https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jul/22/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

Looking East towards Long Mynd.

3 October.

Dyspepia…,.. aversion to looking at women. ( Or men)

Bronchitis… An allergy to wild horses.

Neuralgia.. where is Nalgia?

Disseminated sclerosis.   . A desire to spread rumours

Osteoporosis,…. .. apprehension about the Austro Hungarian empire

Boil on the knee .. This is a new addition to the boil in the bag menu

Gastroenteritis…. What you get when you visit a gastro pub.

Nausea… A seaside resort in North America.

Inflamed gullet,….

A fish that is cooked directly over a flame at your table.

Bunion… …A special kind of onion used in English cookery

.

https://www.mariapapadima.com/adolescents-and-perfectionism-some-psychoanalytic-ideas/#:~:text=Winnicott%2C%20instead%2C%20was%20interested%20in,at%20the%20start%20of%20life.

In our yard, we had a dog on wheels.

Its fur was almost gone,it was so worn

I sat upon its musty back,my steed.

I thought that he looked sad, he looked forlorn

In that house my grandma lived and died

My father was a child it was his dog

Rich as grass in meadows was its fur.

The rusty wheels were bright and pierced the fog

I see the yard the coal shed and the lav.

The green back gate my grandad coming in

The shed where bikes were piled up in a rush.

The cat jumped  up so fast on the ash bin

Dad went off then grandad went off too.

I see them coming home in polished shoes

You might be poor but still you could look neat

A Sunday coat,best shoes on polished feet

Pray Father,give me some washing.I’ve got Wikileaks and a new obsession.
Tell me more,my child.I am feeling bored.
I think someone has been inside my computer.
They can’t be human. so why worry?
Why not,Father?
Well, we are not thin enough to get into the computer.
Ah, they turn themselves into particles and come in with the current..
when it’s high tide.
Do you mean tied?
No,Father.I’ve not been reading that book.Fifty Blades All Gay
Neither have I but in the confessional I’ve heard it all and more.
And how does that make you feel,Father?
Why pay to read a fantasy when you can dream up your own?
Some are born dim… others become dimner by choice
Well,any sins tonight,my dear?
I’m so sorry.I was planning to tell a lie but I forgot.
There’s a list of sins in the Missal…have you read those?
Yes,I’ve not tried most of them yet… though I just got a slight pang of anger
when a brick fell onto my head from a clear blue sky.
That’s natural anger,my child.but I feel it was odd for a brick to fall like that
Has a brick ever fallen on your head,Father.
Not yet but I’m only 97.I must buy a hard hat
Wow,you look much olde than 97 r.Are you longing to diet?
Why, is there no food in heaven?
I wonder who cooks if they eat up food
Maybe they live on manna.
Does God eat food?
That was one topic we never did in the cemetery.
Do you mean the seminary.
At my age, they are all one.
You have reached Nirvana….congratulations.
Well.I’d prefer a cup of tea.
You English!
What are you?
I’m a great Dane.
Did you say a grey Dane.
That too.
Well perk up;the show’s not quite over till the gnat really stings.
Do gnats eat string?
String… it’s my passion.Love it or mate it…get involved.
Live a little.
And for your penance… you must have a bath…
Why?
I don’t like the way you smell.
Well,I am a dog.. we like to sniff.May I borrow your hanky?
Definitely,I shall dry your tears for you and please try to commit few intriguing sins before you come back here.
I’ll wash it for you.And dry it out of doors
Well,it’s not over till that gnat gets its sting and the phone gets a ring

The Case for Having a Hobby https://nyti.ms/2G2D0cG

Z

Isn’t it telling that you forgot?” said Brigid Schulte, author of “Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time,” when I told her I had blanked on the word.

“That’s so indicative of where we are in our culture right now, that you can actually forget what it is to have something you like to do that’s not a) tied to work and b) productive,” Ms. Schulte said.

While researching her book Ms. Schulte realized how many “lifehacks” make hobbies out to be keys to productivity rather than activities just meant to be enjoyed, and she saw that it was difficult for people to get out of that way of thinking.

But eventually, she found that people responded to “neuroscience and research about how you need a space where you’re calm that leads to insight.” Yet even with that knowledge in hand, Ms. Schulte said, people still saw hobbies as means to improve their performance at work. “That’s the only way I can break through to people about why having leisure is important.”

