https://medium.com/swlh/poetry-and-prose-b301b7e8bcc6
Consolation
When tensions in the mind can splinter souls
And into strangers ears we pour our woes..
When grief and sorrow shudder thriough our walls.
And whether all is lost we cannot know
When what is in or out we cannot tell.
When fantasy and dream become confused.
When spears of angst are felt to maim each cell.
When sensibility is utterly bemused.
. He in whom we to trusted wills to fail
For what he said was love was mere desire.
Now pain and disappointment make us frail;
With torment know this lover was a liar.
Then, having lost all other means to live,
We turn to darkness where our consolation is.
Share this:
Thoughts at dusk in winter
Four o’clock– and the sun’s still glowing
Four o’clock – of a colour bright day,
Up above, pink-tinged clouds are sliding
Down still sky, sweeping sun away.
Come back sweet sun, do not yet leave us.
Come back bright beams,I need sunlight
Down on earth,it’s witch moon darkness,
When your golden face is out of sight.
I see the orange clouds extending
I feel such sense of sky lit bright.
But gently now, the mist surrounds you
And sweeps away that happy sight.
Into velvet blackness sinking,
The dazzling, dreaming darkness falls.
Goodbye to haste,and glare, and sunshine,
Time for reverie,night time calls.
On the night-trains gentle journeys,
On this trackless train we ride
Strange new visions, haunting pictures
We will see in dreams’ designs.
In my night train,I’ll be happy
In such rich deep reverie.
We visit darkness in our sleeping,
There we learn its ecstasy.
Now we may have no God to hold us,
In His Hands of Living Love,
What will help us trust deep blackness
If there’s no Saviour from above?
Must we enter that great darkness,
Go back to dark from which we came,
Into dark all living creatures,
In that darkness find our home?
Trust the dark unknown, to hold us,
Trust the dark,both night and day.
Must we walk into that darkness
And trust it is our safest way?
Share this:
The 20 Best Chromebook Keyboard Shortcuts
Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think
Ways to Read, Write, Teach and Learn Poetry With The New York Times
The tears the love the pain
Text
Once she loved me now it’s turned to hate.
I can’t engage her in a true debate.
I kissed her once but she will kiss no more.
And with her love she will not be a w****
I approve of virtue and of vice.
I loved this woman once but cannot twice.
So I must leave her though my heart still yearns.
For this my body she has lately spurned.
So I must travel onwards till I find
Someone I can love with heart and mind
The way is dark and cold and I feel grim.
The blood that runs my body now turns thin.
Better take advice before you start
Do not kiss when you must from her part
Pppp
Share this:
Elemental as a storm
L
A force far deeper than our anger
Elemental as a storm
Annihilating all before it
Terror makes man’s rage perform.
This force fearing self is threatened
Runs to rise and to protect,
Most murderous when we’re most alarmed
Rage the enemy detects.
Over-riding other feelings
Deprives us of the power to think
Like a nuclear tsunami
Disconnecting human links
Reddened vision,focused,narrow;
Eyes locked onto enemy’s
All the wider context losing,
Wipes out our good memories
Like a mother tiger fighting,
And the cornered eagle’s force;
We will destroy what we think other
Without bitter,pained remorse.
Nature made such to protect us;
Yet our perception can be wrong.
Once the flood of feeling takes us
All reflections seems too long
Later, if we see our victims,
Will we know that we have erred?
For hate deceives ourselves and others
When our inmost terror’s bared.
How can we step back and ponder,
See life from a wider view?
How can we become less blinded,
So we see our world anew?
Succumb not to final despond
Succumb not to black despair.
Always there are those who see.
Always there are those that care.
Tempered by reflective wisdom
Rage can change when understood.
When we find another being
Who contains our frightful flood
Share this:
Why did they die ?
