three dogs, three herons
over the fields, word of joy
of a new order

Three haiku for a Saturday night

miz du

crows and jackdaws rise
from the mud of the dark stalked field
black month indeed


slate blue

on the wet tarmac
under a rain thickened sky
one hydrangea head


me and you

stone beast we live in
lives in us too  rust and green
on stone  on your sleeve

~

That'll do.

Three spring haiku

Down the road, evening,
wearing Joseph's Crocs again,
red points of sorrel.

~

Golden girls and lads...
pulling up dandelions.
Oh for a rabbit.

~

So sweet to get by
on more than mere fortitude.
Spring's here, at long last.

~

Flash fiction * Friday, plus a photo and a haiku.

Cinderella's rat footman, changed back to rodent state at midnight, was, on the whole, not sorry to be so.  He retired to his home behind the wainscotting, occasionally going out to the corner of the yard to dine on the remains of the pumpkin carriage.  Even in his old age, he spoke little of a rather dreary evening evening spent in human form, waiting in the chill night air on the steps of the palace on the drama taking place within, unbalanced by taillessness and discomforted by agoraphobia, the desire to urinate and the presence in his mouth of a set of molars and premolars.  No, he thought, he had little to thank the fairy godmother for at all.

~

Burning cone subsides

an incandescent backbone

fire bends and breaks.  

~

* Flash fiction: when the matter of this came up, the idea came to me to take a piece from the pile of scrap paper of varying sizes we clip together as shopping lists, write something that filled one leaf of whatever size, quickly and with little revision.  So it is very flash (in the sense of very minimal, not as in very showy) flash fiction. I've not kept it up very diligently, and then sometimes it's something I wrote before, rather longer than a shopping list page. But for this month, when getting stuff out overrides lack of conviction - I'll try produce something each week in this category, observing a tradition of an alliterative day of the week throughout November's daily blogging.  This one is very short and inconsequential.

Haiku, some orange things I made, looking up in St Brieuc...

~
Tending to curse darkness,
it takes two matches, then
the beeswax kindles.
~

The clementine marmalade potted up last night still looked runny, but when I opened a jar, it had a reasonable soft set on it. No need to pour it all back into the pan.

And to match the marmalade, I finally sewed all the corners and the ends in on this rather quaint garment, knitted in one piece on a circular needle from a pack of yarn from a cheap supermarket of German origin which will remain nameless.

Not the most elegant or flattering item of clothing, but I worked the pattern out myself on squared paper, and it is very chunky yarn, so that's hardly surprising.  The big old Bakelite buttons which I found in the button tin, came, I think, from an old coat of my mum's.  I do like wearing warm sleeveless things in winter, down the back seems to be the coldest part.

~

First Sunday in Advent, time for the first mince pie of the season and to listening to the Advent service on Radio 3, perhaps the moment I feel happiest about Christmas. 

~ 

I went into St Brieuc the other day where they were putting the Christmas lights in the trees with a crane vehicle thing.  

A number of people, like the woman on the bike with the child on the back, and me, stopped to watch and remark on this, which may indicate a lack of sophistication or much else going on, but I prefer to think it shows a curiosity and pleasure in life.

~

I'd taken the camera because of late I've got out of the habit rather, and then now and then I see something I'd like to snap and regret not having it, and there are also certain things I've meant to record for a long time.  One of them is this frieze on the pediment of the post office in St Brieuc.  It features a topless classical kind of god and goddess, of benign rather than fearsome aspect, but the god has a quill pen in one hand and an old-fashioned telegraph machine, like the one in 'Lark Rise to Candleford', in the other, and the goddess, naked breasts akimbo, is chatting on the phone and leaning on a mail box, with a telegraph pole and wires in the background.  I've long loved this bit of municipal sculpture, which I now notice is signed 'Le Goff'  and probably I ought to find out more about it; I can't quite work out how much conscious humour it contains.

Three October haiku

Clouded yellow, down

and out in the marigolds

white with exhaustion.

~~~

Morning's minion treads

the blue afternoon, enhanced,

grainy and owlish.

~~~

Works in progress

making mountains out of molehills.

Hugo's on his hols.

~~~

(Trying out Blogger's new post editor, in the run-up to Nablopomo.  Don't know if I like it yet, though it does give you an extra-large option on pictures, and a jump break...  Anyone else using it?)

(Post-post edit, extra large just chops the end off the photo in this layout.  Large does too.  Great.)

Three invertebrate haiku

Spider and thistledown

Frustration all round
in a conflict of interests.
We all make mistakes.

~~~

Sympetum*

Red dragon couchant
on a green ground, long enough
to stay in focus.

~~~

Snail under blackberries

Pace of life too much?
Find a place to hide away,
pass fruitful hours.

~~~

(* Dragonfly identification proves difficult. I think it was a sympetum.)

Three garden haiku

Small gold earth dragon

spreads tiny foetal hands, curves

back into its cave.

~

Calyces uphold

arachnid architecture,

aphid entrapment.

