vegetarian options

Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night are long gone, Remembrance Day is here, and all the supermarket and lifestyle magazines are already looking ahead to Christmas. I am less than interested in the recipes for fish, flesh and fowl, so am glad to see that the latest Waitrose weekly is catering for the vegetarians among us:

Four beers for Christmas lunch

“Four beers for Christmas lunch”? I can think of worse options.
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saturday morning

desk detail
I’m currently staying with my sister**, who I suspect is frustrated by my inevitable late arrival at the breakfast table on weekends. She knows I’m awake; she hears me call “I’ll be down in a minute!”; but the clock ticks on and the minute turns into an hour.

I think what we’ve both failed to appreciate is my desperate need for validation.

It’s the weekend. I write my blog. If I’m lucky, someone clicks the “like” button. If I wait a bit, maybe someone else does. A bit longer, and maybe someone else…

How can I possibly leave my computer to go and have breakfast when there’s the chance that there are people out there in the world beyond my screen who are liking me? It would be rude to abandon them.
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critical moments

poetry book
For reasons that I won’t go into here, I have just spent the last two days writing a formal “critical review”. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience and I was delighted to take the opportunity to sneak out to watch a firework display last night. As the local secondhand book shop was having a late night opening, I decided to pop in on the way home and delay my return to my desk even longer.
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stereo-topical

students playing football, Midlands, England
I don’t often get involved with topical news stories on the blog, but this photo of lads playing football in the Midlands, taken on a glorious autumn afternoon a couple of weeks ago, seems doubly appropriate now as the Football Association celebrated their 150th anniversary yesterday and storms are forecast across the country today.

facing up to fiction

cornfield (maize) after harvest
Several lists of “rules for poetry” have been doing the rounds this week, perhaps in response to these 25 rules for editing poems from Rob Mackenzie for Magma Poetry.

It’s hard to disagree with anything Mackenzie says, particularly as the list is followed by the rider “good poets are always ready to break rules whenever a poem demands it.”

That said, the “rule” that caught my eye was:

15. Consider the poem’s “truth”. Not the literal facts (although those may be important at times) but the emotional resonance. Is the emotion genuine or just received wisdom?

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