 |
Anchor in a storm
|
Cycling to the train station this morning, going hell for leather in the bus lane something unexpected came up. A small boy ran straight into my path.
Cue: spectacular bike dive then palms and knees smacking tarmac. Boy unhurt, but I was left spreadeagled unable to move after the introduction to the floor. Thank God Bristol buses are so unreliable and one wasn't lumbering its way behind me. Luckily two kind samaritans picked me up, plonked me on the pavement, offering water and tissues to mop up the blood and untangle the bike.
After some minutes on the pavement I rang my kids, both in bed, at the ungodly hour of 8.00am. Apparently it took seven minutes for my son to get from horizontal sleeping mode in bed to arrive by my side, also by bike. I love the fact he timed the rescue mission. My daughter, ever practical, came with paracetamol and the promise of cups of tea back home.
Fortunately no major harm was done other than nasty scrapes, bruises and a pulled muscle.
So, thank you for the kindness of those strangers who stopped to help and who made themselves late for work, and for my lovely family.
At the terminal the coach heaves,
swallows me and my every possession
You said "goodnight, not goodbye."
We thunder down the highway -
three days to Ayers Rock
I begin to unravel you and me;
unpick the horrors of what we did
and I see nothing but an emotional landscape
and when I reach Adelaide
angular, flowered, calm city
my accent still marks me out
and nobody shares these harsh pillows.
We skirt the Flinders Ranges.
Grey bushes break up the red stony soil
and lone houses break up the hours.
The water pipeline follows the road for hundreds of miles
and far away at Stony Point where you worked
a fire is burning
No doubt the sharks are breeding now.
I'm feeling reather antiquated. I visited WH Smiths and Rymans with the intention of buying a fountain pen. My last fountain pen used green ink, had a broad nib and was used for writing countless letters.
Letters are sadly old fashioned, but the feel of a fountain pen in your hand opens new possiblities when writing. The look of the ink on the page is far more satisfying and has personality, unlike the humdrum of arial or the crotetchy Times New Roman fonts.
In my writing playbook a fountain pen would be the perfect instrument, adding weight to crossings out or scribblings of my short stories and poems. The flow of ideas through the pen has a different feel from the scratchy tap tap on a keyboard, with its myriads of typos or instant deletions. A fountain pen, I decided, is essential to my writing experiments of getting into the flow - and it would be fun to play with the physicality of writing, so long as purple prose doesn't emerge of course, but even then as an expression of thought it could be a relief after the intensity of my daily rigour of the taut press releases I write for work.
The assistant looked me up and down. I'd asked, politely, if I could try the pens out so I could test out the nib and the thickness of the instrument in my hand. Back in my day this was how it was done - Smiths had a special counter for the purpose.
"Of course not. Sealed packets," she said, staring at me and speaking louder than was strictly necessary to get her point across.
"She was probably looking for the owl on your shoulder." my colleague replied when I returned to the office grumpy and aggrieved.
