Notebook Season

I am sure I am not alone in this, but as a writer, I love notebooks (and pens). Well, now is the time to go crazy and buy up all those new term designs that didn't sell before school started. After trying all the usual outlets I find Woolies still can't be beaten. They are the best. I bought three this week; two 'designer' and one cheap basic model -59p. This was to compare against the other basic pads from Asda and Tesco - both 89p). Of course at 59p it may fall to tatters, with the wire bindings bleeding my fingers, only time will tell.

I have finally updated my profile. It was fun to check out a few websites of some of my favorites. Alanis has one of the best, stylish and calm. It made my site look puny. I have a long way to go.

The birds in my garden have been dancing a carnival this week. They've scoffed all the Saskatoon berries off the trees. I had hoped to make a couple of gallons of wine with those berries, but nature took them first. Its my own fault for not filling the bird feeders. Yesterday I heard the cheeky peep, peep, peep of a chaffinch, trying to point out to me the feeders were empty. But when I do fill them, the little birdies throw away the seeds they hate and leave ground fodder for squabbling magpies and crapping, bumbling pheasants.

A friend mailed me a sad poem this week. I can't find a web link to it so here it is in full;

DEATH OF A SON [who died in a mental hospital aged one]

John Silkin



Something has ceased to come along with me.
Something like a person: something very like one.
And there was no nobility in it
Or anything like that.

Something was there like a one year
Old house, dumb as stone. While the near buildings
Sang like birds and laughed
Understanding the pact

They were to have with silence. But he
Neither sang nor laughed. He did not bless silence
Like bread, with words.
He did not forsake silence.

But rather, like a house in mourning
Kept the eye turned in to watch the silence while
The other houses like birds
Sang around him.

And the breathing silence neither
Moved nor was still.

I have seen stones: I have seen brick
But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone
But a house of flesh and blood
With flesh of stone

And bricks for blood. A house
Of stones and blood in breathing silence with the other
Birds singing crazy on its chimneys.
But this was silence,

This was something else, this was
Hearing and speaking though he was a house drawn
Into silence, this was
Something religious in his silence,


Something shining in his quiet,
This was different this was altogether something else;
Though he never spoke, this
Was something to do with death.

And then slowly the eye stopped looking
Inward. The silence rose and became still.
The look turned to the outer place and stopped.
With the birds still shrilling around him.
And as if he could speak

He turned over on his side with his one year
Red as a wound
He turned over as if he could be sorry for this
And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones,
And he died.


The last line made me gasp. The pace and the punctuation express the anguish felt. It is so powerful. It reminded me of the heart wrenching song by Patty Griffin 'Goodbye' . The song makes me cry when I listen to Patty while driving, it may be the end of me. I am learning to play the guitar and 'Goodbye is the one song I am aspiring towards playing well before the end of the year.