Author: Cat By Herself

Blogger, poet, thinker, dreamer, living by the sea.

Try and Catch the Wind

He had shaggy blond hair, the colour of ripened corn stalks, and deep blue eyes like a cloudless sky on an August afternoon. I’d never seen eyes that shade before (though years later I married a man whose eyes were the same). He wore a dark blue corduroy jacket and a floppy hat down over his floppy fringe when he rode his (push) bike to school, and he played the guitar, but he didn’t sing, though he liked Dylan, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles.

He was my best friend’s boyfriend.

One night I dreamt about him, and when I woke up I realised: this must be what being in love feels like.

Months later, after he’d stopped going out with my friend, but we were all three round at her house, he put his arm round me and kissed me – my first time. It was the week before my seventeenth birthday.

We never ‘went out’ anywhere together, but he came round to my house a couple of times, and we would play records and kiss and cuddle – very chastely (as I realised later). The last time, he brought me a box of chocolates for my birthday, but didn’t even try to kiss me. Altogether, I guess it lasted about three weeks.

And afterwards, I thought: this is what being in love feels like.

Welcome to the New World

In the evenings, I sometimes look around and think – I should do that tomorrow.

And then in the morning, at some point, I might make a start at whatever it is, and do that until I feel like I’ve done enough.

Or else I might not do any of it and it’s still waiting when the evening comes round again.

And you know what?

The days still pass.

Treasure Trove

On Thursday, after writing my blog post, I decided I wanted a feature image of a bard declaiming to a hall full of Anglo Saxons – as you do. Didn’t have to be too authentic (given that there was very little representational art at that time), what I had in mind was a 19th century illustration of some mock-gothic Walter Scott fantasy of the Dark Ages. But Googling didn’t help much, throwing up mostly images from 21st fantasy fiction and re-enactors, mostly mediaeval in style, which was not at all what I had in mind.

What I stumbled across, however, was a fabulous treasure trove of images which held me fascinated (and delayed my breakfast) for a couple of hours or more: the British Library Flickr page of copyright-free images, mostly black and white, page after page of illustrations from (probably justly) forgotten novels and travelogues, landscapes, people, advertisements, cartoons, engravings, illuminated letters, botanical drawings, maps, snippets of graphic design, architectural plans, odd bits of text, signatures, portraits, and on and on, all scanned from books and documents in the BL collection.

I can’t begin to describe the joy I get from scrolling through these pages – so far I’ve only sampled the first twenty of over ten thousand, so that should keep me happy for a while. It’s a wonderful galimaufrey (ooh, I don’t often get a chance to use that word – in fact I’m not sure I ever have before!), a completely random grab-bag of stuff. Forget trying to use the search function, that searches the whole of Flickr (unless there’s some clever subtle way of narrowing it that I haven’t found yet), and in my case threw up the above-mentioned re-enactors, plus quite a few involving lego figures. But the randomness of it all, the serendipity, the joyous juxtapositions are part of the fun.

I always say I’m not a visual person, but I’m quite happy wandering through this electronic gallery – more so than many real world ones that I’ve visited, where I tend to get bored quite easily. I feel as though I’ve made a wonderful discovery, found a place that I can keep going back to without having to leave the house, and who knows? Maybe one day I’ll come across some unanticipated inspiration that will start me writing again.

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NaPoWriMo

April is NaPoWriMo, short for National Poetry Writing Month – though these days, like NaNoWriMo, it’s an international event.

It was started in 2003 by American poet Maureen Thorson, who decided to write a poem a day and post them on her blog. Since then, poets from all over the world have taken up the challenge, and poems spring up every April faster than daffodils in Wordsworth’s garden at Grasmere.

To find out more, you can visit the NaPoWriMo website. But to join in, all you need to do is write a poem and post it somewhere – on a blog, on Facebook, wherever the fancy takes you.

Share it with the world, get out there, and support your fellow poets by reading their contributions.

You can read my contribution here.

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.