New Year: climbing cat, birds, creative writing, flying pies and Bill Bailey

Happy New Year!

Kasumi, our grey fluffy cat, saw in the New Year by leaping into our cherry tree on New Years morning after watching a pigeon sitting at the top of the tree for about 10 minutes. She only dared jump up into the tree once the bird had flown off. She's rather ungainly in the tree and spent most of the time glaring at the birds from her new vantage point chattering at them. They did not seem bothered. 

Kasumi cat clinging on to the trunk of the tree as she climbs

 She's too noisy and slow to catch birds. As soon as she spots one she chatters at it. Last year I saw some juvenile starlings goading her to chase them then flying at her mimicking her chattering noise! The same starlings would come hopping right up to my feet as I hung the washing out, I was worried one was going to actually peck my toes they were that brazen!

Kasumi stands half way up the tree looking skyward.

Bill Bailey

On the 2nd of January we went down to that London to see Bill Bailey. It was a matinee performance so we planed to get lunch first, but every single Japanese restaurant we went to had a queue out of the door. In the end we tried an Egyptian place selling the worlds first version of the pie. It was lovely. Something like very thin pizza base wrapped around, in my case, spicy sausage meat, olives and cheese. The portions were enormous. So I recommend The Flying Pie, if you're near Covent Garden and are looking for something different to eat. 

Kick start to my writing this year

I have singed up to For Book Sake's Kick Start Your Creative Heart programme for January. It means I get a writing prompt and resources emailed to me every day and a facebook group of other women to share my writing with. So far this week I've written about rail journeys, fairgrounds, school, the new moon and emotional baggage. I'm enjoying it a lot. 

Birds

At this time of year with bare tree branches I can notice the birds better than at other times of the year. They also congregate around our gardens and the edges of the fields more. Although this year I am yet to see the Egret who has visited in previous winters. 

Today I took some photos of the birds in the garden which I've included below. 

A black and white photo of a starling perched between our satellite dish and the drain pipe

A collared dove preening its tail feathers. I think it looks cute with its eye closed. 

The same collared dove showing off those tail feathers! 

2018

Arvon Foundation Writing Course in Shropshire

2018 started with an opportunity I will never forget and forever be grateful for. I earned a free place on an Arvon Foundation writing course in Shropshire. Half of the students had a visual impairment the other half didn't. Our tutors were amazing, the setting was stunning, I learnt so much and I'll treasure the experience all of my life. 

Book shelves at John Osborne's house

Jake and Kerry our tutors 

Maybe the two most valuable things to come out of the week away was it cut down my usage of social media in particular, after a week cut off from all the distractions the internet brings I was not keen to go back to my old ways. I also started reading more and have spent the rest of the year reading. You can see more photos of my week in Shropshire here.

Railway Protest 

Although later in 2018 our railways would go into a complete melt down, when a new timetable was introduced back in January we were protesting for better access at Biggleswade station. Here are a couple of my photographs from the protest and you can see more here

Paul and Shadow Minister for Transport 

Protesters outside Biggleswade station 

Write Like a Grrrl and Brick Lane

In January after completing my Arvon foundation course I started my second Write Like a Grrrl 6 week course just off Brick Lane. The picture below is of some of my favourite street art from around there. The course was fantastic, I met some brilliant women writers and had a lot of fun. 

During April I took part in NaNoWriMo camp where I wrote 30,000 words in a month.

Street art

Hackney History Day with cousin Helen

Cousin Helen and me

In February I met up with my cousin Helen and we spent the day in Hackney researching our family history. We took over a table in the pie and eel mock up shop at Hackney museum and walked around Victoria Park as well as fitting in a bus ride and delicious lunch and drinks. 

Hackney street near Victoria Park

The Beast from the East 

When the snow set in, in late Feb I was busy travelling to the Olympic Park to be interviewed for a job at Scope. I got caught in snow disrupting trains in London but managed to make the interview and got the job! 

Garden in snow

Japan

We escaped the beast from the east, after our plane was doused in warm slush to melt the ice that had formed on it, to holiday in Japan. We visited Osaka which was a new place for both of Jase and I.

