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Have you heard?  A herd of herbs was taken there, Uprooted, stem and flowers bared, Stolen from the soil.  Have you seen? The creeping ivy leaned to me,  Whispered of reburying  Not ten feet along. Have you felt?  The hand is dealt from grass to kelp Lives lost in a snap And winter looms, fearsome. 

Eat and drink without entertainment Walk around the block  Write a silly little ditty in 10 minutes Clear your 'work' area (for writing, cooking, working, relaxing...) Take your earphones out when you're not listening to anything Look at something for a minute Irish designer guy's little games Stop what you're doing and lie on the floor Set a timer and get that thing  done. Right now.  Ask yourself: do I want  that, or is it just habit? 

 Win the match with an overhead smash miss-hit drop shot. Especially against an angry bugger.  Striking a penalty so hard that it blasts off the crossbar, sails across the pitch, and into your own net.  Swap out your putter and golf ball for a cue and white ball on the greens. English, baby.  Surgery to replace knees and ankles with diesel-powered bogies. Win the marathon.  'Where's the cue ball going?' [cue ball leaves table, returns home, tells wife he's quit his job, etc. Full on short film] 'Probably a 5-iron, d'you think?' [golfer perilously swinging five steam irons at a golf ball] A duel to The Death [combatants fence their way through town until they reach the local haunt, The Death, for a pint] Thor playing bowling strike Ronnie O'Sullivan 'oh that's a beautiful cue' [referencing queue of people, skewers them, uses it to play snooker] 'She's a world class runner' [runner bean.......]

1. Learning to sing in tune 2. Recording Amber's Embrace 3. Recording Sultans (all parts)  4. Writing an original song 5. Writing a short musical 6. Complete Justin grade 3 course (properly) 7. Recording This is Absolution/Reject Yourself  8. Grade 1 piano 9. Record Drifting but good 10. Buy a partial capo and learn Rylynn......

 "What? A melon?" (like watermelon...) I Stroke My Lovely Mouse (computer, real...) The Hallway Monitor (power trip beat poem) I Love My Morning Cough-y Don't Make Me Choose – I'm Bi-cyclical! Visceral Medicinal Trouble Giraffe Bath The Folding House of the Paper Shaper Apoplectic Buddhism Golden Shower...or a Platinum Bath? 

 The Dope Pope The Thin Bin-Man Clan Man 'n' Tease (Apple's new food fetish OnlyFans rival?) Mug the thug that mugged that mug The Minotaur Monitor It's a glass half. Fool! (not a rhyme) The Rind Kind.  Be blindly kind.  Noil. The Roar-ing Mirr-or. Crotch Watch.

One-line summaries of the books I've recently read Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome –  Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake  –  Unreasonable Hospitality by X  –  The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse  – Very good, sir. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde  — A little litany of literary liturgy, littered liberally with literal literary larks.  Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett — Big, beautiful ideas and a Littlebottom. 

Relative Anderson was the only living thing for about 300 miles. Oh there were brutalist shrubs and the occasional reluctant bacterium, but the proper animals - cows, rats, humans - were starkly missing. The reason? No fresh water for about 500 kilometres.  (Unhelpfully switching units was one of Ms Anderson's favourite little jokes. Were she ever invited to parties, which she naturally wasn't, she would not have been a hoot.)  This was the desert, as arid and deadly as a holiday to the sun. The midday rocks could serve eggs over-easy and every now and then a grain of sand melted into a globule of glass. Dramatic narrators couldn't even say 'this was a place where people went to die' , because most people would run out of food, water or sanity before getting here.  But Relative Anderson had something up her sleeve that even nature's hostility couldn't overcome: eccentricity.  A raw and utterly unhinged sociopath, she rarely noticed life's obstacles, neve...

[This is part two of a serialised story that I'm writing with remarkable inconsistency. Here's part one . ] The man across the table was Cavendish Scroot. Lording over a sheaf of papers like a hungry albatross scanning the water’s surface, he was impatiently waiting for Alacrity Johnson to wind up his sermon.  Oh how he would relish being the bearer of bad news. He'd already planned how he would look up into the man's eyes as he delivered the killing blow. He would see the confusion, the refusal, the dawning anguish.  He would hear the man beg to retain his position. He would listen with studied apathy as he kicked the legs of this swindling, masses-deluding charlatan out from under his body.  There was a certain smile often deployed during these moments. Equal parts sympathetic and recalcitrant and entirely absolving of blame. It was a smile that said I would love to but I can' t but which really meant I've done everything in my power to make sure this terribl...

