Well, that leaves more gin for me! Hurrah!!

Having said that......After forty odd years of cooking a turkey for christmas dinner, using many and various methods, to good effect, this year, with fourteen to feed, I managed to incinerate it!! It was dark brown when it came out of the oven, and after we had carved it, it looked as though it had exploded. No carcass for soup (which is my favourite part of having a turkey) boo hoo!! They all ate it though and pronouced it good. There was very little left of anything, except cheese and biscuits, because they said they were all too gorged. And four people said it was the most fun Christmas Dinner they had ever attended. I thought it was fun too......but that might have been the gin.....

This is the one my Mum and I used to contemplate on New Year's Eve...posting it early...so you might enjoy:-

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.'

And he replied,
'Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!'

So I went forth and finding the Hand of God
Trod gladly into the night
He led me towards the hills
And the breaking of day in the lone east.

So heart be still!
What need our human life to know
If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention."



by Minnie Louise Harkins 1875-1957

All day snow fell
Snow fell all night
My silent lintel
Silted white
Inside a Creature -
Feathered - Bright -
With snowy Feature
Eyes of Light
Propounds - Delight.

Christabel LaMotte
from Possession, A.S. Byatt

A snow queen.

Is it called aliteration?

Well - it should be. Lovely, Lovely snow poem, thankyou giselle.

I've got some fluey virus - not feeling top-hole, but I am being treated very kindly.

Indeed. A snow queen, I can see that. Guess I was thinking of something less imaginative .. a ptarmigan, beautiful white bird that nestles in the snow and is virtually invisible unless you disturb it and suddenly the snow transforms into feathers and wings. I think the poem also captures quite well the Christabel LaMotte character at this point in her life as described in Byatt's book.

Loss Creek

He went there to have it
exact. The broken prose of the bush roads.
The piles of half-burnt slash. Stumps
high on the valley wall like sconces
on a medieval ruin. To have it tangible.
To carry it as a load rather than as mood
or mist. To heft it - earth measure,
rock measure - and feel it raw drag without phrase
for the voice or handle for the hand.
He went there to hear the rapids curl around
the big basaltic boulders saying
husserl husserl, saying I'll
do the crying for you, licking the schists
into skippable discs. That uninhabited laughter
sluicing the methodically shorn valley.
He went there to finger the strike/slip
fissure between rock and stone between Vivaldi's
waterfall and the wavering note a varied thrush
sets on a shelf of air. Recognizing the sweet
perils rushing in the creek crawling
through the rock.
He knew he should not trust such
pauseless syntax.
That he should just say no.
But he went there just the same.

Don McKay
2007 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology

Some interpretation of McKay's poetry quoted from the Anthology:

In Strike/Slip, Don McKay walks us out to the uncertain ground between the known and the unknown, between the names we have given things and things as they are. This is wonder's territory, and from within it, McKay considers a time "before mind and math"; before rock, in human hands, turned over in the mind, becomes stone. The poems confront the strangeness and inadequacy of using language to address the point at which language fails ---

(Strike/Slip is a collection of poems by Don McKay)

Penny, I hope you are feeling better soon.

This Don McKay poem gives a lot to ponder on.

Life… be thankful for it


Love your life because you are living it,
It doesn’t matter what others think about it.

Love you friends because they are always around to help you,
What would have happened to your life if they weren't with you?

Love your family because they care for you,

Can you think of your future without a family
living near by to help you?

Life is just a story that is being recited by god,
So whatever is happening is happening according to god.

Be thankful for the god, who made all these
people available to help you,

Because without these people around,
our lives would have been doomed.

thankyou andrew angusa: You are fortunate in your family.

If I feel a certain lack, perhaps this is why this poem, though beautiful, makes me cry.