Dotonbori canal and neon lights

It was too early for cherry blossom but the plum blossom was glorious.

White eye bird on plum blossom

Gin

2018 has definitely been a year for drinking gin, not lease when Ruth, Rachel and I went to Portobello Road to drink Gin at Gintonica. We had a wonderful time and the gin was amazing. 

As well as drinking gin I drank some spiced mead with Tess in April when we went to see Nerina Pallot in Bristol having amazing fun and visiting a women's world war one photography exhibition as well. 

Gin and tonic 

The Royal Albert Hall

In May Jase and I went to a concert of playstation game music and the Royal Albert Hall, we stayed at the Kensington Gore hotel which was wonderfully sumptuous. 

The Royal Albert Hall

Mum and Dad Move House 

At the end of May, Mum and Dad moved house. 

Mum and Dad

They have some interesting new neighbours. 

goats

South Wales in a heatwave 

I spent a magical weekend in Caldicot South Wales with Tess and her family. It was the height of the heatwave with temperatures close to 30 every day. We visited Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley, my new favourite place in the UK. The scenery is stunning. 

Tess in the abbey

We also took to hiding out in caves with Welsh dragons to keep cool! Fish and Chips over looking the severn estuary at sunset and standing stones were other highlights in a magical weekend. 

Welsh dragon

Whitstable 

Again during the heatwave I visited Whitstable with Ruth and Rachel. We had a wonderful day mooching along the beach, sunbathing, drinking and buying gin and visiting a second hand book shop which declared on it's sign that it had 7 rooms of books! 

7 rooms of books

Hackney canal and the Olympic Park 

Red rowing boats in a fan shape on the canal

Since May I have been working at Scope's new offices which are based in Here East in the Olympic Park. The office overlooks the canal and during the long hot summer it gave me ample time to wander its banks and take photos like this one of some bright boats. 

On the 31st July I completed my year of taking a photo every day challenge. It was a huge relief but I learnt a lot from it as well. 

Weekends of theatre and cultural visits 

During August, Mum and I spent the weekend in London going to 3 theatre productions! I took the photo below from the Globe looking over to St Paul's. We saw Emilia at the Globe which was amazing and then both parts of the Cicero plays by the RSC the next day. 

St Paul's Cathedral at dusk

Later in the summer, we visited John Clare's cottage and Flag Fen which aren't far from where my parents now live. 

Clematis at John Clare's Cottage

In September, Mum and I spent the weekend in Stratford upon Avon which we explored as well as fitting in seeing Tamburlaine and The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare's house 

St Paul's Cathedral

Again Ruth, Rachel and I had a day out in London where we visited the Mythrarium, St Stephen's Wallbrook church for a lunch time concert and then St Paul's in the afternoon. 

St Paul's Cathedral 

Edinburgh 

In October Jase and I headed up to Edinburgh for a long weekend where we ate steak, had Sunday lunch in Keneth Graham's old house which is suitably decorated with Wind in the Willow's memorabilia and visited the Botanic Gardens. I discovered the Edinburgh Gin Company flavoured gins (plum and vanilla.)

Hot pink flowers against a feathery green background

Family Fireworks

No we didn't all have a big barney, instead I went to a firework display with my nieces, brother, sister in law and parents. I had a lovely time, drank more gin, this time violet flavoured.

Pink heart shaped burst of fireworks.

Christmas 

Just before Christmas it was another trip to London where I took this photo of the tree in Trafalgar Square. 

Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree with St Martine's in the Field Church 

Amongst all of that wonderful stuff that happened I ended up back on anti depressants. Though this time I caught my mental health dip in time and was able to carry on working through out the treatment but i did spend a very unhappy week in June in bed with side effects of the medication rather than on holiday as I'd planned. I'm still working on my mental health taking it slowly trying to take care of myself. I've not managed to see my friend Lorraine this year but hopefully I can remedy that in 2019. 

2019

I'm looking forward to 2019 not least because I have a Burns Night Supper away lined up as well as a new Write Like a Grrrrl course to start in the spring. Then come September I'll be off to Australia for a month! 

