l’esprit de l’escalier

Fire escapes are good places to sit on hot evenings and last weekend found me at the top of a rather attractive red and yellow metal staircase with a glass of wine by my side.

I was very tempted to break into song, but didn’t really think the neighbours would appreciate my rendition of Moon River, so instead I read my book. But it was a long summer evening and I’d already spent several hours on a train, so the light lasted well past the last page.

Reading turned to thinking.
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a little focus

Once more I’m sitting here with a host of possible topics to write about and, once more, it’s proving difficult to zoom in on one specific idea and get a blog post written.

As I said last weekend, “When you’re stuck for something to write, it is often because you are looking vaguely around you and there are simply too many potential subjects.”

Pinning down a single idea is like trying to find the queen among the heaving life of an ants’ nest or a hive of bees, a specific car in a multi-storey carpark, one precise tree in the forest…
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July

It’s really too hot for thought, so I’ve dug back into the archives for something to suit the weather.

Heat swells to stuff the corners
of the room, tucking itself up
to pad the picture rail, deadening
the walls. We lie at the edges
of a king-sized bed, white cotton
smooth beneath us. You reach across
and touch me. Sweat breaks
under the weight of your hand.

butterfly thoughts & mindful musings

I’ve been recording the videos for a new online writing course with the working title “Creative Inspirations”. The course was born from the fact that, at some time in their life, almost every writer looks at a blank screen or a blank page and realises they don’t know how to get started.

For me, this happens quite regularly. Indeed, I could say it happens almost every weekend when it’s time to write a blog post. Sadly, although each class in the course will provide a new activity or insight to trigger ideas, I’m not sure it’s what I need for writing here; I do, however, hope it will be of use to other writers and poets who have hit a bit of a wall.
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irrelevant facts

In yesterday’s post, I touched on how the natural world is changing and how, while words I learned as a child are being lost from children’s vocabularies, there will presumably be a need for new words for the invasive species that are making their way to the UK common.

This got me thinking about how so much of what I learned in school has been superseded.
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