1 – We finally had some snow here in the Bradford area – not enough to close the roads as our accountant at work has been hoping for, indeed barely enough to cover my windscreen or even to warrant the name snow – sleet would be nearer lol. Still beware what you wish for, the Beast from the East came in March…
2 – There was a dusting of snow on the hills, however, as you can see in the background of this picture of the Mosque in Bradford, for which I have been the draughtsman for about ten years of its 12 or thirteen years of construction. The building is a purpose built mosque, unlike many in Bradford, which are converted churches, cinemas or large houses. As such, it was designed as a community facility as well as a place of worship and is relatively undecorous (for the sake of economy, since the whole building is built with donations from the congregation). This Islamic star is the exception on the outside of the Mosque and below, one of my contributions – Islamic geometrical, fretwork panels in the main Prayer Hall – they took some drawing up, I can tell you…
3 – I am grateful that uploading images to this page seems, finally, to be working normally – long may it continue…
4 – I haven’t been sharing (or taking) and pictures of textures, which I use, poentially in PhotShop artwork – here are some bubbles…
5 – An inheritance from my late and dear sister, Carol, finally came through courtesy of her partner. I looked up to see if the branch of my bank was open in nearby Keighley, it wasn’t, but the website said I could use the Post Office at the bottom of the road. fine thought I, but the PO told me they no longer dealt with my bank so it meant a drive into Bradford (where it was news to the Customer Assistant that the PO don’t work with their bank) “Oh!” says she “You could have paid that cheque in using the banking app on your phone!” until she realised the cheque was in Euros which meant fetching an A4 quadruplicate document to fill in before handing it and the cheque over the counter. Although the funds won’t clear for a week, I decided to celebrate in a way I knew Carol would have approved of – went straight across the road to Waterstones bookshop, housed in the old Bradford Wool Exchange where I bought
1 Bradford At Work – with details of the mills which will flesh out my A to Z on fabrics and Fibres
2 Depression and How to Get through It
3 a colouring book as a Valentine’s gift for Barabara – Pride and Prejudice
4 Three tiny Van Gogh themed notebooks also for Barbara – since we are both addicted to notebooks…
5 The Chemist, latest release by A.A. Dhand, a local detective story writer – a Sikh who trained as a Pharmacist before turning to writing – gritty…
6 – The former Bradford Wool Exchange is testament to the fact that Bradford, in the 19th Century, had more millionaires than any other city in the world! It is built in High Gothic style – reminiscent of a church and although it has had a large glass box inserted on one side, this has the effect od opening the interior to view. This one for the bookshop lover – you know who you are…
7 – On my way home from the banking expedition, and not being in a hurry, I decided to call in to British Wool – a warehouse I pass on my way to work and through whose open doors, enormous bales of wool can be seen. there are a few survivors and thrivers of the glory days of Bradford’s wool industry, British Wool is a government-controlled cooperative farmers’ organisation to market wool to wholesalers like another Bradford firm – Haworth Scourers. there is also a dyeing firm still operating in Keighley. I had long been interested in drawing together a piece on these survivors and the A to Z gives the perfect opportunity. I rang the bell and two guys came down and we conducted an impromptu interview standing in reception before one of them offered to show me around the factory where each year’s shearing crop ( these days a byproduct of the rearing of sheep for meat) is sorted into upto 90 grades of wool, budled into 8 ton lots and then sold by auction.
So now I have to correct and edit the interview’s AI transcript and it will be available here at some point in April, if not before.
8 – A little light play in the car park in Bradford…
9 – I had another “Bonus” postcard from the Poetry Postcard Festival- the festival which keeps on giving…
10 – The Ten Things of Thankful and all who sail in her…
Did I foresee or was it anticipation I liked to imagine the worst that could happen – perhaps to disarm the future remove the sting inoculate
When it began mercifully slowly I was not taken by surprise I had a plan to cope wasted no time learning how to navigate blindness
Routes I had taken for granted were walked with mindfulness recording all the sensual input paying least attention to fading sight except as an index of impressions mentally mapped
I decluttered my domicile of all I wouldn’t need or couldn’t trust myself to do safely any more books and tools both were a wrench
I kept what I thought I might manage – basic tools just in case I found I could and books someone might read out loud to me if such an one might be found to share my treasured
And my most treasured – music well listening would not be a problem but I wanted to make music, to sing songs so set about learning favourites by heart, words and chords which laziness had always mitigated against before
Did memory which is not a sense nevertheless swell in compensation or was it always in me to perform differently and without seeing my audience, stage fright diminished so it was not a total loss – blindness…
1 – Although I never know in advance, what I am going to mention here, I am grateful to be of sound, and creative mind and faced with a blank page (screen) I trust that things will come to me.
2 – I was grateful to receive an email from Afshan, an Indian woman who I “met” during the A to Z Challenge 2022 – you can read about her here and I hope she may decide to participate here. Afshan is just one of many lovely people I have met through this blog and keep in touch with…
3 – My Critique Partner Nik shared his 12 in 12 month short story and I have nearly finished my second month’s story to the prompt of “Shuttered” – I will be chatting with Nik later this afternoon (for me) morning in Minneapolis… You cannot read the stories unless you are participating but I can share mine with by posting it here (next post)…
4 – I received a late “Bonus” postcard from lkast July-August Poetry Postcard Festival. Most of the participants are American but they publish a list of all the non-American participants so Americans can send a bonus card to them. So this is my second card from Grant Swados of New York – once on the regular list I was on and again on the bonus list. He has framed the original (postcard-sized) painting I sent him and sent me a reproduction of one of his paintings entitled “The Llama Lisa) a pastiche of the Mona Lisa featuring a llama. Also, he sent a poem about playing darts – a game that makes me think of English pubs, but since he sent the card, rather like when you have bought a new car, I keep seeing dartboards in American TV dramas all the time. Two countries united by a love of tiny missiles…
The postcard I originally sent to Grant…
5 – My Continuous Blood Monitoring experiment is bearing fruit, I am losing weight slowly by keeping my carb count down to an average of 159 grams per day. The drug trial I am participating in, a lower dose of the “weight-loss” drug Semaglutide, might also be helping – I do feel less inclined to snack, am content with smaller meals – but that is not the main point of the study – it is to test whether, at this lower dose, semaglutide helps prevent cardiac events and I have to say that the feeling of queasiness and wind makes me question whether it is worth the price (if it works). I am pretty sure that after the “Randomisation” interview, I am on the real and not the placebo pills – only 4 1/2 years of the study to go – burp!
6 – I have finished “C” in the A to Z and will have time tomorrow to work on “D” which is for Decoration of Fabrics as well as a list of seven fabrics beginning with D
Damask
Dimity
Dobby (see also Piqué)
Double cloth
Double Crepe
Double Georgette
Drill
Duchesse
Dupioni
It is proving to be the most work of any of my A to Z’s so far…
7 – I am a creature of habit and so my washing is in – half already in the dryer and half about to be hung up – Sundays routine is Sunday routine…
8 – Glad to be participating here at TTOT – we had 12 posts last week and as Afshan grat#2 said it inspired her with positivity, I guess its working right!
9 – reminded I have 3 TTOT to visit…
10 – Speaking to my sister in Nova Scotia in an hour…
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.
