Statistics – the Greatest Lie

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I’ve grown used to lying over the last few years. It all started after Donald Trump’s first election when he declared that millions of people had attended his inauguration and claimed it was far more than had attended Barack Obama’s inauguration. The pictures clearly showed this was not the case, and although it’s true that pictures can lie, is more likely that a politician was lying. We soon learned that if his lips were moving, he was lying.


The one on the left is a candlestick – it has a metal insert. The one on the right it a snowman. They always make snowmen when they have spare wood and time as they sell well at Christmas when they do the craft fair in the Cathedral.

WP is much the same. I have had over 400 views a day for several weeks now. I have also had an average of 12 people a day recorded as looking. So which is it WP – 400 or 12?

It could be AI robots, but in that case why don’t they show up on both counters. It could be that I’m being monitored by American Intelligence for my comments on President Trump and the Death of Democracy, but they wouldn’t do that surely? Juxtaposing the two words in view of the moronic outpourings we hear every day is surely just handing me an opportunity for mockery. It couldn’t be much else as nobody else would be interested, and in truth I’m sure it must be AI. Trump is flirting with Armageddon, but AI is setting up to slowly strangle the life out of us. It will be like the boiling frog – we won’t notice until it is too late.

The candlestick again. It started out as a bent bit of pine with a split and a massive knot. She just set to work, the knot pinged out, another, as you can see, stayed to make a decorative feature, and the split disappeared along with a lot of the wood. She is getting good at this.

It’s much the same with Julia’s wood turning (where she went today). I won’t notice that all the shelves are covered in turned wood products until it’s too late.

She baked simnel muffins over Easter too, but they don’t last, so they won’t be taking anything over.

 

 

 

Reasons to be Cheerful

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As I have become older, I have become more soft-hearted. this is comparative, of course. I am soft-hearted compared to a farmer, but a murderer of innocents to a vegan. Last night, I added two more deaths to my conscience. No rats were harmed in last night’s trapping, but two mice paid the ultimate price. It wasn’t an ideal result as I am after bigger vermin, but it does show that the traps work and that I reset them properly.

Daffodils in Nottingham

Today I have been to the doctor already, had a relaxed breakfast of bacon cobs from Greggs, watched an episode of The Sweeney on TV and attended to the blog. I am now ready to start work, but it also time for lunch and I will need to prioritise. It is a hard life. A little light writing, I think, and a slightly delayed lunch.

And after lunch . . .

The steam seems to have gone out of my day. I have pottered and fiddled and moved things about, but not much has actually happened.

Blossom at Wilford

Julia’s wedding outfit was delivered (it’s actually a jacket and a pair of trousers but “wedding outfit” shows I’m taking it seriously) and I received a three month supply of arthritis injections. The delivery man took my sharps bin away. That’s about it. Not one of my more exciting days.

I assume that if I checked the internet I would find more stories about warfare and politics, but I don’t want to. I am able to live without knowing all the details. I presume if WW3 breaks out Julia will let me know. And if she doesn’t, an almighty flash and mushroom cloud will do the job.

Narcissi

Spring in the Mencap Garden

One thing I don’t need to worry about, as Julia pointed out, is losing my hair due to radiation poisoning.  Even in the midst of so many worries about Armageddon, there is still a bright spot if you look.

A Rat Conundrum

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We set rat traps yesterday. They are in boxes to stop birds and cats becoming involved in the attempted murder. This morning Julia reported both boxes had tails sticking out of them and one of the rats had, in addition, been partly eaten. Probably another rat, or even one of the rare cats we get. I give you this gruesome detail only to prove that it was dead.

By this afternoon, when I finally got myself enthused to deal with rat remains, both boxes were empty and all the bait was gone. There were, however traces of rat in both boxes.

I’m sure we killed one. The other may have been killed or merely stunned. Feedback on the trap website indicates that sometimes the springs aren’t strong enough and a rat can pull its head out and escape. It is probably a sadder and a wiser rat, but it is still breathing, though presumably less keen on the scent of peanut butter.

I’m a little worried by the thought of the amount of carnivorous activity going on in my flower beds, and even more concerned to find I’ve been spelling carnivorous wrong all my life. I haven’t needed to write it often, or my spellchecker would have pointed it out, but in my head it is spelt carniverous and I was very surprised to find it wasn’t.

Worse was to come when I tried to reset the traps. They wouldn’t reset. I tried to get help from the company website. First I was offered advice by a website that cropped up as I searched for the official company one. I hate it when that happens. They wanted £1 (refundable) to put me in touch with an expert. he chances of them having an expert on rat traps seemed unlikely. The likelihood of them using my payment details to steal money seemed slightly higher.

Then I was offered membership of a Discord group to seek advice. I’m vaguely familiar with the name but I don’t want to join anything just to get advice.

Feedback on Amazon indicates other people had this problem, but didn’t offer a solution.

Finally I found a video on how to set them, but there was no troubleshooting advice. Eventually, having spent half an hour searching and pondering I remembered some of the tricks of setting the old-fashioned sort of trap. Taking great care, I reset them whilst lifting the bait/trigger platform slightly. This allowed the catch to engage and they are currently lurking in the shrubbery.

We know here is at least one more, as we saw it after the other two traps were sprung.

I know it’s barbaric, but they spread diseases, kill water voles and make a mess in sheds. They also chase squirrels, which was very funny to watch but not entertaining enough to grant them a stay of execution. When we had one and it appeared once or twice a week I could put up with it, but we have been seeing two at a time nearly every day and something needed doing.

I think pictures of flowers might be good for this post.

Less Than Optimal Start to the Morning

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After a good run on the email (months without errors) we are back to the old problem – can’t log in (can’t even get a page that allows me to attempt to log in) and a message telling me there is a problem (which I can see, without a message) and that I should try later.

I generally start by suspecting BT is useless. Then I go through a variety of dark suspicions , usually hinging on cyber attacks by malevolent foreign powers. Then I decide BT is useless. My evidence for this is that my other email account never seems to have the same problem. I just tried it. It is working perfectly.

I would use the alternative, but it just seems like a lot of trouble to change addresses. So far, I have avoided doing it. When I changed debit cards last year – just a simple renewal rather than a major change – it appeared to be a lot more complicated than previous changes. I have not become more complicated, but it seems the systems of various companies have become more complicated. One insisted I signed up to their app before I could change card details and TESCO failed to deliver my groceries because I had missed ticking a box when changing details.

It’s amazing how much we now rely on email and the internet. I’m sure that one day civilisation will end just because we can’t access the internet. Nobody uses cash these days and we would all have to turn to looting or starve.

However, I’m sure world governments will already have a plan in hand. After all, they can’t really concerned just about religious wars, oil and sending people into space with a non-functioning $23 million toilet, can they?

Well, that used to be what I thought. Now I’m not so sure.

In years to come will someone make a film of how a handful of billionaires turned world politics into a real life version of Risk: The Game of Global Domination?

A Skyful of Kites

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River Nene, Fotheringhay

I had a haiku accepted yesterday. The accompanying haibun were rejected, but it’s quite a red letter day when I get a haiku accepted, so I don’t mind.

That leaves me with plenty of choice in haibun when I select the one for submission this month. It’s falling into place so well, it’s bound to be a disappointment when it all falls apart. Because, let’s face it, all the good plans turn out to be too good to be true.

We went for a drive this afternoon. It was quite pleasant but I took no photos so you’ll have to take my word for it. I am only just getting used to going out again and am not very good at it. At one time there were five red kites in front of us, with a couple coming very low. We also saw one landing in a tree and a buzzard on telephone wires.

Fotheringhay – cottage and phone box with library and defibrillator

Peterborough never had buzzards when I lived here, and England didn’t have red kites at all – they were all in a small part of Wales. They were reintroduced into the Chilterns in 1989 and Northamptonshire in 1995. Now they are so common they have been put on the Green List. This is quite a change and shows we can reduce some of the decline in nature.

I’ve just had an email from WP suggesting I am getting to the limit of my free plan and suggesting that I might like to take out a discounted paid-for plan. I’ve been on a paid-for plan for years and am slightly annoyed by this. That’s why I get annoyed by the constant minor faults and inefficiencies. The cost of WP is a major item in my annual budget and I’m not sure they take it as seriously as I do. They really should notice me and the service I pay for, and if they haven’t been providing it, how about a refund? I think I know what the answer will be to that.

Fotheringhay, Northamptonshire

 

Thinking About Doing Something

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Nothing happens, they say, until somebody sells something.

It’s one of those glib one-liners they use in sales training. However, it’s true. Nothing happens until you do something. Whether it’s the glorious poetry career that is waiting, (if you can manage to send off that first submission), or one of those numismatic articles I keep meaning to write, it’s true. Nothing will happen until you do something.

So I wrote a paragraph about doing things.

Then I looked at details of a number of poetry magazines. It started as a list of possible places for submission, and ended with a half-formed rant in my head.

There is so much detail in some of the submission guidelines. Some 10 point, some 12 point and quite a few don’t mind. Some Times New Roman, one I hadn’t heard of and quite a few don’t mind. Several are still only accepting postal submissions. One explains why it is easier for them to read and digest. What they mean, I think, is that it cuts down on submissions. Or they hate trees.

Generally I avoid these as I still don’t have my printer set up. I really should do that, but I would probably still avoid these magazines. One has published me in the past, but email submissions are so much easier.

I realise that poetry editors are unpaid, and that they are snowed under with submissions, but are they missing something good by making their submission procedures overly complex?

One of the coaches at Newark RUFC, an excellent club that Number One Son played for briefly, once expounded a theory of recruitment to me. It was in relation to one of their age-groups, which was led by an ambitious coach who tried to relive his imagined past glories by bossing kids about. He poached players from surrounding teams and then decided to stop signing new players.

How, the other coach asked, did you know that you weren’t turning away the next Dusty Hare?

That’s a good point, Make it difficult and you might put off a nervous genius. Even if you don’t, is it (rugby or poetry) about finding talent, or about helping people be the best they can be?

How to Write a Tanka Prose

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Buzzard pursued by crow

This an answer to a query raised in the comments, but it’s something for everyone to read. Have a go, you might like it.

First, read this. Then abandon thoughts of haiku and haibun for a moment.

If I were starting again I would start with tanka prose. These are like haibun in that they contain prose and a poem, but they are more relaxed.

The trouble lies with the poem. A tanka is a small poem (5-7-5-7-7) according to general wisdom. This isn’t true. That syllable count should be the maximum. You can write fewer syllables.

Some editors like to preserve the short-long-short-long-long layout, others don’t mind as long as it has five lines. It’s just a poem and can include poetic effects, though probably not rhyme. As such, it is free from all the baggage that comes with haiku, and all the conflicting views of editors.

Little Egret at Aldeburgh

You can find tanka and tanka prose in Contemporary Haibun Online, Quail Eggs and Cattails. These are all available online. They are also easy to submit to if you want to have a go at being published.

Rather than listen to me, just read tanka and then practice. If I write ten tanka (which can take between twenty minutes and a week) you can be sure that at least one will tail off without being finished, and a couple will clearly be rubbish that can’t be helped by editing. Even after editing it’s likely that only two or three will be good enough to retain. That’s normal. Just keep writing and eventually you will get there. Don’t take notice of your internal editor until you have written a batch, or you will never actually finish a poem.

Eventually you will have enough to send off. Do it. You won’t be published unless you make submissions.

I send out a batch, one is probably accepted, the rest come back. I add another and send them out again. Usually one of the rejects will be picked at this point. I sometimes send things out three four times before I get fed up with them. By that time I usually have replacements written.

Little Egret – Blacktoft Sands

Next – tanka prose. They are like a haibun but with a tanka rather than a haiku. There is some discussion whether a haibun should be in haiku-like language (ie terse and often slightly stilted). You don’t have that with tanka prose, just write what you like. If you can write a blog post you can write a prose section for a tanka prose.

Then write the tanka to go with it. Some people claim to write the haiku/tanka first then write the prose section. I can’t do that. I write the prose and then write a suitable tanka.

Here are some comments I had recently.

“I think the haiku are not nearly as successful as the prose in your haibun.”

“After a careful review of your poem, I regret that I have had to pass it on.”

“Unfortunately, your work did not quite fit the shape that the issue ended up taking.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get this piece. Is it me or is its meaning or intention too obscure?”

The lesson from those comments is that not every submission ends in success and it’s all par of the process.

Heron

So, to summarise – read, write, submit, expect rejection, read, write, submit . . .

Eventually it will work out, but expect some rejections to begin with. At the start the rejections can seem depressing, overpowering and inevitable. Eventually you will get an acceptance, then another, and it will gradually build up . . .

There’s a lot of other stuff tha goes into writing a good tanka prose, and eventually I might learn some of it, but for the moment I find that the best way to work is to write plenty, submit a lot, shrug off rejection and recycle the rejects.

The recycling is key to my writing – it saves effort, and when a reject is accepted it proves that editing is a matter of opinions and rejected work is not always bad work. And above all, it’s about hard work and  persistence rather than that ephemeral thing we call talent

Good luck.

Cormorant, Lowestoft, Suffolk

Another Trip to hospital

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Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

I eventually dragged myself o hospital this morning. Resentfully. Almost sullen. £20 for taxis, a chunk out of the middle of my day. A brush with inefficiency. A second brush with inefficiency. Home.

Inefficiency one – I was told, on reporting to he main reception, I was booked in and that I should sit in the waiting area. After an hour and not a lot of action I went to the secondary reception desk and asked what was happening. They started shuffling through a plastic box of blood test requests. Mine weren’t in there as I still had them in my pocket. I seems that the main reception should have told me to hand my forms in when I got to the waiting area.

It’s a good thing I asked, otherwise I might still be there.

Eventually, someone came along to do the testing. A blind cobbler with a darning needle would have inspired more confidence.

I know that my veins are hard to hit, and are getting worse, the more they are used. But I also know who is and who is not a competent phlebotomist. And who has an acceptable bedside manner. Telling me that her lack of success is my fault because I am hard to test is a fail in my eyes.

It’s something I was born with, not something I have chosen. I had hydrated this morning, exercised and worn a short-sleeved shirt. There’s not much more I can do apart from cutting off a finger tip and having a tap fitted.

I sat through it without wincing or complaining. I made lighthearted conversation to encourage her. In return, she complained and took three attempts to get the blood. It wasn’t helped by the fact the doctor wanted five tubes.

Last time I gave that much blood they gave me a biscuit and a cup of tea.

Once I have recovered my composure I will write a post about how to start writing poetry.

Tomorrow I have another medical appointment, which I am hoping will be the last for some time.

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

Looking For a Rest

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I had a look at Contemporary Haibun Online (CHO) yesterday. It is always worth a read, and I make a brief appearance. Regular readers may recognise the events from last year when Julia’s stumble in the garden became the subject of legends at the hospital, with one of the junior staff saying “Yes, I’ve heard about you.”

This month I only have one submission marked. Sometimes the calendar falls like that. I intend using the time writing and catching up with myself.  The journal in question only accepts one poem as a submission so the pressure is on to produce something really good. It always feels like only having one chance makes acceptance less likely, as does their policy of using guest editors.

Old habits die hard, and I am still inclined to write for an editor to increase my chances of acceptance. It’s hard if you don’t really know them, or their work. It often worries me when I search and can’t find anything they have written. I can normally find something online but not always.

The other problem, and the one which meant I missed submitting last time, is that the submission window is only two weeks long 1st April to 15th April. Last time I forgot that and switched on about a week too late. I’d better get on with some work.

Tomorrow I have blood tests. I hope they do them this time as taxi fares aren’t cheap.

Meanwhile, having let my hair grow for a couple of weeks I couldn’t decide on a trim, an electric shave or a wet shave. I went for electric shave. Bad choice. I really must go back to a regime of two or three shaves a week.

 

Trivial Conversation with Myself

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A whole day stretched out in front of me this morning . . .

I had pretty much the same thing yesterday too, and that didn’t really work out that well. I seem to have done a few things, but nothing that makes me feel good.

Today I go up, read WP, did comments etc, had breakfast, read and wrote some trivia before making lunch (Julia is at the tearoom this afternoon so we eat early), watched TV, drifted into a nap, dreamed about a gang of monkeys taking over the world, woke in the middle of a nature programme and decided to use the small hoover. It is currently charging as it was flat. Washed up and now, waiting for a charge in the hoover, I am typing trivia and thinking “I really must get a keyboard where the “t” works.”. It’s irritating going back to insert all the missing letters.

The original blog post was slightly more bitter than the one you see here but I decided to lighten the mood. It’s alarming how short a factual account of my day can be, and how simple it seems in hindsight.

I’m currently trying to access my comments, but I can’t. This is just another example of how WP are perpetually tinkering and perpetually making life harder. I’m seriously thinking of going back to a free blog rather than paying for irritatingly fault filled services. I would miss the photo storage but I don’t take many photos these days so probably wouldn’t miss it. People often worry about losing all their words, but to be honest, I probably wouldn’t. To a large extent, my blog is just disposable words. Any pride I have in the blog is in my ability to keep it going for so long and the fact I have attracted a dozen other bloggers of distinction to become regular readers.

I pressed the blue bell and nothing happened. I tried again. I refreshed the page and a shadowy version came down, then disappeared. Repeat. And again. Eventually I got them. Why does it take three attempts to access something that used to be there reliably for the first ten years I used it. Why do I have to press more buttons to read other blogs than I used to? Why do they now blank out the side panels when I am writing, I can write with things down the side. Probably “an improvement” I didn’t need in the first place.

Then I had trouble with the photos . . .

Why, why, why, why, why?