Does it matter if I cast my vote
The polling station is a common ground
Will it make a difference what I write?

If our writing’s good it should throw light
On whether politicians are unsound
Or if it matters, should I  go to vote

Today the atmosphere in Britain’s not too bright
We are from chaos just one single bound
Will it make a difference what I write?

Ideas like shadow’s on the walls of caves
Need capturing immediately they’re found
Does it matter if I use my vote?

In our country, all our nerves are taut
A little noise will wantonly resound
Will it make a difference what I write?

The politicians strident still abound
The agents of derision lead their hounds
Does it matter if I cast my vote
Will it make a difference that I wrote?

I

The pathos of the bull

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/7-things-will-doom-novel-avoid

Do thesee exercises

• The Five-Minute Nonstop. Write for five minutes, first thing in the morning if possible, without stopping to think about what you’re writing. No correcting. Just write.
• The Page-Long Sentence. Choose something to describe (a room or a character) and write a page-long sentence about it, not pausing to edit and instead going on whatever tangents present themselves.
• The List Maker. Whenever you’re stuck for an idea to pursue, make a list. Brainstorm ideas without assessing them. Turn off your filter. Get lots of ideas, then pick the best one.

Writers who have dulled the inner critic don’t worry about getting the words right. The only thing they worry about is getting the words written.

“The people” have chosen to exit
The Europe to which we belong
My husband is fuming
His identity’s human
We’re not English cos our name is too long

My big  head is   a gift from the Vikings
The bones in my feet are all Celts
My blue eyes are Irish
My lips are  quite smilish
So  being European was a help.

The man who delivers the parcels
Puts Mary down as my surname
For even the Londoners
Hear it with wonderment
It’s Danish, I say, try again

Thwaite is a puzzle to many
Like Hebrew names might be to me
For  vowels are guessed at
Just how brilliant is that?
You  just have to believe it to see

I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(O)

I have got three odd shoes in my bedroom
Though all of them seem to be black
Where have their partners gone?
What on earth have  I done?
I must be distidy, what luck!

When I take them off in the late evening
I should peg them together right then
They like to go wandering
Leaving me wondering
If I should really be a  stray man.

For  women used to do all the housework
Being  tidy should be up our street
I f God made a mistake
Why can’t he remake
My brain and recreate me more neat?

1, This is for women- have your hair cut short in May in a decent hairdressers.You will be cooler in the summer and by November it should have grown about 3 inches.Have it trimmed but keep long so your head will feel warmer in winter

Savings: The minimum charge here is £35.A new place opened where it is £52.If you only go 2 or 3 times a year instead of 8  you will save £175.
2.Make a loaf of bread  at home.You don’t need a machine.Quality bread here  in a proper bakery is £2.50  for a large loaf.Buy dried yeast and strong flour… save  maybe £60 a year
3 Become a supporter of your newspaper online.ThGuardianan asks for £5 per month.The daily paper costs £2, more at the weekend.So potentially large savings…
4.When you go out make sure you go to the loo before coming home.For people who work from home or are retired,  it means your water bill is much higher.Go into Starbucks and use theirs! Or any other big chain.What a pity Amazon haveno coffee shops!
5 Don’t use toothpaste.It is not essential.Brush well.
6 Combine last year’s autumn clothes in different ways.Just buy a new scarf or knit one.Knitting is quite expensive nowadays though you can buy wool from places online….
7 Have only 2 meals a day.Plus fruit or carrots.
8 Reuse every bit of paper you can.
9 Write letters.The stamps are expensive but phone calls are too.
!0.Borrow/share books.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever?ocid=ww.social.link.email

Extract

Mental blind spots

The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.

People who ace cognitive tests are more likely to see past their own flaws

That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly more likely to have a “bias blind spot”. That is, they are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they are quite capable of criticising the foibles of others. And they have a greater tendency to fall for the “gambler’s fallacy” – the idea that if a tossed coin turns heads 10 times, it will be more likely to fall tails on the 11th. The fallacy has been the ruination of roulette players planning for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also lead stock investors to sell their shares before they reach peak value – in the belief that their luck has to run out sooner or later.

