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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| The Hill At my fortieth birthday party, they told me, “Might as well enjoy it, mate. It’s all downhill from here.” I’ll be seventy-three next month and I’m still heading upwards. Word count: 29 |
| Saturday Morning Musing Noticed that the Shadows and Light Poetry Contest had shot to the top of my Favorites list this morning. Thought I haven’t looked at that in a while - wonder what’s going on to have stirred the waters. So I went and looked. It’s a contest I like a great deal, partly because it’s for free form poetry, which is my favoured speciality, and because I’ve had a modicum of success in it in the past. Well, it’s nice to get the occasional encouragement, isn’t it? Anyway, I was looking down the list of entries for the current contest and I spied the name of winklett in the woods  , a recent discovery of mine, although she’s been around in WdC for much longer than I have. Naturally, I took a read of her offering.It was so good, I had to applaud it in some way. Without giving a full review, it seemed the only option was to Like the poem. So I hunted through the forum to click on the necessary. Found it and did so, but not before I’d noticed submissions by two other poets I have high regard for, fyn  and concrete_angel.Which meant I had to go read their entries too. And theirs were just as brilliant, requiring me to Like both of them, just as I’d done for Winklett. So then I’d Liked three of the entries and it struck me that, to be fair, I should read the others. I did. And (you’re not going to believe this) they were all good, way above the average in fact. If you’re looking to read a really strong field of entries, go see for yourself. Even if you don’t like poetry. Go find out just how powerful poetry can be in free form. https://www.writing.com/main/forums/item_id/1935693-Shadows-and-Light-Poetry-Con... I had been toying with the idea of throwing something at the contest myself but it seemed I had only succeeded in daunting myself. It would be cheeky to enter anything of mine amongst such company, after all. And then I had a thought. Unless I entered something entirely different, of course. Something so different that no one would even think of comparing it to the masterpieces around it. Something so brash and left field that it could only be judged purely for itself. Yes, I might just do that... Word count: 391 |
| Trinkets I have to admit that I cannot resist collecting trinkets. Don’t ask me why I do so - I really don’t know why. As far as I can see, they have no use apart from being something we can collect. And there is something in me that enforces the collection of worthless objects. Years ago, when I still served the god Nicotine, I smoked a brand that brought out a series of collector’s cards. These had the theme of important monuments in America and I kinda liked ‘em. That’s all. They weren’t astoundingly beautiful or noteworthy in any way - they just presented themselves as a target, to collect the full set. So I did exactly that. It wasn’t a huge set and the cigarette company soon stopped producing them. I found myself with several sets of the cards, neatly stacked in order and sitting on my computer desk, waiting for me to think of a use for them. I never managed that supreme effort of the imagination. In the end, they disappeared into a drawer and, in the course of some move or other, they vanished forever. Over the years the same pattern has often repeated itself. For a while I was fascinated by advertisers’ photographs of credit cards they were pushing. Something about those clever photos, gleaming in their metallic colours and taken from ever more inventive angles, attracted me and I started copying them to the hard drive. For all I know, they still abide somewhere on some computer long put out to grass in a dark and dusty cupboard (ooh, delightful mixed metaphor!). When I was very young, before the age of eleven in fact, I collected china figurines of horses. Again, I don’t know what started me on that. But they were all lost, broken in the great move from Cape Town to Zimbabwe and unmourned for even a moment. Collections have great allure while I’m amassing them, but lose their magic very quickly. And now I collect trinkets. It’s almost a forbidden pleasure, sneaking in and grabbing another one, as though it were somehow forbidden. Perhaps that’s part of the attraction. Word count: 354 |
| Tact I wanted to write something for the blog today but the only thing that occurred was too controversial for me to comment upon. It’s a bugger, being tactful. Word count: 28 |
| Poem for Pookie The cat on her perch by the window to watch the spring come in the trees, the birds nesting and buds sprouting, all life bustling to stir her rampant urges, mouse assassin that she is. Line count: 5 Free verse For no other reason than that it’s true. |
| Happiness Is… There’s a song that pops into my head on those rare occasions when I’m feeling irrationally happy. I didn’t know the name of the song until Andrea did her usual detective work and found it in YouTube. Not bad for using only my scant memory of the first few words of the song, hey? The rest was filled in by my dum-de-dum-dee-deeing through the melody. It is fairly amazing that the song has remained in my memory for as long as it has. It dates from 1929 and nears it’s one hundredth birthday therefore. Believe it or not, that is way before my time and the only reason why I should know it at all is that it was played on the radio a few times in my youth. Such a strange little thing to have created so strong a home in my mind. There is no explaining the idiosyncrasies of the human brain. The name of the song is The Wedding of the Painted Doll and it comes from a Broadway musical surely forgotten after all these years. Apart from the limitless memory of YouTube, of course. It’s a merry little tune that is perfect for expressing a mindless, inexplicable happiness similar to the mood that always awakens its memory in me. I’ll put a link below to the YouTube film of the play for your interest. It’s one of those grand productions with a cast of hundreds of dancers, probably one of the very earliest of such creatures. Much of the dancing is surprisingly inventive and adept for the time. I particularly like the dance of the feller who is to conduct the wedding, for instance, and the scene where a giant ball is passed along a line of chorus girls is also very original. Andrea commented with the sobering thought that the entire cast must be dead by now and those cheerful, fit and energetic performers in the clip had no thought of how they would one day be old and frail. Even that could not dent my happiness at remembering the song this morning, however. Anyway, I’ll shut up now and let you enjoy the YouTube clip. Word count: 368 |
| A Geographical Thought There are two things I never thought would happen in my lifetime. One was the reunification of Germany and the other was the independence of Eritrea from Ethiopia. Both were highly unlikely to ever be achieved but have now happened. At this rate, there might even come a day when the Kurds have their own country again. And that hasn’t happened for thousands of years. They are, after all, of Biblical age and are descended from the people known as the Medes and the Persians. They are the Medes. Word count: 89 |
| Falling Out of Love - The Blog Post I wrote a poem today. Unprompted, unbidden, just because I felt like it. Although it was Colin Hay’s song, I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You, that put me in the right mood. Not that the poem’s about the song - it isn’t. But the mood is probably the same. Anyway, I read it to my wife and she says I should put it on the Newsfeed. Which seems a bit forward to me but I figured I could put it in the blog and then announce the new blog post. That should be self effacing enough, surely. So here it is:
And, if you want to listen to Colin Hay’s song: Word Count: 123 |
| A Missive for Today Today is my Annual Humiliation Day with my doctor. I am to be prodded, interrogated, inspected, disrobed and examined to the nth degree, finally to be cast out with the usual admonitions and warnings of how careful I need to be, in spite of my essentially reasonable numbers. Don’t get me wrong - I like my doctor and we have as much entertaining conversation as is possible in the circumstances. It is just that it’s difficult to be completely at ease when undressed and laid out on a giant sheet of tissue paper for inspection. And it is likely to be somewhat longer than usual, given the interesting year I have had healthwise and the fact that I missed last year’s humiliation thanks to Covid. No, I didn’t catch it. It’s just that the humiliation was supposed to be by video link but, for some unknown reason, it never happened. So there is much for my doctor and I to discuss today. And it may be some time before I can leave the harsh world of reality to return to the comforting arms of WdC. Which is the point of this message to my unreadership. I shall be missing for an unknown period this morning. Please try hard to get by without me during that time. Thank you. Word count: 219 |
| Just watching a tribute performance on YouTube and the thought struck me: how cool must it be to have your own words quoted back at you? |
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