Second-hand is restyled pre-loved Second-hand gives way to Charity Shops Pre-loved is the new height of fashion Pre-loved is pre-valued…
To the ardent de-clutterer The professional house-clearer Disposer of parents’ schmutter Second-hand is reborn pre-loved
Where once such clearance Activities gleaned a pittance High Street donation is now the way Second-hand gives way to Charity Shops
But for those prepared to make the effort The internet offers a third commercial vision And Charity Shops are mined for Vintage Pre-loved is the new height of fashion
Is a lover to be devalued Because they have been In previous relationships? Pre-loved is pre-valued…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write a Cascade poem – You will use each line from your first stanza in subsequent stanzas. For example, if your first stanza is three lines, your will have four stanzas. The first line of your first stanza becomes the last line of the second stanza. The second line of the first stanza becomes the last line of your second stanza, and so on.
This poem is also written for the Keighley Library [IRL] Group whose prompt for this month is Pre-loved…
2 – My daughter, Beverley, is coming round later to do some housework. I say my daughter, but step-daughter, strictly speaking, but after being in her life for 43 years out of 56, I go with daughter. She comes round every Tuesday to spend time with her mother but has gone by the time I get back from work, so I regard this as my time with her and we will sit down to tea and a chat as well as the cleaning…
3 – I can confirm that signs of Spring abound…
These bulbs have been planted for a few years…/
Whereas these ones, and the ones below, were newly planted last Autumn…
And these straggly strugglers, must have self-seeded in a pot of mighty Stargazer Lillies that just get bigger every year…
Shrubs too are preparing their blossom…
And as testament to how little frost we have had (so far – fingers crossed), the Nemetia has survived the Winter outside – which is as well since we have nowhere indoors for them…
4 – I still have a job! Work is calming down – a bit – as I wrestle the details of labelling product under control…
5 – I have stopped beating myself up for not progressing the novel and have decided to stimulate my writing by undertaking the 12 Short Stories in 12 Months challenge. The January prompt was Glow and I uploaded on the prescribed day and have received one positive comment so far. You have to comment on at least 4 stories… My Writing Critique Partner, Nik, in troubled Minnesota (troubled by Trump and not the alleged crime wave) but I haven’t been able to find his story yet amongst the 510 other stories…
6 – This group of supportive people
7 – I have managed to spend some time writing for my April A to Z – I am midway through “C” – who knew there were so many fabrics beginning with “C”…
8 I have been trying out a Continuous Blood Sugar Monitor – a free sample from a company who hope to get me hooked on their product, and indeed, I have ordered a month’s supply to follow on, but at £30/10 days usage, it is too expensive to carry on permanently, and my doctor’s practice refuse to fund it instead of the finger-pricking tests that risk neuropathy of the finger tips at £30/month. So I am trying to learn what I can in a month + and may or may not carry on after that. Here’s what I have learned so far – its very convenient to beable to check my blood sugar, 5 minute by 5 minute, on my phone, if slightly addictive. The experiment has incentivised me to make a spreadsheet of all the carbs I eat and between the monitor and my monitor, I have been able to see what effect carbs have on my body. So not only have I reduced my daily intake to 168 grams per day, but I have been able to hone my meals to slower acting carbs thus avoiding big spikes. I advise anyone who is type 2 Diabetic, to give these sensors a go, even if, like me, it is only for a month – to gain insight…
9 – Weekly washing done and in the dryer or hanging up to dry…
You write a novel lickety-split the words pour out upon the page the word count rising like a fountain scenes fill chapters – chapters parts That’s when the fun starts
What you have is just a first draft send it to an agent, they would just laugh assuming you even made it off the slush pile rejection letters bring you down for a while but you must pick yourself up dust off your writing tool of choice and launch your second, third and even fourth draft polishing your bon mots, refine your voice, flesh out your characters, channel your craft That’s when the fun starts
Recruit a critique buddy bully your friends and family into reading confess to your partner you fear it needs a professional count your pennies into tottering piles it’s unlikely they will reach an editor ceiling What the Dickens! Release your Kraken in blog-size bites fret not at savage comments don’t get into fights enough opinions to make your head spin That’s when the fun begins