Members of high IQ society Mensa are not immune to belief in the paranormal (Credit: Thinkstock)

A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensamembers believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.

Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and education.” Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.

If they ordered children to be good
We thought it must be possible and right
So virtue must by will power   be oruled

We assumed that adults understood
Our feelings and our nature and our sight
When they ordered children to be good

Our selves were growing like the flowers in bud
Tender, wild and vulnerable to blight
When virtue was by will power  harshly oruled

Yet school is   a mere prison in the flood
Of growth towards the sun and its great light
Yet they ordered children to be good

By watching other people and their moods
We noticed how obsessively they cried
That virtue can by will power  be  ruled

They frightened us by saying when we died
God would judge us harshly   in his Pride
If they  believed that fear would make us good
Virtue must by terror  cruel be  ruled

And that can’t be right

I wanted to be good and thought  that meant
I need only wish to make it so:
I was what I desired in my intent

I suffered from strange tortures  throughout Lent
I dropped a boiling kettle on my toe
I wanted to be good and thought  it  meant

On my birthday I was quite absent
Any joy, I thought saints did not show
I was what I desired in pure intent

I thought God  lived like Moses in a tent
I feared Hell and saw the rosy glow
I wanted to be good yet turmoil   rent

As I grew,  neurosis in me sent
The fires of hell  to cause my overflow
I was by men desired though not fluent

I realised too late how I don’t  know
Who I am nor whither I should go.
I wanted to be good and thought  that meant
I was what I desired with such intent

This life is just a film where we play parts
If you take a trip or bad luck hits
Choose  the courage of the  human heart

Love’s the root of all the good that starts
But  power will hide in love until it’s hot
This life  might be a film where we play parts

Love and power are sometimes both inert
Yet from real love, the human is begot
With  what damage to the  human heart?

In error then we falsely do deport
The souls  whose ignorance is  a woeful threat
This life  might be a film where we learn art

In Stalin’s time,  the people wrote reports,
Were spies in networks friendship made unthought
With death to  courage  and the  human heart

Of the love of mothers, we forget
Before we spoke she was the  heart we met
This life is  a  great play with many parts
To enhance the courage  of our shuddering hearts

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/can-poetry-really-be-tran_b_109618.html

” Mohamed Enani, who translates the Bard into Arabic, actually admitted to the latter. In an interview with the “Al-Ahram Weekly he said, “it was not until … for five months I was practically incarcerated in a room in a French hospital — that I gave the matter serious consideration.”

You’ll understand Enani’s challenge if you’ve watched a performance of the storm sequence in Shakespeare’s King Lear, wherein you can hear the violence of the words—a violence which complements and heightens the meaning. To come close to effectively translating that effect, you would not only have to carry over meaning, replete with all the wordplay and metaphor, but also replicate the aural impact in the new language. No doubt a lot of this gets lost.”

You can’t have your iCake and eat it too.
Nokia,with tea, bread and butter
Nokia was a maiden fair who roamed with daisies in her hair
She looked through the Windows phone at me.
I had nothing on at all except a tampon.Well, it’s not exactly on, you know what I mean? It’s in there… you know.Why did we not learn the names?
I want a you-Phone.Or a superego-Phone
Sam  will sung,Sam  shall sing.Sam had singed.Sam had sang.Sam had sung.That sounds wrung.English, ain’t it splung?
Remember blind people can’t see you when you are glued to your phone…. so they will beat you.I have a white stick already… but I ain’t blind! Just blind drunk…. on air.
Hair on a G string…  that means they still have their hair down below?
Preludes and fugues.I though fugues were when you forget who you are.Like married love.Or maybe adultery but I can’t commit that now.I’ll have to get married again
Dead and never committed effrontery!
He shall feed his flock?Did they have mattresses 2,000 years ago? Is flock alive? No wonder some folk can’t sleep.
It’s funny, you can lie on the sofa and drowse all day but go to bed and worry.Am I asleep? Will I go to sleep? When? Shall I get up and watch TV? No,we haven’t got one yet!How unfair is that? Will I stop thinking?Why not? OMG I wish it was tomorrow.It is tomorrow OMG I’ve ben awake all night.I should be a cab driver and do late shifts.Except I can’t drive.

