Kith My Ath.

Some thoughts about an interesting if rather rebarbative Start the Week with Jay Griffiths and others discussing her book Kith.

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On Flaubert’s Beach.

Chesil Beach in Dorset. You have to imagine the parrot.I finally managed to post this last night at 2.37am having got started on it at midnight and my computer dying on me just as I finished formatting it. As a result, I thought it was going to appear with the date of the 23rd and therefore screw up my plan to get the remaining 3 blogs done by the 24th. My response to this eventuality was to write a long, splenetic, poorly reasoned and partially obscene rant about it really being the 22nd still. I clicked on post and it came up with the date of the 22nd, because it had managed to save a draft when the computer died before 2am here, which is before midnight GMT, hence it had the date I wanted. So, it appears that I'm still on track, seemingly, to get all 12 blogs done by the 24th, crappy stomach, wonderful family and last minute preparations permitting. All the best with all your stuff.

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The Lime Kilns at Solva.

Solva sunset, by Alicia Almond (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicia__almond)This is a very brief thinking-out-loud piece about how it might have felt to be a miner and also, stemming from this, how it might have felt to be a member of the most powerful nation in the world during the industrial era, and how that might influence the type of fantasy worlds you'd create if you were a certain Anglo-Saxon philologist by the name of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Jotted down on the fly during a visit to Solva in January 2012 and resuscitated here to constitute the eighth of the twelve blogs of Christmas.

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Two Points.

It's late, I've been out at a jolly nice but very wet barbecue all day and I'm a little bit drunk. Can you tell this fifth instalment in the twelve blogs of Christmas is kind of on autopilot? Well, this huge fucking pile of unfinished writing isn't going to publish itself, is it? Perhaps you could write me a letter of complaint. Seriously. I'm lonely.

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New Lines.

I’m currently putting together a package of the poems I’ve written in the past year or so for submission. Here I have a go at working out why the task is so daunting and also, somewhat paradoxically, why writing poetry is still pretty much the best thing you can do without breaking the law or your hips.

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