaching to ivory as the year began to fade.

Travelling by car, we sped past far too fast for me to do more than note the overall effect.

Today, though, the stark silhouettes looking over my garden fence have reminded me of these skeletal armies. I can only imagine what it must be like to walk past field after field of them, particularly when the wind is high and their mis-shapen yellowing limbs twitch and shiver and they whisper to each other in a secret language.

seasonal nostalgia

The tail end of summer always makes me slightly nostalgic.

Every time I see blackberries growing in the hedgerow, I remember that one of the few good things about going back to school after the long summer holidays was knowing that we would go blackberrying the next weekend.