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1st February: Ten Things of Thankful

February 1, 2026humanist55

Ten things for which I give thanks this week…

1 – The sun is shining!

2 – My daughter, Beverley, is coming round later to do some housework. I say my daughter, but step-daughter, strictly speaking, but after being in her life for 43 years out of 56, I go with daughter. She comes round every Tuesday to spend time with her mother but has gone by the time I get back from work, so I regard this as my time with her and we will sit down to tea and a chat as well as the cleaning…

3 – I can confirm that signs of Spring abound…

These bulbs have been planted for a few years…/

Whereas these ones, and the ones below, were newly planted last Autumn…

And these straggly strugglers, must have self-seeded in a pot of mighty Stargazer Lillies that just get bigger every year…

And as testament to how little frost we have had (so far – fingers crossed), the Nemetia has survived the Winter outside – which is as well since we have nowhere indoors for them…

4 – I still have a job! Work is calming down – a bit – as I wrestle the details of labelling product under control…

5 – I have stopped beating myself up for not progressing the novel and have decided to stimulate my writing by undertaking the 12 Short Stories in 12 Months challenge. The January prompt was Glow and I uploaded on the prescribed day and have received one positive comment so far. You have to comment on at least 4 stories… My Writing Critique Partner, Nik, in troubled Minnesota (troubled by Trump and not the alleged crime wave) but I haven’t been able to find his story yet amongst the 510 other stories…

6 – This group of supportive people

7 – I have managed to spend some time writing for my April A to Z – I am midway through “C” – who knew there were so many fabrics beginning with “C”…

8 I have been trying out a Continuous Blood Sugar Monitor – a free sample from a company who hope to get me hooked on their product, and indeed, I have ordered a month’s supply to follow on, but at £30/10 days usage, it is too expensive to carry on permanently, and my doctor’s practice refuse to fund it instead of the finger-pricking tests that risk neuropathy of the finger tips at £30/month. So I am trying to learn what I can in a month + and may or may not carry on after that. Here’s what I have learned so far – its very convenient to beable to check my blood sugar, 5 minute by 5 minute, on my phone, if slightly addictive. The experiment has incentivised me to make a spreadsheet of all the carbs I eat and between the monitor and my monitor, I have been able to see what effect carbs have on my body. So not only have I reduced my daily intake to 168 grams per day, but I have been able to hone my meals to slower acting carbs thus avoiding big spikes. I advise anyone who is type 2 Diabetic, to give these sensors a go, even if, like me, it is only for a month – to gain insight…

9 – Weekly washing done and in the dryer or hanging up to dry…

10 – Made it to TTOF…

Have a great week everybody!

Giving Birth

January 30, 2026January 30, 2026humanist55

You write a novel lickety-split
the words pour out upon the page
the word count rising like a fountain
scenes fill chapters – chapters parts
That’s when the fun starts

What you have is just a first draft
send it to an agent, they would just laugh
assuming you even made it off the slush pile
rejection letters bring you down for a while
but you must pick yourself up
dust off your writing tool of choice
and launch your second, third and even fourth draft
polishing your bon mots, refine your voice,
flesh out your characters, channel your craft
That’s when the fun starts

Recruit a critique buddy
bully your friends and family into reading
confess to your partner you fear it needs a professional
count your pennies into tottering piles
it’s unlikely they will reach an editor ceiling
What the Dickens! Release your Kraken in blog-size bites
fret not at savage comments
don’t get into fights
enough opinions to make your head spin
That’s when the fun begins

At last your manuscript is done
but you must face one last and monumental question
to publish yourself or on great houses wait
or look for small and independent publishers
but are you sufficiently niche, do you fit a genre
and if you forge heroically through this labyrinth
That’s where the fun starts

Editors and graphic artists are but a few
wait till the sensitivity readers
get their hooks in you
blurbs written by the great and good
all these hurdles you should reckon
to jump and clear if write you would
and getting published…
That’s when the fun starts

Interviews and promotional tours
signing your book so much it bores
and after many hotels bland
your royalties pay for holiday sands
but just as you lie back sipping a drink
your editor ringtone and phone start to blink
No rest for the weary – up and at ‘em dearie
Success means your public seek for seconds
strike while the iron is hot she reckons
You face a blank screen…
That’s when the fun starts

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Grace in OpenLinkNight invtes us to submit a poem of our choice! This poem, tongue in cheek, is not from personal experience but pure wishful thinking, and were it to come true, it would be, as somebody once said “A lovely problem to have…”

24th January: Ten Things of Thankful

January 24, 2026January 24, 2026humanist55

Ten things for which I give thanks this week…

– If you wondered why I didn’t post here last week, it was because I had a crisis at work! I work Tuesday to Thursday lunchtime but on my way home last Thursday, my immediate boss rang to say that Trading Standards had turned up unannounced and were not happy with our labelling of our products. This is one of the areas that I am responsible for but he didn’t ask me to come back in – which I would have done and would have saved him being made to feel like a naughty boy for the duration of their visit – the whole afternoon! My work, doing the things that others either can’t or don’t want to do, is also not always fully valued because it doesn’t generate revenue in the way that, say, sales or production itself do, but things like getting the details of nutrition right on labels are legal requirements and under the rapid growth in wholesaling that we have undergone in the last year, many products have been added to our system by people other than me and there are details missing. All of which is to say, that I spent every day of my 4.5 days off, going through all the data that creates the labels in order to fix the problem! Except for Monday when I only got up early and only did two hours work before a family emergency gained priority.
I am grateful that the task is now almost complete, and checked and that going forward, the protocols I have been calling for around the introduction of new products, stand a greater chance of being followed after the rap on the knuckles…
– On Sunday, the family grapevine was buzzing with the news that Barbara’s brother was in hospital and we had no way of contacting him since his phone was not responding and his partner was abroad. After some detective work by several family members, the hospital that Steve was in, was located and we got to speak to him. He had fallen and his iPhone was indeed not working, so I searched for an old phone to take to him, and on Monday, Barbara and I drove to the hospital just north of Manchester – an hour away, arriving just as he was waiting to be discharged. After a couple of hours waiting for his meds to be dispensed, we drove him home, got him settled in with the knowledge his partner would be home that night – he is doing well now…
– Sunday had also been Barbara’s birthday and I took a break from my labours to bring us over to our daughter Beverley’s in the next village for afternoon tea with a few grandsons and one girlfriend (who is now in India for a couple of months to learn Yoga teaching). So that was a nice interlude…
– A week later and the house is still awash with flowers, to Barbara’s delight, at our age, there are few material things we desire so flowers hit the spot…

5. – Normal service is now being resumed in all areas – I posted a poem, “The Cartography of Life”, for a prompt from the dVerse Poets Pub which I was glad to see was visited by our own Artmater – so nice when people explore the blog for the other things to be found posted here…

6. – After a repetition of the fault with uploading photos here and another round of consulting the tech guys at Bluehost – they finally said that they had tracked down the issue, which I presume was with a third party piece of software since they couldn’t give a timeframe for fixing it – however it now seems to be working as the picture above loaded without issue…

7. -I manged to pick up my ukulele(s) after Christmas, and now that the work crisis is over, I intend to play more regularly – I play all sorts of songs but I have a lot from the ’20’s an ’30’s and more recently some more jazz numbers. I didn’t make it to ten today but I leave you with a favourite rendition of Carole King’s “One Fine Day” by the lovely Sophie Madeline. Sophie made an album of songs as well as the 50 songs of which this was the first, that she posted in 59 days on YouTube before sadly retiring from the world of musical performance on health grounds…

Have a great week ahead, each and everyone of you Gratudinals (and anyone else who stumbles in here…)

The Cartography of Life

January 23, 2026January 23, 2026humanist55

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;

From The Song of Wandering Aengus
By William Butler Yeats

Happy the man who dreams his purpose
plots his course to achieve that very goal
marches to the beat of his own drum
and pity one forced to follow roads
laid down by parents’ aspirations
but I drifted into adulthood
with no pressure and no direction
and took many turns along the way
slowly grew into the man I am
Though I am old with wandering

Love life is the companion to work
the superficial couplings of youth
conducted with more vigour than sense
reaching the sunny uplands mid-life
settling into a career I thought
would last a lifetime, a love to match
but people carry pasts within them
like hidden rocks in a calm ocean
and accidents deflect one’s passage
Through hollow lands and hilly lands

To know another is a life’s work
the unity of coupledom is
illusion, we travel parallel
at best, learning the geography
of roads built across bogs of trauma
always ready to gently subside
and mire a person in buried past
and paths are hard to find in a slough
of despond and she has lost her way
I will find out where she has gone

Looking back at the path I followed
there is more coherence than I thought
skills grown and transferred in work and life
and love too, so much surer than in youth
and all the scars and breaks accreted
are the medals of experience
and trying not to look toward the end
but focus on the roadside flowers
the next generations we began
And kiss her lips and take her hands…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in FormForAll, Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to writa a Glosa, a Spanish poetry form in which four lines borrowed from a poem by another – the cabreza, are expanded upon over 4 ten-line stanzas… I chose lines from WB Yeats, who I have loved since studying him at school, and whose poems still resonate with me today. In 1995, I went to live in Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats is from, and is buried beneath nearby Ben Bulben mountain. I was a signwriter and painted a sign and mural of Yeats and his work, for The Winding Stair bookshop there – you can see me working on it in this news clip…

Colours of the Day

January 16, 2026January 16, 2026humanist55

The light filtering through the shutters
picks up a little of their blue
on its predawn passage
into the white-walled
beige, marbled floor bedroom
sun rises swifter than at home
not quite the tropics
but tantalisingly close to Africa

The sun rises scarlet and
all-consuming of the sky
– silhouetting the island
dark purple across the bay
Red sky in the morning
doesn’t translate to Crete
where most days in this lockdown Winter
that is not like our Winter
begin with a red curtain raiser.
Soon blinding light floods the sky, the Bay
the mountains delicately bluing their shadows
and highlighting their tops
before the rising heat filters
everything with glimmering heat haze.

We sit in the shade of the terrace
beneath the deep green leaves
of the carob tree and count
the millipedes that have climbed
the delicately off-white walls
in the night dash, reaching for
who knows what insectile heaven…
A fallen comrade
dark brown in desiccation
is moving sideways
in unlikely reanimation
until we see that his body
is being carried back to the nest
by a tiny black ant a tenth his size
we sit astounded by this feat
but don’t forget to film it
for posterity or a rainy day reminder
when we are one day returned to England.

I walk down to town for market day
mixing with brightly dressed
younger women and black wrapped
older ones in widows weeds
with only an occasional male
to keep me company.
The azure sea is only feet away

The couple who live on the yacht
just out in the bay
are here, and we chat in the shade
of a vegetable stall loaded with
piles of black glossy aubergines
and ripe red tomatoes next to
bunches of wild greens, picked
from among the hundred or so
Crete proffers – if you know
what you are looking for.
Cyrille’s once blonde hair
is salt and pepper
tied back in a ponytail
their clothes too, faded with
exposure to sun and saltwater.

I spend some time chatting
with the banana man
who sells nothing else
and whose English is good
enough for a conversation.
I am English and so not averse
to discuss the weather –
he talks of the recent
thunderstorms whose hailstones
devastated his neighbours’ crops
but divinely spared his
while Barbara and I had been
enjoying the night of sturm und drang
from the safety of our covered balcony
the crackle and crash of it
ricocheting and rambling around
the mountains and – the ultraviolet
flashes turned into dark sound.

Walking back up the long hill
to the village, I pass the
white and ochre, black and grey
patchwork trunks of the group of gum trees
foreigners too – all the way from Australia
these strangers who fit in so well
people believe them to be native.

Home again in the cool of the flat
and after a siesta
I pick a bright yellow lemon
from the tree within reach of our balcony
and squeeze it into dark green olive oil
to dress the salad of tomatoes
and cucumbers I hauled up
from the market – dot it with
tiny Cretan olives – mostly grown for oil
and look out on the bonfires
ranged around in the olive groves
as farmers burn the prunings
of their trees.

Night falls quickly
colours fade to black…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian in OpenLinkNight invites us to submit a poem of our choice for Open Link Night…

11th January: Ten Things of Thankful

January 11, 2026January 11, 2026humanist55

Ten things for which I give thanks this week…

1 – The Jasmine seems to be holding its own against some quite sharp frosts…

2 – Indoors, we have been enjoying the scent from this lovely basket of bulbs – a Christmas present…

3 – I sent off for a tapestry circle so that I could begin the Hooking Kit my sister Helen sent for Christmas – it is, as it says on the tin, most therapeutic…

4 – The named storm passed us by this week and we have had no snow this year…

5 – We were pet sitting young Winnie, our daughter’s Border Collie for a few hours yesterday, she is now old enough to travel in the footwell of the car calmly…

6 – Hereabouts, each Yorkshire stone quarry marks its dressed stone with a different marking – ours has simple parallel lines of dashes – photographed in yesterday’s welcome sun…

7 – The Poets Pub has started prompting again after the Christmas break – I typed up a poem from my writing group about “a time I was in danger” – a sailing story in which I wisely turned back – else I might not be here to tell the tale (for which I am grateful)…