At last your manuscript is done but you must face one last and monumental question to publish yourself or on great houses wait or look for small and independent publishers but are you sufficiently niche, do you fit a genre and if you forge heroically through this labyrinth That’s where the fun starts
Editors and graphic artists are but a few wait till the sensitivity readers get their hooks in you blurbs written by the great and good all these hurdles you should reckon to jump and clear if write you would and getting published… That’s when the fun starts
Interviews and promotional tours signing your book so much it bores and after many hotels bland your royalties pay for holiday sands but just as you lie back sipping a drink your editor ringtone and phone start to blink No rest for the weary – up and at ‘em dearie Success means your public seek for seconds strike while the iron is hot she reckons You face a blank screen… That’s when the fun starts
Over at dVerse Poets Pub,Grace in OpenLinkNight invtes us to submit a poem of our choice! This poem, tongue in cheek, is not from personal experience but pure wishful thinking, and were it to come true, it would be, as somebody once said “A lovely problem to have…”
– If you wondered why I didn’t post here last week, it was because I had a crisis at work! I work Tuesday to Thursday lunchtime but on my way home last Thursday, my immediate boss rang to say that Trading Standards had turned up unannounced and were not happy with our labelling of our products. This is one of the areas that I am responsible for but he didn’t ask me to come back in – which I would have done and would have saved him being made to feel like a naughty boy for the duration of their visit – the whole afternoon! My work, doing the things that others either can’t or don’t want to do, is also not always fully valued because it doesn’t generate revenue in the way that, say, sales or production itself do, but things like getting the details of nutrition right on labels are legal requirements and under the rapid growth in wholesaling that we have undergone in the last year, many products have been added to our system by people other than me and there are details missing. All of which is to say, that I spent every day of my 4.5 days off, going through all the data that creates the labels in order to fix the problem! Except for Monday when I only got up early and only did two hours work before a family emergency gained priority. I am grateful that the task is now almost complete, and checked and that going forward, the protocols I have been calling for around the introduction of new products, stand a greater chance of being followed after the rap on the knuckles…
– On Sunday, the family grapevine was buzzing with the news that Barbara’s brother was in hospital and we had no way of contacting him since his phone was not responding and his partner was abroad. After some detective work by several family members, the hospital that Steve was in, was located and we got to speak to him. He had fallen and his iPhone was indeed not working, so I searched for an old phone to take to him, and on Monday, Barbara and I drove to the hospital just north of Manchester – an hour away, arriving just as he was waiting to be discharged. After a couple of hours waiting for his meds to be dispensed, we drove him home, got him settled in with the knowledge his partner would be home that night – he is doing well now…
– Sunday had also been Barbara’s birthday and I took a break from my labours to bring us over to our daughter Beverley’s in the next village for afternoon tea with a few grandsons and one girlfriend (who is now in India for a couple of months to learn Yoga teaching). So that was a nice interlude…
– A week later and the house is still awash with flowers, to Barbara’s delight, at our age, there are few material things we desire so flowers hit the spot…
5. – Normal service is now being resumed in all areas – I posted a poem, “The Cartography of Life”, for a prompt from the dVerse Poets Pub which I was glad to see was visited by our own Artmater – so nice when people explore the blog for the other things to be found posted here…
6. – After a repetition of the fault with uploading photos here and another round of consulting the tech guys at Bluehost – they finally said that they had tracked down the issue, which I presume was with a third party piece of software since they couldn’t give a timeframe for fixing it – however it now seems to be working as the picture above loaded without issue…
