30/03 'forgot what did'

In the days when we used to buy the children Boot's Scribbling Diaries - remember them? - always one of my favourite Christmas presents too - my elder son used to leave his lying around and open so it was obviously not intended to be secret.   Many pages had 'forgot what did' scrawled across them, but one day, when I had obviously upset him, he wrote in the thickest blackest felt tip he could find 'Mummy is thick!!!' and left it lying where I could be sure to see it.

I didn't actually forget what I did yesterday so much as come to a sort of brain halt;  I even travelled a bit - post haste to buy a monitor, since there is nothing more frustrating than have one cease to function mid-sentence and be totally unable to make sense of anything any more ...

And perhaps it is a good idea to leave Bridie et al for a bit - Script Frenzy begins tomorrow and apart from an hour spent trying to understand what all the terms on the Celtx software actually mean (and I'm little wiser now)  I've done nothing at all towards it, except to decide that my Shenanigan's cast will be attending the Private View of Annabel's exhibition at Chloe's gallery.

29/03 conversation with a good friend

Colleagues many years ago
trust and liking,
her support when things went bad
and an Irish holiday
Years before we let out spouses meet
in case they spoilt things ...
tonight we talked of a wedding,
and our granddaughters.

24/03 Ivan might not have been so terrible, but ...

At least they’d had the summer.

It wouldn’t be true to say that it had been entirely blissful – she hadn’t enjoyed feeling so ignorant, so stiff and unsure of what to say, how to behave, and there was always that chorus in the back of her mind, the one that said 'nice girls don’t.'

And it worried her, that she might not be a ‘nice’ girl ... but it had been nice, much nicer than she’d been led to believe.   And he had only been nice when she was ...

And since they didn’t have anything to talk about – oh how she wished she’d been blessed with that social ease which Bea had, she was sure that he’d talk to her then, but ... they had to do something to fill the time while Bea and his friend went for walks, and because they were at the far beach, where no-one else ever went, what they did did seem sort of unreal, not connected to real life.

But when Dad found out – because he’d come into Dad’s shop to speak to her when she was working there – then it had got real, real and horrible and she’d been stopped from going out and they’d looked pitying at her when she said he’d promised to marry her ... and after that, after her Dad said he’d speak to him, Ivan never spoke to her again.

[another travelling of imagination and time ...]

23/03 Proper travelling

Warm sun and blue sky - what else would he suggest but a ride, on the A10?
I don't remember which was the last time - returning home from Kent or Stirling?
The latter was very wet, I remember that.
Today to South Gare, a true 'Edgelands' place:  dereliction plus
Plus a mothballed steelworks, belching smoke, steam and flare
a nuclear power station, cuboid across the water
Next door to decommissioning asbestos ships, girdered and caged
and something nasty to do with electric cables
A place to go to be alone, and individual.

[One of my early 6S posts gave another view: 
http://sixsentences.ning.com/profiles/blogs/north-south-divide ]

21/03 Fashion and forbiddings, 1934

Culottes will be back in fashion this summer, according to the Telegraph today.

The article included a photograph of 'beach pyjamas' popular in 1934 apparently and I remembered this photograph of my aunt Muriel and her best friend Bea - taken at a beach in Essex, when she would have been eighteen.

She didn't marry until after her sixtieth birthday.   In the way of family rumours, truths and lies, I was told by my mother - Muriel's sister-in-law - that there had been a young man but thought to be not good enough for her so her parents forbade the association.    Her brother, my father denies this, but he would have been eleven at the time of any such confrontation.

Other photos on the page in the album that this was from show two young men - one, I know, married Bea - but what happened to other (who, I have to say does look somewhat sly and untrustworthy!) I have no idea.

20/03 travelling across the keyboard

Some Sundays the front door doesn't even get unlocked, although that wasn't the case today, as yet another friend of my husband's visits and congratulates me on my tolerance at allowing one petrol tank and one oil tank to sit on the kitchen worktop "keeping warm" - unnecessary really, they've only been there for a fortnight ...
And writing has been all I've done in the way of 'travelling' (although I did see the perigee (? can't remember the word) moon on the way back from the Chinese Take-away last night) but at least 'Bridie 5' has gone well this week - 9800 words added - and my 'Crime Scene' tale has another four episodes - now about 4000 words.   Absolutely zilch in the way of poetry though, sadly - aros was so good for that daily small kickstart to the brain.

I have begun trying to design a cover for Bridie 5 too - and need to think of a title ...

19/03 Great great grandparents

I knew their names, their parents’ names, the dates of their respective births and deaths and the date of their marriage.

I had stood at the front door of the house they occupied in the latter years of their life.
I had photographed their grave, read the sad litany of names of their dead daughters.
I knew that Susanna had been sufficiently highly thought of to be invited to a civic tea to commemorate the winning of the Crimean War, and that John loved cricket, was ‘greatly esteemed’ on the Bradford Wool Exchange and had suffered from asthma for much of his life.
But until I found this photograph, anonymous amidst a collection of cartes de visite, I had no idea what they looked like.

I am more grateful than can possibly be imagined that they took the trouble to visit a Blackpool photographic studio, sometime in the early 1870s, to stiffly pose for  their photograph.

This post began life as a response to today's Thinking Ten prompt 'Posing for a photograph' and is just one of the ways I have been time travelling this week.   Action in my current novel takes place in 1971, with some ten year flash-backs, and I have been remembering that time too.

