Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2012

A road less travelled ... or when to take the muddy path

Hah! Sometimes poets know best. ... take Robert Frost for example and his poem "The Road Not Taken". Had I heeded his advice; had I heeded the advice knowingly tutt-tutting inside my head; had I stopped for a moment to acknowledge the glee on Four-legged-friend's face when he realised I was about to allow him the muddiest bath of his life ... well! ... ... here's the sorry tale and a muddy tail for good measure - "Two roads diverged in a wood ... long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth" The road ahead was shorter. The road behind had two dog walkers, a pair of Labradors (one being an extremely cantankerous old lady, whom we normally avoid at all costs, sometimes with considerable elongation of our walk) and two black bears (Newfoundlands actually, swimming in the stream I had wanted to give Four-legged-friend a dip in, before I worried about him being swept away by the recent-rain-swollen torren

Of ranting, love and jingle bells

Rant alert sirens can be turned off. I did enough ranting yesterday, thoroughly ranted out ... until the next time. If you want to see what got under my skin, have a look at this http://jottify.com/works/suffer-the-children-no-more/ or read the papers. Got to change the subject quick or I'll be off again. I've said it before, but - you've guessed it - I'm going to say it again, the best three words in the English language are "I love you, Mummy." For daddies, insert Daddy. Oops! I never was good at maths, or even basic counting ... four words! These are the best four words, probably in any language. In my house, they are usually followed by several minutes of "I love you more" and "No, I love you more" and "You can't know how much I love you anyway, but it's definitely more than you love me" and "I love you infinity much" and "I love you infinity-much-times-a-hundred" and "Which is still i

Rejecting the rejection ... and why Littlest isn't an atheist

Huh! Being rejected is never easy. But  J K Rowling was allegedly rejected eighteen times before Christopher Little took her on, so my current tally of seven means I have a way to go yet. Ho hum. Can I bear another three months of daily stealing myself to open my otherwise sleepy email account - the one reserved for secret ordering of gifts;  receipt of work related journals and newspaper subscriptions that would otherwise clog up the home account and make the recipient of secret gifts less than happy; registration of my facebook, twitter, blogger and jottify accounts; oh! and agent submissions, of course? Following this stealing activity and relief at lack of a reply, there's the bit where I kid myself - maybe I haven't heard because they're reading it; maybe they like it and are waiting 'til the evening or weekend to phone; maybe someone will finally give me licence to spend all day, every day being a writer ... I tend at this point to drift off into fantasy. Until

Magic!

"I was born to believe in magic." Thus pronounced Littlest from the back seat of the car. "After all, I have to, because I've seen a fairy." She asked if I believe in magic and in a rather oblique way (not wanting to hurt the feelings of the child, off school, sporting a fever, who was distraught to discover that I don't believe her teddies have sensitive feelings too) I replied that there are some things that happen that I don't understand and that if she wants to call that lack of understanding magic then that's fine. She quickly put me in my place, "Just because you haven't seen something doesn't mean it's not real. Look at God - well you can't obviously look at him - because no-one's seen him. Well he's real. And he's magic of course. Just like Father Christmas!"

Of hopeful time wasting, present lists and planting trees

Written on Saturday 8th December: "But that would be a waste of my time," I replied to Littlest's request to spend time browsing in shops this morning. I then listed all the chores I planned to do, when we got home. She paused, thinking, then asked, "If you  did  have any time to waste how long would it be?" And persevered, "Surely you have some time you  could  waste. I just want to know how long. We could waste time together." Her idea of wasting time was to browse and add to her Christmas list: the list that she had taken shopping with her ... on a clipboard! The chores I had to complete on getting home mainly involved the planting of trees. Or to be more precise, the final planting of the final tree in our fruit-pie/apple-crumble-generating orchard - the one that will feed fruity puddings to our grandchildren. This task has not been easy to finish - It got off to a good start. Garden centre visited, trees selected, paid for (those