7. -I manged to pick up my ukulele(s) after Christmas, and now that the work crisis is over, I intend to play more regularly – I play all sorts of songs but I have a lot from the ’20’s an ’30’s and more recently some more jazz numbers. I didn’t make it to ten today but I leave you with a favourite rendition of Carole King’s “One Fine Day” by the lovely Sophie Madeline. Sophie made an album of songs as well as the 50 songs of which this was the first, that she posted in 59 days on YouTube before sadly retiring from the world of musical performance on health grounds…
Have a great week ahead, each and everyone of you Gratudinals (and anyone else who stumbles in here…)
Happy the man who dreams his purpose plots his course to achieve that very goal marches to the beat of his own drum and pity one forced to follow roads laid down by parents’ aspirations but I drifted into adulthood with no pressure and no direction and took many turns along the way slowly grew into the man I am Though I am old with wandering
Love life is the companion to work the superficial couplings of youth conducted with more vigour than sense reaching the sunny uplands mid-life settling into a career I thought would last a lifetime, a love to match but people carry pasts within them like hidden rocks in a calm ocean and accidents deflect one’s passage Through hollow lands and hilly lands
To know another is a life’s work the unity of coupledom is illusion, we travel parallel at best, learning the geography of roads built across bogs of trauma always ready to gently subside and mire a person in buried past and paths are hard to find in a slough of despond and she has lost her way I will find out where she has gone
Looking back at the path I followed there is more coherence than I thought skills grown and transferred in work and life and love too, so much surer than in youth and all the scars and breaks accreted are the medals of experience and trying not to look toward the end but focus on the roadside flowers the next generations we began And kiss her lips and take her hands…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in FormForAll, Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to writa a Glosa, a Spanish poetry form in which four lines borrowed from a poem by another – the cabreza, are expanded upon over 4 ten-line stanzas… I chose lines from WB Yeats, who I have loved since studying him at school, and whose poems still resonate with me today. In 1995, I went to live in Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats is from, and is buried beneath nearby Ben Bulben mountain. I was a signwriter and painted a sign and mural of Yeats and his work, for The Winding Stair bookshop there – you can see me working on it in this news clip…
The light filtering through the shutters picks up a little of their blue on its predawn passage into the white-walled beige, marbled floor bedroom sun rises swifter than at home not quite the tropics but tantalisingly close to Africa
The sun rises scarlet and all-consuming of the sky – silhouetting the island dark purple across the bay Red sky in the morning doesn’t translate to Crete where most days in this lockdown Winter that is not like our Winter begin with a red curtain raiser. Soon blinding light floods the sky, the Bay the mountains delicately bluing their shadows and highlighting their tops before the rising heat filters everything with glimmering heat haze.
We sit in the shade of the terrace beneath the deep green leaves of the carob tree and count the millipedes that have climbed the delicately off-white walls in the night dash, reaching for who knows what insectile heaven… A fallen comrade dark brown in desiccation is moving sideways in unlikely reanimation until we see that his body is being carried back to the nest by a tiny black ant a tenth his size we sit astounded by this feat but don’t forget to film it for posterity or a rainy day reminder when we are one day returned to England.
I walk down to town for market day mixing with brightly dressed younger women and black wrapped older ones in widows weeds with only an occasional male to keep me company. The azure sea is only feet away
The couple who live on the yacht just out in the bay are here, and we chat in the shade of a vegetable stall loaded with piles of black glossy aubergines and ripe red tomatoes next to bunches of wild greens, picked from among the hundred or so Crete proffers – if you know what you are looking for. Cyrille’s once blonde hair is salt and pepper tied back in a ponytail their clothes too, faded with exposure to sun and saltwater.
I spend some time chatting with the banana man who sells nothing else and whose English is good enough for a conversation. I am English and so not averse to discuss the weather – he talks of the recent thunderstorms whose hailstones devastated his neighbours’ crops but divinely spared his while Barbara and I had been enjoying the night of sturm und drang from the safety of our covered balcony the crackle and crash of it ricocheting and rambling around the mountains and – the ultraviolet flashes turned into dark sound.
