Monthly Archives: August 2025

Off with the Birds

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A few weeks ago we had a Chaffinch in the garden. They used to be common. We had quite a few on the farm and if you read Tootlepedal’s blog you will see that he still does. For some reason we have not been able to tempt one into the garden until now. We were hoping for another Goldfinch story – once we got them in we often see groups of up to five. It hasn’t happened. We have yet to see another Chaffinch. The same happened with the Greenfinches, though they are quite rare after the disease outbreak. We saw a couple, then nothing.

Carden Warbler, pictured on Wikipedia. This is the British variety, the one in the header is Scandinavian and a little more distinctive.

Two days ago we saw a smallish brown bird  lurking in a shrub. My first thought was Goldcrest because it was quite fluttery and furtive, but it was too big, too brown and didn’t have a gold streak. Then I thought Robin, but there was no red breast. It was just a dull brown bird with pale underparts and no distinguishing features. The Garden Warbler is famous for having no distinguishing features, and that would seem to be what we saw. Apart from being anonymous they are also mis-named, as they don’t often appear in gardens.  They do, however,  like woodland margins, and with the trees only being yards beyond the garden wall, that’s a good description of our habitat.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have had another acceptance.  So, despite a rushed selection of poetry I have managed to get three acceptances and two rejections, and am still waiting to hear from the final one. I am approaching the end of this month in a more relaxed mood, and have most of my submissions done already. They are waiting now. I will let them wait a bit longer, because the best thing you can do is leave them to mature then edit again, and again . . .

That’s always been the part I have been bad at. I’m lazy and badly organised and should write a lot more. If I did I would be able to leave things and polish them properly. That’s where the quality come from. I really should be concentrating on quality rather than quantity.

Chaffinch in the Bird Garden

Report of Two days – Good in Places

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Yesterday seems to have been a day of doing much, but finishing without a lot to show for it. I’ve edited a few pieces, written the start of two more and composed an article on a Coventry medallion. Then I cooked a couple of quiches and watched TV with Julia when she returned from her stint at the cafe.

She reset the TV yesterday morning. We’ve been having pixelation on some channels, which we originally put down to thunderstorms, then transmitter problems. Other things then started to malfunction and we eventually decided it needed resetting. This seems to have done the trick.

Two other good things happened too. One, I looked myself up on Google, trying to find the haibun that was used as an example in a writing prompt article. I found it, so that’s good. It’s the first time someone has asked me to let them use a poem for something like that. As I’m unlikely to win the King’s Gold Medal for poetry or be offered an honorary doctorate, this is as good as it gets for me.

I also noted that I am on the submissions page of another magazine, where they have links to a few poems as examples, a tanka this time. It’s nice to be selected, particularly when I’m having a difficult patch.

Today then proceeded much the same as yesterday – a lot of effort producing no real results – and nothing good happened today. I’m looking for a garage to see to the car warning light and the one I selected told me it couldn’t do anything for two weeks. They have taken some details and will give me a general opinion tomorrow, but I now need to think if i want to use a garage that can’t see me for two weeks. I’ve been spoiled over the years by having decent garages and this isn’t how I want to go on. I don’t mind booking two weeks in advance for routine work, but two weeks to check a minor fault isn’t good.

Julia took a picture of a wooden gorilla at the weekend. It amuses her to make comparisons. She also bought two leaping hares. I like hares. I wrote a poem about hares. It was rejected several times. I may write another now we have the sculpture. I assume from other pictures she sent me, that she is thinking of stones and Japanese maples for the garden.

Time and Motion and Veggieburgers

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Today, I decided to keep a check on my time. One entry in the diary is ten minutes for sorting out my phone, which went black and refused to open up or restart. It seemed like a lifetime but it was only about ten minutes. Unfortunately I couldn’t time it, as that was how I was timing things, and I couldn’t tell when the writing ended and the wrestling with technology began.

I’ve had two unwelcome emails since last writing. One is a rejection. It wasn’t unexpected, and it was nicely put (and basically bounced right off my carefully cultivated shell of resilience) but it was still not welcome.