Now a Conservative MP has been suspended for using the phrase “The nigger in the woodpile”.
As a  child I heard people say when going shopping, Don’t let them dew you.I didn’t realise they meant “Jew.” I don’t know if adults did but I am ashamed to say it was used very frequently.As a woman, I know all who are not white men are considered defective is some way and even men don’t have it easy if they are poor, shy or nervous.
As a teenager my brothers refused to let me read the Sunday paper as ” women shouldn’t need to read about politics”, they refuse to let me put a record on  the hi fi as” I would probably damage it”.I had to iron their clothes while I was doing exams at school.Of course an adult could have intervened but they didn’t and it does have a bad effect.I was 25 before I could afford a  gramophone and play my own 2 records!
While we did homework in the front room one of my brothers played Wagner all the time very loud.I’ve hated it ever since.I was glad to  be able to go to college where I was treated well by everybody.It was wonderful.
And it’s not as bad as what some go through but we don’t reflect enough.

The tent of shelter refers to the tents used by the Jewish people wandering for 40 years in the desert after leaving Egypt.This is now remembered at Sukkot,The Feast of Tabernacles.It is in the autumn so also links to the ingathering of crops

https://youtu.be/bHipdvZmPBs

Defiant and life-affirming in the face of death

After the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death by suicide people are still puzzling about her.Was she schizophrenic? Was her husband an hypnotically attractive demon who betrayed her.And her mother… was she too close and burdensome or too neurotic or too far away?

Well, I have an idea.. that it may be some of us work too hard, push ourselves too hard; value ourselves only if we achieve perfection in all spheres of our lives.And this can make us profoundly exhausted…. and then we get into a downward spiral.Sylvia Plath had 3 pregnancies in 3 years.~Her mother was far away in the USA and she had no family here.

She and her husband worked very hard at their writing and she produced many poems even during those childbearing years.And they also moved home several times.

We sometimes live as if we have no body; we  get ideas of what we would like to achieve and e.g. get up at 4 am to write for 3 hours before the children waken up.And such women are unlikely to serve ready meals for dinner.It will be a fancy dish from Fanny Farmer or The Joy of Cookery.Then they decorate their own homes and entertain many visitors at the weekend.

To be blunt, in my view, the fatigue is the main problem and forgetting we need time for ourselves.You cannot usually have it all unless you can afford to employ servants of some kind.And they need supervising

We need to care for our physical well-being and defer that work that will make our name or the money we need to build a big extension on our house.

It’s quite ironical here that most people have fantastic large kitchens but buy ready meals and even MASHED POTATO in the supermarket.Better to have a small kitchen and less debt so less worry on your mind.And cooking, if not too ambitious can  be a form of meditation if we do it slowly

You are probably not going mad… you need more rest and to learn to relax.I am not a doctor so these are just my personal views.If Sylvia Plath had not pushed herself too hard mentally she might be here today.And if you don’t have some time for relating to Nature and other people what’s the point of life?

For me the point of being alive is to live and be aware that we live; to savour the days ,the friends.the flowers ,the food.To perceive and to dream as well as to work in our jobs or in our homes.Otherwise we are like automatons

Say, Father, give me your blessing.It is 40 years since my last confession
Well, it wasn’t your last, was it?
That’s rude
What do you want?
I’d like obsoletion for all my sins
Absolution?
No, I want all my sins to become obsolete.
What are they?
Adultery
Bad temper
Raising my voice
Sleeping with onion tarts
Telling the truth in Parliament
Well, the last is obsolete.But I can’t make acts obsolete.It happens when people lose interest in them
Well they are obsolete for me

Do you repent?
No, I feel deprived.
Repent or I can’t carry on
I didn’t know you did carry on!
Well,you do now!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsoletion

plural 

obsoletions