Inspiration from the Tedium

    The last few weeks I’ve been nursing a cold and annoying cough. The good news, for my partner is that I lost my voice for a few days. Of course, for every piece of  great news, there is a piece of not-so-good that seems to come along and smack you in the face. Yes, my voice has returned.

    Due to the tedium of spending all day at home and my eyes feeling a little tired, with screen time, I decided it was time to look through old notebooks and files.

    Some notebooks contain the blogs I've written over the last eleven and a half years. That's six hundred and twenty-five to be exact. I even came across a few surprises along the way, as to how I chose my subject matter in the early years.

    Now, my  completed and unfinished manuscripts, are contained in plastic folders. Some of the unfinished works have been printed out on paper and some not, I hold them all on my hard disk drives anyway. But, each file has a notebook enclosed and sometime these are also accompanied by sheets of lined A4. 

    These notebooks/A4 sheets contain outlines, descriptions of characters, plots and rough drafts for each of the chapters. All written in longhand, as unfortunately, shorthand is not something I ever managed to grasp.

    There was one of these unfinished works  that caught my eye dating back to 2015. I started to try and remember why I just never finished it. The answer is that in everything I write, I always require to know how it's going to end. This story I just could never think of an ending.

    I read through the notes and character outlines, call it inspiration or, boredom, the ending came to me in a flash. 

    So guess what I’m working on?

    Have a great week.

   

    

    

Nature Sculpting the Landscape

 

    If you live in Tenerife or any of the principal Canary Islands, it's impossible to not realize that the landscape has been resculpted by volcanic explosions in years gone by.  

    The last one in Tenerife was November 18 1909. The following extract from a poem by William Cowper, although written about Mount Etna, Italy, is very appropriate and could have been written about Mount Teide.

 Slept unperceived, the mountain yet entire;

When, conscious of no danger from below, 

She towered a  cloud capped pyramid of snow,

No thunders shook with deep intestine sound

The blooming groves that girdled her around.

Her unctuous olives and her purple vines

Unfelt the fury of those bursting mines

The peasant’s hopes, and not in vain, assured,

In peace upon her sloping sides matured.

When on a day, like that of the last doom,

A conflagration laboring in her womb,

She teemed and heaved with an infernal birth,

That took the circling seas and solid earth.

Dark and voluminous the vapor rise,

And hang their horrors in the neighboring skies,

While through the Stygian veil, that blots the day,

In dazzling streaks the vivid lightning's play.

 But oh! what muse, and in what powers of song,

Can trace the torrent as it burns along?

Havoc and devastation in the van,

It marches over the prostrate works of man;

Vines, olives, herbage, forests disappear.

 

Heroism by William Cowper (1731-1800)

Best Foot Forward !!

    

 

 

    Happy New Year! to you all. Yes, it's that time again when we think about our past year and we make positive plans for the future.

    Thinking about the past can make us a little melancholy, but also brings a smile to our face. One of the many memories that brought a smile to my face, was when I was recalling New Year's Eves or Hogmanays as it is called in Scotland.

     In particular, I was remembering the parties my mother and father had in their home. My mother would spend all day preparing a midnight feast, which normally consisted of scotch broth, steak pie, boiled peas and mashed potatoes.

    This feast was given to all who had gathered to see the bells in, (strike of midnight). Before the clock struck twelve, the first foot was selected. This man, (yes, no equal opportunities then), had to be tall with dark hair, not part of the household and didn’t enter the home until after twelve.

    Tradition was he would bring the householders good luck for the year ahead. Similar to the three kings he had to come bearing gifts, which included a lump of coal and whisky.

 As a party usually lasted all night, sandwiches, beef stew, soup and shortbread were provided for any of the later revellers. In our home, they were free to fill their bellies after they gave the company, (other celebrators) a song.

   The normal for many of the partygoers was to go from house to house in a street, most would carry a piece of coal and whisky, just in case they happened to be the, ‘First foot’.

   These were fun times, a tradition which died a long time ago. However, the memory definitely won't, hopefully for a long time.

    Have a great year and remember in the words of Robert Burns;

‘Now’s the day and now’s the hour’