Alacrity Johnson was a man that understood the world and his place in it. Specifically, he understood that overlooking the scurrying ants of Alderway from a 12th-storey office was decidedly more pleasant than being part of the colony. He gazed at the crowds absently, a stray thought wondering why anyone would choose labour and laughable wages over a successful career. Lack of ambition and late toilet training, probably.  “Earmark that for the new book will you, Egg?” Mr Johnson’s assistant was Miss Caitlyn Gregg, distinguished magna cum laude graduate of Alderway’s most prestigious school. With a mind like whetted steel and a stare that could make continents sprint, one might expect her to find the chronic mispronunciation of her name as Quailing Egg to be offensive or demeaning.  But she simply nodded her head with the kind of robotic sagacity that could only come from working with Alacrity Johnson.  “Of course, sir. If you could just repeat that out loud?”  Among...

I think most of us expect progress to come in huge, sweeping waves. And sometimes it does.  But in most cases, for most things, those waves are more like ripples on the surface. Small. Subtle. But there .  So it is with mental health.  When you've been stressed and anxious for a long time, and the main stressor is removed, you might expect to feel an instant release. A euphoric blast of anti-stress!  I haven't found that. But what I have found is that the signs of mental health progress are there. You just need to know what you're looking for. For me, that improvement is far less about how I feel  than what I do .  Stress leads to a lot of symptoms. Among them tiredness, anxiety, bloating, sore muscles, lack of enthusiasm - and so on. It is a fallacy that those things could ever just up sticks and disappear overnight. You can feel those things for a long time after the cause, that main stressor, is gone.  But what you do , that's different.  A sma...

Or... Space Guns Go Boom Boom: A spaghetti space western starring forgettable characters and lazy contrivance.  Old Man's War starts off strong with sincere, amusing characterisation. It deploys humour without the exclamation points and sincerity that's quiet and real. I believe John loved his wife profoundly, and misses her terribly, but that eight years have passed and the feelings are deep but no longer raw. That he has quiet scars on his soul.  The author doesn't ever try and say "My heart ached at the loss, every day, like an earthquake levelling Japan" but instead makes simple, real observations: "I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive." That's beautiful. It's showing, not telling, and what endears me immediately to the main character.  I also believe in John's age. It's a first-person view of a 75-year-old and I believe ...

I had this client when I was self-employed. Greek guy. Unbelievably successful - revered, even - but also intense and dramatic. But here’s the thing: I never did the work. Sly and devilish, I’d get AI to do the work for me, whatever it was. Eventually, I f*cked up and got caught. His anger was righteous, like a bolt of lightning. But he was cunning too. The fury contained within the gathering clouds. He invited me round for a drink and, safe in my intellectual superiority, I accepted. Well bugger that for a laugh. He led me to the basement, where his deranged brother lived. Weird guy. Loved sticks. Anyway the brother, he was a wild one. He sat me down at his computer - ostensibly for help with a copy problem - and when I was distracted, cuffed me to the seat. He said I could leave as soon as I’d finished writing the copy. It was one landing page. So, freaked as I was, I knew it wouldn’t last long. But these Greeks - they’re sly too. I sent the first version. Reply: sharp...

The lights dim and the chorus of excited chatter is extinguished. I nestle into my chair. Rapt. A character strolls on stage and I burst into a wide, excited smile. Before a word is spoken, or a note is played, I’m humming with anticipation. … The cast bows and I’m on my feet, smacking my palms together and cheering until I’m hoarse. I feel moved. More, I feel something deep in my chest - a powerful, pulsating energy.  I feel  inspired . … It was the second time I’d seen Hamilton. And as I stood waiting for the bus home — gripping  cash because my phone was dead — I got thinking. About how I felt all the same sensations last time, too. Pride, shock, cringe, joy and sadness. The rest.  I thought about how, across all art, there are very few things that bring me that intense, lingering inspiration. A great musical theatre performance is certainly one of them. I considered some others: The novel I tear open at first light, on the bus, at lunch, and late at ...