Getting ready for thunder

Got the morning started with some good poetry time, and may have finished my first ever villanelle, its repetitive form working well with my subject matter which was about walking around the hill fort wall. Felt powerfully antsy after a while. 

Took myself off to the gym, then had to return when I reached the park, as I had no facemark. Nobody wears facemasks in the gym, but it was empty enough to have lots of space around me. It was good for mind and body. Also I was listening to the History of English podcast, by Kevin Stroud, which I have done for a year or so. It really is excellent, and relentlessly thorough. Food shopping then home again, sauntering across the park. Back to work, although focus was hard to come by today. Reading Rachel Boast's book Hotel Raphael, which hasn't yet gripped me in the way that Void Studies did. There are two pages at the back of Hotel Raphael called  Reading | Viewing, which has all her intertextual references. Lots of Akhmatova, who I like very much. Poems inspired by other poems. Surely the filthy rag and bone shop of the heart should come into it somewhere. I don't know if all this is due to my inability to relax properly at the moment, and go with the flow.   

Spent some time looking for a pair of green shorts I use for the gym. Returning spent time looking at copy of Tess Jolly's Breakfast at the Origami Cafe is one of them. 

Otherwise little. Clouding over this evening, I sat outside and had a can of beer and read a book about wild flowers, before boiling some small potatoes and cutting chives etc. for a salad supper.  Later there was an impressive thunderstorm, coming in from the chanel and passing for the most part just to the east of us. I poked my head out of the Velux window in the top bathroom to get a better view.  Saw one of two of those strikes that seem to travel horizontally, and the violet flashing sky.  

Lorraine said there was a small fire at school today. A piece of electrical equipment spontaneously burst into flames, when being charged, and it caught some paper on fire. Luckily someone was on hand and it was sorted in moments. 

Below an orange low sun, as it gets ready to thunder, taken leaning out of our Juliette Balcony.