A few days after moving in he stuffed
the money into the roof of the doll's house
and kept practising his new voice.
He was only a few feet short of his own
vanishing point. He moved around late at night.
She heard him. She couldn't pin him down.
He sang about the pain in his heart.
He told her he was playing tennis,
extending his serve in the basement gym
15 storeys below their bedroom.
One night he didn't come back.
Her sister was visiting. She was knee-deep
in homework and adultery and when
she saw the doll's house she thought
of her childhood and burst into tears.
The doll's house was their father's obsession,
modelled on the family home.
They pulled it into the centre of room.
It was heavier and bigger than they remembered,
like their childhood. 'D'you think
it's haunted?' They laughed breathlessly,
as if that's where he'd been hiding all these years.
All the furniture in the rooms had fallen over,
their fingers feeling through tiny windows,
trying to make every little thing right again.

• From The Rapture, published by Salt (£9.99). To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p go to the Guardian Bookshop

I identified with this poem because of my days as a 'paperboy', back when we were called that, although I had an afternoon route so I only had to do one morning a week but I liked the mornings, well, sometimes --- I like the way the newsagents action, 'his little sacrifice', flows out into the world:

The Newsagent

My clock has gone although the sun has yet to take the sky.
I thought I was the first to see the snow, but his old eyes
have marked it all before I catch him in his column of light:
a rolled up metal shutter-blind, a paper bale held tight

between his knees so he can bring his blade up through the twine,
and through his little sacrifice he frees the day's headlines:
its strikes and wars, the weather's big seize up, runs on the pound.
One final star still burns above my head without a sound

as I set off. The dark country I grew up in is gone.
Ten thousand unseen dawns will settle softly on this one.
But with streets all hushed I take my papers on my round
into the gathering blue, wearing my luminous armband.

Paul Farley

Very nice image. I never had my own paper route, but tagged along with my best friend on hers. I loved getting up early on Sunday mornings with her, especially in the winter. To go out into the dark and cold of January seemed daring and secret. The very best part was jumping back into her bed afterward with cold nosed and our clothes still on.

Here is my contribution for today:

Philip Larkin - The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.


I love the first stanza of this poem - can't you just hear the almost words.

Really unusual subject for a poem, but very evocative.

I'm the only one in our family who didn't have a paper round. My husband lived on the outskirts of a large town and so there were plenty of houses. All three of my kids had paper rounds in this village and its outskirts. But where I grew up, there were about eight houses per mile. LOL. The postman also delivered the newspapers. I'm such a hillbilly.

That's a great story Saffron, thanks. I guess with boys it was a bit different - I had a friend who helped me with my route sometimes and on Saturday mornings we used to go to his place after and raid the fridge and then watch Saturday morning cartoons (his family had TV cable, we only had rabbit ears).

And Penny, there are many great things about living in a rural area but finding 'employment' (even delivering papers) may not be among them, at least in some areas. I'm afraid you would not have made much money delivering papers with 8 customers or less per mile .. we used to earn about 2 cents per paper so you would have done an awful lot of peddling (assuming you had a bike) to earn 2 cents!

Well, at least papers paid more than coat hangers .. we used to collect piles of coat hangers and sell them to the dry cleaners .. for half a cent a piece.

I didn't care about earning money. I did have a bike and I used to peddle as fast as I could singing 'The Man from Laramie' - and was about as far away from Laramie....metaphorically speaking, as you could get. It was a song broadcast on the radio in those days, and I liked the tune.

I was allowed to ride the horses, bareback. One horse in return for bathing the farmer's wife's twin sons and putting them to bed, and the other horse (Copper) for nothing, because the owner liked me. Gosh, giselle, you have brought back some memories, quite unexpectedly...thankyou. xx

And those twin sons - you would be surprised if you knew who they are now. LOL

Well Penny, you are tougher than me. I've ridden a bit with a saddle but bareback looks way too painful!

And I agree, it wasn't about the money so much, I used to ride my bike everywhere as well, although I didn't sing 'The Man from Laramie' while doing so ... the little money I earned brought me greater independence because I didn't get an 'allowance' so I would have been broke without it .. with my money I could get on the bus and go anywhere in the city, or go to a movie or hang out downtown or whatever, and I bought stuff that I wanted, like sports stuff and records and I saved up for a stereo .. that was a great thing because then I could play my records real LOUD and impress my friends, which was very important to me at the time.