8 – Grateful for the TTOF – especially on a dark, dank day like today…

9 – Grateful that I will be having my bi-weekly chat with my sister in Nova Scotia and trusting that even if Trump invades Canada, she will be safely remote there…

10 – Grateful that the tide of opinion seems to be turning against Trump and his dictatorship and crossing my fingers that the American people will find the right action to take to restore democracy and rebuild the damage at home and abroad…

Ars Poetica Abecedarium

January 9, 2026January 10, 2026humanist55

A poet is a person whose language
Becomes a special form of
Communication, a message –
Directed words with meaning for
Everyman in their world of “things”
Flinging out new ideas for the times,
Gestating a better way to grasp for
Hope that births a movement from
Individual to friends, to groups that
Jump to join a movement with
Kinetic energy that enjoins all to
Love, not hate, the poet sings
Metaphor, alliteration and rhythm and
No style or form is unsuitable to carry
Out the mission sacred, the
Poet’s role from print to poetry slam
Questioning, commenting, highlighting
Rights denied, inequity amplified
So the message – at first a pretence
Trickles, seeps, runs like a stream
Underground, which nobody can dam
Violence cannot hold back the flow of
Waves of awareness, rejection of the
Xenophobic in favour of the xenogogue
Young and old align in the new
Zeitgeist and the poet seeks new inspiration.

Over at dVerse, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write an Abecadarium Acrostic poem for the start of the year…

The Outing

January 7, 2026January 11, 2026humanist55

Danger is not always found in dark places
and on a sunny, sparkling water day
I nearly lost my life sailing a dinghy
a day after the storm swept the Mediterranean
the only sign of its passing, the
long lazy undulating swell that
swished almost silently up the slipway
where my friends helped me position
the tiny boat with its single sail brought
on a roof rack, their part played, they
departed for our rendezvous down the coast

Out round the headland and turn right
was my plan, it seemed feasible
mast stepped and rigged, I pushed off
down the concrete slipway, which, slippery
with slime, shot me downwards into
the clear water of the corner of the coast
the cliffs stretching out to the headland
on my right, and behind me to the left
a rocky stretch, broken only by the slipway
enclosed between concrete walls where nobody
watched my sudden progress into deep water

I pushed the daggerboard down into
it’s slot, tightened the sail, and
gripped the tiller to set my course
– a series of alternating tacks left to open sea
and right, towards the cliffs, then
a couple of tacks into the wind should do it
I thought, then around the headland
and a straight run down the coast
the wind behind me and a peaceful glide
to the rendezvous beach
but soon I realised that every tack
away from the cliffs – broadside on to
the greasy swells, rolled me strongly, spilling
the wind from my sail, slowing my progress and
each tack into the wind, was not making
the progress I hoped, and each time
I found myself back at the cliff, faster
than seemed right, and then
I saw the cave beneath the headland
a lazy wave suddenly smashing
tons of water into its maw and
I realised my efforts were only
bringing me closer to being sucked
into that awful mouth and crunched
and nobody would ever know
what became of me and so
discretion, the better part of valour
I turned around and with the wind
behind me, I headed back to the slipway

But danger was not yet passed
as I remembered the slippery slope
I would have to negotiate, and speed
seemed the only way to reach the
top and with no regard to the
bottom of the boat, I urged it on
pulling up the dagger board at the
last minute and trusting my aim
I shot up the slime, sail still straining
and tumbled out near enough
to the safe ground to make it up
with just one slip and
pulled the dinghy after me
before a following swell should
pluck it back…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics, invites us to write in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop, paying particular attention to consciously incorporating accuracy (detail), spontaneity (immediacy), and mystery (revelation) in writing the poem.

4th January: Ten Things of Thankful

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026humanist55

Ten things for which I give thanks this first week of 2026…

1 – Christmas Day was spent at my daughter’s house and I was grateful that I was not responsible for the cooking, beyond two large chickens one of which I took over for the carnivores amongst us. The other one was part of a buffet at ours on Boxing Day and of course, I made bought too much food so we will be compromising our diet for weeks to come…

Four of my six grandsons on Christmas Day with Barbara, their Nan, in the middle…

2 – I promised to show you the present I bought for Barbara – I was on safe ground here – unlike choosing clothes – because Barbara is the Immelda Marcos of handbags and this one was one of her favourite colours – mission successful!

