A poem about Vik Muniz’s exhibition at CAC Malaga in 2012 In 2012 I visited Vik Muniz’s exhibition at CAC Malaga. The exhibition featured the Wasteland project which Muniz created with garbage tip workers. Returning home from holiday I wrote a poem about Vik Muniz’s exhibition at CAC Malaga in 2012. I made a post and made a video of the art and a soundtrack with me reading the poem. But I didn’t transcribe the words of the poem, so have…
I went to the CAC Malaga in Oct 2012 and was very lucky to see an exhibition by Vik Muniz. It’s hard to believe it’s that long ago. I took photographs of the photographs of the “Portraits of Garbage” installations which Muniz created at Jardim Granacho, a Rio landfill site for the exhibition. Taking photos is graciously allowed by the CAC. It is probably the norm at most galleries these days. I’ve done it in…
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Follow this blog on Bloglovin’
Hey here’s to Bloglovin’, a great blog aggregator! A what? I hear you say. It’s a website that publishes extracts from other blogs and gives you a link to them. Read how you can subscribe at Bloglovin …
Still playing strains of rock, pop, country, jazz, electronica, rhythm and blues I’ve moved into hospital radio, where I’m presenting a weekly music show at 10PM on Sunday nights. You can listen live or Listen Again via the impressive Bay Trust Radio website.
In 2018 on a day when I was starting with “man ’flu“, I revisited CAC, and Centre Pompidou Màlaga, for the first time. I visited the Contemporary Art Centre in Dec 2018, for the Hernan Bas exhibition. The last time I’d been here was to Vik Muniz’s “Wasteland” exhibition. Before that, to a Gilbert and George show. This was the first Spanish exhibition (called “A Brief Intermission”) for the Miami artist, Hernan Bas. It comprised 36…
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A Kind of Magic
Here’s a story I wrote some time ago, after randomly picking 5 Rory Story Cubes (reading, Big Top, ladder, magician, and a fish) …
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Sol y Sombra
In 2010 I went to the Feria de Pedro Romero in Ronda, Spain and wrote this poem, “Sol y Sombra” (translation “Sun and Shade”) based on my experience of the Feria Goyesca
Our Airbnb hostess negotiated a taxi trip from Almeria city to the pueblo blanco of Rodalquilar for €50. The price seemed a bit steep but being so close to what would be our resting place for a couple of weeks, we were keen to finally get there…
The two of us with Piper the chihuahua, arrive in Dieppe to travel to Paris via Rouen …
Your indefatigable trio arrive in Paris via Rouen ready for a trip next day to Barcelona. We are eating up the miles. Read all about it!
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The Rolling Stones, Manchester 2018
The Rolling Stones, truly legendary rock musicians, played a gig on 5 June 2018 and I was there in a humungous crowd. This is my review of a tumultuous event. Getting into the stadium … we had two and half hours to people-watch, until support act Richard Ashcroft came onstage with his band at 6:45pm. It can’t be easy supporting the biggest group in the world — well, in my rock universe at least –…
The two of us and Piper the chihuahua arrive in Dieppe to travel to Paris via Rouen
Read about our journey from Newhaven, Sussex, across the English Channel to Dieppe in a bid to escape the UK winter
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Borrow Box
If your library closed in the recent council budget cuts you can still borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your library service online or via an app on your phone
You might enjoy my appreciation of Christina Hardyment’s book, “Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk” on GoodReads.com. But then you mightn’t. Well, you know what you’re like…
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Writer’s podcast
Here’s a podcast I made for a local writing group one night. Er… watch the creativity pouring out of your speakers/earphones (whatever) while you listen
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Self portrait
On a hot day in the garden I used my iPad as a mirror and sketched a self portrait on paper …
All about how I planned to take my Chihuahua dog abroad to escape another dull UK winter
In the middle of yearning to get away from the UK for the winter I only went and bought a dog! Complications!!
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Escape from the UK winter
I’ve become more unhappy with the effect of the UK winter on my state of mind and have yearned for an escape… This is the first post about my escape abroad
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Sketching the lake
Here’s today’s sketch, made on another grey, cold day. I climbed over a fence to draw from the lakeside …
I had some drawing lessons with a local artist. Then I went to Spain and spent some time doing some sketches from the terrace of our holiday apartment. See what you think of them.