1 Fell off writers’ block into a pit of tigers.Bad layout.
2.Strangled by over-loving cat.Verdict: guilty
3.Large bottle of ink bounced back off wall . thus broke skull.Suicide denied by dead man or wife as appropriate [Delete one]
4 Forgot to eat while writing long novel.Was not worth it
5 Forgot to sleep owing to inspiration.Stupid despite possessing unique genius
6.Killed by malfunction of new laptop.[Can be returned to Amazon free when body is removed]
7.Tried to meditate and fell out of the window. Accidental death
8 Tried to clean outside of the window with a microfibre cloth.A pane broke and cut his throat.Incidental death
9 Got depressed by lack of air.Jumped and lost balance killing two cats on the patio.Verdict Unfair
10.Thought he was sleepwalking and walked off roof of extension [only just completed].Insurance will be paid.
11.Fainted in church and was used as a human sacrifice.Jesus wept
12 Hit head on bannister while falling down the stairs.Euthanasia while dizzy.Resurrection imminent
13.Fought off wife but bitten by the dog .Both dead.Verdict, pointless end.
14 Wrote a best seller, got drunk and died of shock!
15 His website was declared a threat to humanity.Died of shame.
Share this:
From the dazzling darkness
From the dazzling dark comes our pure new year
A performance both liturgical and spare
Candle light in darkness,ancient ,new
Illuminated shadows of despair
Enter in the ones who loss can bear
Do not cross them out, nor make them skew
The performance,ah liturgical , ah spare
From the dazzling dark comes our new year
When will be the last of my own few?
lluminate and fear not bleak despair
We do not let the fear of feelings bare
Abbreviate the pleasure , lose the clue.
A performance mute, liturgical and spare
Candles in the darkness, how so fair?
Dark and light combine, Da Vinci drew
Eliminate excesses of despair
In the little crib the light was blue
Another, holier world is here and now
A performance both liturgical and spare
Illuminated shadows of despair
Share this:
Then I broke my nose
Attracted by the first line of your verse
I set myself in aspic and feel worse
Drawn over to your garden by a rose
I broke my glasses then I broke my nose
When I left I felt like being soothed
Oriental massage made me bruised
When the books I read were full of dust
I felt I had to get them off my chest
I wonder why the doctor was so kind
I was dead but now I’m going blind
My doctor is a brilliant young man
He’s got a Ph.D, she’s çalled Diane
He wondered why I eat just Weetabix
Why ask a pin to tell us why it pricks?
Mother gave us Ovaltine and cake.
I wonder why she never learnt to bake
Share this:
10 Best Ways to Get My Chromebook Screen Back to Normal – TechWiser
How Technology Has Changed the Way Authors Write | The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/135515/technology-changed-way-authors-write
Our writing instruments are also working on our thoughts.” Nietzsche wrote, or more precisely typed
Share this:
Poems about fire
https://interestingliterature.com/2018/01/10-of-the-best-poems-about-fire/
Fire, one of the four Aristotelian elements, is a useful symbol for poets: it can denote passion, purification, anger, destruction, and, of course, literal blazes and conflagrations. Here are ten of the finest poems about fire.
Share this:
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost | Poetry Foundation
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice
Fire and Ice
BY ROBERT FROST
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Share this:
Is the pen mightier than the keyboard?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/cognitive-benefits-handwriting-decline-typing
Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”
Furthermore pens and keyboards use very different media. “Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool,” says Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. “Obviously you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”
An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. “When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing,” Bustarret adds. “The software does keep track of the changes somewhere, but users cannot access them. With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin and later additions are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages.”
But does all this really change our relation to reading and writing? The advocates of digital documents are convinced it makes no difference. “What we want from writing – and what the Sumerians wanted – is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts,” Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio, wrote some years ago. “This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.”
Some neuroscientists are not so sure. They think that giving up handwriting will affect how future generations learn to read. “Drawing each letter by hand substantially improves subsequent recognition,” Gentaz explains.
Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, two researchers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, have carried out a study of 76 children, aged three to five. The group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer. They repeated the experiment on adults, teaching them Bengali or Tamil characters. The results were much the same as with the children.
Drawing each letter by hand improves our grasp of the alphabet because we really have a “body memory”, Gentaz adds. “Some people have difficulty reading again after a stroke. To help them remember the alphabet again, we ask them to trace the letters with their finger. Often it works, the gesture restoring the memory.”
