Saturday 14 September 2013

Where has it gone?



Once again I'm moaning about 'time'. I haven't posted for 9 months, enough time to have a baby, but my baby has been my poetry portfolio. The MA is finished and my portfolio is sitting on a desk somewhere in Lancaster. I thought I'd feel bereft after the MA but I'm writing as much as ever and starting to send poems out to magazines and competitions. It takes a lot of organisation to keep track of them all. I don't want to get in a mess sending copies of the same poem to different magazines at the same time. I keep a sort of running commentary on Excel that seems to take care of it all.

My Stanza group is going strong. We've been meeting for two years now and we have a wonderful time together. There is a lot of talent there. We are feeling brave enough to give our first public reading, so hopefully we'll have it organised for the New Year. The hardest thing is to find a venue for free.

Meanwhile I'm just back from a holiday in Fort William, via the lake district, which was magic. Having lived out of the UK for so long I'm starting to feel like a tourist in my own country.The photograph is of the gatehouse at Milton Lockhart near Carluke, which is being restored. The old house was moved stone-by-stone to a theme park in Japan. The new owners of Milton have built a wonderful looking new house which doesn't clash at all with the feeling of the place.

It is still boiling hot in Portugal and so dry that I'm permanently sniffing the air for the smell of smoke. The other day there were two fires, which looked much closer than they were, but I had to get into the car, passport and wallet in hand, and go and make sure that they weren't just around the corner. The smell of burning travels for miles. Luckily the fire station is very near to us and a siren goes off to gather up the firemen when they are needed. They are volunteers and do an amazing job.

I am now resolved to get back into blogging. I don't think I've really sussed out how it all works but I'll get there eventually.

Is Venice shrinking?

Is Venice shrinking?