"Rigor of beauty is the quest." – WCW
A very colour-coordinated group today, but chosen on merit I promise! I read a lot more during April, mostly because of the Easter holidays, and also because I finished off a few books I’d been reading for a while. Again, it was very hard to choose, and I toyed with the idea of allowing myself…
This week I began writing my long poem/thing (I really don’t know what it’s going to look like). I’ve been ‘working on it’ for weeks, in the sense that I have had ideas and phrases going round in my head, but on Wednesday, after a lot of laundry and other procrastination, I sat down and…
When I first started writing, I thought I was going to write a novel. I began (as we often do) on January 1st, having selected a couple of useful books for Neil to wrap for me for Christmas. I hoped to finish a first draft by the end of the year, and it seemed sensible…
Last time, I talked about how I was setting out to find my poetry head again and I’m glad to report that it’s working. I took a complete break from everything for a week – unplanned but definitely needed. We have been to Estonia for a long weekend for a friend’s wedding and the books and…
May was a great month for writing, and research, and walking and filling journal pages with all sorts of things about the Thames. I wrote seven short stories and a couple of poems and I was loving it. In June, everything fell apart. The terror attacks, the negativity and uncertainty surrounding the General Election, a…
Yesterday was a glorious day for walking by the river, and almost the whole section was completely new to me – I’ve been to Greenwich before, but otherwise I had never really been anywhere east of Tower Bridge. I had a bit of a wander in Borough Market for old times’ sake and to collect some…
Old Deer Park, Kew Gardens, Syon Park, Mortlake Cemetery, Dukes Meadows… Most of my walk yesterday took me alongside parks and woodland, and it would have been easy to imagine myself deep in the country. I worked a bit on trees, and can now confidently identify Horse Chestnut and London Plane, still can’t tell the difference…
Yesterday I completed stage one of my Thames walk, from Teddington Lock to Richmond Bridge. In the photo above you can just see the end of the weir, upstream below the footbridge. This marks the limit of the tidal Thames, which is why I chose it as my starting place. Except of course, that it…