Like most people, we are experiencing a curtailed Christmas. Of the offspring wanting to come home, one is now in Tier 4 on the south coast, and another is languishing in self-isolation on the other side of town after his app pinged, even though he only had Covid-19 last month. Which leaves just one for dinner.
About Me
- Deborah Harvey Poetry
- Bristol , United Kingdom
- Poet and poetry facilitator. Co-founder of the Leaping Word Poetry Consultancy, which provides advice for poets on writing, editing and publishing, as well as qualified counselling support for those exploring personal issues in their work - https://theleapingword.com. My sixth poetry collection, Love the Albatross, is now available from Indigo Dreams or directly from me.
Friday, 25 December 2020
Deck the Halls with Border Collie
Monday, 21 December 2020
A Winter Solstice Blessing
Happy Winter Solstice. May the returning light sit like a fox on the roof of your shed in the coming year. (Unless you have rabbits or chickens.)
Wednesday, 16 December 2020
O brave new world
There's a whole new world for puppies to explore, but it's not as easy as it might be in the middle of winter and the dead of a pandemic. Still, we're doing our best, and now Cwtch has had all her vaccinations, we'll be able to visit the park and encounter other dogs a bit more.
We were loaned a puppy carrier for the time before she could walk outdoors, which I was really pleased about, but she never managed to settle in it comfortably.
So it was back to the original plan of carrying her around.
Saturday, 12 December 2020
On Sneezing and False Teeth
Getting over my latest bout of gastritis - the fourth in three months. This time I was in sufficient pain to be whisked to our local A&E. These days it's not a place for the faint-hearted. The staff were run off their feet, and as I was waiting for a taxi to get home, a bloke who looked about 40 was ejected, complaining that 'all the fucking foreign people' were being seen before him. He was going to WRITE TO HIS MP. The nurse accompanying an elderly woman who was waiting for her husband to pick her up looked at me and rolled her eyes. I bet they hear that all the time.
I was pleased to see the new Banksy that's appeared on a house at the bottom of Vale Street in Totterdown. (The steepest residential street in the country, don't you know.) It's of a woman sneezing her false teeth out, and it reminds me of a story my late Uncle Noel tells in his book about my grandmother, Hilda Hill, and her neighbours in Douglas Road, Horfield in the 1920s:
'Then Mrs Amor, further down the street. Kath to her friends. Born to well-to-do parents but somehow ending up in Douglas Road with her second husband. Very smart but with a slight flavour of 'no better than she ought to be' about her. Given to muttered conversations with Mum that suddenly seemed to stop if I entered the room. Don't know what they were about, but suspect that Les Dawson used to have the same subjects under consideration when he did his sketches for the television. My favourite story of Mrs Amor concerned a visit to town with my mother: when walking up Union Street, Kath sneezed suddenly and her dentures flew from her mouth and landed in one of the numerous heaps of horse manure common in the streets in those days. Faced with a choice between such weighty considerations of hygiene and vanity, Kath opted for the vanity and replaced the dentures.'
Here's a photo of Vale Street back in September. You can just see the house that now bears a Banksy at the end of the road on the right, in the centre of the photo.