Month: Mar 2020

Why?

Blog. What an ugly word.

Like a beautiful ballet dancer in a garage mechanic’s overalls. Not that I have anything against garage mechanics’ overalls but there’s a reason why ballet dancers don’t wear ’em.

Words can be beautiful or lovely or apt or intimate or ordinary or nasty or ugly. Ugly’s the worst.

But that’s what this is called so we have to live with it – or ignore it.

Instructions keep popping up telling me to start writing or type, followed by a / which I take to be another ‘or’. Well I am typing. And I keeep being instructed to choose a block. I don’t know how to identify a ‘block’ (other than a block of wood or a group of buildings in a city) and I can’t see any – so how can I choose one? There is also an irritating, rectangular shape filled with odd symbols drifting about on the screen – what should I do with that?

Why does almost everything to do with information technology have to be so complex? or, why am I so stupid that I can’t instantly understand what’s happening/required on the screen?

I hope the other members of our writers’ group can come up with a blog worthy of the name.

Random Act of Kindness

I wandered the aisles forlornly, seeking the one (somewhat essential) ingredient that I’d failed to find for my dinner tonight, and pondering the possibility of alternatives.

I’d made up my mind to buy a bag of tortilla chips, make the usual sauce and just dunk them into it, when a member of staff passed me, caught my eye and smiled kindly. I plucked up my courage to speak:

‘This is probably a really stupid question, but if you had any pasta, where would it be?’ Even though I probably go in there once a week in normal times, my memory struggles to retain that sort of simple information.

‘It WOULD be down the end of this aisle’ she admitted, ‘but there’s one pack in the back I can let you have if you want it?’

I felt very special and immensely grateful as she disappeared to some mysterious cornucopia and, returning, pushed a packet of dried conchiglie into my waiting basket, with the words: ‘..is that all right?’

‘That’s perfect, thank you so much!’

I didn’t admit that I’d only popped into her shop on the off chance of getting the one ingredient for pasta bake that I’d failed to find in the Tesco across the road.

Here we go…

Finally got round to setting up a blog for Southsea Storytellers, when nobody’s quite sure what’s going to happen next. Four intrepid writers – Trevor, Linda, Debbie and Paul – met as usual at Southsea Library in Palmerston Road on Sunday morning. Mostly we were looking at possible covers for our next collection (‘Of Flights and Fancies’).

This post is by way of an experiment to see if the automatic posting to Facebook and Twitter is any more successful than previous attempts to link FB and Twitter.

When will we meet again? Aye, there’s the rub.

Who We Are

Southsea Storytellers is a writers’ collective based in Southsea, Hampshire, on the south coast of England. We get together regularly to drink coffee, share ideas, egg each other on, write and publish.

To date, we have published two collections of our work: ‘Southsea Soup’ (2018) and ‘Life and Love’ (2019). The third collection, ‘Flights and Fancies’ is currently in production.

You can find out more about us on Facebook; Twitter and our website