Walking back up the long hill to the village, I pass the white and ochre, black and grey patchwork trunks of the group of gum trees foreigners too – all the way from Australia these strangers who fit in so well people believe them to be native.
Home again in the cool of the flat and after a siesta I pick a bright yellow lemon from the tree within reach of our balcony and squeeze it into dark green olive oil to dress the salad of tomatoes and cucumbers I hauled up from the market – dot it with tiny Cretan olives – mostly grown for oil and look out on the bonfires ranged around in the olive groves as farmers burn the prunings of their trees.
1 – The Jasmine seems to be holding its own against some quite sharp frosts…
2 – Indoors, we have been enjoying the scent from this lovely basket of bulbs – a Christmas present…
3 – I sent off for a tapestry circle so that I could begin the Hooking Kit my sister Helen sent for Christmas – it is, as it says on the tin, most therapeutic…
4 – The named storm passed us by this week and we have had no snow this year…
5 – We were pet sitting young Winnie, our daughter’s Border Collie for a few hours yesterday, she is now old enough to travel in the footwell of the car calmly…
6 – Hereabouts, each Yorkshire stone quarry marks its dressed stone with a different marking – ours has simple parallel lines of dashes – photographed in yesterday’s welcome sun…
7 – The Poets Pub has started prompting again after the Christmas break – I typed up a poem from my writing group about “a time I was in danger” – a sailing story in which I wisely turned back – else I might not be here to tell the tale (for which I am grateful)…
8 – Grateful for the TTOF – especially on a dark, dank day like today…
9 – Grateful that I will be having my bi-weekly chat with my sister in Nova Scotia and trusting that even if Trump invades Canada, she will be safely remote there…
10 – Grateful that the tide of opinion seems to be turning against Trump and his dictatorship and crossing my fingers that the American people will find the right action to take to restore democracy and rebuild the damage at home and abroad…
A poet is a person whose language Becomes a special form of Communication, a message – Directed words with meaning for Everyman in their world of “things” Flinging out new ideas for the times, Gestating a better way to grasp for Hope that births a movement from Individual to friends, to groups that Jump to join a movement with Kinetic energy that enjoins all to Love, not hate, the poet sings Metaphor, alliteration and rhythm and No style or form is unsuitable to carry Out the mission sacred, the Poet’s role from print to poetry slam Questioning, commenting, highlighting Rights denied, inequity amplified So the message – at first a pretence Trickles, seeps, runs like a stream Underground, which nobody can dam Violence cannot hold back the flow of Waves of awareness, rejection of the Xenophobic in favour of the xenogogue Young and old align in the new Zeitgeist and the poet seeks new inspiration.
Danger is not always found in dark places and on a sunny, sparkling water day I nearly lost my life sailing a dinghy a day after the storm swept the Mediterranean the only sign of its passing, the long lazy undulating swell that swished almost silently up the slipway where my friends helped me position the tiny boat with its single sail brought on a roof rack, their part played, they departed for our rendezvous down the coast
Out round the headland and turn right was my plan, it seemed feasible mast stepped and rigged, I pushed off down the concrete slipway, which, slippery with slime, shot me downwards into the clear water of the corner of the coast the cliffs stretching out to the headland on my right, and behind me to the left a rocky stretch, broken only by the slipway enclosed between concrete walls where nobody watched my sudden progress into deep water
I pushed the daggerboard down into it’s slot, tightened the sail, and gripped the tiller to set my course – a series of alternating tacks left to open sea and right, towards the cliffs, then a couple of tacks into the wind should do it I thought, then around the headland and a straight run down the coast the wind behind me and a peaceful glide to the rendezvous beach but soon I realised that every tack away from the cliffs – broadside on to the greasy swells, rolled me strongly, spilling the wind from my sail, slowing my progress and each tack into the wind, was not making the progress I hoped, and each time I found myself back at the cliff, faster than seemed right, and then I saw the cave beneath the headland a lazy wave suddenly smashing tons of water into its maw and I realised my efforts were only bringing me closer to being sucked into that awful mouth and crunched and nobody would ever know what became of me and so discretion, the better part of valour I turned around and with the wind behind me, I headed back to the slipway
But danger was not yet passed as I remembered the slippery slope I would have to negotiate, and speed seemed the only way to reach the top and with no regard to the bottom of the boat, I urged it on pulling up the dagger board at the last minute and trusting my aim I shot up the slime, sail still straining and tumbled out near enough to the safe ground to make it up with just one slip and pulled the dinghy after me before a following swell should pluck it back…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics, invites us to write in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop, paying particular attention to consciously incorporating accuracy (detail), spontaneity (immediacy), and mystery (revelation) in writing the poem.
