Budging the sluggard...

...ripples of the Somme, he wrote, and I imagine the young soldier laying down his book, grass-stalk in mouth, to watch the hospital barge drift by in the reddening varnished sunlight. Perhaps that afternoon he was on leave, a few still hours respite from the cacophony of Flanders.

There is something fierce and sad in the writing of this war poet and the best of his poetry came in the single year before his death in action by another canal. He described men marching asleep, the 'ecstasy of fumbling' at the clarion 'Gas! Gas!' and 'The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori.'

And in his dream,there,  'How unto Avalon, in agony / Kings passed in the dark barge...'

Wilfred Owen wrote those words on December 8th 1917, exactly 73 years before the birth of MCH;  he fell eleven months later at an age close to hers now, one of nearly 900,000 of his countrymen, and one of few who left a legacy of the carnage in haunting verse.

Missed Bliss

Sharing a pack of gum is uncontroversial, most colleagues won't be impressed if you help yourself to a swig from their water bottles but my friend D___  shares her hand cream.

It comes out of her purse (a miracle of discovery worth its own story), she  squeezes a dainty line on her palm, and proffers the tube to a girl-friend who repeats the manoevure but hesitates before offering to the next-in-line, yours truly.

"Go on, try it," says D___ , who is often unimpressed by certain types of male objections, so I do, but what I notice is how ungreasy it is, how it sinks into my skin and the redolence of exotic sunsets or some other nonsense which, even as I enjoy, my man-brain snarkily carps is likely a synthetic pong created in a lab next to Fresh Kills landfill in Jersey, and now my forearms feel as soft as the proverbial babies bum.

The next day I go to the ladies' aisle, rather than the section where they stack the cheap vaseline-based junk for guys and unsophisticated people who don't know The Secret:  Spa Indulgence's Mediterranean Bliss, infused with Olive Leaf, Fig and Green Tomato.

I rush home, strip off and put dollops of the stuff all over the bod - a bit of jogging and lots of this stuff and an irresistable  summer physique is just round the corner—shazaaam, baby !

Then I notice the goup ain't sinking in, I read the label and discover I've schmeered myself with Mediterranean Bliss Body Wash.

Sabrina

I was asked about the short. The story was suggested by the song Sabrina Fair in Milton's Comus—'a twisted braid of lilies knitting the loose train of thy amber dropping hair'—and beauty and death.

Cheery, huh ?

Fifty Shades of QWERTY #1 on 6S

This was a challenge to write a 6S short using leading QWERTY letters in each sentence.

Check out QWERTY at the Plaza Hotel too. It has a twist on the challenge which I thought was kinda clever-clogs. All my 6S stuff are on the Shorts page. Stuff is a plural noun, right?

Tragedy

I lost my phone yesterday. I called it. It was still switched on. I texted my contact information, hoping a finder would think to read a new message. Nothing. I left another, praying he or she might check the phone's voicemail. Nothing.

But after some thinking and sleuthing I was able to make a phone call. The guy at the other end was the kind of guy who communicates barely, in grunts. Several facts were presented and  his final grunt confirmed that he had, indeed, received a phone call at 9.22 a.m. This call, I mentioned by way of explanantion, was made from my cell phone, which I mislaid a short while before and which would dearly love to be returned to the bosom of its owner.

Okay. I didn't say it exactly like that but I did give him a number to call. I would collect the phone at it's finders convenience. And I thanked him profusely for his time.

Since then, I heard nothing. After many hours, I tired of the wait and cancelled the phone (and yes, the finder had been making calls all day). These blighters should get it in the neck. Or early male-pattern baldness on they and their descendents to the seventh generation. Something like that.

Upside: I do have a new cell phone. Shiny.

Here be Unicorns

Pembrokeshire has secret places of sunken lanes and high hedgerows profuse with honesuckle, rosehip and Queen Anne's lace, tinkling of hidden streams, and dragonflies darting between sunlight and shade above the brown water beneath Brandy Brook's hump-back bridge.

And when it does rain, in West Wales the rain is often soft, and at this time of year perfect for walking bare-headed. It really is a magical part of Britain. Pic by Hazel, my sister-in-law.

Yee ha !

Just pulled my bleeding nose away from the grindstone. SEHALLIDAY.COM 1.0 is up. The folks at Goodreads were wonderfully quick in creating my author account, tho' the cover image of Window has to update into their database (err... I guess?). I used a stock image for the background but I should head off into the woods with the camera and create something gothic and other-wordly. It's nearly 11 and I have to be up mad early, so up the wooden hill, perchance to dream and don't let the bb's bite. Good night.