Brocken Spectre

My shadow forming a Brocken Spectre

So Saturday wasn't just a brilliant reunion with old friends we witnessed a rare meteorological phenomena. It's called a Brocken Spectre and you see them if the conditions are just right. You need the sun behind you shining on to fog or cloud which is to the front and below of you. Then what happens is you shadow is projected onto the fog looking huge and not only that but your shadow has a rainbow halo around it.

The photograph above is of the one I saw when walking on the white horse at Uffington. I suitably spooky place to see one. Apparently in the past climbers would be terrified by seeing them. They're named after a mountain in Germany where sightings of them are common.

I sent my picture to the Met Office when they tweeted about fog this week and they sent me this information about them. There's also a great story about a sighting of one in the 19th century in Scotland. I wonder if these Brocken Spectres could have fuelled the Abominable snowman myth in mountain ranges?

Getting my photograph was difficult as my camera did not, in fact could not, focus on the fog. I had to set it to manual focus and force the camera to focus on the ground just before the drop. For us standing on the hill side the Brocken Spectre's halo was very obvious but as always not so much when you look back at the photograph. So I had to mess around with the saturation of the photo and bring down the white. But it's probably as good as I was going to get.

Reunion

Our 3 shadows 

Saturday just past, I met up with two friends who until very recently I had not seen in nearly 30 years. It was one of the most magical days of my life.

In November last year I met up with my friend Tess who I hadn’t seen in 27 years. Thanks to social media Tess got in touch with me about a year ago and we’ve stayed in touch this time. On Saturday Charlotte joined us for another meet up. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since May 1988, when I left Cornwall to move to Yorkshire.

Leaving Cornwall at 14 was an incredibly difficult thing for me to do. Although we had only lived there for 2 years and 3 months those months coincided with becoming a teenager, and all that entails for a girl. I was 11 when we arrived in Newquay and my head was full of smugglers and pirates and a childish hope for being somewhere new and beautiful. Instead I encountered so many strange things. I went from a school of 200, 9 -13 year olds to a school of over a 1000, 11 -18 year olds. For the first 6 months my life was spent in a bewildered attempt to fit in and be accepted or in a self imposed, dignified isolation.

But I eventually made friends with Charlotte and Tess and things began to change. We were the rejects. The group of girls who didn’t quite fit in with the rest. I was finally accepted for who I was and I felt like I belonged. By 1987 I was extremely happy. My life revolved around my friends. reading and writing romance stories, buying records, singing in the choir, hanging out in Newquay town or on the beach and the crushes we had on various boys (and embarrassingly one of our teachers.)  At one point we even formed a girl group! 

Then all too soon it came to an end when my Dad was posted to Yorkshire, which back then with out cheap phone calls or the internet might as well have been Mars. I tearfully bid farewell to my Cornish friends and had to go through the whole “new girl” thing again but this time as an angry 14 year old, Not much fun for my parents! Luckily Doncaster also produced some wonderful friends who I have in my life still.

Tess and Charlotte had been friends long before I turned up in 1986 and have remained friends ever since. I just popped up for a tiny amount of time. Yet, they still wanted to be friends with me then and now. I feel so incredibly grateful and blessed. When we met up it was as if no time had elapsed. We were so comfortable together, it was so simple and easy. We are quite different in some ways and similar in others, but I think we share a similar outlook, which holds true as much now as it did then. 

The path to Waland's Smithy through the trees

Our day together was so perfect I don’t think I can do justice writing about it. So I am just going to focus on one thing. After walking up and around the white horse at Uffington and a brief stop for a cup of tea in a local pub, we walked to Wayland’s Smithy. We took a detour through the trees and found a log to sit on to eat lunch. There we were three women in our early 40s, wrapped up warm, sitting on a log drinking soup which Charlotte and Tess had brought in flasks and eating cheese pastries I’d picked up at the station. It was freezing although the sun was slanting through the slender trees. We were chatting about our memories of school and our lives. At that point it was if the rest of the world had slipped away. It was just us, the trees and our laughter. I keep thinking we were like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, meeting up again to recount our parts in the adventure and reminisce about our time in the Shire. That act of sharing each others food and company, comfortably, with out effort, with out drama, with gratitude and kindness, was precious and priceless. 