Ten things for which I give thanks this first week of 2026…
1 – Christmas Day was spent at my daughter’s house and I was grateful that I was not responsible for the cooking, beyond two large chickens one of which I took over for the carnivores amongst us. The other one was part of a buffet at ours on Boxing Day and of course, I made bought too much food so we will be compromising our diet for weeks to come…
Four of my six grandsons on Christmas Day with Barbara, their Nan, in the middle…
2 – I promised to show you the present I bought for Barbara – I was on safe ground here – unlike choosing clothes – because Barbara is the Immelda Marcos of handbags and this one was one of her favourite colours – mission successful!
3 – Barbara bought me a set of Sabatier chef’s knives – the top three in the picture below. The fourth down was a present from my parents when I wen t to university and I have used it almost every day since and through two food businesses. It is a carbon steel knife which means if it is not cleaned and dried immediately after use it will rust… Despite this care, it has worn away as it used to be the length of the fifth knife – which was a gift from an old schoo; friend, who lives in France and collected tokens from his supermarket, exchanged for this knife which he gifted as a replacement, having seen the diminished status of my first Sabatier! The new set come with self-sharpening cases which they need, as they are very sharp indeed and you wouldn’t want to brush against them unguarded…
4 – Jake, the grandson who was travelling with his Doctor girlfriend this Summer, gave me a set of spices from Morroco – I wonder if you can guess what they are?
My sister in Canada has made me a hooker! I confess that I opened it early as I had no clue what to get for her – I decided to send her a Needle-felting kit, so we now we shall both be quietly crafting…
5 – The low Winter sun reaches parts of the house not usually illuminated, here striking the top of the stairs through the upstairs windows… For the builders among you, the doors were all made from reclaimed wood so they will never shrink!
6 – I am participating (along with 20,000 others) in a drug trial of an oral version of Semaglutide. I had an interview with the project after 3 months of the run-in doses and will now be randomised for real or placebo. I hope I am on the real ones since the object of the drug is to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Semaglutides in higher doses are the injectable weight-loss drugs and whilst this one seems to be having a beneficial effect on blood sugar and blood pressure, it will likely not cause much weight loss. I shall be watching my test results carefully to see whether I think I am on real or placebo… The trial is over 5 years…
7 – I had lunch in Harrogate (about 45 minutes drive) with Tricia, my American, second cousin once removed and her husband Jack and their two sons, wife, girlfriend and one grandchild. From left to right, me, Tricia, Jack, Min (Korean), Tusk, Palmer, Eda (Turkish) and Josiah. I had not met Palmer, Min and Tusk before so ot is great to now know the whole family!
Myself holding forth at the lunch table. We had Blackeye Beans and Tomato which is a typical Southern dish and I took some of my Persimmon Cake which is also a Southern treat…
8 – I have finally made a start on writing the pages for the A to Z for April and have completed the Theme Reveal, and the A and B pages. If I can get all the posts prepared in advance, I will have more time for reading and commenting on other people’s posts…
9 – After as deep a dive into the back end of computing as I have done since working with Windows 95, all to no avail, and with resorting to top-level help from BlueHost, I got my picture uploading problem solved -only to find it has returned this morning – will it load into Linkzy – I shall soon see…
10 – Grateful to be part of this community of gratitude – Happy New Year to you all!
