Solent Green – blog

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More poems?

A couple of days ago, I got a notification on Facebook that there had been two visits to my Solent Green FB page – which suggested to me that someone (I think I can guess who) had visited it to see if I’d posted any more poems.

I hadn’t, although I did actually write two more in the days following the last one I posted – scribbled on a scrap of paper when I was out for a walk while staying at the family holiday cabin in the Surrey Hills. When I got back to the cabin, I found there was a problem with my laptop (which has since resolved itself), and the next day I went to stay at my daughter’s for my birthday/Easter weekend, so I haven’t done any more since – until this morning, when inspiration struck again.

So I thought I’d rescue the scrappy piece of paper from my handbag and type them all up.

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NaPoWriMo 2023 -3 Blocked

Blocked

I used to have a writer’s head
but when I looked, the muse had fled.

I thought I had a line today,
I tried to chase another one,
but then the first one ran away
and I was left with none.

My brain is locked,
my writing’s blocked.
What else is there to say?

Linda Rushby 4 April 2023

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NaPoWriMo 2023-2 Spring Morning

Open your door and snuff the air,
like a fox emerging from its earth,
survivors from their dugouts.
Like a curious cat,
scenting adventure,
or a cautious one,
checking for changes
from the familiar.

Under those lowering skies,
between those scattered showers,
seeking the truth:
bright patches of colour among dark leaves;
snatches of birdsong among the traffic.

Like a heart waiting for hope.
Like a lost poet, seeking the next word.

Linda Rushby 2 April 2023

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NaPoWriMo 2023 – 1 The Last Bridge

The Last Bridge

You crossed the last bridge
and here you stand.
Nowhere else to go,
and nothing to change
except yourself.

You wanted to know her better,
you thought that was the way
to find some kind of peace,
and reconciliation.

But what you learned did
nothing of the kind.
She is just as stubborn,
and you as confused,
as you always were.

You are both as bad as each other,
you and your own worst enemy.
You cannot change her,
and you cannot love her.

You have crossed the last bridge,
and there’s nowhere else to go.

Linda Rushby April 2023

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Late Start…

…to NaPoWriMo, with a poem I wrote last week (as explained yesterday), one I wrote yesterday, and a third one just written. This gives me three poems for four days, so I will just number them sequentially. Maybe I’ll catch up eventually, probably not.

In fact, I’ve just discovered that it wasn’t yesterday, it was the day before, I didn’t post anything at all yesterday. On the other hand, I have a feeling that I wrote an extra poem last year so maybe it balances out.

I seem to have a problem with integrating my soshul meeja – my last blog post didn’t automatically get shared on Facebook, as it used to (as recently as the previous post from 26 February), but did go automatically on Twitter. Instagram, however, which I’ve been using to post a daily photo since the start of the year, has NOT given me the option to share on Twitter since 10 February, although prior to that it was doing so automatically. If anybody has any idea how I can rectify this, I’d love to know.

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Updates

Sunday 2 April 2023

I didn’t think I was going to do this – a bit late in the day for me to start. But as you can see (if you’ve been here before) I spent this morning sorting out a few changes to this blog. It’s part of a process – long overdue – of attempting to overhaul my online presence in general, including buying a new domain name (lindarushby.com), sorting out what’s worth keeping and what needs doing to it, and transferring it all to new and hopefully more cost effective hosting – quite a challenge after over twelve years in one place, and I’ve got about three months left to get it done before letting go of the old damson-tree.co.uk stuff. Which is a bit over-optimistic given that I’ve also sort-of committed myself to finishing The Long Way Back by the end of the year. We shall see.

But last week I wrote a new poem, in response to one I found printed on an A4 sheet among some other stuff. I don’t know where it came from, I can’t remember the name of the writer, and I Googled what I thought was the title this morning without finding anything relevant, but I expect at some point I’ll find that A4 sheet again and be able to give credit where credit is due.

In the mean time, I now have two poems to offer for this year’s NaPoWriMo.

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Blogging

At the latest count, I have two blogs which are still current (by which I mean I’ve posted at least once in the last two years), as well as another one which I set up for a group, of whom only one other person has ever posted to it (and he hasn’t done so lately). I’m sure there are a few others around that I’ve created at various times and subsequently abandoned (or the entire platform has gone out of business and thus they’ve been obliterated).  And now I’m contemplating setting up a whole new website.

Of them all, I guess this one is my favourite. It’s semi-private – except it isn’t really, because I do share it on Facebook and Twitter – but I write honestly on the premise that I can say what I want because no one is ever going to read it – which is in fact a good assumption because so few people ever do.

But against that, I’m not writing – not really writing anything – because of the old, old issue that I just can’t think of anything to write about. Except that here I am again, finding myself writing once more about my inability to write.

I have sort of committed myself to completing TLWB this year. Which in a sense I might do because a lot of it is already ‘written’, but what do I add, what do I take out, and, hardest of all, where and when do I finish? If I can answer those questions I might get somewhere.

But that’s an aside. What I was really thinking about when I started this was the question of whether ‘…’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take words against a sea of writer’s block, and by opposing end it?’ (with apologies to WS). Sorry, don’t know where that came from – well, obviously I do, it came from Hamlet, but I don’t know why it popped in my head at that moment, except that it seemed to follow naturally from using the word ‘whether’ (words are tricky like that). What I was REALLY thinking was whether it’s worth writing stuff out of my head like this, as I used to for so many years, and spewing it out into the ether, or whether my time could be better spent in other ways. I mean, is writing this drivel every now and again preferable to writing nothing at all, or just a waste of effort and time which could be better directed at finding more original ways of avoiding the housework?

