Decided to learn how to take photos instead of paying a photographer.

I pitched an idea for a feature to Discover Your History Magazine editor, Linne Matthews and she has accepted.

He is larger than a pigeon but smaller than an eagle, about the same size as a herring gull. His feathers are tatty mostly raven black with a few pale patches. He looks as though he's been hard at whatever he does when he is not socialising.

        There is something proportionally wrong with his undercarriage and his legs with feathery leggings, look too long but he's lovely. He comes running when I call, just like a cat ... but ... he did not come at all today. I guess he wasn't too keen on the food I gave him yesterday. With a wacking great, black, beak like his he probably prefers lion meat.

Sent a sonnet to the Writing Magazine Competition.

I have got a bumper crop of parsley; bright green, bushy and fragrant, so I phoned the shop and asked if they thought the parsley might sell.

"Bring six bunches." So I cut, weighed, bundled and tied them with string this morning. Then I poured about eight inches of water into a bucket in which to carry them. In my backpack I had a smaller container with 30p a bunch printed on the label.

When I left the shop, the parsley looking sumptuous was displayed almost at eye level on a bunker on the forecourt and the assistant had hinted that she would buy some to enhance her fish dinner.

... and there's another crop in the border ready to pick. Cottage industry.

NEXT! I'm planning a ghost story

A meeting is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Reading aloud and discussion of our pieces on 'departure' is what I've planned.

Then we might read aloud some extracts of published works. (Coleridge, Emily Bronte, George Orwell). The extracts were chosen for their representation of different moods. With those in mind, I'll suggest that we write a piece describing a mood for example; frivolity, excitment, or langour. Depending on how things develop, we could read each others' work aloud.

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Finished my entry for the Park Publication Competition.

Publisher;Penguin

Author; George Eliot

Title; Adam Bede

Once you get used to the dialect;

"Which was ye thinkin' on, Seth," "the pretty parson's face or her sarmunt, when ye forgot the panels?", the slow pace and domestic details, Adam Bede has a curiously compulsive effect. The chapter titled, A Crisis, where our hero comes to grief had me quite concerned.

I don't find the omniscient viewpoint annoying but the story might have been even more effective in the 1st person.

'That was a very enjoyable meeting,' said David

'Very stimulating,' said Elizabeth.

We had a theme which was, 'My Favourite Place', this week.

David had written a new composition, that he sang to guitar accompaniment. Elizabeth, read her account of one of the six week family holidays she used to take with her parents and sisters, in Scotland.

I read my essay which compared several places I like and concluded with my favourite, Elne en Roussillon, Cathedral Cloisters. Jenny had been unwell but she described a place she liked, using the spoken word.

We drank coffee and afterwards, read some extracts from the books of famous authors on the subject of 'arriving'. After discussing those the four of us wrote a few hundred words with 'arriving' as the theme. The results made us laugh.

... never wanted to. What am I to do?

I can't 'elp eet.

The bay tree, outside the kitchen window, looks spiffing, at the moment. Would have been easier to plant in early Spring, when the ground was damp with Winter rain. Eight gallons of water were used to drench the site - and me. A circle marked with sand was scored with a metal culinary spatula; the turf spiked and torn off with a garden fork.

'Oh,' said a voice from over the hedge. 'A pond.'

What the bay tree thought, of being ousted from its pot and transplanted for the second time this year, I have yet to discover. Hope it doesn't change into a trifid.

Sent two stories to Woman's Weekly magazine this week. Some of the local pigeons are fighting to defend their territory. One of them waddled by with an injured wing at dusk and earned himself a place in a poem.

Also wrote the first draft of a Christmas story and an entry for the Big Issue Comp.

Poems ... sent one to the Ralph Ockendon Comp. and the other to Mslexia

Began research for the National Poetry Prize last night by listing usual things such as;

smiles, birdsong, breakfast, pigeon.

Then I wrote a list of unusual things such as;

a tempest, a green woodpecker, a fight, falling in love.

I plan to write, anything that comes to mind via observation, reading or discussion, about a topic from each list, in the hope of creating a poem.

I began studying Creative Writing because after receiving, 'thank you for sending your story' ... 'but we published one like that yesterday', or 'thanks but not quite suitable', type letters for a year, I thought I might start behaving oddly if I didn't get some advice. I even considered working for nothing in the village shop to take my mind of the rejection slips. While on the course though I became anxious about missing freelance opportunities!

Now the course has finished I've been submitting with more confidence. Rejection letters? Phooey!

I have been shrieking with laughter.

'THE YEAR BEGAN...' ( Peter Mayle ) and ended 'with lunch' in fact the whole experience seemed more like eating than reading a book. 'Faustin shrugged with disbelief, shoulders and eyebrows going up in unison as he contemplated the extraordinary idea ...' ( Peter Mayle )

The book reminded me of the year I inhabited an apartement under the eves, in Canet en Roussillon.

References; Penguin,1989, Mayle P., A Year in Provence p. 3, p. 7

I am currently reading about the Norman Conquest of England.

'It would have taken in the region of five days for news of the landing to reach York, a distance of close on 250 miles from Hastings.' N.B.The manuscript I sent first class post last Monday morning to London from Suffolk, had not arrived on Thursday.

Reference

Amberley, 2009, Rex P., 1066, A New History of the Norman Conquest

'we invite a poem with the sea as its theme.'

The Flood Tide

First Verse  ( fourth draft )

There were crabs like spiders scrawling in the

mud and planing gulls cheered as a

flood tide seeped deeper bringing sticks,

sometime delayed by scrap piping or brick.

It drank the angle bathed the shell

licked the crinkle and drowned the smell

cooled the air and silvered space

like the redshank and peewit landing place.