17/03 - Edgelands (belated)

A spurt of inspiration with my current novel, working title 'Bridie 5' novel (now at 45K words), meant I didn't get round to mentioning the book I've been reading for the past week or so:  'Edgelands' by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.   Subtitled 'Journeys into England's true Wilderness' it describes and discusses various areas of England - chapter headings such as 'Containers', 'Landfill', 'Power' and 'Pallets'.   If only for their reference, on page 43 to a 'detumescent subtitle' I can heartily recommend book - but there is so much more to it ...

16/03

Vacillating today between two mindsets: 
Is the enjoyable writing of a novel self-indulgence
or the eventual to-be-hoped-for, enlightenment
of at least a small proportion of the reading world?

15/3 limitations

Limited first because my right eye is half-closed
vision impaired.
Secondly by my frightful appearance -
half of my face being scarlet, swollen and throbbing,
glasses pushed awry by too fat nose,
mouth twisted marginally into sneer.
Pain? not a lot, just stinging heat, and tenderness

And embarrassment as first pharmacist
then GP recoil in horror (while husband laughs,
not entirely without sympathy).
At present I blame catkins,
held when given to me by grand-daughters.
And hope that antihistamine and antibiotics
will make it go away.

10/3 Counselling required?

A friend of my husband's came round today, wanting some of our frogs' spawn.   He was the sort who talked non-stop, about boring things so I did not listen to him, just patiently found him a couple of ice-cream cartons and watched while he scooped and re-scooped the reluctant frogs' spawn into them, each needing at least three attempts.   I wondered afterwards whether the frogs who had been responsible for laying it would feel bereft.

9/3 - future travelling

Several warming reminders today of the forthcoming House of Writers gathering in North Carolina:   a comment on the subject of Utopia by  Mike Handley - he and his wife Gita have very kindly offered to let me stay with them for a couple of days before the event so that I can recover from jet lag, an experience which which more than double the enjoyment both before and after the event;  a Facebook comment on the subject of friendship from Michael B,  and other 6S posts from the many others who will be there ... July can't come quick enough.

8/3 Travels in my head - blushing

Tuesday is the day the bin men come - 'binmen' is a northern term:  down south they are invariably 'dustmen' but I do not know where the dividing line is for the name change - and because they usually arrive by 8.30 a.m. for at least the blue recycling boxes - newspapers and wine bottles almost exclusively in ours - most of my neighbours are either in the process of putting their bins out when I do mine or have left them out overnight.
Almost invariably I see my next-door-but-two neighbour (NOT the one who apparently inspects his foul water drain daily - he is next-door-but-one) which is not a problem as he is a perfectly nice man and probably the one I have had most conversations with over the years (I am not very sociable.).   No, the problem is that I have put him in a series of stories, and enabled him thereby to get up to all sorts of shenanigans ... initially with the very fictionalised 'me' I put in the same story.   NOT, not, not wishful thinking, just a bit of farcical fun ... but now I blush every time I see him, and sincerely hope not to get into conversation with him because I know I shall not be able to prevent myself grinning inappropriately.

7/3

For the first time in years - decades maybe - that once ubiquitous hymn 'Morning has broken' came into my head this morning as I walked up for the paper, the sun now rising nearly opposite my window instead of far to the right, above the Cleveland Hills.   I know nothing about music, but thought about that pure clarity of sound that denotes morning, beginning and new fresh start, remembering also the song of the shepherd boy at the beginning of Act three of Tosca - Io de' sospiri.

6/3 - words and pictures - evidence of travel

Pigeon Bike has produced a chapbook of image-inspired words - eighteen images, ten poets, and one of my poems was chosen - see http://issuu.com/pigeonbike/docs/lilbookfinal_final

AND today I was asked to contribute to something similar by Susan May James at Scribble and Scatter

5/3 Stay at home

I didn't travel far today,
just took Bridie back to bed,
and had a look at Liam's childhood,
and the state of marital play between Tony
and the gallery-obsessed Chloë,
touching briefly on Dan and Annabel,
post graduates and needing to grow up.

On 6S no further than last Tuesday,
non-fiction musings on my fellow men.

But this was all inside my head
and went no further than the keyboard.

4/3

Today's travelling was through time, twice.
Once to search reasons for and age at deaths
(so as to explain my 'family history'
for next week's 'healthy heart check')
and finding, on the BMD the hitherto
unlooked for death of Arthur Topple
in 1935, aged seventy-five.

The other, far far older:
sea eagle totem,
neolithic Orcadians
of Isbister

3/3 - commuting

It's forty years since I commuted,
a daily exit from the house
to share a travelling space with others.
My  alternative solution
was to share - inflict perhaps?
my place of work,
my working space,
on family.

2/3 minorly scary

A totally dozy day sat in the reception area awaiting a call to be sworn in as a juror but eventually the call came that the case would not be proceeding.   So I hastened to the station with my part-read Maggie O'Farrell, with its multiplicity of slightly scary parallels to my own life, returning to it once on the train.   Only a ten minute, two station journey, but long enough to completely lose myself in the story so that it came as a shock to be alerted by the voice of the conductor announcing the name of my station ...

1/3 - March stones

Early today I booked my flight for Atlanta for the 2011 Six Sentences House of Words gathering.   New Orleans was wonderful, for more reasons that just HoW, but this will be a more concentrated version - staying in large chalets with places to eat and meet together - in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
And I think March stones will be on the theme of travel, or place