Sorry everyone, it seems to have been eleven days since my last post. I managed to get all my submissions done before panic set in (though to be fair it was a very easy month) and have spent several days relaxing and feeling good about being able to organise myself. It won’t last, as this coming month is the complete opposite. Last month I had six easy submissions to do.  Two were for anthologies and one of them guarantees to include a submission from every member. The other guarantees to take one if you send five, so I send three, just to preserve an element of jeopardy. . Next month the target is twelve.  I really need to get a move on as a couple have to be done by mid-month and several are quite challenging.

I’ve had two or three acceptances since I last wrote. To balance that, I had two sets of results from poetry competitions where my entries sank without trace. It’s what normally happens, so it wasn’t a surprise. I have, of course, looked at the winning entries to see what they have, or what I lack, and, as usual, can’t come to any firm conclusions.

For one of them, I think I might be a bit too modern for the judge, when I look  at the winning entries. As I’m considered old-fashioned by a number of editors this came as a bit of a surprise. With the other one I couldn’t see anything wrong,. In that case, I suspect my words just didn’t grab the judges. That’s how it goes. One day I will write a poem that resonates with a judge and may get lucky.

The car is booked in for servicing and repair. It’s a lot less convenient than my previous arrangement, where the garage was a hundred yards from the shop, but that’s what happens when you move. The nurse at the GP surgery failed to find blood yesterday and there was nobody else on duty so I am going back tomorrow. And the washing machine has broken down. It’s 19 years old so I can’t complain, but having only just got on top of the light bulb replacement (they all seemed to blow/start flickering within a week or two) I could have done with a few weeks of nothing failing.

We have, I think, five different sorts of bulb/tube in use, plus at least three different for the lamps. I needed three different tubes and ended up having to buy two of them via Amazon – one is still in transit. Now we know they fit, I will be buying spares.

It seemed much simpler at the last house, but when I run through the bulbs we still used three sorts, with three more in lamps. I think it seemed simpler because we had spares for all of them  and knew where to get them from. A new town makes things more complicated.

I wonder if, in years to come, a research student will look up from his electronic reader in his environmentally controlled study cubicle (with built in whale music), drink a nutritionally balanced sip of plant-based smoothie and Google “light bulb” . . .

The language, to him, will be like reading the Canterbury Tales, and the things I mention will all be exhibits in museums. As he sits round with his contemporaries, indulging in mutual grooming and complaining about the bonobos down the street, I wonder what they will say about their hairless ape ancestors who ran the planet into the ground and are still rumoured to live in underground bunkers in remote mountain ranges.

Pictures are some recent ones from Julia. She’s going through an artistic phase. Sort of van Gogh meets Warhol.