I just wanted to say thank you to Tess and Charlotte for welcoming me back. 

Wayland's smithy in the afternoon sunlight

Scott's antarctic expedition photographs and the poetry ambulance

Yesterday morning I read that some of the photographs taken on Scott's doomed expedition to Antarctica are going on sale. The Guardian article includes two of the pictures for sale. I was drawn to read this article for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was about photography but mostly because last year I read The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, which is his account of Scott's expedition. He was a young man on the expedition. The book was recommended to me under unusual circumstances.

Last June I joined my Mum and her best friend Angela at the Stoke - on - Trent Hot Air Literary Festival.  It was a brilliant few days. One of the initiatives they had there was a poetry ambulance. You could pop in for some emergency poetry treatment. The poetry para-medic was a literature lecturer at Keel University who also takes her poetry ambulance to nursing homes where she writes and reads poetry with patients who have dementia.

We had a lovely chat about what poetry and literature meant to us. After which she prescribed me three poems to read, quietly with a cup of tea. She also recommended reading the Worst Journey in the World.  I found the book extremely moving. A rivverting read of adventure and folly. Set at a time where modern technology was first being used, like the ill fated motorised sleds but being used by men who were Victorians. It's full of stiff upper lips and under statement, of bravery and friendship.

So the article about the photographs piqued my interest. The article mentions the Scott Polar exploration museum in Cambridge where I really must visit.

Of course at the Literary festival I did take some photographs. Here's one of my favourites from the opening celebration at Trentham Gardens. It's a sculpture of a sprite pulling a dandelion clock. I love how the sculptor  manages to create movement.



Then this morning I came across this article mentioning the Scott Polar Exploration museum again and a modern collection of photographs of the North Pole. The stunning images are beautiful but the photographer Timo Lieber says the images show global warming at its worst which is a terrifying thought.

What Great Disability Awareness and Service Looks Like

So I'm writing this post because I have just experienced some of the best customer service in a cafe or shop in a long time. It left me wanting to praise this member of John Lewis' staff publicly. It was only when I was composing my tweet to John Lewis that I realised that not only was it great customer service but a fantastic example of disability awareness. I had been helped in a way which actually made me completely unaware that the motivation for the help was because of my sight impairment. It was like ninja disability awareness!

When I sat down at my table in the John Lewis cafe in Birmingham with my coffee and sauasage sarnie I did so smiling because a member of staff had been so helpful. But as I thought about it I was puzzled. It was almost as if this member of staff knew I was partially sighted. But because I had my hands full with bags and a rucksack on my back, I wasn't using my symbol cane. How had this John Lewis staff member known?

Well the whole thing went like this.

I arrived in the cafe and made my way to the "hot food" stand. There was a couple waiting in front of me. The chap serving cheerfully greeted me and said "We're just waiting for some fresh bacon and sausages."
"Ok" I said, looking at the menus pinned to a board next to me but that menu was for lunch.
"Do you know what you'd like?" He asked.
"Um that's the lunch menu do you have a breakfast one?"
The chap in front of me indicated it was in front of him and moved aside so I could look at it. Of course I had to get up close to read it. I am guessing at this point our breakfast server knew that I couldn't see very well. Though he didn't let on.
Instead he casually started to tell me what was on offer.
"I'll have a sausage sandwich" I decided.

So the fresh food came out and the couple in front of me were served. Then it was my turn. After making up my sandwich the chap told me very clearly where the cutlery was and asked me if I wanted a drink. There was quite a queue at the coffee station so I asked him if there was somewhere else to get a coffee. Her replied
"Yes there is, we have a couple of machines, and it's the exact same coffee beans. Look I'll show you where it is."

And so he left his station and took me to the coffee machine where he made me my Americano. On our way over there he offered to carry my tray because "you have a lot of bags." I politely declined.

He made sure I got to the till safely and left me there after I had thanked him profusely.

Now that might all have been just good customer service and if so that's great because everyone will benefit from that. But in hindsight I think he was particularly attentive because he'd worked out that I couldn't see very well and might struggle using the coffee machine.