The other is from a woman asking if her email has got through. How do you handle that? I don’t know her, I don’t recognise the name and a quick Google search turned up nobody that seems likely to have sent it. I would have searched Facebook, which seems to be the best source of unknown women wanting to make contact but couldn’t see how to search . Probably best not to try.

So I blocked it. Then I unblocked it, because it might be genuine. As I read the message “Please let me know if this comes through!” I decided that anyone who really wanted to get in touch would have added some sort of explanation, and as I dithered, I decided that I don’t want to get in touch with someone who would use an exclamation mark there. It just isn’t necessary.

I could run through endless possibilities, but I just think a mystery woman emailing out of the blue definitely requires blocking. I’d like to hand out a lecture on the etiquette of making contact over the internet, but that would answer her question. I’m not sure what shows up if you are blocked.

Ah well, I was making veggie burgers for tonight’s tea before I decided to blog, so I’d better get back. I was leaving the mixture to stand before gauging how wet it is, so I need to start forming it into recognisable burgers. and have no more excuse for sitting round typing. This time I will brush them with oil, the spray technique I used last time was not a success.

When I was younger I imagined life would have slightly more to offer than this . . .

And more photos – sorry about the repetition.


Sunday Morning, Seed and Song

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Sunday morning. I marked the occasion by going back to bed and didn’t switch the computer on until just after 9.00. The spellchecker just tried to claim that I marred the occasion.  Can’t really blame the machine as I should have spelt it correctly in the first place.

Next I checked emails. Nothing of interest. Then I started peering into the lives of people who I follow on WP. Gardening, cycling, concerts, watching baseball . . .

Fascinating stuff.

Breakfast. We had a cereal delivery last night so were back on cereal with fresh fruit. I like porridge and sausage cobs and crustless breakfast quiche (we ran out of cereal three days ago, in case you were wondering – logistical and conversational breakdown. Cereal and fruit seems like it is a better choice, though I worry about the amount of calories in the fruit.

“Worry about” and “have cut out” are two different things. I could go onto plain wheat biscuits but I mentally group that with “gruel” and “bread and water” – a punishment rather than a breakfast.

I’m back at the computer now. Next task is to order more sunflower seeds for feeding the birds. The last lot are nearing the end. They have been very popular and 20kg has lasted eight months. It works out at about £1 a week, which isn’t bad. A second class stamp (if I ever want to send a letter)  is 87p these days. At least we have birds every day – under the new postal system we only have letters alternate days.

I note that I have just had five emails – one is confirmation of the bird food order. Three are unwelcome and unnecessary and one is telling me about a sale on clothes for big men, which may be slightly interesting. All in all, though, email is pretty useless. The spam box is even worse – prizes, special offers, parcels for delivery, schemes to help me become rich at the press of a button . . .

This is all done with the assistance of China in Your Hand going round in my head. I heard it on TV a few days ago and it has stuck with me. Click the link to You Tube and you can have it too. No need to thank me . . .

 

A Flock of Psychedelic Sheep

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After writing about quiche and rejection when you may have been expecting more Shaun the Sheep, I thought I’d better make a bit more effort and get some more photos on.

I’m just not sure what to write. It’s going to have to be entertaining to make up for the fact that Shaun is not that interesting to everyone, but there’s a limit to the magic you can weave when all you have to report is some heavyweight procrastination and a call to the doctor so I can give more blood. I would have thought they had enough to build a fill size model of me by now, but it seems they still need more.

We have had a large meal of quiche and salad and Julia is currently doing her normal evening thing of flitting in and out and doing various odd jobs which, in her mind are vital to the smooth running of our lives.

 

All our married life I have tried to get her to accept three things, which she seems unable to do.

I will only mention one, as discussing wives in blogs is not a recipe for a relaxed evening. She has never been able to grasp that planting things in pots is just making work. God gave us flower beds and that’s where we should plant stuff. The rain will water it, the roots will seek the moisture out and if it dies you replace it with something more drought-resistant. You don’t stick it in a pot and spend two hours watering every night. IF you have a small space or a balcony, then you use pots – but half a dozen pots on a balcony is not hard work.

