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Archives for March, 2014

Study

A215 – Life Writing – Working in the Dark

From the two pieces I've already posted, Early Memories & Initiative at Night and another I drafted this piece as part of the life writing tutorial for A215 Creative Writing. It has summarised the original freewrites and linked them with a through-line. Working in the Dark “How many civil servants does it take to change a lightbulb?”“None, they prefer to work in the dark!”As a small child I play with lego by candlelight, a power cut. I sit beside the glass door to the balcony, the rest of the room is dark and impenetrable. The multicolour swirl pattern on the carpet is vivid. The thick green base tile and the red and white lego bricks forming into a house. In the dim Scottish winter night I can’t play for long before it is too dark. Almost twenty I spend a…
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Black Belt Speed Drills

I went to watch the Choi Kwang Do black belt test of one of my son's close friends this morning at the Ellis Academy of Choi Kwang Do in Redhill, Surrey.  Here is a very short video (about 50 seconds) of her doing some speed drills as part of the test. I have to say I think it is awesome how fast they go, especially as they are only eight years old! Related articles Martial arts training helps children with cancer
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A215 – Life Writing – Initiative at Night

Here's the second of the pieces I wrote for the A215 Creative Writing online tutorial on life writing. Saturday 13th December 1991 It’s 3am on a Saturday before Christmas 1991, I’ve only been awake for 21 hours. After a day of lectures I went with the UOTC to Redford Barracks in Edinburgh for a training camp. Since 1830 I have been on the Pentland Hills doing orienteering and solving problems with a team of third year cadets. We’ve not been good at following the approved DS solutions. To change the tire on a land rover without a jack we ignored the planks and mik crates and instead rolled the vehicle onto its side before righting it after we’d changed the tire. Our time was the fastest, but the officer wasn’t pleased. To take a casualty across a minefield (laid with…
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250 Posts

Well 251 now as it happens, since this one is the 251st post on themself. I've always been a bit vague about blog dates, largely because it doesn't really matter all that much. I've been writing for decades, before it was even possible to publish it easily. There are still a couple of ring binders with stories in them and also dozens of notebooks and a couple of boxes of index cards from before the internet. I doubt many of those will ever be published, although they may well be mined for ideas eventually. This is not my first blog, and as much as I can I've imported the articles written for the previous blogs into wordpress. I've also gone back and gathered up things that I wrote for publication and added them into the archives where I can. There…
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A215 – Life Writing – An Early Memory

We're on to life writing, which is a pretty wide field I've realised. I've temporarily paused trying to write TMA4 and prep for the EMA to participate in A215's 4th online tutorial. The task here is to write three short snapshots of memories and then try to link them together with a through-line. We've not to post the original pieces to the tutorial, but rather a consolidated draft. So I thought that this would give me three ready made blog articles, but on reflection I only want to post two of them. Here's the first. An Early Memory It’s sometime in the late 1970s, I’m about six or seven. Sitting on the multi-coloured living room carpet, it has a pattern of squares with swirly bits on the inside of them. Each of the squares has a border wide enough for…
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