Although learning to write by hand does seem to play an important part in reading, no one can say whether the tool alters the quality of the text itself. Do we express ourselves more freely and clearly with a pen than with a keyboard? Does it make any difference to the way the brain works? Some studies suggest this may indeed be the case. In a paper published in April in the journal Psychological Science, two US researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject.
The study focused on more than 300 students at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles. It suggested that students who took longhand notes were better able to answer questions on the lecture than those using a laptop. For the scientists, the reason is clear: those working on paper rephrased information as they took notes, which required them to carry out a preliminary process of summarising and comprehension; in contrast, those working on a keyboard tended to take a lot of notes, sometimes even making a literal transcript, but avoided what is known as “desirable difficulty”.
On the basic issue of handwriting France has chosen to take the opposite course from the US. In the early 2000s the ministry of education instructed schools to start teaching cursive writing when pupils entered primary school [aged six]. “For a long time we attached little importance to handwriting, which was seen as a fairly routine exercise,” says school inspector Viviane Bouysse. “But in 2000, drawing on work in the neurosciences, we realised that this learning process was a key step in cognitive development.”
“With joined-up writing children learn words as blocks of letters, which helps with spelling,” Bouysse explains. “It’s important in a country where spelling is so complex! However, the ornamental capitals in the patterns published in the 2013 exercise books have been simplified, with fewer loops and scrolls […] They are important, though, because they distinguish proper names or the start of a sentence.”
Some handwriting advocates regret the disappearance of these ornamental effects. “It’s not just a question of writing a letter: it also involves drawing, acquiring a sense of harmony and balance, with rounded forms,” Jouvent asserts. “There is an element of dancing when we write, a melody in the message, which adds emotion to the text. After all that’s why emoticons were invented, to restore a little emotion to text messages.”
Writing has always been seen as expressing our personality. In his books the historian Philippe Artières explained how doctors and detectives, in the late 19th and early 20th century, found signs of deviance among lunatics and delinquents, simply by examining the way they formed their letters. “With handwriting we come closer to the intimacy of the author,” Jouvent explains. “That’s why we are more powerfully moved by the manuscript of a poem by Verlaine than by the same work simply printed in a book. Each person’s hand is different: the gesture is charged with emotion, lending it a special charm.”
Which no doubt explains the narcissistic relationship we often entertain with our own scrawl.
Despite omnipresent IT, Gentaz believes handwriting will persist. “Touchscreens and styluses are taking us back to handwriting. Our love affair with keyboards may not last,” he says.
“It still plays an important part in everyday life,” Bustarret adds. “We write by hand more often than we think, if only to fill in forms or make a label for a jam jar. Writing is still very much alive in our surroundings – in advertising, signing, graffiti and street demonstrations.” Certainly the graphic arts and calligraphy are thriving.
Perhaps, in their way, they compensate for our soulless keyboards.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
… we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future. Support the Guardian from as little as £1 – it only takes a minute.
SingleMonthlyAnnual£5 per month£10 per monthOther
ContinueRemind me in January
Topics
Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”
Furthermore pens and keyboards use very different media. “Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool,” says Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. “Obviously you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”
An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. “When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing,” Bustarret adds. “The software does keep track of the changes somewhere, but users cannot access them. With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin and later additions are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages.”
But does all this really change our relation to reading and writing? The advocates of digital documents are convinced it makes no difference. “What we want from writing – and what the Sumerians wanted – is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts,” Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio, wrote some years ago. “This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.”
Some neuroscientists are not so sure. They think that giving up handwriting will affect how future generations learn to read. “Drawing each letter by hand substantially improves subsequent recognition,” Gentaz explains.
Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, two researchers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, have carried out a study of 76 children, aged three to five. The group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer. They repeated the experiment on adults, teaching them Bengali or Tamil characters. The results were much the same as with the children.
Drawing each letter by hand improves our grasp of the alphabet because we really have a “body memory”, Gentaz adds. “Some people have difficulty reading again after a stroke. To help them remember the alphabet again, we ask them to trace the letters with their finger. Often it works, the gesture restoring the memory.”
Although learning to write by hand does seem to play an important part in reading, no one can say whether the tool alters the quality of the text itself. Do we express ourselves more freely and clearly with a pen than with a keyboard? Does it make any difference to the way the brain works? Some studies suggest this may indeed be the case. In a paper published in April in the journal Psychological Science, two US researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject.
