Traditionally of course, the twelfth night should be one of misrule and miscreancy. And with the shadow of Shakespeare looming, I’ve been putting off writing this night – it felt as though it needed to be particularly artful and artless and art-formed. (more…)
Urban Happinesses
Fat fluffy sparrows having dust baths under a fence on a busy street corner.
Two handsome grownup sisters who come into a cafe with their mum and play cards over lunch.
A long flat wall and a row of front doors that open on a back alley – one with an impossibly narrow strip of bright red geraniums planted in front, growing in the crack between wall and road.
The pair of businessmen very seriously splitting a piece of chocolate honeycomb to share with their lattes.
A smiley stubbly man who stopped and held the elevator door.
Coffee foam art.
Beautifully dressed cyclists riding by, sitting very upright and garbed in scarves and embroidered coats and bike helmets.
Unexpectedly encountering the random friend crossing the road – who for a few moments, is “walking that way too.”
The Eleventh Night
Someone wrote to me the other day that unfinished books haunt them. That East of Eden was sitting on their coffee table as they typed, making ghost noises, while Dead Until Dark (how apt) had been clanking chains and hanging around in white sheets again… There were jokes made about needing priests and holy water, or Bill Murray et al…
I have been musing in recent nights about my appearance and writings here: I’m aware the strange anonymity of blogging peoples places like this with thousands of ghost writers. (more…)
For Sonnnets’ Sake
Ceremony
The kettle boils with bubbly hiss and click,
The water pours with warm and curling steam,
The practiced sound of stirring, neat and quick,
Makes fragrance waft and everything just seem
So comfortable, easy, quiet, tranquil,
And words pour calm and soothing from the pot,
The anxious, asking feelings now are still,
When even silence doesn’t seem a stop. (more…)
The Tenth Night
I begin writing here to express a re-discovered joy. I’d suddenly remembered the pleasure of writing for pleasure – the delight of being in love with language and all it could animate and elevate and illuminate.
Lately though, I’ve been thinking something else. (more…)
The Eighth Night
There has been some silence echoing here, and for an odd reason. I’ve been writing fiction. (more…)
To Dinazade
My dearest sister,
I know it seemed like such a noble and clever idea when we began. So many innocent women put to death: if I could delay his mad rage for just a night or two, that would be a few lives spared. In the end, I could have thus ascended to the heavens in proud knowledge that a lifetime of education in history and philosophy and literature saved kinswomen from cruel deaths. One to save many, and she only disarmingly armed with a head full of golden and fanastical tales, a silver tongue and mouth of music for tale-telling, and a hidden heart of flint for her new husband. (more…)
The Seventh Night
After a week, Scheherazade must have begun wondering how long she could keep spinning tales. Seven nights of telling stories to someone distraught and demented with grief but so immensely powerful that he could pronounce your death sentence before you even finish a sentence. Seven mornings of thanking the gods for another dawning day of life, and then hours of furrowing your brow in anxiety to come up with the next chapter of the story before dusk fell.
Two things strike me here. (more…)