(You'll need to click to see the aphid...)

~

Opiate seedhead,

past pink sugar glory now

hangs brown as kippers.

~

Narcissus buds, and making the most of roleplay in the ELT classroom.

After some rather disappointing and frustrating efforts with the Inktense pencils, when I wondered if my competence was up to the medium, I'm quite pleased with this one. They really are more like painting than drawing, with the concommitent relative difficulty in controlling the result, and the unpredictable brightness and and intensity of colour and consequent risk of heavy-handedness are still a little unnerving. I still wish I could be more subtle and delicate and understated in drawing and painting, and indeed photography, and cooking, and probably everything I do, but there we are.

I was also quite pleased because I didn't use any photos for the picture, but sat down with a cup of tea after an afternoon's grass-cutting (I initially typed 'lawn mowing' there, but that is rather to glamourise the activity and our grass...) and drew the plants quite quickly. I find the buds of these late narcissus very attractive, with a touch of allium shapeliness about them.

I never draw or paint anything larger than A4, in order to be able to scan it.

~~~

Something rather good has happened with my students. We suddenly find they are capable of roleplays in class. Roleplay in language teaching can be dismal, if it isn't pitched right, if the right language isn't provided and drilled first, if the subject is unclear or inappropriate, or if the students simply lack the confidence or the desire or don't understand what they're supposed to be doing and why. So we haven't done a great deal before, but they must be making some progress as they are doing it and enjoying it now. And I enjoy it too, as it feels less like I'm having to pull them along all the time, and it's really quite entertaining sometimes to see what they come up with.

I find if I prowl around listening to try to help them while they are preparing, they become inhibited, or get distracted, so I tend to place my chair in the middle of the horseshoe of tables, and listen, and chip in occasionally when it sounds like they need it. It helps too if it looks like I'm purposefully occupied, rather than watching them or gazing into space. So I began jotting. It's a nice way of reclaiming a little bit of space and time for myself while working, and at the same time being engaged with people round me. Here are some results. I tidied them up and completed them a bit afterwards.

Haiku

Head down listening

laughter in two languages

my eyes here, ears there.

Restaurant roleplay

Somewhere in the main course the appetite falters.

It's too late to ask for a clean fork,

and the table by the window proves to be draughty.

You wonder what the bill will be, and get ready to leave,

feeling that you could have chosen better, though

the starter and the sticky toffee pudding weren't too bad.

Outside

Outside, a tailless magpie flies

into a St Andrew's cross

of faded jet trails,

and the plane tree buds

chase on the tails

of last year's pompoms.

Raymonde

Raymonde wears beads

of cranberry resin,

and a scarf striped like a bee.

The antsy child spills out

from the busy, urbane woman

of a certain age. Beneath

the peppered-and-salted centre parting,

the odd black bob,

the mischief is infectious.

(Raymonde drove me mad for several years, then I realised how fond I was of her.)

A few more minutes

A few more minutes, another sip of juice,

striped socks with ballerina laces,

and Sunday will be a grasse matinée.

A chocolate sardine for Setu, dinner for two, some spring things, and a haiku.

The mysterious and very clever Setu, over in Finistere, whose lovely blog is in French and English and who seems to have equal facility in Breton and German and Spanish too, and to know about all kinds of things, very kindly came up with the word 'engoulants' for the crocodiles which swallow the beams in the last post. There doesn't appear to be an English translation, the nearest being the heraldic adjective 'engouled' which means 'being half-swallowed by'. So probably it's like grisaille, one uses the French term.

Setu also had a short funny post featuring a sardine motif, and another very poignant one about the Algerian war of 1962, which together put me in mind of 'L'equipier', a film I like very much.

So by way of thanks, because a new word learned is like chocolate in the mouth, here is a chocolate sardine! Or rather the wrapper from one. I always fancy these when I travel in Finistere (I daresay I could get them more locally but haven't looked), but have never treated myself to a tin. I mentioned this to lovely sister once and she sent me some for Christmas - Breton chocolate sardines from Essex, sardines to Brittany!

I photographed them before I ate them, but unfortunately lost the photo. But I had smoothed out the foil from one and pinned it on the board, so this I scanned. This was something my father always liked to do with Easter egg wrappers; I remember him patiently smoothing out the colourful metallic foil, and trying to copy him and getting frustrated when the material ripped and flaked.

~~~

A tête-a-tête over the duckweed.

~~~

~~~

Yellow forsythia

with floss pink flowering cherry.

Only Spring would dare.

Some things that have given me pleasure...(because I've moaned enough lately!)

The consistent creative initiative and talent of some people around here never ceases to amaze, delight and sometimes, I'm afraid, discourage me rather, but I try not to give way to that!

Dave Bonta and Dana Guthrie-Martin have come up with a fantastic idea for a poetry site. (I mean, that Dave's going to have to pull his finger out, he's only running a blog I only don't go to more often because I know if I do I could be there all day reading and following up links, then a one-a-day Shutterchance photoblog, a Twittering microblog, one for his homeplace, Pummer's Hollow, then doing qarrtsiluni, overseeing Festival of the Trees, and who know what else... Lazy git.)

