Sorry everyone, I’ve been neglecting you. When you combine the nappish nature of old age, the fatigue of recovery and the lack of sleep due to the hot nights, I seem to spend my life waking up in a chair and wondering where the last hour went. I looked for a library picture of an old man napping. Frankly, they were depressing.

We have had a real storm of butterflies in the garden, with a growing list of species, including white ones and little brown ones (precision has never been one of my strong points) and the birds continue to delight. We have had a family of blue tits visiting regularly, and using the bird bath, and the goldfinch contingent is growing in numbers. Not only do we have a few more on the feeders, but there are more in the air and they frequently sing from a perch on the TV aerial.

I have kept up my writing for the Numismatic Society Facebook page and done several pieces for the Peterborough Military History Group. What I’m not doing is writing poetry, or anything I might get paid for. I really need to earn some money to pay for the research sites and WordPress. What I do notice, with much of my writing now being 500-2,000 words long, I am now blasting through 500 words, where 250 used to seem like plenty.

I have recently been wondering if anyone has done an analysis of the people who use the different types of Social Media. WP users are obviously top of the pile, Facebook users are more varied, and at the bottom of the pile comes Quora. Yes, I’ve been on it again despite all I said. Amongst the gems and genii (there are a few) are people like a professor from an American University who tells me that all War Poets were British Army Officers of the First World War.

This is wrong. We also have non-British War poets, some women wrote war poetry, they weren’t all in the forces, Rupert Brooke was in the Royal Navy, they weren’t all from WW1 and they weren’t all officers.

However, leaving all that to one side, isn’t life unfair? I sit here, crushed by the weight of my own ignorance whilst a man in the USA, confident in the quality of his intellect, makes big money teaching despite his dangerous stupidity.

This is a German WW1 poster exhorting school children to collect nettles. They could be processed for their fibre in the same way as flax. The yield was less, but they grew wild.

Here’s a poem from Moina Michael, a very untypical war poet, according to the definition above. She wasn’t an officer, she wasn’t British. she never served in the Army and she wasn’t a man.

And with that, it’s time to go.

(I had planned to use Alan Seeger as my atypical war poet and quote Rendezvous with Death, but I was close to getting political as I mused on a scenario where he returned from the war, entered  politics and filled the White House with the Seeger family. Particularly Pete and Peggy.

That thought, I admit, cheered me immensely.