Indeed, Americans’ difficult relationship with leisure is nothing new.

“People forget that when we were negotiating the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, there were three conditions people wanted: minimum wage, 40-hour workweek and mandatory two-week vacation,” Ms. Schulte said. We got two out of three, “and we’ve been stuck ever since.” One in four Americans has no access to paid time off, and those who do often don’t take all of their vacation time or they spend their vacations checking email. Many of us have been taught to hate not being productive, and we’ve structured our culture around work, not play.

I have been writing poetry which obviously uses metaphors. I notice a lot of metaphors are based on terms used in art especially drawing.

Ultimately most metaphors must be based on something concrete in the real world. There are probably a lot of metaphor based on growing things in your garden. Based on our existence as objects in the real world and our bodies therefore and our minds

Don’t run before you can walk. Mathematics is studied from very simple levels to The heights of abstractions so don’t try to learn calculus before you have mastered arithmetics

In that sentence master is a metaphor we don’t literally master arithmetic but we could master a wild horse or another person. There’s nowhere else for metaphor to come from than the world of our senses. And that will vary somewhat for everybody especially in different countries different places different work situations personal relationships etc

Willpower is often lacking but we can take a horse to the water but we can’t make it drink

I’m going to solve this problem if it’s the last thing I do.

That feels stupid because if you die after you solve the problem you won’t know that is is solved will you?

Sometimes it’s good to widen your view. Tunnel vision limits you.

Focusing on a very small part of the outside world is necessary at times but it can also be dangerous when you look down your footpath and it looks clear but if you had a broader view you might see there is a lion in the field next to your house

If you are looking at anything you will see it differently if you

Take a step back.

Get things in perspective

See things rom a different angle

And turn things over in your mind.

So I am going to write about this eventually because I think it’s very interesting.

I’m frequently impressed when I remember sayings adages, things my mother used to say which are often related to bodily states

When I couldn’t find my glasses I was searching nervously or frantically and only found them when I gave up…..

I remembered my mother saying

You can’t see, for looking.

This is very interesting because like language itself and the developments from it these are coming from the lips of ordinary People. And they’re recognisinhg something which is only in the last hundred years been scientifically described I believe.

There are two kinds of seeing

Very focussed seeing.. narrow purposive vision… This is when we’ve got some thing which our mind is pinned on to and we ignore everything else apart from that very narrow bit of the world that we see very intently. We can also switch into this when we’re under stress, severe stress sometimes.

Then there is the way that the owl must look when it is looking from the tree for something to eat

Wide vision where you’re not focusing sharply on any individual spot in the landscape but your eyes widened and you’re scanning the whole at once. When the owl sees something then he or she must switch into the sharply focused mode and swoop down to catch the little beast that was spotted so the owl could have something to eat

I think artists also will be familiar with this. The eye muscles have to be relaxed which  will happen spontaneously when necessary or sometimes you can do it deliberately. There are breathing techniques and relaxation techniques which can switch into this mode

Going back to the adage

You can’t see for looking.

See refers to broad vision with the eye muscles relaxed

And ,cleverly, looking refers to sharply focused vision

So if you’re looking too hard you can’t see

Well it took me 48 hours to find my glasses

I had taken them off in my bedroom to put some sunscreen on my face and then I couldn’t find them

I was looking in the bedroom for them

But when I found them they were downstairs in the sitting room

I wasn’t even trying to find them them and I’d given up completely

My old ones are adequate for most purposes but nevertheless if you if you wear glasses you know that having the ones you’re used to especially for reading is really very important and some of us feel incomplete without them.

I’m always grateful when I find something and I often look up at the sky and say

Thank you.

And thank you to all those human beings that came before us and left us wisdom in these sayings. And this was long before they were schools and universities and other learning organizations.

I sometimes think that we are getting less intelligence as time goes on.