Hey it’s Springtime! A lovely day brought out lots of visitors to the town. I felt I should go draw. The windmill shouldn’t be too challenging to sketch, I thought! You can see how wrong I was. I hid in a shelter with people eating fish and chips on the other side of it and I drew what I thought I saw. It’s a classic mistake to draw what you don’t see, to imagine what’s…
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Sketching the bay
Well the drawing lessons have been running for a few weeks now and I’ve been unhappy with my output from them. I needed to get out from the classroom into the great outdoors …
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“Drawing for beginners”
I went to a beginners’ drawing class at a local college. The 1st lesson wasn’t what I was expecting…
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The Empuhuh
RoryStoryCubes helped me write this piece of flash fiction about a dog, a dragonfly and a dragon in a spare half-hour.
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Round robin anyone?
Some time ago I took part in writing a ’round robin’ …
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Gardenias again
Based on the prompt ‘Gardenias again’, I wrote this piece of flash fiction about a man who, living alone, comes home from another hard day at the office. But all is not well.
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Interruptions
Steve got a writing toolkit for Christmas, and last night we each took one of its’ emery boards, each with a prompt on it, and started writing. Then he interrupted us every 5 minutes with another line we used to change the direction of our stories. My starting prompt was I loved the way she said “balloon”. She said it as if she were blowing bubbles., and the interruptions, are in italics below. Here’s what I came up with…
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The wheels on the bus …
Writers & Artists Yearbook asked on Facebook “Writing exercise time: write a short paragraph to accompany this image.” I posted this …
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About 35°C in the shade
‘Opening the wardrobe door’ was a recent writing prompt I was given. Quick as a flash fiction writer, I came up with this…
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Murder. No mystery.
The runes were cast and these are what the gods came back with – a black cat, a lightning bolt, a light bulb, an eye, a question, a footprint, an abacus, a compass and a magic wand – see the picture! I did my best with this meagre material… so here is my offering!
Reading and writing have always been easier for me than ‘rithmetic, so that’s why this isn’t a blog about numbers. Mathematicians see beauty …
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Photo prompt kills!
The little man had sharp blue eyes similar to those of a mynah bird we once had caged in the kitchen at home. Gordon continued, “He’s my most trusted forensic man. He’ll take you through to the morgue…
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Two poems …
I attempted a couple of poetry styles – an ‘echo’ poem and a ‘diamante’ poem …
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Tommy’s tale
A stranded train passenger tells a tale to pass the time in the waiting room
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The City
I threw some Rory Story Cubes and the images revealed let me imagine a City …
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Is there life?
More photographic prompts this week er… “prompted” me to combine 2 snaps into a quick sci-fi 70’s pastiche. Simples!
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bots
“I know what you mean” St John squeaked. “I mean, where are the women? We came here for a night of sybaritic pleasure and no totty about. Not a sausage. I was so looking forward to putting the pedal to the metal, if you know what I mean.”
The writing prompt was to write about your favourite colour. Guess what mine is.
From the Latin word for “patchwork,” the cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets. Though poets often borrow lines from other writers and mix them in with their own, a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources. Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil. Quite good company, huh?!
Here’s a poem abut one of my cats…
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Oscar, Ella and Ringo
Our cat lost us, so I wrote about the trauma. i guess it helped me.
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Calvin and Hobbes
Recently, after making a donation, my wife brought home a book of comic strips from a charity table at work. It was “The Calvin And Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book” by Bill Watterson, commemorating his own comic strip, which was pretty big in US newspapers in the 80’s and 90’s.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][wpseo_breadcrumb] The only creativity act I’ve managed since my last post, “Streets of Fire”, has been some Tweets to try to Win Tickets for the Wordpool Gala Evening in Blackpool on 2 July 2014.
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Streets of fire
A picture of a boy and a miner freshly out of the mine inspired me to write this piece of flash fiction…
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The Elephant of Doom
This is a piece of hokum, inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s characters in “The Jungle Book”…
You know the one where someone shows you a work of art or even just an everyday household object, and it inspires you to write something? I’ll show you mine, you show me yours…
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Dialogue
I was asked to write something entirely in dialogue. I’m not the greatest talker in the world but when it comes to imagining a dialogue that’s easier for me… see what you think.
