“Beautiful writing. Each word pulls you towards the next in effortless momentum. Very much enjoy your work.”
– Mark Peter Beeson
“I love your blog! You write so beautifully.”
– Oliver Ryan
Thursday, 26 December 2024
A lymerical ballad…?
…in the time it took me to climb the café stairs!
There once was a chap called Will,
who struggled to stay very still;
He wandered as only
He could… – very lonely:
Down dale, ’round lake, and uphill!
Tuesday, 24 December 2024
Let slip the dog afar…
I posted the following on Instagram late last night:
Any human being that can write such a sentence as that below – especially in the context it bookends… – is a saint: of emotion; of love; of wordsmithery; of so many things that are so vitally important to me. And yet it is just one of thousands that move in the same way: a quality of writing so rarely encountered; a quality of life, a quality of love… ditto.
“I walked for hours in the forest that night though I don’t remember the trees.”
Thank you @paulbesleywrite for the read of the year; maybe even the decade. Still got some way to go (after over a hundred pages, tonight); but feel that I am on the journey with you.
It was yet another sentence in his book, The Search, yet another situation, yet another way of defusing a tightly-packed grenade of emotion carefully, thoughtfully, differently, vividly, and never over-statedly, never explosively. Even the sharpest, toughest, most brutal events are gently smuggled into your brain, and only then do they suddenly evolve from pocket-sized Rembrandt etchings seen in near darkness to the most audacious, brightly-lit, multi-hued Jackson Pollock and Van Gogh canvases.
Wednesday, 7 February 2024
A Tale of Two Kitties…
A rather camera-shy Petronius the Arbiter |
The first cat is the steepest…
I was outside Darwen rather than Damascus: however, the conversion took place just as abruptly, with only a few seconds warning. One moment I was being asked…
– How would you feel about looking after Jay for a while?
[All of my friend’s cats – and horses – were named after birds: Blackbird – ‘Blackie’ for short – a rook-coloured bruiser wearing white gloves (probably concealing knuckle-dusters); and big bullying brother to Kestrel – a beautiful, mournful tabby, with the same gleaming toes; and currently Jay – who, not being a blood relative, was beaten up by both of them almost daily, and therefore frequently went missing for days, and always came home injured. Why Kestrel didn’t also fly away – without the “coming home” bit, of course… – I shall never know for certain. Timidity is one possibility; but likely also some warped form of sibling loyalty.]
Wednesday, 31 January 2024
Can I take your postcode, please…?
Exactly ten thousand days ago today, driving home on a gently warm afternoon in the middle of September 1996, I was on the receiving end of the first of three serious road traffic collisions (RTCs) that wrote-off the succession of vehicles I was driving and increasingly damaged my neck: leading, ten years later – despite hundreds of physiotherapy sessions, and many, various minor operations – to major, and extended, surgery: when my cervical spine was stabilized from the front with four surprisingly lengthy screws and a sizable titanium plate. (My neck was so badly deformed – like the poor cars before it – that a bespoke mechanical replacement for one of my cervical disks had to be forgone; and the two vertebrae surrounding it were instead fused together.) I have not seen my shoulders since.
Sunday, 7 January 2024
Unless a man starts afresh about things…
Loweswater at dawn, frozen in time |