I know John Lewis provide disability awareness training for their staff and take customer service very seriously. It really shows when things like this happen. I'm usually not a fan of this kind of canteen / self service set up but John Lewis are clearly making sure that it works for all of their customers. If only other retailers could take a leaf out of their book.

New Camera - pictures of Lumpy cat

So over the years I have posted my pictures on this blog, sometimes more regularly than recent times, and I've also blogged about being a partially sighted photographer Well I have started a new journey with my photography. I have taken the plunge and got a proper digital SLR camera. A Nikon D7200 no less. I had resisted for a long time convinced that I needed the large digital screen, that digital cameras have, to be able to take photographs. My Nikon V1 camera meant I could have all the benefits of a digital camera with a digital view finder and try different lenses and different settings. The trouble was that after a number of years I had two lenses which broke and there just wasn't anything new coming out for the camera. It was like Nikon had forgotten about their V1 camera. Maybe they thought those customers who wanted more would just move to a DSLR.

Jason let me have another go with his digital SLR and I found that I could see through the view finder. What had seemed difficult before now didn't so much.  My eye sight hasn't got any better in the last few years so that's not making the difference. I think the difference is that I have now spent the last 6 years taking photographs and getting used to composing images through a small square. Even with the digital view finder and screen I would regularly take pictures which contained things I had no idea were there. I love taking photos of flowers and often I don't spot the insects or bugs on the flowers until I'm processing the photos on my computer! Often I use the zoom to look for bees using my ears to seek out their direction. I know that I must miss plenty of things other photographers wouldn't but when I do track down that bee using my ears and my zoom it's like finding rare treasure. I am sure the thrill is just the same for those photographers who capture a rare mountain lion.

Speaking of rare mountain lions. I have been using my tabby cat Lumpy as a model for some of my first photographs. So far I am finding no problems using the view finder, once I worked out that red rectangles mean it's not focussing and black mean it is. (My old camera had black meaning not focused green in focus.) Sometimes depending on the background the black squares don't show up too well but that's where being able to choose where I want the camera to focus gives me more control.

The camera has so many settings it's quite a job getting my head round it all. I downloaded Thom Hogan's guide for the Nikon D7200 to discover it had around 1000 pages! Thom Hogan does a great series of guides to cameras which are well worth checking out and buying if you have a new camera or are considering a new one. A little daunted by all of the detail in Thom Hogan's guide I also started watching a YouTube guide for my new camera by Tony and Chelsea Northrup They also have some snappy videos on YouTube which describe general features of digital photography right down to very basics. Jase has also been a real help, explaining things to me. I am not a patient student but he is a very patient teacher!

But it would have been useful to know when Jason changed the camera settings after borrowing it to test how it was working. He set it up to his usual settings, which is to slightly under expose everything. I didn't know this and went outside to take some pictures of Lumpy. It was a very dull day but not so dull that I shouldn't have been able to get a brighter shot of Lumpy than the one directly below.

Lumpy the tabby cat walking towards me - under exposed

When Jase got home from work I said to him I was worried the camera had a fault as it couldn't manage with low light even when I adjusted the aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It was then that he remembered what he had done! He had set the camera to take pictures at 0.7 of an F stop below what the camera was set to. So this under exposed all of the photos I was taking, making them look gloomy.

Of course I was able to adjust this once I was processing the photos. The picture below is after I adjusted it.  

Lumpy the tabby cat walking towards me - brighter this time

 Yesterday I started to practice changing how the camera focuses and took this photo of Lumpy sitting on a box in the garden. I focused just on his face and in particular his eyes.

Close up of Lumpy's face his eyes narrow

I'm lucky that Lumpy is a very willing model when he is in the garden. I have taken pictures of other things other than Lumpy, which I will try and share later in the week. I went to St James's Park in London to take photographs of the birds there. You can always check out my photos on Flickr which I upload regularly.

Camden Town

This weekend I went to Camden with my two friends Ruth and Rachel. It was about a decade since I had last been to Camden. There was a lot which reassuringly was still the same but also quite a lot that has changed. Gentrification is creeping into Camden, which is a real shame. As the woman in the piercing place said to me "You don't come to Camden to buy artisan bread, there's plenty of places to buy artisan bread now in London but there's only one Camden."