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Horror flash
I wrote this piece when my friend Lauren brought in another yet another great idea – write some flash fiction. She gave us the idea that a little boy was in bed, meant to go to sleep, but he couldn’t, for the very good reason that he thought there was something hiding under the bed!
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Writer’s Block
Anyway I was tellin’ you about this geezer. Supposed to have done a lot he has. A lotta writin’ not a lotta wacky baccy! Does a lot of soul searchin’ too I expect. Staring out the window, I mean. Often see him, looking down at me I do. Why me I’ve no idea. I’m not exactly inspiring…
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Just like Conan Doyle?
Don’t deny you always wanted to write like Conan Doyle? Me too. So I gave it a go.
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Adolphus and Me
What if a fascist group rose to prominence in the United States, sometime round about now? Huh? Well what would YOU do?
A haiku is a 3-line poem with 17 syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Thought I’d give it a bash!
This poem was inspired by a photograph of a building awning I saw in September 2007, in Ronda, Southern Spain. The huge photo depicted some famous local bullfighters…
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Ash crisis? What ash crisis?
When the airline says its safe to fly again, sadly it looks like our holiday is nearly over
When the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland in 2010 it caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe and also to my holiday! Read all about my holiday issues here …
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Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall
Drawn by the first-ever lighting of the 70-mile monument from end to end, thousands of visitors filled every local car park, lay-by and footpath, while helicopters and a NASA satellite recorded the necklace of beacons from above. I played my part!
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The Dean of Gibraltar
Here’s an extract from a long standing project I’ve got on, writing a series of short stories about Gibraltar clergy – don’t ask me why but it seemed a good idea at the time!
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An Introduction to Gibraltar
I worked in Gibraltar for 6 months a few years ago. For me it was an amazing and unique experience. Here are a few things I learned.
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In The Machine
…as he pressed the On button, there was a loud report, the TV screen shattered and an acrid cloud exuded from the gaping hole…
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Those Were the Days
In 2009 some old friends and I made a nostalgic return to some old pub haunts. I played the papparazi part. We all ended up feeling old. Where did the time go?
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How Honey Got Happy
As soon as Honey Dale woke up, Steve Taylor’s face swam into view. It was a waking nightmare. She stopped herself from screaming as memories flooded back. In spite of the occasional nightmare, Honey knew everything was so much better now.
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Perfect Day
As part of an exercise in characterisation, the men in my class were asked to write a piece about a woman, and the ladies were to write about a man. Examples given to us were from Alan Bennett’s “A Chip In the Sugar”. I haven’t read the book, but to my knowledge, this lady never lived ‘oop North’…
I read and enjoyed for a second time, “Death and the Sun, a Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain”. Edward Lewine embarks on an eye-opening journey around Spain, with Spain’s most adored bullfighter. Also here’s a CBS video about the brothers Ordonez.
Some of my friends in Gibraltar noticed the site was down. I’m happy to report it’s back online again. Thanks Roy and Sylvie!
Here’s a ‘concrete poem’ I wrote. Concrete, pattern, or shape poetry is … “poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme, and so on. Judge for yourself if I managed it!
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Joosy
This story was inspired by my sometime tutor’s Bichon Frise dog. It’s a dirty job but someone had to write it…
Recently in my creative writing class we carried out an exercise, adding to the beginning or end of a fragment of text we’d been given by our tutor. I was excited by the start of the story and piggybacked my text on to it.
Below is an extract from Stephen King’s “Night Shift”…
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The Rock
I think this was one of the first pieces of ‘flash fiction’, for want of a better term, I ever wrote in the first Creative Writing class I attended, in 2009. It came out of a lesson to which my tutor brought a smooth khaki coloured rock, and told us the 15 ideas it had given him for a story. He asked us to use our imagination and to come up with something ourselves …
This poem was inspired by watching tv adverts showing shiny, happy people buying nice sofas, immediately followed by ‘Warzone’. ‘Warzone’ was a Channel 5 documentary series following the lives of British servicemen and women at Kandahar Airbase, Afghanistan. Amongst the team was a fire crew, who had put out a plane fire..