Category: writing and writers

melon yellow

yellow gourd flower
I commented last week that there are very few flowers in the garden at the moment, but it would be wrong to say there were none at all.

Each morning, I dutifully water the patch of ornamental gourds I planted in an attempt to cover some of the chain link fence between us and the neighbours. And each day I am amazed at the size and colour of the flowers.

Since the flowers first appeared a couple of weeks ago, a line of poetry has been running through my head. I’m not sure whether it’s triggered by the suspicion that gourds and melons must be related, by the brightness of the flowers or by the similarity of the sounds of gourd and gaudy…
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flying visits

This isn’t the busiest blog in the world, and I don’t suppose it will ever have a huge audience, but WordPress send me notifications of new followers and likes, and it’s always nice to think that a post has appealed to readers, even if it’s impossible to know exactly why.

I check the stats page to see if I can find out a little more about who is reading and clicking, but this often poses more questions than it answers. I happened to look just after midnight the other night, just after the numbers had been reset, and this is what I found:

blog visits & views stats
Dear visitor, whoever you are, can you tell me how you managed to travel half way round the world in a matter of minutes and why you read six pages of my blog from three different countries?

here be dragons

dragonfly closed wings

The cats bring me gifts; they leave them outside the door: lizards, locusts, snakes, birds, eggs, embryos, feathers…

I’m never sure what I’ll find on the verandah in the morning. Never sure if it will be alive or dead, complete or dismembered.

So when I found this lovely creature the other morning, I assumed he was only in one piece because the cats had got bored and abandoned the game when he died of shock.

Naturally, I went to get the camera to take some close-ups… Continue reading “here be dragons”

more bugs

Yesterday I gathered together some pictures of bugs that have appeared on the blog over the years. Today, along with a new photo of a recent unidentifed visitor to the house, I thought I’d gather together a few of the fragments of poetry that I’ve posted here on the same broad subject.

unidentified caterpillar with red bristles

It was probably clear when I wrote about one of my very early poems that I’ve been writing about creepy crawlies pretty much since I was old enough to write. However, since I was brought up in the UK, the bugs weren’t as exotic as those featured in yesterday’s picture gallery.
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what’s not to like?

In a recent email, a friend said he’d “been enjoying” the recent posts on the blog. “But you haven’t liked them!” I retorted. Of course that raised the subject of what the like button signifies to each of us and why some of the posts here are more popular than others.

orange nasturtiums
Which also raises the question of what blogs are for – especially this one – and whether I should be deliberately posting things that I think will generate more followers and likes.
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