My heart was in my mouth [so I had to eat suck it all day which gave my thumb a rest]
My heart sank [ to the bottom of the pond in Barrow Bridge]
I fell head over heels in love with a cat.[That’s why I had no children as inter-species marriage is not yet allowed but soon it will be here]
I could not swallow his excuse as my mouth was full of chocolate buttons I had torn off my uniform..well they looked like chocolate]
That is hard to digest.[So may I please spit it out?]
I spat him out [but he came back as he was on an elastic rope]

I was wondering if new phrases come into existence now and I don’t recall any.Is it because we are no longer so involved in creating our language or because there are experts in academia who study it.At one time ordinary people made buildings etc and m ust have developed skills in geometry etc from a practical point of view.And it was they who invented writing and numbers etc not people in Universities who do not create but analayse and criticise and study signs and connections.
So has the rise of experts made us stupider than people were in the past?Is it poets who invent new idioms?

My eyes nearly leaped out of my head when he passed by…
Luckily I had put superglue down the sides of them at breakfast time.
My hands grasped the nettle and I almost threw the flowers at his head.Then he said:
You are the hoover of my soul.
Walls have fears,you know.
A rolling brick gathers no floss.
I patted him on the wreck and we parted with no acrimony and no real money either.What is acrimony?
I’m a pharisee and ‘i’m ok.Jewish by right and a whirling prayer.
I can’t live without hue or colour
Tint me this day.oh Lord.
Does God sell salt on the internet.He has a Lot.Sorry Lot’s wife.Does it clatter?

Hennetwistle has a railway stop
The name is Viking now it’s usually spelled
Entwistle, where reservoirs fill up
Manchester wants water, here it’s held

Too Thirlmere is an artificial lake
For tea in Manchester, those thirsty folk
How much more d’ye think that they will take?
Hamlets drowned, dull cypress trees that cloak

I once passed through Darwen on a train
On the way to Ilkley with my aunt
No memory of bliss with me remains
Except the flowers so wild, their ghosts still haunt

Yet nowhere else gives me the feel of home
This landscape is my body and my soul

The music is the waves as they run high
Across the pebbly sands onto the road
Then groaning of the shingle as waves die

The fish that dwell deep in the dark, dark brine
The flow within as outer waters flow
The music of the waves as they run high

The moon reflects sun’s light to other eyes
Above the seas which rise up to its goad.
Then groans the shingle as the steep waves die

The sea holds hidden goods where we can’t pry
In the deep the heavy water moulds
The music of the waves as they run high

All the day and all of the black night
The seas and oceans change from high to low
Ah, groans the earth as each wave has to die

Re-hear these sounds, are they a sacred code?
As angels wrestled, Jacob feared the Lord
His music is the waves as they run high
His groaning is the shingle as waves die

The fields in flames, the stubble set alight
The earth herself was burning in our sight
The ancient lands of Essex still grew grain
As hares ran into hedgerows seared with pain

The empty road, the smoke, the land on fire
The ashes left a newer crop would sire
The land to Epping vast and flat was bright
Yet covered in its smoke there was no light

Our little human world is but a skin
Destruction easy with a word or bomb
Dependent on the government, those liars
Weak as watered gruel, they must be fired

Caught inside the symbols of the Earth
From destruction comes a brave new birth

Snow clouds hang like canopies forlorn,
Tinged with grey from lack of proper care,
While from the Channel sing the dread foghorns

Sailors in the night long for new dawn
Fear boats of refugees may still sail there
Snow clouds hang like canopies well torn

A dinghy holds the Saviour lately born
There is no space on earth safe from great fear
From the Channel sigh the families drowned

From maternal space, Jesu is torn
His father holds his arms around those dear
Snow clouds hang, are lacy wings no more

The hearts of British ” natives” have turned sour
Into Jesu’s side we thrust our spears
Tune the channel.Requiems need scores

All lives now, and all of time is here
Do not mistake the song of silent choirs.
Snow clouds hang like canopies forlorn,
While in the Channel, stuttering are the horns

When Mary joined her art class  she found there was a very interesting man called Brian who came from Burnley. Brian’s work was excellent although none of the students adventured beyond Constable in their paintings. But then who could go beyond Constable?

But why should dear old people be made to confront modern and post modern thoughts and feelings? Even Gustav Munch was really beyond the pale. Was he trying to warn us?

I suppose that people like to retain the idea  of the world as in some sense orderly and beautiful with patterns that can be discovered by scientists or artists. The idea that these patterns are not real that they may be imposed by us and that now we no longer have the strength or faith to do that is a subject for discussion Mary decided.

