Tag: thoughts

K

Another one of these…

These things from which were crudely hewn


And in this expanse shaped and formed


Give way to  heart and hate and fires


that burn and fiercely do refine
 
This love that cuts and scars run deep


warm laughter hollow peaks then fades


And darkness melts at growing light


Which swells and soars, illuminating.
 
So come what will, we bend unbroken
Buffeted by winds of change


and edges soften, time moves onwards


rearranged and stained and aged.
 
Now take this thing I have become


With artists eye see shape and form


And lines, deep colours, shades and tones


this creation ever changing.

Room to swing a cat

Not that I would. But if I had to.

People are forever musing on here aren’t they. You can’t swing a cat without encountering musings of one description of another.

Not that I would advocate swinging cats.  I would not.  I don’t even know where that saying comes from.  Perhaps it was an old way of measuring things?   Now again I repeat that I would not but if I were to swing an animal then it would probably be something a little more manageable like a tortoise or a guinea pig.  Cats are notoriously averse to being swung and have far too many sharp and pointy bits to be buggering around with trying to work out how wide your living room is to see if your new sofa will fit.

If I absolutely had to know whether the new 3 piece would squeeze through the door then I would punt for a measuring tortoise.  They are a bit short of  purchase points though so it’s probably wise to put it in some sort of cloth sack to swing it thereby reducing the chance of losing one’s grip and sending the measuring tortoise soaring through a window.  Last thing you want is glass all over and having to use something a little smaller to then measure the window so you can order new glass.  If you were in need of measuring a window though, and again this is just hypothetical, then I reckon a squirrel would do the job.  Red though not grey, the grey ones are a a bit feisty.  If you cant get your hands on a squirrel then maybe try a hamster.  A red squirrel is generally equal to 2 hamsters.

Just for reference the Tortoise in the picture above is equal to 7 red squirrels, so 14 hamsters.  Or is that a turtle?  Doesn’t matter they are pretty much interchangeable.

Oh and for those living in hot countries, do not use a lizard because we all know their tails fall off and the sight of the orphaned tail wriggling about will likely upset the kids.  Unless of course you can get your hands on a chameleon they work really well as they move pretty slowly though can be a bugger to find once you’ve put them down.  A friend of mine who lays carpets swears by chameleons but goes through two or three a month.

Not that I would though.  What a ridiculous and rather cruel idea.

Besides, everybody knows the old fashioned way of measuring things was by swinging small soot faced children, recently emerged from cleaning chimneys or making smocks and bed caps.

 

H is for Home

I have lived in a fair few places in my life.

I have lived in a fair few places in my life.  Hull, Secunda, Mossel Bay, Grahamstown, Oudtshoorn, Knysna, Immingham, Barton-Upon-Humber, Sheffield, Sowerby Bridge, Brighouse and Halifax.  Not the one in Nova Scotia.   I think that’s all of them.

My instinct here is to explore the phrase that ‘home is where the heart is’, and looking back all of those places – perhaps with the exception of Hull (Which I left when I was 10) and Halifax (where I live now) – felt rather temporary.   I have very few, though definitely some, memories that I look back upon with fondness, and try as I might I find myself hard pressed to remember the feeling of content I have where I live now.

Perhaps it is the stage in my life that I find myself at, the life I have made for myself and the physical surroundings that all together make my current home something different to everything that has gone before.  It is not a fancy house by any means, only a small terrace in an average part of an average norther town but it is mine.  Or ours, as I share it with my wife and children.  It is the place that we have made our home for the last ten years and where the memories that mean the most to me have been made.

It is where I have watched my boys grow up, each room filled with magical memories of at least one of them covering it in vomit.  It is the place where I have threatened to paint and put up shelves and trust me, I will get round to it I promise.  When we are long gone somebody will pull up the carpets and see the large cock I drew on the wooden floors in the back bedroom.

We renovated it from top to bottom recently, and put everything we had into it to make it the place that we could spend the next decade though there is perhaps still not quite enough room for my comic collection.  Oh, and don’t get me started on the collection of things at the bottom of the stairs up to the kids bedrooms.

It is about more than just the four of us though, it is the place where my wife and I have made new friends and welcomed them into our home and been so very grateful when they have eventually left because we do rather like the peace and quiet too.

When I go out I see so many people that I know from the community, and I feel like I belong here and am part of the community and proudly so.

I love where I live, the house I live in and the people I share it with and who knows, maybe we would have been happy in any of the myriad of places I have lived but to me this one is special.

 

Next time…I is for i-spy

 

 

 

G is for god.

I’m not looking for a debate or deep discussion on whether a supernatural power does, or does not exist. 

I’m not looking for a debate or deep discussion on whether a supernatural power does, or does not exist.  You are more than welcome to leave your thoughts on the matter if you wish – but I don’t intend to get into fisticuffs over it.

I just wanted to see for myself whether I would start to write about it and then carry on given that when I sit down to write I do not always know where it will go.  I have something of a history with organised religion and whilst you will probably have noticed a passive aggressiveness in my writing towards it I don’t think it is something I have fully explored my feelings on yet.

Having got even this far I do not feel my thoughts on the matter are fully formed and I need to work on expressing them more clearly.  They’re more emotions than words and they don’t always make a lot of sense.  Actually, I might not quite know what those feelings are yet but when I do I am sure you will be the first to know.

Until then I think I will stick with my light derision and mockery until I am in a more serious mood.

Photo courtesy of pixabay

The place where he once sat

In her final few years, her family now long gone,  she would simply sit and watch the seasons change from her chair in front of the window.

The challenge…In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a chair on a porch. Why is it there, and what might it mean? Think about using it as a prop or the main thrust of your story.

The deadline for the piece has passed but I figured I’d write it anyway.  

 

In her final few years, her family now long gone,  she would simply sit and watch the seasons change from her chair in front of the window.

As memories faded into nothing, time racing by unrelenting, neighbourhood children passed by and waved occasionally before running off excitedly.  Spring enticed summer, and autumn blew away into winter and always she watched.

When snow fell she would pull a small blanket across her knees.   It was the one he had given her all those years ago.  Before he left.  She smiled to herself and waited, he would be home soon surely.

 

https://carrotranch.com/2017/11/02/november-2-flash-fiction-challenge-2/

How very curious

Just a thought or two

So, I wrote here about the busy week I had culminating in events of the weekend, and following that I found myself rather weary for a few days and catching up on things so had no opportunity to write.

The majority of the stuff I published in the last week and a half were written before last week commenced so I found myself having done little or no writing for over a week when I sat down to write this morning.

Curious it was that I really struggled.  I’ve been able to churn out up to 3 or 4 pieces a day for months effortlessly but when I sat there everything seemed very foreign to me.  I looked at my previous posts and they seemed wholly unfamiliar and whilst I have tried to keep up with comments I had to keep going back to look at what  I had written.  Lots of the ideas I had seemed rather empty and it struck me that my brain has been in a wholly different non creative place.

Browsing through my reader I wondered how much I had missed.  I have read a few things recently but so very little as I slipped back into the routines I had before I took up writing a few months ago and it struck me how very easy it would be for me to simply put down my pen and to not write again.

I had a few pointless conference calls at work today so I managed to scribble down a few limericks and haiku, and slowly things started to feel familiar again.  Tonight I have managed to plonk myself in front of the keyboard and I can just about feel the ideas starting to come back and thoughts forming.

I haven’t done this for long, so perhaps I do not have the muscle memory quite formed yet but I am now more aware of the need to keep feeding my brain and to try and maintain the creative processes because I didn’t much like the idea of not doing this again though it would be quite easy to let something else take its place because life can just get in the way sometimes.