The study focused on more than 300 students at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles. It suggested that students who took longhand notes were better able to answer questions on the lecture than those using a laptop. For the scientists, the reason is clear: those working on paper rephrased information as they took notes, which required them to carry out a preliminary process of summarising and comprehension; in contrast, those working on a keyboard tended to take a lot of notes, sometimes even making a literal transcript, but avoided what is known as “desirable difficulty”.
On the basic issue of handwriting France has chosen to take the opposite course from the US. In the early 2000s the ministry of education instructed schools to start teaching cursive writing when pupils entered primary school [aged six]. “For a long time we attached little importance to handwriting, which was seen as a fairly routine exercise,” says school inspector Viviane Bouysse. “But in 2000, drawing on work in the neurosciences, we realised that this learning process was a key step in cognitive development.”
“With joined-up writing children learn words as blocks of letters, which helps with spelling,” Bouysse explains. “It’s important in a country where spelling is so complex! However, the ornamental capitals in the patterns published in the 2013 exercise books have been simplified, with fewer loops and scrolls […] They are important, though, because they distinguish proper names or the start of a sentence.”
Some handwriting advocates regret the disappearance of these ornamental effects. “It’s not just a question of writing a letter: it also involves drawing, acquiring a sense of harmony and balance, with rounded forms,” Jouvent asserts. “There is an element of dancing when we write, a melody in the message, which adds emotion to the text. After all that’s why emoticons were invented, to restore a little emotion to text messages.”
Writing has always been seen as expressing our personality. In his books the historian Philippe Artières explained how doctors and detectives, in the late 19th and early 20th century, found signs of deviance among lunatics and delinquents, simply by examining the way they formed their letters. “With handwriting we come closer to the intimacy of the author,” Jouvent explains. “That’s why we are more powerfully moved by the manuscript of a poem by Verlaine than by the same work simply printed in a book. Each person’s hand is different: the gesture is charged with emotion, lending it a special charm.”
Which no doubt explains the narcissistic relationship we often entertain with our own scrawl.
Despite omnipresent IT, Gentaz believes handwriting will persist. “Touchscreens and styluses are taking us back to handwriting. Our love affair with keyboards may not last,” he says.
“It still plays an important part in everyday life,” Bustarret adds. “We write by hand more often than we think, if only to fill in forms or make a label for a jam jar. Writing is still very much alive in our surroundings – in advertising, signing, graffiti and street demonstrations.” Certainly the graphic arts and calligraphy are thriving.
Perhaps, in their way, they compensate for our soulless keyboards.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
… we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future. Support the Guardian from as little as £1 – it only takes a minute.
SingleMonthlyAnnual£5 per month£10 per monthOther
ContinueRemind me in January
Topics
Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”
Furthermore pens and keyboards use very different media. “Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool,” says Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. “Obviously you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”
An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. “When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing,” Bustarret adds. “The software does keep track of the changes somewhere, but users cannot access them. With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin and later additions are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages.”
But does all this really change our relation to reading and writing? The advocates of digital documents are convinced it makes no difference. “What we want from writing – and what the Sumerians wanted – is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts,” Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio, wrote some years ago. “This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.”
Some neuroscientists are not so sure. They think that giving up handwriting will affect how future generations learn to read. “Drawing each letter by hand substantially improves subsequent recognition,” Gentaz explains.
Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, two researchers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, have carried out a study of 76 children, aged three to five. The group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer. They repeated the experiment on adults, teaching them Bengali or Tamil characters. The results were much the same as with the children.
Drawing each letter by hand improves our grasp of the alphabet because we really have a “body memory”, Gentaz adds. “Some people have difficulty reading again after a stroke. To help them remember the alphabet again, we ask them to trace the letters with their finger. Often it works, the gesture restoring the memory.”
Although learning to write by hand does seem to play an important part in reading, no one can say whether the tool alters the quality of the text itself. Do we express ourselves more freely and clearly with a pen than with a keyboard? Does it make any difference to the way the brain works? Some studies suggest this may indeed be the case. In a paper published in April in the journal Psychological Science, two US researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject.