After our visit I have written a series of haiku about Camden. I liked the fact that haiku are like little snap shots of a time or place. Camden being even busier than I remember, I thought the haiku could capture those fleeting glimpses you get of the quirky and classic Camden as you mill about through the vast crowds.

Camden Haiku Octet 

Shadows amongst the 

London grime, goths slink seeking

Fancy frills and thrills

Grizzled punk's hair spikes

Skyward in parrot feathered

Breath taking colours

Nirvana is a

White slash across the back of

A middle aged Dad

Indian silk bed-

Spread, patchouli scented, burnt 

Orange elephants

Food from a thousand

Cultures entice the weary 

Tourists to devour

Your future laid out

In intricate cards: your life 

A patchwork of myths

The canal's flank churned

To mud for money feeding

Gentrification 

How long a haven

For hippy, indie kids and

Joyful subversion? 

My first poem selected for publication

I've been posting a lot more of my creative writing on my blog in the last few months. Mainly poems but also this short story I wrote for Halloween. Then earlier this month I submitted  this poem  to the online (and print) Exceptions journal  and it was accepted. I was over the moon. It is my first poem chosen for publication, on their online journal for now but I have asked for it to be considered for the print publication as well, so fingers crossed.

So I thought it might be interesting to write a bit about writing. When I was growing up I had two dream careers, one was to be an actor the other a writer. I ended up teaching drama and English! Woody Allen's droll line "Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach Phys Ed" was always at the back of mind. But I didn't stay long in teaching.

I started writing regularly for pleasure (not just school assignments) at age 12. I wrote poems (back then they resembled pop lyrics) and I wrote romances which I would share with my friends at school. One lunch time when I was busy writing the next instalment to my Emi-Sue romance, in a class room which still had old fashioned wooden desks with lift up lids and holes for ink wells, a boy caught hold of my story. He read bits of it out loud to the others in the class who fell about laughing. In a fit of pique I snatched the pages off him and threw them in the bin. Something I have regretted ever since. My confidence was well and truly dented. I carried on writing though just not in school.

As a teenager I started to write "protest poetry" one rather memorable example, for all the wrong reasons, was written about climate change where I criticised George Bush Snr; I described him as a "hater of broccoli" and then realised I couldn't find anything to rhyme with broccoli. It wasn't long after that that I gave up on rhyme. I was also studying different poets at school like Philip Larkin, Wilfred Owen, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Sylvia Plath. My poetry as a result became more gothic in description and more streamlined in style.

I was still writing stories as well but now they were about the super natural or sic-fi. I didn't share my stories with anyone but I did share my poetry with my friend Lorraine and through out my late teens and early 20s Lorraine and I would have regular poetry writing sessions together over tea or beer, brilliant bursts of creativity.

I never shared my writing with anyone other than Lorraine and a couple of other close friends though.

I stopped writing almost completely for about 10 years. I was always very busy at work and actually writing a lot of reports and guidance for my job. It was something that troubled me a lot, as I had always found writing creatively a cathartic experience. I also started blogging in 2008 and took up photography which seemed the fill that creative gap somewhat.

Then in 2010, I attended a mental health recovery group, which encouraged me to use creative writing as a way to understand and manage my mental health. It was life changing. Within months of taking the course Jase and I had moved from London and I was running my own business, working part time. I started writing again. At first just story ideas and fragments of poetry. Then in 2013, I joined a challenge to write a poem every day. I haven't looked back since.

It is true, I think that writing is viewed differently by society than other creative pursuits. I was very much involved with photography and received no end of encouragement. I had no intention of doing photography professionally. I had no desire to have my photographs published. Though in fact they have been in RNIB publications at work! Similarly I have plenty of friends who are musicians and artists who aren't aspiring to do either professionally. (I also have friends who do want to do this professionally.) But if I say I enjoy creative writing to people they always ask if I have anything published. It's like if someone says "I play the guitar a bit" and you immediately asked them if they have had a top 40 hit yet. Or if someone says "I paint a bit" and you ask when they last had an exhibition at the Tate.