And so, more Shaun. When I am more relaxed I will revisit this, but for now, here are more photographs.

Would Larkin call it Quiche?

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Swings and Roundabouts, what goes around comes around, as one door closes another door opens . . .

Hot on the heels of my last rejection comes an acceptance. Not only an acceptance, but an acceptance for two tanka prose. Any double acceptance is a red letter day, as I said recently. This one was particularly good, as I had only sent two.

This is when I noticed something strange. The three that had been rejected a couple of days ago, looked poor when they were returned. The two that were accepted looked good when I re-read them. When I sent them off, they all seemed to be much the same level. It looks like I evaluate my work in relation to what happens when it is judged by an editor.

I must guard against this effect when viewing my work.

Here is a haibun that was rejected many times (four, I think) but accepted within hours by the final editor. It changed a few times over its life but the final version was not, as I recall, changed from the version that had been rejected by the previous editor.

Hidden Worlds

He wears a grey gaberdine and rides a bicycle from church to church. In his head he composes poems about sex and tombs. On YouTube he flickers in black and white, like a newsreel from the 1950s. Smiles are clearly still on ration.

Larkin used more bad language than you normally expect from a librarian. This becomes understandable when you find that he started his day with half a bottle of sherry.

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Inspired by the life of Philip Larkin

(Published in Failed Haiku – February 2021)

I added the footnote because I had just been rejected by an editor for being obscure( it was a poem about a visit to Adlestrop). The editor who accepted it, did not use the footnote. You might want to read this, if you aren’t familiar with Larkin. I selected 1963 partly because of the poem and partly because of the sound. It wasn’t an easy decision because the rhyme counts against it in Japanese style poetry.

Meanwhile here are some pictures of my latest quiches, complete with ready made pastry cases. When I was a boy quiches were called flans and my mother used to make “egg and bacon pie”, which has been replaced by Quiche Lorraine. Haven’t we changed over the years? Change and improvement, that old thing.

The top picture is what happened to the leftover egg from the quiches. We just ate it for breakfast. The other pictures are quiches with a definite yellow cast to the photo and a couple of pics of the great biscuit disaster. I only had two cutters – the little man and a glass from the cupboard.

There is a lot of spinach in the flans, though you can’t really see it. We’ve also had it in curry this week. It’s going to mess my INR results up but I ordered a 500g bag with the groceries, which is a lot more spinach than it sounds when you actually have to use it. Green vegetables contain Vitamin K, which is the antidote for Warfarin so if you eat more, the INR goes down. You are supposed to eat the same things each week to stop the INR moving. So the choice is this – die of a blood clot, die of boredom, get scurvy. Discuss.

A Day of Non-Achievement

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Another day and a rejection. It wasn’t unexpected, because I haven’t been struggling for the last few months. Normally I would not have sent much out this month, but having set myself targets for submissions, and needing to show some self-discipline, I wrote and submitted anyway. In some ways it was a bad idea, but based on past experience I can’t afford to let the momentum fade.

Believe it or not, there was a time when I used to have all my submissions ready for the beginning of the month. I seemed to have so much time in those days. The theory was that if I submitted first, all the subsequent submissions had to do two things – one is that they had to be good enough for publication, but the second was that they had to be good enough to replace the submissions I’d already submitted. This works if editors look at submissions as they come in, but it doesn’t if they wait until the end of the submission period before looking.

There used to be a lot of blogs and internet articles about the science of submissions at one time. I couldn’t find any tonight. There were a few about how to submit (spelling, manners, timeliness, stick to the submissions guidelines etc) but none of the sort I wanted – the ones that used to treat it as pseudo-science and work out ways of increasing your chances by trickery and mind control.

Pictures are from Julia and my sister – they went round the Shaun the Sheep exhibition in Peterborough yesterday. More about that tomorrow. I now have a home made quiche to eat and a wife to talk to. She hasn’t seen much of me today as I have been messing about on the keyboard and achieving very little.

Ah well, time to go. I will add a few photos and talk about them in the next post.