#notwriting

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Still Here

If I started writing again… every now and then…

The above is as far as I’d got before I decided to a) make a coffee and b) have my morning crap, which entailed finding my Kindle and reading the next chapter of The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde while sitting on the toilet (and incidentally downloading a sample of The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, which came up as a ‘you might enjoy…’ recommendation. I discovered the other day that at some point in the past I’d read the first of Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano books, but I couldn’t remember when or why or anything about it or why I hadn’t chosen to download the next one. So, if I have the sample – and the title did catch my attention – I might read it sometime and decide to buy the whole book – or not, but if I don’t I never will and that might be a shame.

Anyway.

What was that first sentence again?

‘…every now and then ‘ I think maybe I will (start writing again), or perhaps it was going to be: every now and then the thought strikes me that maybe I should, but usually I get involved in doing something else and time passes and it goes away again without me doing anything about it. And reading that back, it occurs to me that it could be a metaphor for sitting on the toilet (or vice versa)

Anyway.

I think I was going to make a serious point, and end up with sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago, which may or not be relevant. A point about making goals and plans for the year and trying to satisfy other people’s expectations (which is a hiding to nothing, it seems to me).

I don’t do goals and plans any more. I never was very comfortable with them – I’ve blogged about that times without number – and at my stage of life, honestly, why should I? Who cares what I do with my time, if I don’t?

There are, in theory, at least two books which I ‘should’ be trying to finish. The start of a year is supposedly a spur to effort, but at my age it is also a reminder that my remaining stock of years is steadily going down, and raises the question whether it really matters that much how I spend them? It’s not as though the ‘dreams and plans’ I’ve made in the past have made much difference to the world.

So here I am, a week into 2023 – not even starting on the first of the year, as far as those things matter, fifty words short of my arbitrary target of 500 per day, and not even having said what I was intending to say. I’ll see if I can find that poem and share it.

#notwriting

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Something weird

Something weird has happened. This blog disappeared in May 2021 and since then has been displaying a message saying that the version of PhP wasn’t compatible. I tried to follow the instructions for updating the version of PhP, and thought I’d done so, but nothing seemed to be happening, just the same message whenever anyone tried to link to this site.

I found by experiment that the Damson Tree and Phyllida Fogg blogs were still accessible, and so was the Southsea Storytellers, so I could have continued blogging if I’d wanted to, but it seemed like a good time to give up, and that’s what I did. I carried on writing a journal for a while, just something where I wrote (at first every day) but didn’t share it with anybody (or rather didn’t put it anywhere where other people could potentially read it even if they wanted to), but after a couple of months that just fizzled out too. I think I may have jotted down a couple of poems since then, but don’t really know what happened to them. I removed writing from my life as a hobby, as I’d been drifting towards for several years, and deleted ‘writer’ from the tagline on my FB profile, though I left in ‘poet’.

This morning I saw that I’d had an email from my hosting provider saying that I needed to update the PhP version on my whole site before the 9th February. I almost didn’t renew it when it came up in September, because I hadn’t done anything with the site in so long, but then I paid for another two years, almost out of inertia, and from a superstitious dread that if I didn’t, I’d regret it.

Anyway, I almost didn’t read the email, but having paid up in the autumn I thought I’d better. It also gave a link to how to do it, so I tried it, though it didn’t look any different from what I’d done before. But hey presto, suddenly I have my blog back…

Except that…

Now it appears that the Damson Tree blog isn’t working any more (but with a different error message). which means the ‘bookshop’ isn’t either.

Not that I have any plans of writing anything – or any expectations of selling any copies of my books.

PS: I had a brainwave and changed the php version on Damson-tree.co.uk back to the one it was before. Now all the blogs seem to be working. Go figure.

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Wind on My Face

Monday morning, sunny, I walked to the rock gardens again, like last week. I was later than usual – didn’t leave home till after eight – so instead of taking a flask, I went to the kiosk and bought tea and a bacon bap and took them to my favourite bench, passing the café on the way, and noticing that the doors were open, although I thought it wasn’t open until nine. Maybe it was special early opening for today. Still, I was okay in the garden. I’d also noticed, after I ordered tea, that the kiosk is run by a coffee shop I’ve been to a couple of times, so their coffee is probably decent coffee – normally I avoid buying it from the kiosks because I assume it will be instant. Of course, decaff is often instant anyway, but next time I go that way I’ll ask.

In the gardens I went to check on the fish in the pond. I saw the two big fellas – one black, one coppery – and looked out for the tadpoles clustering along the edge – there were still some, but not as many as before. I walked round to the other bit of the pond, below the waterfall, and saw a man holding a camera. I paused and realised why – I don’t remember there being a plastic heron over the other side of the pond before, and then it moved its head. The first time I saw the tadpoles, I remember being amazed by how many there were, and then thinking: ‘if a heron finds them, it could clear this lot’.

Something I was thinking of yesterday in the context of plans and failure was a story my therapist told me on Thursday, about a past client from years ago who, towards the end of her therapy, revealed something about her life that she hadn’t mentioned because, as the therapist said, it ‘didn’t fit in with the story’. I’ve been wondering what she meant by that: was it just to tell me that things can change, however stuck and entrenched they feel, or was she suggesting that I’m holding back something because it doesn’t fit my ‘story’, either from her or maybe from myself?

I haven’t expressed that very well, and now I can’t see the connections with the planning thing, though I’m sure there was one. If I keep writing, maybe it will come to me.

Then there was that quote about ‘living your way into a new kind of thinking…’ rather than ‘…thinking your way into a new kind of living…’ (I had to look it up again) which also seems relevant. That seems to me to put the emphasis on doing (living) rather than planning (thinking) – so that doing something – whether that be knitting or other crafts, writing, walking, gardening, even a jigsaw – is better for me than when I am thinking about what those actions are leading to, or how best to do them – which sounds either very profound or utterly banal.