The knees, the knees!

This has been a long but pretty good day – had to be at the office for work (bad) but came home at lunchtime (good) and have spent the rest of the day tidying, eating and moderating the forum. Sitting down where possible.
My knees are having a go at me for all the recent squash games and badminton and carrying people about. They are very stroppy things (always have been) but I think this is a subtle reminder that I'm supposed to be getting older. I was always ahead of my time.

Anyway, yesterday I passed out a couple of times from sheer exhaustion (ok, and most of a bottle of wine), but it was a good day – spent some time observing the grand Peter Blegvad at work with our nation's up and coming young writers. Excellent fun, though teaching a room full of teenagers how to write depressing repetitive pantoums was probably a bit like teaching a dog how to eat…

Tamsyn is industriously cleaning the bathroom as I speak, which should probably fill me with feelings of guilt, but they've got diverted somewhere on the way. Am mostly groggy from tiredness and sore of knee.

I thought about writing a poem about knees, but realised I've already done that. Suggestions for topics welcome!

: 28 Jul 2005 21:42 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The slime that coats my inside head bones

Ok, tiny, tinny, foolish, great idea created by boring work of the day:

1) Everyone likes animals. Animals are cute.
2) Everyone likes So Duko. So Duko are ..ummm.. well, I don't know why, but they're good.

Therefore:
Animal Soduko!

On a grid of 9X9, you have to fill it in so that each line horizontally and vertically, and each box contains one (and only one) of each of the following nine categories of animal:

Mammal
Reptile
Bird
Amphibian
Insect
Arachnid
Fish
Gastropod
Politician

(disputes over categorisation to be decided by a system of duels, wherein combatants pelt each other with slices of soap until one party is defeated/clean)

Here's one for you to try yourself!

: 26 Jul 2005 23:01 |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Back to Ballistics

There may be a problem with my elbows. They look fairly normal, a cross between padded coathangers and chicken’s feet, but I’m not sure they are fully functional. Somewhere between the little pulses sent out by my brain and the typing tips of my fingers, something is getting lost. Maybe I lean on them too much. The full weight of my chin is not to be dismissed lightly.
My fingers don’t even seem to be typing much – note lack of recent blog entries. I should nag them more.

Yesterday I had a very nice evening eating spinach soup with Tamsyn, Ziqian and Leila. We did a poetry workshop, and the two poems I managed to rivet together were about headphones, and Wittgenstein. And rubbish. Ribbush. Baggage. Mind you, this won’t stop me handing them in, if needs be…

Badminton tonight, so a bit of token running around and swearing at work colleague. 10 points if you manage to leave a mark. I won’t tell you about the funniness of Anna’s damaging her nose on a glass door, because I’m fairly sure she’ll have mentioned it on her blog. (See favourites).

Officially, of course, I’m at work, so am not typing this. You must have imagined it.

: 26 Jul 2005 14:33 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Thursday – hang of got.

I used to hate thursdays – the combination of double history with a paper round can't have helped. Not so today! On one of those good days that involve not going to work, I have spent the morning trying to work out how to do a four-line sestina. Shorter. Easier. I hope.
Having fueled this great effort with left over curry from a fun evening previous, and some stewed peppermint tea, I have got as far as downloading a picture of a bathroom tile from the web, and opening and closing Hearts a lot. Damn that black queen, following me around…

England are doing strangely well in the Ashes. Ah, bbc website…

Ok – traditional sestina is a six line poem where you re-use the last word of each line shuffled in a particular order, so that you end up with six sixline verse, ending with a verse of three lines containing all the words. The shuffling is done by starting the second verse with the last line of the first verse, followed by the first line as the second, the fifth line as the third etc. (I wrote an exel spreadsheet to do all that bit for me. Both lazy AND geeky).

The four line version will be the same, only shorter, fewer verses, and less complication – verses will go ABCD, DACB, BDCA, BA/CD. Simple!
Now I just need to find four good words…

: 21 Jul 2005 12:45 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Boil in a bag day

This shouldn't take long.

I've had a day like many other tuesdays, dull as a duck with no conversation. The highlight so far (apart from whinging about it all in print) has been printing up Vic's poetry module for her. They are neat poems. She has more of them than me. Damn.

The purpose of this blog (oh high purpose!) is to type something so my fingers don't rust up while my brain tries to stop its chain from slipping off. Meant to be thinking deeply about poetry. So far, I've remembered how to spell it.

I was in a meeting for an hour today, and wrote a pantoum about having a broken leg. I miss having a broken leg. It was something to write on. (Still got the leg, just not the break, or the plaster.)

A poem (not by me):

Oh, to be a broken leg
In plaster white as chalk
And travel everywhere by crutch
While others have to walk.

: 19 Jul 2005 21:41 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem