Walking The Dog

If I put my hand up, if I try to have my say, will anybody listen?  If I tread softly in a wood of silver trees and whisper susurrations; snippets sparsely spoken from my soul - my supplications rising in the warming breeze, will my words rustle any of the paper leaves and stop them falling? Falling, f  a   l     l      i       n        g falling to our precious fragile earth. Fragile is our world. Fragile our grasp of what - it - is. One world. Precious. And us, just, holding on, mere atoms in a surging sea of selfish, greedy strife. Fragile is our hold, our will, our voice. Our life. To right a wrong with words is right. To hit back with fury risks a monster roused. Stirred to act; tit for tat. Tit for tat. Tit for tat. An eye for an eye. Think on that. If I put up my hand and cry. And cry. Will it stay the will of leaders who capitulate and bluster and risk throwing o...

I own dogs - Four-legged-friend and Bertie Baggins.  I own dogs and therefore I walk. I walk the dogs. And I walk me, obviously. Learning how to walk is one of the milestones on our journey from infancy to adulthood. So ordinary. So fundamental. So universally ... well, ... useful. We walk to the sink to brush our teeth. We walk to the kettle to pour a hot drink. We walk to fall into the arms of those we love. We walk to work. We walk to the cinema.  We walk to ....  To? We don't always have to walk to do or achieve something.  We can walk aimlessly. In Old Scots this would be daundering, as in 'I go out for a wee daunder wi' my dugs.' Like this - Walk - definition, (mostly) from online OED: verb - to move at a regular pace by lifting and setting down each foot in turn, while never having both or all feet off the ground at the same time (that would be a jump!) In the English language, we have lots of words (... again, mostly f...

Sometimes, when I visit an art exhibition, it is enough to spend an hour or so getting lost in the paintings. Sometimes, the paintings are not to my taste and rather than getting lost in the art, it loses me and I leave feeling that I have walked through a sweetshop and failed to eat any of the sweets. I have been to art exhibitions where every picture is a wow - Turner, Lowry, the 2017 BP portrait award - and to some where none is - Rauschenberg at Tate Modern. And I have been to some unexpected gems - Ernest Shepherd's illustrations at the Winnie the Pooh exhibition at the V&A and a marine art exhibition in 2016, in a small maritime gallery in Mystic, USA. Special exhibitions or event exhibitions are expensive and I have devised a private, retrospective is-it-worth-it score. If there is one picture that makes me stop and stare. And stare again. That pauses time. And takes my breath away. If there is one of these - there only needs to be one - then the is-it-worth-it wor...

I can't believe I've let #WinniethePoohDay pass without posting something about the bear of little brain who is and always has been my favourite literary character. Were I ever cast away on a desert island, the collected tales of Pooh would be the book or books I would choose to have with me. Alan Alexander Milne created a character who has universal appeal. Whether we are young or old, in China or Dubai or Greenland or a windy village in a wintry England, we all have Pooh days. Days when we 'stop to think and forget to start again.' And days when we fail to 'pay attention to where we are going and without meaning to get nowhere.' I have those days all the time. There is Winnie-the-Pooh thinking or philosophy or whatever-you-want-to-call-it in all of us. For a birthday treat this week, my big children invited me to London. It was one of those 'I'll come down* to London and spend the day with you for your birthday doing whatever yo want to do'...

Snoring. Snoring - go on; say 'snoring.' And again. And again. Play with the word; roll it around your mouth - sno-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-rrrr-ring. Try it again. I defy you to do this without a tiny twitch appearing at the corner of your mouth. A tiny twitch plus a slight wrinkling of the skin at the outer angles of your eyes. Why is snoring funny? Why, for example, did I find it impossible to discuss snoring yesterday without smiling; in a professional situation where smiling was probably inappropriate? Snoring is funny. In the same way that everything about toilets is funny to a seven year old boy. It makes us smile; childishly. It's something only other people do; isn't it? It's funny! Unless you live with someone who snores. Or you are the snor-ee ... snor-er ... ? ... one who snores ... and live life in a permanent fog of day-time exhaustion. Snoring is not restricted to humans. Four-legged-friend and Bertie Baggins snore: they sprawl in front of the...

Fart - definition: do I have to spell this one out? We all know what a fart is. It's Bertie Baggins emptying the room faster than even he could leap up at the rustle of wrapper and hint of a biscuit. Perhaps it's his passion for all things biscuit-crumby and sticky and generally curled up and slowly decaying that he finds on the kitchen floor or dead in the middle of a field that leads to the efficacy of his room-evacuating talent. The picture of innocence Farts are also the bubbles suggesting the early morning swimmers are using some internal combustion engine to propel themselves up the pool and that the changing room toilets are probably best avoided when the swimming session ends. Farts are universally unpleasant and embarrassing; always and instantly orphaned and totally necessary. We all do them. Yes ... we do; all of us. At all ages; next time you're near a very young baby watch it jump in  surprise when it noisily passes wind. Fart as flatulence is from...

I haven't done this for a while. Blogging, I mean. The while has been spent tackling the annual creative writing exercise otherwise referred to as the NHS appraisal.  There must be a better way of establishing if we are fit to practice. A way that doesn't involve finding fifty differently worded paragraphs in which we comment on how we reflect on out learning activities. Yes - okay - it does make us think about our role. Yes - it also confronts situations where we might have acted differently. And it does force us to keep current with latest research and treatment protocols. So, maybe it does enable us to practice better medicine. But how many ways can I find to say 'I am working to relevant standards.'  I prefer this creative form of linguistic perambulation.  Perambulation - this has become our home, code-word for walk. If we mention the w word, Four-legged-friend and Berti-Baggins go into paroxysms of over-excited tail- wagging and barking. We, therefore, ...