It's harder to share creative writing with an audience as well I think. The internet has made sharing easier particularly in areas like fan fiction. But I've looked, and locally we have no writers groups. I'd need to travel to Cambridge or London to take part in a regular writers group. (To be fair Bedford might have something but that's far harder for me to travel to than either Cambridge or London and yet it's closer! Thanks to crappy public transport in Bedfordshire.)

Anyway all this made me realise that I needed to write for myself, then see if there were any journals or online groups that might be interested in publishing my work. But first and foremost I would write for fun, for me. So that's what I am doing.

I'm hoping to start attending a writers group and course for women in Camden later in the year and I am writing more and more in my spare time both poetry, short stories and I am working on a novel. I find writing lowers my blood pressure which is a plus. So expect more creative writing on here and hopefully a few more of my pieces will be chosen for publication. I'm also following a creative writing course book and trying to be more disciplined, diverse and experimental with what I write. I am filling up note books fast and to paraphrase Virginia Wolf I am searching for the pearls within all the writing within them!

Mental health poetry

As I've mentioned before I am taking part in a challenge to write a poem or something creative every day during 2016. I post what I write on a small Facebook group for friends also taking part in the challenge to write more.  

Over the last month or so (actually since the beginning of December really) I've been struggling with my mental health again.  Amongst the poems I've drafted about nature or train journeys I've written about my mental health. I thought this sequence of poems might be useful to share to show the stages of my mental health. 

Mindfulness 

Empty your mind

They say as if

I could just break

Open its shell

Fragile casing

And pour out its

Meagre contents

Like cracking an egg. 

Brittle fragments

White sharp shards of

Memory and

Matter mixing

With the mess of

Thought impression,

Leaving nothing

Behind but a void. 

Ambushed

Ambushed, my memories wrenched from me

Leaving behind jagged shards and bright splinters

Like glimpses of my past through shattered mirrors 

Half an eye or a lip all that remain of a face. 

Flickers and fragments of chaotic scenes:

Grown men weeping

The arch of a flaming branch swinging

A motorbike roaring down a school corridor.

Disjointed but not unrelated,

Scattered leaves before a bonfire, yet to catch light.

Facebook On This Day

Washing stagnates in the belly of the machine

No longer rocking queasily 

Dirty dishes heaped in squalid piles, offerings 

To the gods of procrastination

A walk to the post box and arctic expedition

So I stay at home 

Facebook's Never Miss A Menory, tells me of

Nine Februaries spent like this 

Black Dog

When the black dog comes

I can not make a simple choice

When the black dog comes

I can not perform the simplest chore

When the black dog comes

In the smallest things I find no joy

When the black dog comes

I am a tree petrified to the core

When the black dog barks

He drowns out all sound

When the black dog barks 

I cower for cover

When the black dog barks 

I can not be found

When the black dog barks 

I have become another

When the black dog leaves

Which he always will

When the black dog leaves

I struggle free

When the black dog leaves

My senses fill

When the black dog leaves

My life unfreezes. 

New Day

Rain washed morning streets

Fresh light on an old scene

Paving as reflective as mirror

Inverts the brightening sky 

So the gulls reel at my feet, 

Their cries a scree of sound, 

Fragments falling from the clouds 

Raining on the park birds' song. 

Walking as far as the light house,

Looming sentinel of saltiness 

It's eye blank never blinking 

Blind to the sea's gleam and glitter, 

I notice on my way but not when coming back

An abandoned sodden bobble hat

Strewn like a bloated sea urchin 

In an expanse of inky Carpark. 

Wishing I'd brought a coat 

In a dress smothered in poppies

I shiver towards the memorial

Where a lone man reverently reads 

The names of all of the fallen

I'm so grateful for this journey 

And chance to see new places

And think of the old things differently.  

This is something I couldn't do last week

Sit back, eyes closed listening 

To rain peppering the roof 

Of this train platform shelter

To the flourishes of bird song 

The scurrying sound of nature 

To the industrial roar of the 

High and low speed trains 

To smell my freesia and pear

Perfume, a rare luxury 

To drink scolding creamy coffee

Savouring the flavour 

And just enjoy the experience

For what it is: being alive.