17th October: Ten Things of Thankful

Things for which I am thankful for this week…

I realise that my TToT’s have become vast and sprawling of late, understandable when covering travels, but perhaps placing an undue demand on you lovely readers and so I am trying to rein in a little this week…

1- Due to my travels I missed out on the TToT meme of photographing the second bookshelf down on the right-hand side of the right-most bookshelf as you enter the room – which in the case below, is my bedroom/study…

2- Grateful for the view from the smaller of our kitchen windows (we live in an upside-down house, so the kitchen is upstairs) and here shows the lovely early morning Autumn sunshine. Hypograt, the view is being overtaken by a Christmas tree which a neighbour planted in the graveyard many years ago. During our 6 month abscence during covid, said neighbour curtailed the top of the tree, but, as trees will do, it simply sprouted a new crown which is now well past the kitchen window and I include a shot (with different weather altogether) from a mere 15 months ago to show how fast it grows…

3- Going to the cinema – we have a choice of Northern Morris Cinemas in two of our local towns – independents who struggle but are surviving, albeit with slightly sticky carpets in the lobby, and The Ilkley Cinema, a posh independent with three rows of settees for seating (so quite small audiences in two screens) and where pizza, cake and coffee are brought to your seat! I went to watch “Pressure” about the conflict between and American and English meteorologist to deliver the right forecast and allow the D-Day invasion to proceed – excellent! A tribute to meteorologists…

4. At the risk of inflaming Clark’s bulb envy, the last in the bulb succession for the year flowered this week, the Spider Orchid Lily. I showed them to you last year, when they were a late planting yet still flowered in July so I expected them to be earlier this year, but here we are in October, after an admittedly late Summer/mild Autumn…

5- Hypograt – Barbara cannot bring herself to go out today as planned, which means that I will be working on my mini-poetry book project instead. I would much rather we were going out – depression is the pits…

6- The last few weeks have been so busy that I have hardly got any writing done, you may recall that I had to get up at 5am to complete my Deadlines short story last week, however I managed to write for one of the dVerse Poets Pub prompts this week which you can read here. The Deadlines story was my second attempt at a piece of fan fiction and although I didn’t flag it as such, I was surprised that none of the commenters picked up on it! I can’t link to the Deadlines site because it is closed to non-participants but I realised I can make it available to you here – see if you can guess the book it is a fan-extension of…

7- I am still getting dribs and drabs of Poetry Postcards arriving (though I still have about 10 bonus ones to reply to) – its nice that the festival putters on…

8- Grateful for the TToT since, as well as the lovely people it connects me too, it acts like a kind of diary – which was after all, the original idea of a Blog…

9- I did manage to write a poem for my Keighley Library Poets Group which will be meeting on Tuseday evening. The prompt was Wonder which was also the National Poetry Day prompt for this year. Keighley library was the beneficiary of a £10,000 grant towards its construction, by Andrew Carneige the Scottish born millionaire who made his fortune in America and used it to promote literacy by building many libraries all over Britain – bless him…

10- Hypograt – I fell over in a building site, an old Department store, Brown and Muff, known eventually as “The Harrods of the North” after it was bought by the House of Fraser which owns Harrods in London. I was checking some measurements for my boss who bought the building to convert into appartments. It could have been worse, everybody else had just left the building but I was not badly hurt and picked myself up and am now nearly recovered from a merely sore calf – it did though, make driving home that day feel as if the clutch was twice as stiff as normal going home that day and it reminds me that I need to write a lone-working safety policy for the factory where I work! Incidentally, another hypograt, we are applying for SALSA Accreditation, without which some wholesalers will not buy from us. We had the mentoring day which is like having a mock exam, lol! We have a lot of work to do to pass but – and here is the hypograt – it may make my bosses take seriously, some of the things I have been telling them need doing…

Hmmm… Not sure I was any less sprawling in this week’s TToT – but as Archy the Cockroach in “Archy and Mehitabel” was wont to say “wothehell wothehell” (Archy – a reincarnated Free Verse poet, communicates with the humans in the newspaper office where he lives, by jumping, with great effort, on the keys of a typewriter which they leave primed with a sheet of paper each night – he cannot work punctuation or capitals…

Wishing you each and every one, the very best possible week to come…