These people had lived through world war II and had served their country like Brian who had worked on radar in the Edison light bulb factory in Eastern Enfield.

The Germans were not totally deceived by it being called a light bulb factory and the area was bombed heavily; fortunately Brian’s landlady had a very strong house with a cellar so fortunately the dear man had been saved

Mary was  nervous because unlike the other students she had only taken up art when she was almost 60 years old. But anyone who does that is very brave she told herself sensitively.

But it’s not always a bad thing to be nervous.. perhaps it’s essential to be so every time you start a fresh creation

After spending half an hour looking at the blank sheet of drawing paper Mary  took up pencil and began to sketch the seabird made of wood that she had taken with her to the class that morning.

Ate we meant to put the shadows in she asked Deli the art teacher

Yes do. Shadows as re what make things real as Jung certainly saido maybe in a different language. No not Chinese,Margaret.

Actually once Mary started it wasn’t as frightening as she had imagined. And soon it was time for the coffee break

In the kitchen of the ancient and beautiful house the student sat round a large pine table to drink their instant coffee. Mary had never realised before how much she hated it as a drink and so she thought she would pour it over some plants in pots when nobody was looking rather than waste it completely m

Brian told everyone that he had been to Morrison’s and to his surprise he found a bottle of wine there exactly so was one he had bought at an expensive wine tasting experience  he had gone to in Central London

Millicent and Mimie two old friends who lived near the Catholic church in Holbrook Green 🍏 seem to feel scandalised

Did you buy any send Millicent

Of course I did said Brian. I bought three.

You should have seen the expression on Millicent’s first she was utterly critical as of unmarried or widowed older men buying wine.

Will Mary said,Wine is very useful when you are entertaining.

And heard Brian murmur quietly.

Especially when you are entertaining yourself

He had a little grin on his

Was very handsome thin bony and handsome face. In the sun his hair almost looked like fuse wire. Perhaps Millicent was trying to hide her attraction towards him as no doubt he was the best losing man in the art class which wasn’t difficult because there was only one other one there the rest of the students were all female.)

What’s a lovely sense of humour he had

Then they heard a little voice saying

I’d like to try some of that wine Brian.

They looked tound but they could not see anybody Was this the still small voice that Elijah heard on the mountain?

Then they look down the room and saw a little black cat smiling. They had never seen a cat previously but then life can be very surprising sometimes thank goodness

Emile cried Mary what on earth are you doing here?

You forgot to take your senior citizens bus pass so I thought I would come on the bus with it to meet you down here.

I’m surprised that they let you use my bus pass when you were not a human being

Well they’re so used to The madness of the current era and  our government in particular that they don’t seem to notice now whether we’re people animals or even spirits from the next world.

I came in a cab, Mary revealed,because I had to carry my art materials with me.

Oh said Emile, I don’t mind going in a cab.

Millicent and Mimi were looking at Mary as if she was a complete lunatic. The truth was revealed to all

Well some people bring their partner to the art class but not many bring their cat. And a talking cat is a very rare phenomenon in Britain ell

Have you brought your art materials Emile?

Mary has not bought me any art materials but if you let me have some of your paint I can make a picture using my paws.

No said Deli. We can’t risk getting pains on these wonderful old floors.

Don’t worr I’ve got some.socks since I can put on after I finished the painting

Or I had borrow some pastels

Mary already had a stramge reputation among the old folks so now they’re thought she was completely bonkers but the truth was that Emile was worried that Mary was falling in love with Brian and Emile did not want Mary to find a new partner unless he was absolutely certain this man would accept him as an equal in the houshould

I hate to say this said the art teacher to Mary but your cat is better at art than you are!!

Well it certainly looks post modern Mary answered. Do you think that people would buy these?

Saatchi maybe? Or maybe the king would like to buy one?

Well you never know do you?

It takes all sorts to make a world

And so say all of us

Was anyone buy emiles picture?

You have to wait 10 years for the next exciting instalment to be published. Why not write it yourself so that you can put your own experience in as you may have an even more strain story than Mary’s

https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/lettice-knollys-elizabeth-i-nemesis-enemy-robert-dudley-love-triangle/

Once i wrote a villanelle a day.

