Notes from a Small City

 

Got up, cooked breakfast, discovered I have ordered the wrong bacon this week, had coffee from the cafetiere (made by No 1 Son, who is a coffee aficionado), sat, redundant, while he and his mother muttered about wedding plans and played with their phones. Nobody holds conversations anymore.

It took 13 minutes to get to the station, as there were no hold-ups and 19 minutes to get back using a longer route as I try to relearn the geography of the area. If I’m being picky, it actually took 19 minutes to get there, but six of them were spent on the drive waiting as Julia discovered a couple of last minute jobs which, of course, took priority over punctuality.

There are no trains to Norwich due to work on the tracks so it is down to the good old “replacement bus service”.  Today’s “bus” is a luxury coach, so it isn’t too bad.

It is a pleasant morning, with a plentiful, and varied, supply of blossom and a variety of birds, including a pied wagtail, several lustrous blackbirds and the usual magpies and pigeons. It’s he sort of morning that makes you think you should write a poem. Later, I probably will.

I was reading some William Carlos Williams last night. They are quite short poems and I could probably write a lot of poems that length. I just need to have a range of suitable subjects and something interesting to say about them. That might be more difficult. As I’ve said before, there are plenty of words, and they aren’t the problem. Learning to put he right words in the right order is the skill, and that only be learned by laying down a lot of poorly selected words in the wrong order.

Try this for a poem about plums.

I’d better get on with that now. Half an hour of poetry followed by getting lunch made for Julia before she goes to work in the tea room, and I will have several hours more to write before she returns home.