The new one's called Postal Poetry . The stipulation is that you write a poem on the front of a postcard-sized photograph, it doesn't have to be a real postcard but it must be the size of one, so the poem length is necessarily limited by that. According to a post at Dave's, people often used to write on the front of postcards, and someone speculated that the choice of image composition might be influenced by the available writing space afforded. Of course with Photoshop and such like, one can choose light text to go over dark areas, etc. some people over-write the images, others work around them. It really is a fascinating idea and a delightful site, and there's some cracking good people contributing to it.

Which is why I was more than pleased when they took my offering, which was 'written' on a facsimile old black and white photo from a museum we visited in Morbihan last year. It's here.

~~~

Because drawing and painting is still an infrequent enough part of my activities to be worthy of remark, here's the latest watercolour pencil offering. I am pleased with it, though it's even more slavishly tight than ever. An unlooked-for benefit of Flickr is that posting pictures other than photographs has led me to various art groups which poke me to do a bit more of this kind of thing.

~~~

Inspired in part by Annie, who is alarmingly young and alarmingly clever, and has recently reappeared in this corner of the blogging universe, and who draws compulsively and excellently, including from films and telly while she watches them, I've taken to keeping notebook and pen with me while watching, lest I feel moved to doodle or scribble. I feel it also makes it a less passive experience. I like the way one notebook does all, so mine contains prose, poems, journallings, doodles, shopping lists, lesson plans etc. It is quite hard to buy plain or simply lined notebooks here, the French favour squares, vertical as well as horizontal divisions, which I have often thought perhaps said something about their mentality, but now I've found I'm rather used to them, and even find myself slightly daunted by a blanker page...

I've been enjoying some of BBC4's strand on the history of arts programming on TV, including John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing', which I missed both first and second times around, though I've read bits of the book. Also the block of editions of 'Monitor' on Sunday night. I'm too young to remember 'Monitor'; the reviews have been a bit sniffy and amused about it, referring to its 'cobwebby charm', and saying you really have to be more interested in the subject matter than caring about the style of it, but to me it just feels like coming home. I gaze at the grainy black and white footage, listen to Huw Weldon's dry patrician tones, and slip comfortably into a premature (maybe...) state of fartish old reactionaryism and think 'Ah, now this is how arts documentaries should be!'

I enjoyed Henry Moore at home, so deceptively gentle and unassuming, saying how he had to stop reading Neumann's book about archetypes in his work, because, he said in effect, if he found out to much about why he did what he did he might have to stop doing it.

And I loved the Betjeman/Larkin film. (Sorry, I can't really find any links worth bothering with for this...). The first part, with Betjeman on the beach in Lincolnshire, 'Tennyson's county... three-quarters sky', looking across at Hull, I could have hung on my wall in all its monochrome gorgeousness. I'm not a Larkin expert at all; I know he was not a particularly nice person, and revelations since his death have revealed more of his sad- and seediness, but like many people, I have in my life often been stayed and cold-comforted by his clear-eyed stoicism, his putting-his-finger-on-it observations of life, his facing the emptiness, his occasional pessimistic compassion and still more occasional compassionate optimism ( 'What will survive of us...'). Oddly, for all his iconic Grumpy Old Man status, I think he is a young person's poet. He showed us that beyond all the largely put-on romantic agony, the supposedly passionate political posturing, the generally tiresome and tiring earnestness of youth, it was possible to face the underlying fear of pointlessness, the knowledge that it's hard now and it doesn't get any easier, but that there might be a tolerable way through.

And I liked the rather embarrassed and inarticulate way he talked about the beauty of the evening skies over the river in Hull, as though to confess being impressed with something as cornily, naturally beautiful was somewhat letting the side down.

So, a couple of haiku that came with the doodle. They rhyme, which is probably the equivalent of drinking sake with burger and chips or something equally crass, but the first one did it of its own accord, and then it was easy to get the other one to do it.

Henry Moore on 'Monitor'

Utterly humble

utterly sure, he'll mumble

but never stumble.

Larkin on 'Monitor'

Sunset on Hull, rose

and gold, y'know (sigh) there goes

another evening...

~and another, which has nothing to do with the above and doesn't rhyme, but because I like haiku in threes.

Autumn morning

Tom in red fleece, black

fleece leggings. Outside the jays

busy with acorns.

(Anyone any idea how to stop Blogger double spacing when you don't want it and doing it when you do?)

Three haiku

Code orange rain warning.

It's a black and white matter,

why would we lie?

[Click to see orange!]
~

Through prismatic rain

Richard of York gave battle...

found gold at the end
~

Molly on the shore,

a salty sea dog, really

feeling much better!
~

Solstice dusk, bad light and camera shake.

(For Robin Starfish).

Walking in darkness, my hands trembling
Looking up
I beheld a star.