Tag: original poem

squaring the circle

The problem with taking photos at a classic car gathering is not just the hordes of people who jostle your elbow or wander absent-mindedly into the frame.

Even when you get there before anyone else, there are far too many polished surfaces: you end up as the main feature of at least half the pictures you take, which might not be quite so bad if the surfaces didn’t act as distorting mirrors.

Another problem is that too many of the cars there are altogether too familiar and you start to reminisce…
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star feature

It’s that time of year again, when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet and our skies light up with shooting stars. (They aren’t stars in the photo, of course; I don’t think they’re even moon daisies: but daytime weeds are a lot easier to photograph than the sky at night.)

In the village in Spain, you only had to step outside onto the lawn and look up, and there was the Milky Way speckle-splashed across the sky as if someone had flicked a paintbrush from one side of the valley to the other.
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looking for guinea pigs

True, the small furry rodent in the picture is a squirrel, not a guinea pig, but surely that further justifies the post title, which says I’m looking for guinea pigs.

I need them because I’ve just published an online video course – The Essential Poet’s Toolbox for Readers and Writers – on Udemy and I need some students. (If you don’t know about Udemy, it’s got lots of interesting courses in all sorts of areas from lifestyle to business to technical, some free, some not. You need to create a user account, but once you’ve signed up for a course you have access to the content for ever without paying any more.)

The Essential Poet’s Toolbox for Readers and Writers takes a non-technical look at modern poetry, grouping the tools into five main areas: metre, form, rhyme, layout, and sound. It’s gone on sale at £35 (for 2.5 hours of video lessons) but I’m giving away discount coupons.
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out on a limb

I was wondering: do adults still ask small children what they want to be when they grow up? And if they do, what are the popular answers?

When I was a little girl, boys still wanted to be train drivers and girls wanted to be ballet dancers. True, one of my brother’s friends was reported to have said he wanted “to be a computer”, but then, we’d always thought he was a bit odd.
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bobcat

Well, no, not a bobcat, a tricolour cat.

Perhaps a tortoiseshell, or perhaps a calico; it probably depends on which side of the Atlantic you live. And if you live in Spain, you might call it a gato mariposa – a butterfly.
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