Category: Blogs

Many of my blog posts are published on Shine A Light On Life, including the series in my Sampler. I also regularly blog on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, mainly about events local to me.

Agatha Christie Literary Festival, Torquay

I was invited to the Agatha Christie Literary Festival in Torquay, South West, by a friend who had tickets for a range of talks. We were going to ‘Lost Lingo’ a talk by author, Kate Kingold from Chicago. I had arrived on the little branch line train from Exeter. It’s like stepping into a novel arriving in Torquay when you leave the period station which is all curly Victorian metalwork and beautiful ornamental pillars, you can immediately see the sea. This day it was the deepest of blue and above a pellucid blue sky with one or two puffy white clouds. The sea was restless in the wind, but the sun was very bright for an autumn day.

Dartmoor Mountains

I found my way back, I just retraced my steps and found familiar bushes and dried up stream, and the stone wall. There was the gate I had opened. It was still there. I was not lost. There was sun everywhere and the bigness of the sky and the space of the moor, which always inspires poetry. As in ‘ROAD TRIP RIVER VOICES.’

Pyrenees

There were mountains everywhere you looked. And it was fabulous, they could keep you awake at night with their presence. I kept the bedroom window open so their fresh air could strea, into the room with their presences. It felt like the Hall of the Mountain King, that there were essences or folk tales all about that lived in these high places.

The Amazing Art of Cath Whitehead

Cath does the same with her depictions of the countryside of Devon, with the light falling on the red soil churned in furrows by the plough and the sea as it sits moodily in a steep sided estuary. Trees become painted as giant friends, with almost a personality they are so firm and present to the viewer. The intrusion of the human world in the form of architecture becomes monumental and reduced to the bare minimum.

Cleeve Abbey, Somerset

We parked the car where it was dry and approached the area on foot. The first building we came to was a gatehouse and there was a notice there from the ‘Almoner’ to say that this was where food was given to the poor. The monks helped the local people when they were in trouble, needed food. Then beyond the gatehouse there is nothing until one reaches a building that looks like a later farm house. A drainage ditch or water supply leads from the gatehouse to the main buildings or the ruins of them that are left.

Spring Hawthorne

HAWTHORNE IN BLOOM
I was walking along the River in Somerset and there ,so early in the year ,was this Hawthorne, a whole tree ablaze against an azure sky. It seemed unreal after months of grey. But it was real. Cicely Mary Barker said in her poem illustrated by her painting of the Hawthorne fairy that the Hawthorne is the first. It is brave and forges ahead.

Poetry From A Railway Car

Robert Louis Stevenson in 1885 wrote, in ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses.’ :

From a Railway Carriage
‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches…

Canada Road: the Trees

From a kayak or even swimming in the lake looking back you can see that the land is all trees.  ..not used to seeing trees next to water, but not this is a land of blue water and green, a land of trees.