The Mystery of Editors and Some Thoughts on Writer’s Block

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

I had my first acceptance from the July submissions on Monday. It was a tanka that had actually been rejected in June, but after a quick check I decided that it was ready to go again.  It was part of a group of nine that had been returned after the tenth was accepted, so I only needed to write one to make the submission up to ten.

It’s one of the age-old questions writers have. I send out ten poems, one is accepted, does that mean the other nine are not good enough?

Sometimes I’ve had an editor ask if they can hold one over for the next edition. I always say yes to that – it saves me work and I assume it saves them work too. If it wasn’t for editors there wouldn’t be any magazines. And if there were no editors and magazines there would be no competition for publication. That’s why I mainly only blog poems that have been published – it means that someone who knows more about it than I do has decided that it merits space.

I’ve also had editors select two or three poems (very, very rarely) and a couple of times they have told me the rest weren’t bad, just not what they wanted for the moment, and I could submit them again at the next submission window. This is very rare – remember we are talking about something in the region of 400 submissions and this sort of thing has happened a handful of times.

Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

It all tends to indicate that several of the ten are publishable, and that they can all be recycled. That’s why I like editors who give quick decisions. If they reject something in the first few weeks, I can use them for another submissions and don’t need to write as much.

This may be a bad attitude, and more akin to the approach of a  worker on a production line than an artist but  this month I’ve just had an article on collectables published in a magazine, plus four Facebook articles for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire and  a couple of longer articles  for the Peterborough Military History Group. If I waited for aesthetics and inspiration to align I’d struggle. Dawn comes, I drag myself from bed, I make tea, then I start writing. I hate mornings. I like tea and I like writing. I have no time for Writer’s Block and curlicues. And I’m more likely to suffer from dehydration than a shortage of words. I have no time for the introspection in the article behind the link. It’s very interesting, and more than slightly familiar, but I can’t afford to let such thoughts take root.

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

 

An Addiction to Words

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Wilford Notts

You can tell I’m addicted to writing. Today, trying to have a rest and gain some perspective I started by ordering groceries online and ended up writing reviews for groceries. I didn’t make a decision about it, I just found myself doing it.

For breakfast we had cereal and raspberries. Somehow, which were starting to go over just days after purchase. I wrote for a while then made lunch (potato cakes using last night’s mash, leftover sausage and tomatoes, all baked in the oven). Normally I fry the potato cakes. They are, I can conform, nicer fried, but less fattening done in the oven. They also, despite a good layer of oil, managed to bake themselves onto the tray.

Tonight we will be having chickpea and sweet pepper veggie burgers with cashew nuts and spring onions. It’s an amalgam of several recipes taken from the internet. I looked at several so I think the method is right and am pretty sure the ingredients will be OK when mixed. Also got garlic, Henderson’s relish, cumin, cumin seed, oatmeal and egg in it. And no chemicals.

Speckled Wood

It will, I forecast, be tasty, but will fall apart and be vaguely disappointing. Very much like my life. Last week I tried my hand at cooking for the first time in ages. I tried olive oil biscuits with vanilla essence, lemon zest and honey. There was nothing vague about the disappointment. They were soft, lacked flavour, and had an unpleasant texture. I struggled with them, Julia refused to eat them and the birds loved them. We put one lot out, crumbled up, and the birds cleared them in minutes. Next day – same result.

If anyone has a recipe that uses oil, so I don’t have to do much kneading and crumbling of butter and flour, I’d love to know about it. I will also make sure I have all the right ingredients. It may be that my several changes to the recipe are to blame for the end result.

Also did quiche last week. can’t find the photos. They came out well, though I did have help in the shape of ready-made pastry cases. They are much better than the cheap ones I buy from the supermarket, and much more expensive too. I will be making more this week, though I am tweaking the recipe.  When extra expense brings better quality I am quite happy with it, though I will be looking at the costings again this week. Reducing the ingredients by an egg doesn’t save much money, but it does save calories.

Fresh Figs

I lost the photographs, so you will be treated to a selection of almost appropriate photos of yesteryear.

It’s a Haibun

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Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat