creative writing – Page 18 – don't confuse the narrator

you don’t know what you’ve got…

When I moved to Spain in the late Eighties, I still thought of the UK as my home. Having now, at least temporarily, ceased to have a permanent base in Spain, I seem to be in the opposite position. I don’t think I’ve ever really suffered with home-sickness, but there is always a hint of greener grass elsewhere. (Or, more realistically, greener grass in the UK and bluer skies in Spain, I suppose.)

I don’t know if the leaves in the picture are actually olive leaves – there were certainly no olives visible on the trees – but even set against the grey English sky they reminded me of the olivar I used to walk through to get to the pueblo and I had to stop to take a photo.
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the big picture

Looking through my photo files for ideas for a blog post, I find mostly close ups of flowers and insects. Panoramic views are few and far between, and pictures of people are even less frequent. Even if a scene could be a landscape, my focus is usually on details.
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upgrades and improvements

Apropos not a lot, I’ve been pondering the influence of computers on poets and their writing.

When I started to read poetry – from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, Belloc’s Cautionary Tales and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury – most of the poems started each line with a capital letter; when I started to write poetry, I did the same.

Later, as I read more modern poets, I learned that this was not compulsory: poems can be punctuated like prose, with capital letters only appearing at the start of a new sentence. I’ve been writing uncapitalised poems for most of my adult life. Which means that I’m always slightly surprised when I see a modern poet capitalise each line.
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connections

I have never paid for upgrades to this blog, so some readers may see adverts at the end of the posts. Even readers who don’t get the ads are probably offered links to “related” posts.

I don’t know what algorithm WordPress uses to choose these stories, but the connections are sometimes tenuous at best. As the image shows, another website I visited recently seemed to have all the bases covered: