Monthly Archives: February 2025

Must Work Harder . . .

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Teasel

It’s been a day of moderate effort and I’m hoping to pick up the pace a little in the coming days.

Success, in my case at least, isn’t built on skill, charm or inspiration, it’s built on work rate, and that’s what has been missing for the last few months. Yes, I’ve been busy moving house and writing for the Numismatic Society Facebook page, but I’ve also allowed myself to use it as an excuse for laziness. This was exposed with the last set of submissions. I was lucky to get away with that like I did. Finding and reanimating old poems, and writing some of them just minutes before the submission deadline is not a sustainable model.

But enough of that. It looks like I’ll have six out of nine accepted, possibly seven, so that’s good so far. I doubt my average will look that good by the end of the year.

Dunnock

I have searched through looking for extra places to submit work and found four more. Three have 100% records of rejecting me and I’ve never tried one of them. We will have to see how it goes. My average will undoubtedly plunge but I said 100 submissions was the target, so I must do eight or nine a month to get there.

Part of the problem is that several online journals are cutting back. Two that were monthly are now cut back to four and six times a year. I sympathise, as monthly must be hard work, but it does make it harder to find places for 100 submissions.

The squirrels, meanwhile, are finding it harder to access the bird food. They can still manage to get too it, but they can’t feed in a sustained manner as they tend to slip more they are now at full stretch. After they have fallen off a few times they tend to eat bread from the floor feeder then wander away. It’s about in balance, though I’m going to save up for some better feeders with anti-squirrel cages. We added a new species of bird to the record today, though nothing exciting – just a white dove from the small flock someone seems to keep round here. Still, it’s nice to break the monotony.

Robin on feeder

For tea we tried Quorn sausages as my sister came round to tea. They were quite good and when paired with onion gravy and mustard mash (plus sweetcorn and green beans) made a very acceptable substitute for meaty sausages. I may start using them on a regular basis as they are probably better for me than proper sausages. They are definitely no worse than the budget supermarket sausages available these days (which seem to get worse and worse). It looks like we will buy these regularly and only get meat sausages when we happen to be near a proper old-fashioned butcher.

A struggling squirrel

Catching Up

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I think my last report was nine submissions, one rejection and one acceptance. It’s now one rejection, four acceptances and one where I have made the alterations the editor asked for, so, with luck, that should be another acceptance. Not a bad start to the year. It just goes to show there’s a very narrow psychological line between success and failure. One patronising rejection was, I admit, enough to make me rethink my writing life. A few acceptances by editors I like restored some balance, and the one today was the icing on the cake. It was from an editor with a prolific high quality output and an acceptance from him always feels like a validation.

Yesterday I used my new slow cooker to produce a vegetable stew. It’s new to me, given by one of our old neighbours. We used to have one, and used it quite a lot until it melted. We were always short of space in the old kitchen and I used to stand it on the hob. This worked well until the day that Julia, thinking of other things, turned the hob on without noticing the slow cooker standing there.

I doubt I’ll use it to produce vegetable stew again as it’s just as easy to do it in a pan on the hob, The pan/hob method is quicker, doesn’t need preparing in advance and only needs cooking for thirty minutes, not 4-6 hours. I will, however, try some other recipes, as I know I liked using it before. My memory is just too bad to recall any of the recipes, apart from pulled pork. But as I always found pulled pork to be disappointing, I doubt I’ll try that again. Somehow, the idea is always better than the reality.

There seem to be plenty of other slow cooker stew recipes so a few weeks of experimentation seem called for. I still have gingerbread men to make. Julia bought me a kit and the ingredients for Christmas, but we had, as usual, so many biscuits given us, that we have only just finished them.  I also want to make peppermint creams for Valentine’s Day, and am already telling Julia that a handmade present is worth so much more than one bought from a shop. She seems suspicious . . .

So much to do – so many excuses!

Photos are more of the squirrelbatics – we added spice to the seed. It put the squirrels off for almost two days. Not enough? Not strong enough? Or are they just not as bothered as the internet suggests?

I’m going to have my own feeder built by an agricultural engi9neer, I think. If I just hang the feeders a few inches further away that should do the trick.

Travels and Birds

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Pied Wagtail

Today’s trip used underpasses and bridges and cycle tracks and took us to the local post office and the shopping centre. We posted a letter to insure the scooter and then looked at the range of shops available. I resisted the temptation to look in the charity shops and Julia bought some Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls for the freezer. I can’t tell the difference between the normal and the vegan varieties, and am convinced that rather than being a tribute to the vegan variety, it is an indictment of the quality of meat in the standard version. It was a bit like being on a rehabilitation course – first find a Post Office . . .

Rook

We saw the first crocuses of our year and I was able to take some bird photographs. Although it’s a built-up area, the first bird I photographed was a rook, normally a farmland bird. It was stalking the area outside the shops and picking at some food someone had dropped.  Sorry to be so vague, but it was difficult to tell what it was. Normally you would expect a crow to be doing this. Rooks are part of the same family but you don’t usually see them acting as urban scavengers.

Rook again

The second bird was a pied wagtail. This wasn’t a surprise as they are always linked with shopping areas and car parks in  my mind. They like the warmth and supposedly feed off bits of broken insect that fall from the cars. I’m not sure how accurate that is, as I’m not sure cars kill many insects these days, due to the presence of fewer insects and better aerodynamics. In the old days a drive in the summer countryside would result in a car festooned in insect body parts. This is not the case these days.

Pied Wagtail

The third bird shot is a collared dove. They erupted from Europe in the 1950s – reaching the UK in 1953b and first breeding in 1956. They were still unusual when I was young, but are now regarded as common garden birds.  They frequently visit our garden.

Collared Dove

Not far from home we passed by some houses that had large mature trees planted on the land just beyond their garden fences. This seemed to result in better bird life, though at the cost of some worry about falling trees. One of them had a big group of sparrows and some starlings round their feeders. We haven’t seen either species in or garden yet. I’m not 100% sure that I’m bothered about this as they can both be a bit overpowering.

On our return home we saw the kite overhead again and the squirrel on the feeder. It’s having to work hard for the seed these days, so we are letting it feed for a while. When we fill up the feeders we will probably add spice as a deterrent.

Squirrel

Squirrel again

 

 

The Second Attempt

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The Cormorant Tree

I’ve just done 561 words on the way people treat shared footpaths in a country park. It was from the point of view of a man who struggled round four miles of such paths whilst trying to master the controls of a mobility scooter. Somewhere along the way it started reflecting on society and how some people always seem to take more than their fair share. It was just entering the territory of the refugee and immigration when I decided that this wasn’t where I wanted to be.  More importantly, it wasn’t, I thought, where my readers wanted to be.  I’m here to practice my writing and portray the persona of an electronic village idiot, not write about serious politics. Serious politics and the views of unqualified bloggers can be found anywhere.

This is Ferry Bridge.  More of this in a later post.

So, back to the country park. I was interested by the low bird numbers and the boring selection of breeds. A day at Clumber or Rufford would have produced much more in terms of history, woodlands, birds and atmosphere. To be fair, Ferry Meadows was, within my lifetime, farmland criss-crossed with public footpaths. Then they started extracting gravel, after that they developed it as a country park. I’m sure, as the years roll on, I will be glad to have it on the doorstep, and the list of interesting birds will begin to develop.

As I travelled round the lakes yesterday, even though I did worry about driving into people and various other things, I did find my head filling with suitable subjects for writing. I’ve had a rough year from the point of view of inspiration – it started with The Cough, moved on to the trip to urology, became a long convalescence and then we moved house. It has been just over twelve months where I have done very little, and my subject matter shrank to old age, memories and what I could see from the window.

A distant heron dreams of great things to come . . .

On the positive side, I made 30 submissions and had 21 acceptances.

On the negative side, I missed a lot of submission opportunities, grew stale and gave serious thought to giving up writing poetry.

At the moment I’m feeling very positive and have a target of 100 submissions this year. I’m not sure where they will all come from, so it’s not a fully formed plan yet but, as they (almost) say in Field of Dreams, if you build it they will come. That applies to most things – if I say 100 submissions, I will manage around 100 submissions, if I build a better bird habitat in the garden, i will attract more birds.

Tree with Orange Spot – one of many marked for death by the authorities.

Pictures are from yesterday’s electric expedition.

 

Travels on an Electric Scooter

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About a year ago I realised I was going to need some help with mobility. My predicament is of my own making, and weight loss, physio and arthritis injections can only do so much. This is particularly true when you are fat and lazy, as that leaves the injections to do the heavy lifting.

First we decided that we were going to move to a bungalow. This is a bit of a defeat, but dragging myself laboriously upstairs on all fours had long lost its novelty value. The trip down, on the other hand, clutching at the bannisters and fighting gravity all the way, always felt like it could end in a trip to hospital. A bungalow was not a hard decision.

 

The next step, the mobility scooter, took a bit more thinking about. We are close to a number of attractions – railway, country park, library, shops – and they would all be in reach on a scooter. However, I wasn’t quite ready to admit that my retirement dreams of striding out over mountains and fells had all dispersed like mist in the morning, and that I had become a cripple.

I know it’s not a word that’s gone out of favour these days, but “disabled” is such a weak word and makes you sound like a victim. I’m not a victim, I’m an idiot who has made, and continues to make, a lot of bad choices, and am therefore the author of my own life story. If I’d worked harder at school and had more focus I could have achieved my ambition to be a history lecturer at a University, but I didn’t, and as my aptitude tests all showed I would be happy working outside, that’s where I went. The arthritis in my back and neck may still have occurred after a lifetime of sitting at a desk hunched over books, so the eventual result may have been the same anyway.

Decision-making always takes time, in this case about three months, so it was only last night, an hour after the end of the delivery window, that I took delivery of a bright blue mobility scooter. The grey was a bit nondescript, the red is a bit dark and the yellow one exists only in my imagination. So blue it was.

I went out on it today. Considering that I have driven cars, vans and even lorries for work, in the UK. Ireland and Africa, and had a variety of two-wheeled transport, you’d think that a four-wheeled mobility scooter would be a piece of cake, wouldn’t you? It’s not. I had my first near-accident within fifty yards of the house, when I thought I’d try full speed. That’s 8mph. It’s not generally considered fast. However, on a cycle path, approaching bollards, and wobbling slightly, it’s both ill-judged and a lot faster than it sounds.

The next three miles continued with a lot of worries about tipping over, avoiding pedestrians, avoiding dogs (ditto children, bikes, adverse camber) and getting up hills. It’s not really designed for hills. On the web page it looks like it is, but an 18% gradient in real life is a lot less than 18% in a catalogue with a creative camera angle. I also spun my wheels several times on muddy patches after off-path excursions (some planned, some not (see comments about avoiding pedestrians etc) ) but managed to extricate myself and get back on my way.

I can now see why they recommend you insure these things – it’s mainly to cover you when you run into somebody.

Twice, towards the end of the “walk”, I found that the green bars had disappeared off my display as the gradient drained the system. Fortunately they came back as I reached a flat bit. Half a dozen times I ended up making sudden stops because I couldn’t control it properly.  This became easier after an hour of practice but it will obviously take time.

Meanwhile, Julia ensured I kept a sense of proportion by keeping pace with, and even overtaking me on a couple of occasions. She also gained some amusement by enquiring if I was light enough to go over some of the bridges we encountered on the way. Roman Generals used to have a slave behind them  muttering as they held their triumphal processions – something that a modern man can have by simply getting married.

When we got home we had our best ever sighting of a kite over the bungalow – it was only about fifteen feet above and seemed to be directly over our garden.

The scooter is currently being charged in the garage and will be back in use tomorrow as we go to the shops.

Pictures are from Julia, using her phone. She did take more but they all seem to be about the size of postage stamps.

 

Adventures with a Cook Book

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We had Toad in the Hole last night. During the week Julia had mentioned it and as we both like it we decided to make it. I managed to get her to do the hard work. For some reason we haven’t had it for years. We had it with some Aberdeen Angus beef sausages, broccoli and sweetcorn and rounded it off with treacle tart left over from the night before. A real festival of nursery food.

This is the first one in a cavalcade of new recipes we are planning to try. It is easy to get stuck in a rut and find you are eating the same old things week in, week out.  We had  Very Convenient Stir-fry and Noodles last week. The recipe is one bag of ready cut stir-fry vegetables, a pack of noodles and a pack of oriental-style sauce. We had sweet and sour sauce last week and will be having the same thing this week, but with plum sauce. It’s on special offer from TESCO and it’s quick and easy to make. We had it most weeks in lockdown and it was always a good night as it is tasty, healthy and easy. Those are three things I love in food. Two others are “cheap” and “fried”.

Toasted Teacakes

Tonight we had salad. Greenery, tomatoes, spring onions, red and green peppers, cucumber, pears, Stilton cheese and pine nuts. The pine nuts are really for a recipe that Tootlepedal suggested for Brussels. I’m still getting round to that, but it seemed silly to leave them there in the cupboard when I was struggling for ingredients. We haven’t got round to bringing all the kitchen ingredients, so had no olives and no dressing but it wasn’t too bad. Sometimes you have to suffer for your waistline.

This afternoon we finally got round to hanging pictures. It’s looking a bit more like a home now. We still have enough pictures to have things on the wall in Nottingham too. To be honest, we really do have to make more of an effort with this move. Living in two houses is trickier than I thought, and it’s not just books that we have too many of. Pans and paintings are also trying to take over.

To close the list of the day’s events, I have had an email and can now record my first acceptance of the year. That’s the advantage of sending out plenty of submissions – a rejection is soon balanced by an acceptance and the world seems a better place again.

Tea and mini-scones Brookfields Garden Centre

 

One Door Opens as Another Door Closes

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I’ve just being going through my spam box. I am expecting an email which hasn’t arrived, and was checking it hadn’t been rejected in error. It hadn’t. It’s a depressing place – I have won several prizes in competitions I haven’t entered, have numerous parcels needing to be collected, have to step in to stop various things being cancelled and have had to ignore several requests for sexual favours from women with exotic names.

Julia says they are all actually likely to be from sweaty men working in distant call centres, including the ones from the “women”. It’s a relief  in a way – I really don’t need a car care kit or an electric drill, or a mystery package, and my days of exotic women are definitely in the past. Apart from being married, I’m entering that phase of my life where Pointless and a nice cup of tea hold more attractions than erotic adventures. Anyway, as I may have mentioned, getting my trousers on and off is something of a trial these days.

It’s going to be a tough month. Having done my  submissions I sat back and reflected on the likely success rate as many of them had been out before and some of them were rushed.  One was going to an editor who has never accepted a haibun off me in six years. Derrick asked why I sent things to him. It’s a good question. There are several answers to this. One is that rejection keeps my feet on the ground. I have had some very successful runs of acceptances, but it’s always good to remember that it’s nor assured. A second is that you need constant rejections to stay immune from their demoralising effects. And third is the need to have targets – I’ve set 100 submissions as this year’s target, and I have minor targets like wearing down certain editors who constantly reject me.

I have already had one reply, as I mentioned, asking for a few alterations to one piece. I have now had a second reply rejecting a second lot. It’s one of “those” rejections, he ones that seem helpful but close with the comment that you should read XYZ for more pointers. I’ve had several like that over the years and always wonder why they think I haven’t read XYZ, particularly when it’s been a fixture on the website for the last five years.

Anyway, it was good news in a way. After slightly polishing two of them I am now in a position to submit all three rejected pieces to another magazine this month. It’s a system that has worked before. It’s important to remember that a rejection is only a sign of one editor’s opinion and other editors may have different opinions.

My Orange Parker Pen

Done!

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A while ago I wrote I wanted to make “submissions to 9 different editors at five magazines, plus three possible competition entries.”

Well, I didn’t bother with the competition entries.  I just ran out of time and inspiration. And one of the magazines caught me out – it has a cut-off date of 25th and I let it pass because I wasn’t concentrating. I also forgot an auction in the same period. Sometimes a brain cannot hold all the infromation you need.

However, I have sent off nine submissions to the nine editors at five magazines. This suggests my original maths was wrong, but that’s the least of my worries.

So far I have had one result – a request to restructure a tanka prose. I can do that. I assume that the next two weeks will hold some mixed news – one of the editors always turns me down and I suspect I will be rejected by several others, as two submissions were written only minutes before I sent them off. This is not the way to write good poetry, but it is the way to meet targets. This month I intend writing everything I need at least two weeks before I need it so I can polish it.

I have ignored Julia and my WP reading over the last week or so, and need to catch up with both. Even as I type, she is cutting fruit for our breakfast. Time, I think, to stop typing for rest of the day and spend time on my Christmas present – a jigsaw of garden birds.

This evening I will start the rewrite and will also try to write a poem about doing jigsaws. In the life of a poet, nothing goes to waste. Then I will tell you the latest squirrel news . . .