The study focused on more than 300 students at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles. It suggested that students who took longhand notes were better able to answer questions on the lecture than those using a laptop. For the scientists, the reason is clear: those working on paper rephrased information as they took notes, which required them to carry out a preliminary process of summarising and comprehension; in contrast, those working on a keyboard tended to take a lot of notes, sometimes even making a literal transcript, but avoided what is known as “desirable difficulty”.
On the basic issue of handwriting France has chosen to take the opposite course from the US. In the early 2000s the ministry of education instructed schools to start teaching cursive writing when pupils entered primary school [aged six]. “For a long time we attached little importance to handwriting, which was seen as a fairly routine exercise,” says school inspector Viviane Bouysse. “But in 2000, drawing on work in the neurosciences, we realised that this learning process was a key step in cognitive development.”
“With joined-up writing children learn words as blocks of letters, which helps with spelling,” Bouysse explains. “It’s important in a country where spelling is so complex! However, the ornamental capitals in the patterns published in the 2013 exercise books have been simplified, with fewer loops and scrolls […] They are important, though, because they distinguish proper names or the start of a sentence.”
Some handwriting advocates regret the disappearance of these ornamental effects. “It’s not just a question of writing a letter: it also involves drawing, acquiring a sense of harmony and balance, with rounded forms,” Jouvent asserts. “There is an element of dancing when we write, a melody in the message, which adds emotion to the text. After all that’s why emoticons were invented, to restore a little emotion to text messages.”
Writing has always been seen as expressing our personality. In his books the historian Philippe Artières explained how doctors and detectives, in the late 19th and early 20th century, found signs of deviance among lunatics and delinquents, simply by examining the way they formed their letters. “With handwriting we come closer to the intimacy of the author,” Jouvent explains. “That’s why we are more powerfully moved by the manuscript of a poem by Verlaine than by the same work simply printed in a book. Each person’s hand is different: the gesture is charged with emotion, lending it a special charm.”
Which no doubt explains the narcissistic relationship we often entertain with our own scrawl.
Despite omnipresent IT, Gentaz believes handwriting will persist. “Touchscreens and styluses are taking us back to handwriting. Our love affair with keyboards may not last,” he says.
“It still plays an important part in everyday life,” Bustarret adds. “We write by hand more often than we think, if only to fill in forms or make a label for a jam jar. Writing is still very much alive in our surroundings – in advertising, signing, graffiti and street demonstrations.” Certainly the graphic arts and calligraphy are thriving.
Perhaps, in their way, they compensate for our soulless keyboards.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
… we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future. Support the Guardian from as little as £1 – it only takes a minute.
SingleMonthlyAnnual£5 per month£10 per monthOther
ContinueRemind me in January
Topics
Share this:
Handwriting vs. Typing:p
Annie and Mary think about Christmas
Mary and her much loved next door neighbour Annie were discussing what to do for Christmas .They had both lost their husbands on their journey through life. I have to inform you here ear Annie who was the mistress of Mary’s husband Stanley for the years at the end of his life and ironically it made her closer to Mary
In fact Mary believed that Annie had killed her own husband because she needed the insurance money. Mary had not said anything because it would never happen. Furthermore she did not have any proof inl but it was a gut reaction as the husband disappeared very suddenly. But she had been a big help to Mary when Stan was ill. She even took 0 their cat Emile out t in her shopping trolley so he could enjoy local scene without danger of getting lost or attacked on route.
And the doctor had never been called.
She will believe what she says because she is so polite
Even if you call the doctor now they don’t come but a few years ago they did especially to old people.
But why had Annie not called 999 and left Dave to have a look at her husband it she was worried about him? That is very suspicious. perhaps her husband never felt ill until she hit him on the head with a cast iron saucepan.
Annie had told her that her husband ran away with his sister-in-law and they had gone to New Zealand but Mary knows she has a lot more money now than she did before. And she did not have a job Perhaps an unknown relative left her some money in their will.
Could Annie have murdered one of her relatives without Mary getting a hint of this crime?
