Category: Real Life

Daffodils - and that poem

27/4/2019

If I ever had to draw up a list of my favourite flowers I suppose daffodils would be near the top of it. I love them all, from the dainty miniatures to the showy doubles. They’re easy to grow and always look so cheerful, especially the first ones that suddenly appear on a cold, wet, or even snowy day when you’re thinking winter is never going to end. Not only are they capable of blooming in the changeable season we call the British spring, but they seem to positively revel in the worst of the March winds and April showers. At the other extreme, they can also shrug off an Easter heatwave like the one we’ve just experienced.

Of course most of the daffs in today’s gardens, parks and roadside verges are cultivated varieties, but there are still wild ones to be enjoyed if you know where to look. You’ll find a few suggestions by clicking here.

And talking of wild daffodils – is there anyone reading this who doesn’t know that famous poem about them? The one inspired by a ramble in the English Lake District? I’ve heard it’s greatly admired by many people, and I’m sure it is a perfectly good poem, but hearing just the first line of it makes me want to clamp my hands over my ears and scream ‘Noooooo!’

Let me explain ...

In the Grammar School for Girls that was old-fashioned even in those far off days, I was ‘taught’ poetry by committing random chunks of it to memory.

Each week, my class was given a poem to learn. The following week, to prove we’d done our homework, we had to write the poem in our English exercise books. So far, so good. At that age I was capable of memorising all sorts of information: lists of French verbs, chemical symbols, the dates of kings and queens … Compared with some of those, learning a poem was fairly easy, especially if it rhymed.

The difficult part wasn’t learning the words, but all those other tricky bits our teacher insisted were important. When she marked the written poems she deducted points for incorrect spellings, missing commas, a lower case letter where the poet had used a capital, and so on.

Well, if that’s what she wanted there was only one way to please her.

It was springtime so what more appropriate poem could she set for us than that daffodil one by William Wordsworth?

I set to work and learned:

capital I wandered lonely as a cloud new line capital T that floats on high o apostrophe e r vales and hills comma new line capital W when all at once I saw a crowd comma new line capital A host comma of golden daffodils semi-colon new line capital B beside the lake comma beneath the trees comma new line capital F fluttering and dancing in the breeze full stop

Yes, I was awarded top marks for that one, and can still recite it today, but the poetry? What poetry? I didn’t start to discover that until many years later.

Have you ever learned poetry by heart? Was it a pleasure, or a pain?

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A quick update

30/1/2019

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A very belated Happy New Year to you!
Yes, I know I should have posted this nearly a whole month ago but I’ve had lots of other demands on my time - mostly good, exciting things I’m happy to report.

In the real world, husband and I have been busy ticking off items on our ideal home and garden wish list. So far we’ve got a lovely, new kitchen, have redecorated some of the other rooms, put lots of shelves in the garage for ‘his’ workshop, added a small greenhouse and shed to ‘my’ back garden, and re-designed the front garden. Still lots to do but we aren’t giving ourselves any deadlines.

It hasn’t been all work. We’ve also allowed ourselves plenty of days off to explore some of the towns, villages and beautiful countryside in this part of the world.

In my writing life, I decided to have a go at NaNoWriMo in November after giving it a miss for the past three years. As expected, I didn’t manage anything near the magic 50,000 words target but I did end up with some interesting new characters and a very rough outline of a story that might have the makings of a novella, so I’m hoping it wasn’t a completely wasted month of frantically scribbling nonsense.

2018 ended on an encouraging note with one of my short stories being long-listed for the Bedford Writing Competition. It’s one I’m particularly fond of so I gave it a few little tweaks and sent it straight off to another competition. Fingers crossed again!

I’ve also dusted off an abandoned children’s novel, decided it’s not all as bad as I thought, and have nearly finished a revised first draft. It still needs some ruthless editing before I even think of showing it to anyone, but I’m quietly pleased with it – so far.

And this year?

Lots of things I would like to do but my only firm New Year resolution is not to have an impossibly long to-do list. It's too stressful! Instead, I’ve adopted a new motto:
Let’s just see what happens, shall we?

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It’s all happening (I hope!)

14/3/2018

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2017 was mostly a year of taking one step forward and two back.

It began optimistically enough with my husband and I deciding to move house. It was something we’d been thinking about for a while. Every time we visited family in Lancashire we fantasized about living there permanently, but we were reluctant to leave our home in Cambridgeshire because it was close to our daughter and son-in-law.

Then daughter and son-in-law announced they were going to move – to Canada. It was certainly a surprise, but we soon saw a bright side. They were planning to start a new chapter of their lives – and so could we.

We put our house up for sale, found a buyer, and made an offer on a house in Lancashire that had everything on our wish list. A couple of months later, when we were about to agree a completion date, our buyer pulled out of the deal. Aargh!

We put our house back on the market and received another offer for it. Everything seemed to be going smoothly – until the new would-be buyers also changed their minds!

We put the house up for sale again, but it was autumn by then and the market had slowed down. We had some viewings but nobody was buying. The Lancashire house we wanted was also put back on the market.

Two days before Christmas, when we were resigned to nothing else happening until well into the New Year, we had a call from our estate agent. Could we do a viewing? That viewer became our third prospective buyer. The not-so-good news was that the house we’d wanted had been sold to someone else.

Fast forward to today …

We’ve found another house to buy (which is even better than the one we lost) and have almost finished going through the whole conveyancing process again. Trying not to get too excited, but we are cautiously saying ‘when we move’ instead of ‘if we ever move’. I don’t think I’ll really believe it though until I have a new door key clutched tightly in my hand!

And my writing?

Some of you may remember that part of my prize for winning a short story competition run by Alfie Dog Fiction was an offer from them to publish a collection of stories if I could produce enough, of an acceptable quality, to fill a book. It was a very big IF, and much harder than I expected, but I’m very pleased to report I’ve finally done it! My collection is now being expertly prepared for publication.

Watch this space …

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Daffodils - and that poem

A quick update

It’s all happening (I hope!)

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Daffodils - and that poem

A quick update

It’s all happening (I hope!)

​My labels

Polite notice

Categories

Archives

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