under another sun

Lorraine and I back to work this morning. Lorraine off to school, while I, with a good deal of doomy trepidation, went back to my desk to consider the hostile future. Freelance work has been very thin this year, and my other projects have stalled or are on ice, and I urgently need to find a way of pulling myself up by my bootstraps. First however, a few wee bits that have been hanging around on my desk that I simply must finish this week. Nevertheless, there were teas to be brought to Pat and Maureen in bed this morning. Maureen said she was going to deliberately disturb me, and she crept into my study at one point and sang lustily for a couple of minutes, grinning at me naughtily all the while. I bring it on myself, as I torment her lots too. Betty came by at lunchtime and took them out in her car to do a spot of shopping in Brighton. I went for my regular constitutional up to the hillfort, listening to my new audiobook, another in the great lectures series, about life for ordinar...

Men dying like the leaves Up at 6:30 again thanks to the kitten, then an early start. More erection copy. Only a few more days this before I can get onto glaucoma. Remembrance day today. Lots of stuff on the radio and TV about the first world war, and the Spanish flu pandemic afterwards which one expert was saying killed 50 million people globally. Picked up my copy of The lost voices of World War 1 edited by Tim Cross. This had been given me by World War II poet Victor West who was a friend of mine but is now dead. The 11th hour always makes me think of Wilfred Owen's parents getting the dreaded telegram as the bells for armistice rang out in Shrewsbury, or one of my all time favourite poets Edward Thomas, when asked by a friend having enlisted in the Artists rifles at the age of 37 what he was fighting for, picked up a handful of soil and crumbled it between his fingers, saying "literally, for this." All that nobility lost, a generation of poets, for what seems today ...