Is your daughter Lyra coming home for Christmas Annie said to Mary. We have not seen her for a very long time. What pity she never had any children. Are you sorry about it? Oh I’m so sorry I should not have said that because it’s not my right to pry into your affairs.
it’s odd that you say that because I got a letter from her this morning or should I say an email from her, she said she’s going to go to Morocco because she doesn’t like the weather in England in December and January and she’s got a cheap holiday for 4 weeks in Morocco for only £69.69.
That’s very cheap replied Annie Do you think we should go to Morocco? Somewhere similar?
No said Mary I don’t like being in a hotel at Christmas.and do they have Turkeys in Morocco?
No they probably have Turkish people but not turkeys
Well we can’t have a roasted Turkish person for Christmas dinner because we are no longer man eating people Annie joked. Well we might have been eating Boris Johnson. Descended from a Turk so I read in the New York Times
They wouldn’t know how to cook Turkeys properly over there.Mary told her .
What I’m proposing is that we will stay here in your house Mary for Christmas morning so I can help too with the cooking and since you have got a big dining room we can invite a couple of local people who have nowhere to go to come and eat a Christmas dinner with us
But what about Dave our favourite paramedic? Shall we invite him to have Christmas dinner with us?
No we won’t invite him. But we can ring 999 and get him to come round if the leg falls off the table. I hope the leg doesn’t fall off while we are eating the dinner though
Well for goodness sake get a man to look at the table before Christmas.
Alright I will get someone to come and look at my leg as well. I can get that nice man Tom who came last year.
You are a total nutcase. He’s a carpenter your leg is not made of wood
I see I made the wrong kind of logical conclusions
A carpenter can mend the table leg or the chair leg. But we need a doctor for our painful human legs
We could listen to the King making his speech at 3pm on ChristmS Day and we must watch because it will be a historic occasion it will be his first time as the King at Christmas. He must have spent a long time preparing for this moment and deciding what to put into a speech but he’s got to be careful with the present government
Yes that’s alright by me, if I make the Christmas pudding will you make the mince pies?
Oh yes I will said Annie I quite like making pastry., I might put some brandy in
Then at 4 pm we’ll have a cup of our favourite Earl Grey tea and we can send the visitors back to their own home or whatever else they want to go go and then we will go to your house or should we do the washing up first?
We can gossip about the neighbours moan about the government and wonder how we will keep warm in the very cold weather We will find out what’s on the television or we could even get a DVD of something like Ben-Hur. You see it’s a very long film and the leading actor Charlton Heston is extremely handsome so it will give us someone to fantasise about. And the chariot ride is very exciting even if you’ve seen it before
But you won’t relax when you see the main character’s mother and his sister being sent to prison then a leper colony.
Well you know what I mean. It’s very well made unlike the more recent ones and you know that good will prevail in the end athough later Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. They killed almost everyone in Jerusalem and set the temple on fire.
It’s only a provisional arrangement because who knows you might meet some charming man between now and Christmas but let’s promise each other that we won’t let each other down by going off with a stranger for the Christmas weekend. Even if he looks like Charlton Heston. You should know by now appearances can be very deceptive.
I don’t really mind said Mary. I could even rewrite my thesis as they want me to make it 50% shorter.
Well that’s not difficult said her friend.
You could just cut it in half with a pair of kitchen scissors.
I don’t think statisticians would like that, Mary informed her.
Well in that case you could apply to become a student at the school of art and you can present that as 2 halves of a thesis glued to a breadboard with a pair of kitchen scissors glued in the middle and some red paint splashed on the things. Or even some tar
Alternatively you could simply have your dissertation retyped and leave out the last two chapters then you would have to write a new conclusion of course but that wouldn’t be tremendous lot of effort effort
But the last option will give me more to think about,Mary cried.Who wants to think about numbers on Christmas Day.
Sometimes we need to think about numbers like the number of guests who are coming for Christmas dinner. Few people want to calculate the standard deviation from the average wage and it’s a median average you can’t calculate the standard deviation. No it’s not a ratio scale.
You’ve lost me cried Annie. What on earth is a ratio? You could start giving tutorials on statistics to the retired population of Knittingham.
