Succinctly Yours : 'The lynx effect' / 'Allowing one's thoughts to wander'

Grandma’s Goulash – A  weekly challenge to respond to the photo, and incorporate a word of the week  in less that 140 characters.    This week’s word was ‘ponder’ and I had a couple of attempts:

The lynx effect?
Each pondered whether it was his brand of aftershave which caused her to lose control and her hand to slide dramatically downwards: sales had never been that bad!

Allowing one’s thoughts to wander
How embarrassing!   She could not forget Henry’s inadequate performance last night, and despite pondering was far from sure either of these would do any better

An end to casual mistresses - Book Blurb Friday

He loves me, he loves me not ...

Anita anticipated yet another Sunday in what had been not so much a month as a year of Sundays and vowed not one month more: time for him to make a choice ... or else.

Francine found it hard to accept, yet again, that Sunday was family, was church, was for making confession, so that sin could begin again on Monday. Her decision was final - it was time to fight for her rights.

Cecile was sick of being the one to be sinned with, of being always the mistress and never the wife and on the second Sunday in September she vowed that this would be his last year as someone else’s husband.

He loves me, he loves me not ... and if not ... WHAT? And WHEN?

And, most intriguingly, WHO?

And what, of course, of the WIVES?

[148 words]

Week #14’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge which this week uses Kay Davies’ “what’s behind the blank windows?” photograph.

Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover. Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book” The number of ought-to-be but not-yet-written books, sadly, increases weekly.

http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html

Berlin tomorrow

We're going to Berlin tomorrow
to meet with my daughter
and a couple of her very good friends
to celebrate her birthday.
Last time I went to Berlin,
in 2004, 
I was riding pillion
on a 1972
BSA Thunderbolt - an A65
From Hull on the ferry
landing in Amsterdam
and I remember
seeing in the sign
as we rode out of the ferry terminal
'Berlin 623k'
It was a bit heart-sinking
but we'd planned
to take three days.
Here I am drawing
the Dom (I think),
amidst a couple of hundred
other BSAs
This time we fly.

Inspiration; imagination

This photo, one of several taken in Stromness as source material for an exhibition I was working towards, was recently used as the Saturday 'Canvas' prompt in Thinking Ten - and it was fascinating to see the various pieces therefrom - and has now been used by my daughter as one of her 100days pieces:
 
http://jkdaviespractice100days2011.blogspot.com/2011/06/12-calendar.html

I just wish I'd painted it to start with!

SuccInctly yours #10 - Grandma's goulash

He laughed, not unkindly, reminding her of humiliation. ‘You’re no better at keeping your balance with a camera than you were trying to ride a bike, are you?'

[A weekly challenge to respond to the photo in less that 140 characters.   This is not something I aim to do regularly but couldn't resist tying this photograph to my own experience] 

Influence remembered à propos of nothing in particular

I remembered a man today, a tutor from long-ago college.

Feeling that us soft and ignorant southerners needed to know about The North he organised a weekend trip to Nottinghamshire, to stay with pit families in terraced houses, toilet down the bottom of the garden, in the snow.
He organised us visits to the Co-op bakery, to a factory making metal cans and to a coalmine – Blidworth – where we descended in the cage, took a train to the coal face and watched the whirring of the gouging teeth, astounded by the noise and the airy cavern at the bottom of the lift-shaft.
In the afternoon he drove us through D.H. Lawrence country, speaking of the man and of the places of his books, the countryside hard edged, unforgiving and beautiful, and then to Hardwick Hall, where he spoke of Bess and of her self-promoting skills to build and to survive.
He was Celtic, dark and passionate, wore a red tie, tweed jacket, taught us Economics, but I cannot recall his name.
The radio in the minibus played the just-released 'The last time’ by the Stones non-stop.