Archives for writing
Onward to 2022!
Me in Glasgow Central for a work trip in November 2021. (Photo: James Kemp) I'm carrying on a theme for my blog, of at least one post reflecting and looking forward every new year, and for once I'm keen that we move onward to 2022 and what it will bring! At the tail end of 2020 I made a few suggestions for 2021 (I didn't go as far as labelling them resolutions, for reasons I explained in last year's post). Always make sure that there is something to look forward to. Keep the scale of ambition realistic (given what I know I can control) Keep up the exercise/activity. Make the most of the situation, whatever it is. Reflections on 2021 Despite everything 2021 has been a good year for my family and me. Looking back through my pictures we've had…
On Resolutions, 2020 and 2021
For a number of years I've posted new year's resolutions on the Themself, along with reflections on how I've got on with them. I didn't do that last year, even though I was sure that I had. Making Resolutions There's been a theme to previous resolutions, they've covered reading, writing and being healthier. The theme is about being a better person, although there's a level of subjectivity about what constitutes 'better'. On the whole being happier with who I am is probably the thing I should have 'm not going to make retrospective resolutions for 2020, the whole point of making new year resolutions is setting yourself some aspirations for the future. As I write 2020 is a few days from being history. Thankfully. Reflections on 2020 Global pandemic and massive recession aside, things haven't been all bad about 2020.…
Hello, Hullo, Hallo [Poetry]
My daughter's writing challenge from school was to write a poem where the first word was Hello. I figured it might be fun to do this myself while she was doing it. So I wrote a villanelle inspired by both the challenge and by our current situation of keeping our social distance. This is a short poem about not being able to see the people that you love. Although I am in the house with the people that I love, I just felt it made the poem work better if the stanzas alternated like a conversation between people that were separated lovers. When reading it imagine each stanza being an exchange between two characters. The first two as a pair, then alternate until the last two are paired. No matter how much you miss people, follow the government advice for…
Sticky End [Flash Fiction] [WW2 SOE]
Sticky End is my flash fiction for the first round of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge this year. The first round was last weekend and the group I'm in were assigned a spy genre story to be set in a prison cell and featuring glue. The story had to be under one thousand words and written within 48 hours. (Last year I wrote Down the Harbour and Burning to Leave for the 2017 flash fiction challenge). I spent a bit of Saturday thinking about it, the hard bit for me was trying to work in the glue naturally and believably. Some help from Google showed me that the WW2 Special Operations Executive (SOE) used to include tubes of bostik adhesive in the containers that they dropped to the Jedburgh teams. The bostik was used to camouflage improved explosive devices…
A Hundred Years Before [Poetry]
War Memorial in Boubers-sur-Canche, France (photo: James Kemp) I wrote the first draft of A Hundred Years Before after visiting a cemetery in France in Boubers sur Canche near Arras. It wasn't one of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, it was an ordinary French commune cemetery, but it had over a hundred graves of French soldiers killed in action during August 1914. On reflection I realised that British soldiers, and before that the constituent nations fielded soldiers in the same place as the legions of WW1 we're currently remembering publicly. Let's not forget their forebears. A Hundred Years Before Here I stand now, near the border of France and Belgium. The cockpit of Europe. A hundred years before, others stood here. British soldiers who fought, and died, with the French against the Germans on this soil. Le sale Boche.…