So say all of us
Share this:
Body Am I by Moheb Costandi review – the new science of self-consciousness
Yet this has given rise to a new dualism, one in which the body and the brain are seen as separate entities. This is what Costandi – a science writer who trained as a neuroscientist – seeks to correct in his illuminating and detailed investigation into how our understanding of the brain and its role in shaping our sense of self has evolved across the last 200 years, and what today’s research in neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology tells us about the
Share this:
Waking up from dreams
I wake up warm from dreams, yet all alone
Every night you’re with me. wanting home
The shattering loss made splinters of my bones
Bandaged like a mummy, am I born?
In the dream, you hold my hand and run
I wake up from these anxious themes alone
I’ve still got your dear ashes and the urn,
Where are you and what have you become?
Your shattering loss astounded all my bones
Now I sleep and rest with turned off phones
I cannot bear impingements, I ache sore.
I wake up from the anxious dreams alone
Inside my soul, from Other love, I’m torn
Afflicted, disconnected, from my core
The shattering of my heart makes me forlorn
I think I hear your footstep by the door
My breast with a sharp dagger is then gored
I wake up slow from dreams still one alone.
The sadness has unsettled my heart’s home.
Share this:
The accident is to the human face
Accidentally tread on someone’s face
As you run for president again
Make sure all their features are erased
Knowingly tread on the human face
It’s not evil, it is just bad taste
The devil is a clown, we feel no strain
Incidentally tread on someone’s face
As you run for president again
Share this:
Stanley meets an angel
Stan had eaten too much pizza because he was extremely ravenous from doing the washing. and hanging it up on the mulberry trees in his long garden Now he felt lazy and other worldly and liable to have visions..Now and then he saw an angel whom he called Yael in his home.But having looked up Yael on a website he realised she was not a very nice woman unlike his dear wife Mary.So he was planning a new name for the angel with her permission
Do you mind if I change your name,he enquired gently when Yael came in through the French window.
Well,what to? Yael asked him familiarly
How about Ysabel? Stan offered.It’s got just an extra b and s.
Or how about,Sybael?
You seem fond of b and s, the angel answered in confusion.
It was just mere chance,said Stan somewhat defensively.
Ok I’ll take Sybael,the angel said loudly .
I want to change my name too, said Emile the cat.
How about Mebiles or Melibes or Eimbles….
I don’t know, pouted the cat haughtily.
How about Semile,said Stan.Though it has no letter b in it, he brooded
They all pondered quietly as the sun shone in through the window and made a lovely lacy pattern on the wall.
In came Mary,Stan’s sweet and aged wife and his computer aided extension into the bargain.
You are very quiet,she murmured.What’s going on here ?
We are trying to find a new name for Emile,Stan told her as Sybael waved her wings about.
It seems very draughty in here,Mary said.And Emile can’t change his name because it will change his personality.
I didn’t know I had a personality,the little cat purred noisily.
It is what is most characteristic of you.For example, if you always hurt those you love then you have a cruel personality or you have got diabetes.Some people want love but they are too harsh and demanding.
So true,Stan added pensively as he thought back over his life.
Anyway,I have some awful news,Mary went on.
You just won’t believe this but Dorothy Grey who lives at the bottom of the hill has just had a heart attack.
How come,Stan asked?
She had an online love relationship with a rather peculiar but intriguing and clever elderly man who turned out to be a sadist in disguise.So when she ended it he flew over and attacked her with an air gun and some cat’s claws which he had bought from a cat market
Is he a wizard,asked Emile.
No, he flew on a stolen magic carpet from Persia.
Persian carpets,I’d love one here said the cat greedily as he imagined sticking his claws into it and milking it.
Actually it’s a kind of plane,said Stan. knowledgeably
How boring ,said Mary feebly
Anyway Dorothy was so shocked her arteries spasmed and she is in A and E now on morphine,she added.
What a shame that she got that instead of a spasm elsewhere….Stan muttered thinking of Freud and fountain pens.
But who’d have sex with such a horrible old man? Mary asked in puzzlement.
An equally horrible old woman,maybe? Stan riposted laughing.
Any way it all goes to show the dangers of online love, he informed the room.
It’s not real love,is it, because in real love the other person is as important to you as yourself.Mary said theologically.