Little songs about the grief I knew

When you cannot sing then you must pray.

Sentences are holy, words can play.

Every day I wrote my song anew

I used to write a villanelle each day.

Donkeys cannot sing but they can bray.

Words and rhythmics sounds act as a cue.

When you cannot sing  then you must pray

Once I broke the law by being gay.

I tell a lie,I’ve told noone but you

I used to write a villanelle  a day.

You cannot buy creation on eBay

Teaching learning singing how to choose?

When I cannot sing I like to pray

Will you be my negative ok?

Capable of nothing, tears are dew

Once I wrote a villanelle a day

I’d rather be in bed with a mild flu

When I cannot sing I like to pray

I once wrote a villanelle each day

I apologise for loving you too much 
We never learned to balance the see-saw
In modern times the lovers should go Dutch

Two lonely   lovers with  a single crutch
Each one having many curious flaws
I apologise for loving you too much

What ever did I do to merit touch?
Then I was too careless with the salt
In modern times the lovers should go Dutch

We should measure what we speak at lunch
Then we weigh the sentences that spilt
I apologise for loving you too much

Maths and stats are useful in the lurch
Equality of signs and numbers,bills
In modern times the lovers should go Dutch

,

Let the mouth be silent, keep quite still
Love is rarely used when writing Wills
I apologise for loving you so much 
In modern times  we lovers cannot touch

I wish we were on Easby Moor again

Or looking down the hill of Hasty Bank

The feel of scented flowers where we had lain

We closed our eyes and into bliss we sank

I wish we were near Saltburn on the sands.

I wish we were near Redcar on the coast.

The butterflies, the seagulls and the Band

Your mother liked the sea and sand the most.

Your father liked the hills and heather moors.

You were torn between them, now you’re gone

Your mother bough some honey for her store

Breathing northern air my loving one

When we got to Stamford you were low

Suburban London where no waters flow

I wish we were in Cleveland on the hills

We have to work in London for the bills.

The emperor got in trouble for his clothes.

Apparently he had none,rumour goes

Even a wise man who knows the truth

Says clothes can make a man look less uncouth.

When you’ve been invisible for years

You cannot understand the eyes that stare

But now he knows he’s visible to all

He’s meeting Donald Trump before the Fall.

Whatever way he jumps the media scream

He’s got special glasses that don’t steam.

They only cost £2,000 a pair

Universal credit helps all there

He’ll be an oap in 3 more years

He’ll get pension credit I am sure.

And on the strength of that I’m sure he’ll get

A loan from Rachel Reeves to buy the specs

Maybe he’s disabled, there’s a grant

To help them have a bath and put on pants.

I’m sure he’s very wealthy all the same

It seems to drive the envious insane.

If one friend cannot give another cash.

The world will end in violence… oh.it has

The Middle East is screaming, wild with grief

Close the curtain now we have to leave.

I don’t know who it was that wrote this play

Holy Moses tablets were just clay

Though you are old and may not live forever

Even in one minute you may do some things creative

You may visit someone lonely and save them from further distress

You may smile at young mother struggling with a baby

You might feed someone who is unwell or depressed

The importance of the future is not that you are going to do something amazing like discover a new continent or a new planet

Importance is not measured only by those huge measures

Touching someone’s heart for a moment it’s very important ….

We do still have a future when we’re old even if it’s only one day and on that day just being alive and experiencing it is worthwhile

Do more of what you like

There are still flowers in the garden don’t ignore them

And the trees are still green you will see them turning when this rain stops.

Even one tiny action

Triggers off reverberations like when you throw a pebble into upon and you see the waves spreading in the water

Evening we don’t know about it we may have already helped someone to know

Share a meal it doesn’t have to be expensive

Open your heart and your door

Everybody is important

We have to be open to surprise

A perception, a conception change can happen at any moment

https://mansfield-devine.com/speculatrix/2017/04/computing-with-arthritis-keyboards-mice-and-more/

Do not leave us for your lonely grave

Do not leave us here when you are gone

Do not leave my heart in blood to bathe

We need your kindness your work is not yet done

Do not leave a sister all alone

Do not leave a brother empty sad.

You who share my skin and share my bones

Come back come back live not with the Dead

Here’s your daughter with her newborn babe

Here’s your eldest son oh mother mine

Live again live again oh stay

Do not leave us yet without a sign

The tears run down our faces but too late.

The human world’s not ours to navigate

The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community.
For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties.
For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/

Extract

Poetry: full of his nature and his visions

Fresh from school and in his early twenties now, I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school instead of a university.”—from his memoir Four Years (1887-1891) (1921). The Yeats were now living in London in Bedford Park where Yeats’ aesthetic sensibility was oftentimes offended by the ubiquitous red brick, however their home was the lively gathering place for their many writer and artist friends to discuss politics, religion, literature, and art. Around this time Yeats met George Bernard Shaw and William Ernest Henley, editor of London’s The National Observer who became a friend and mentor. He also met many of the other up-and-coming authors and poets of his generation and writes of one in his memoir “My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous.”(ibid). In the year 1890 he and Ernest Rhys founded the London-based Rhymers Club. Yeats’ pre-Raphaelite inspired The Wanderings of Usheen [Oisin] and other Poems was published in 1889, which included “The Ballad of Moll Magee”, the traditional Irish song “Down By The Salley Gardens” and “The Stolen Child”.

Yeats was often homesick for Ireland, of which his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was one of the results,

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Though he visited Sligo almost every summer, he also kept a busy schedule in London: when he was not attending lectures or meetings with the Club, he spent time in the British Museum of Natural History doing research for such collaborations as Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and A Book of Irish Verse (1895). He was often shy around women but made the acquaintance of many who became friends including poet Katharine Tynan (1861-1931) and Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), founder of the Theosophical Society of which Yeats joined in 1888. A year later he met his muse and source of unrequited love; poet, feminist, actress, and revolutionary Maud Gonne (1865-1953).

The Abbey Theatre and Beyond

In 1894 Yeats met friend and patron Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) of Coole Park and thus began their involvement with The Irish Literary Theatre which was founded in 1899 in Dublin. (It would become the Abbey Theatre in 1904). As its chief playwright, one of the first plays to be performed there was Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan, with Gonne in the title role. The Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland, opened in December of 1904 and became the flagship for leading Irish playwrights and actors. Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand was one of its first productions. Of his many dramatic and successful works to follow, The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904) are among his best known. When Synge died in 1909 Yeats helped to finish his manuscript for Deirdre of the Sorrows. In 1911 the Abbey Theatre embarked on a tour of the United States.

As a successful poet and playwright now, in 1903 Yeats went on his first lecture tour of the United States, and again in 1914, 1920, and 1932. Yeats and his sisters started the Cuala Press in 1904, which would print over seventy titles by such authors as Ezra Pound, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Bowen, Jack and John Yeats, and Patrick Kavanagh, before it closed in 1946. At the age of forty-six, in 1911, Yeats met Georgie (George) Hyde Lees (1892-1968) and they married on 20 October, 1917. They had two children; Anne (born 1919) and for whom he wrote “A Prayer for My Daughter”;

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Michael was born on 22 August 1921, for whom Yeats wrote “A Prayer for My Son”;

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning’s back.

Sitting all alone in an unknown coffee shop

My shoes were full of water, I wasn’t really there

I was trapped inside the greenhouse, emitting a red stare

Now I have no handbag, I’m carrying a mop

I’m going to the library I am feeling quite unreal

I said I’d meet my sister, I could tell her how I feel.

In my cappuccinos the foam has just congealed

I don’t like the books here not even enough to steal.

I went to an exhibition, the price was rather high

I thought that it was textiles I hope they will be silk

But see there’s Tracey Emin, she’s embroidering a quilt

I can look upwards I can see the starry sky

I’m sitting in the coffee shop, I don’t like that milk

I suppose I better drink it or I will surely wilt

I wish I were on Orrest Head again.

I wish that my own sisters were still here.

I’d like to see the lake  below me now.

The largest longest lake it’s Windermere.

I wish that I were getting off the train

With my old school friends and all our gear

The first and best of all my holidays.

I’d like to take the boat on Windermere.

I wish I were in Ambleside today.

I’d like to  hire a boat that we could steer

I’d see the river Rothay gurgling in

At the Northern end of Windermere.

My sisters and my mother, they have gone.

But drifting on the lake,I smile again