3 – Barbara bought me a set of Sabatier chef’s knives – the top three in the picture below. The fourth down was a present from my parents when I wen t to university and I have used it almost every day since and through two food businesses. It is a carbon steel knife which means if it is not cleaned and dried immediately after use it will rust… Despite this care, it has worn away as it used to be the length of the fifth knife – which was a gift from an old schoo; friend, who lives in France and collected tokens from his supermarket, exchanged for this knife which he gifted as a replacement, having seen the diminished status of my first Sabatier! The new set come with self-sharpening cases which they need, as they are very sharp indeed and you wouldn’t want to brush against them unguarded…

4 – Jake, the grandson who was travelling with his Doctor girlfriend this Summer, gave me a set of spices from Morroco – I wonder if you can guess what they are?

My sister in Canada has made me a hooker! I confess that I opened it early as I had no clue what to get for her – I decided to send her a Needle-felting kit, so we now we shall both be quietly crafting…

5 – The low Winter sun reaches parts of the house not usually illuminated, here striking the top of the stairs through the upstairs windows… For the builders among you, the doors were all made from reclaimed wood so they will never shrink!

6 – I am participating (along with 20,000 others) in a drug trial of an oral version of Semaglutide. I had an interview with the project after 3 months of the run-in doses and will now be randomised for real or placebo. I hope I am on the real ones since the object of the drug is to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Semaglutides in higher doses are the injectable weight-loss drugs and whilst this one seems to be having a beneficial effect on blood sugar and blood pressure, it will likely not cause much weight loss. I shall be watching my test results carefully to see whether I think I am on real or placebo… The trial is over 5 years…

7 – I had lunch in Harrogate (about 45 minutes drive) with Tricia, my American, second cousin once removed and her husband Jack and their two sons, wife, girlfriend and one grandchild. From left to right, me, Tricia, Jack, Min (Korean), Tusk, Palmer, Eda (Turkish) and Josiah. I had not met Palmer, Min and Tusk before so ot is great to now know the whole family!

Myself holding forth at the lunch table. We had Blackeye Beans and Tomato which is a typical Southern dish and I took some of my Persimmon Cake which is also a Southern treat…

8 – I have finally made a start on writing the pages for the A to Z for April and have completed the Theme Reveal, and the A and B pages. If I can get all the posts prepared in advance, I will have more time for reading and commenting on other people’s posts…

9 – After as deep a dive into the back end of computing as I have done since working with Windows 95, all to no avail, and with resorting to top-level help from BlueHost, I got my picture uploading problem solved -only to find it has returned this morning – will it load into Linkzy – I shall soon see…

10 – Grateful to be part of this community of gratitude – Happy New Year to you all!

29th December: Ten Things of Thankful

December 29, 2025December 29, 2025humanist55

Ten things for which I give thanks this week…

I am still having difficulty loading images so this will be an all-text post!

1 – Grateful to have got through Christmas and to be enjoying a further complete week off work.

2 – Nobody fell out – lol, the food was well received even though I overshopped for Boxing Day at ours and we will be eating various naughty items for the foreseeable future…

3 – We finished binge-watching Ted Lasso (that’s not the gratitude) which was such a well-done, human, feel-good series and I heartily recommend it to all and sundry. Interesting inflexion points between American and UK culture…

4 – I received, amongst other things, a new dressing-gown, some Moleskine notebooks for writing poetry in (or, quite frankly, anything), a book, “The World According to David Hockney” – he is a local hero, being from Bradford and having a permanent exhibition (N.B. not an Exhibit (which is an item IN an Exhibition)) in nearby World Heritage site Salts Mill, Saltaire.

5 – Finally, I have made a start on the writing part of my A to Z Challenge for April – the Theme Reveal and I have elevated constituent fibres to the title which now reads “What We Wear – Fabrics and Fibres!” Onwards and upwards…

6 – Got my car fixed just before Christmas – I had been driving around with 3 out of 4 wheelnuts on one front wheel – now had a new hub and tracking done!

7 – I have embarked on a 12 short stories in 12 months challenge, starting on 7th January – the idea is that working to deadlines improves your writing and since my long-term novel is languishing a bit, I thought it couldn’t hurt to stoke the furnaces with some short stories…

8 – The basic level Helpline couldn’t solve my image uploading problem but they have escalated it to the next level (wait 24 hours with bated breath) – watch this space…

9 – I bought a secondhand Melodica – a small keyboard that you play by blowing through a tube – as if being breathalysed and playing the organ had a baby…

10 – This year, an “Annus Horribilis” in so many ways (as Queen Elizabeth II was wont to say), is nearly over and the many troubles in the world must surely come a little closer to resolution Putin and Trump may implode and Israel get the message that they need to do things differently – let’s hope…

Wishing you all a Very Happy New Year!