Well. now Eros is a kind of love,too.But many old men just want their washing done and a companion.Eros has departed from their world.
Sybael smiled and then flew out of the window.
What was that noise, said Mary anxiously.
Just an angel’s wings,said Stan quietly
If only Dorothy had seen an angel instead of that harsh old man she might be much better now.Mary mused.
But not everyone can see them.Their world seems full of horrible old men and beautiful young women
Emile winked at Stan and then ran out to chase a butterfly amongst the scented tulips.. there were lots of angels there every day but only he knew that.
Angels don’t like big modern cities but they like old abbeys and cathedrals,moorlands and mountains; places where such things used to be before post modernist architecture took over.
And cat’s claws are not meant for scratching your loved ones either.And online dating should be avoided except with atheists and agnostics.They are less judgemental about women’s place and roles.It’s strange how harsh many religious people are.Harsh and unforgiving.Very strange it is,thought Stan as he boiled the teapot on the fire to sterilise it
Let’s all have a nice cup of tea,he murmured.
And we’ll pray for the living and the dead
And so say all of us.Amen
Pass the apple pie.Thanks
Share this:
Inside
I can feel the inside of my body it’s darkness and its depths
I can’t explain it with these words except to say Jesus wept.
Share this:
On calling mathematics quantitative methods to make it sound easier!
It seems quite clear that maths should take the blame
As quantity and quality. are not the same
The Hebrew temple used the number pi.
And pi is not a quantity, I say.
So pi is not as a measurable as 10.
It’s decimal expansion never ends
There is no pattern, how God condescends.
Don’t think about this funny stuff it drives you round the bend
Share this:
Creation
by Mike Flemming copyright
My old blue fountain pen allows
The ink across this page to flow
Like wet paint from an artist’s brush,
And words come in a rush.
Enchanted by the hand that writes .
Bewitched by art,beauty alights
The script is like a music score
Through which we step as through a door,
Imagination’s home.
As,mysteriously, to you, to me,
The spirits of our hearts are tamed ,
By rhythms of pen,of brush, of mind,
They enter vision quite unplanned,
Like moths to flutter softly round
Fire joined heart and hand
The pen slows down,the hand grows still,
And ,just as dreams at daybreak will,
They shrink,they disappear,they’re gone
Like dew dies in hot sun
Share this:
The Relationship Between Music and Poetry – Musical Mum
https://www.musicalmum.com/the-relationship-between-music-and-poetry/
DWhether it’s the silences in between musical notes, their timing or the spaces in between words when reciting a poem
Share this:
In our sleep we find the open door
The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams he is alive again
Thus his image lives inside my store
In our sleep we find the open door
We see the precious faces of those gone
The face that was familiar is no more
A nightmare,anxious, running as before
To find our car, to bring home my dear man
Now his image lives within my store
His voice to me sounds muffled by great doors
He wonders how I manage all alone
The love that was so potent is no more
An anger at the doctors made me roar
A dying man ignored by every one
Now his love lives on in my deep core
Death will capture all but is that fair?
We live then die at last of all good bare.
The face that was familiar is no more
Yet his sweet love still haunts my deepest core
Share this:
Keeping a journal this winter
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/style/journaling-benefits.html
On the other hand, Dr. Pennebaker’s research has found that journaling about traumatic or disturbing experiences specifically has the most measurable impact on our overall well-being.
Share this:
Journalling your life
How poetry can light up our darker moments
How can learning poetry by heart help us to be more grounded, happy, calm people? “Let me count the ways,” says Rachel Kelly, who has suffered from anxiety. Whenever she’s feeling wobbly, she finds reciting lines of poetry is grounding, validating and connects her to others who have felt as she is feeling in this moment. And it’s something we can all do: poetry we’ve learned to recite means we have another voice inside us that’s always there, a kind of on-board first responder in times of psychological need.
There’s also a certainty and stability about being able to conjure those words:
Share this:
Mathematics
Mathematicians don’t need to touch.
There’s no blood in the subject although it does have its own beauty if you don’t fall down a hole on the way m
But touch is more important than mathematicsm
Few are seduced by these angels who have no children.
It’s better than schizophrenia. That is my view
How my heart speaks 