I’m in a pickle with my days. For example today I was convinced I had a live webcast at 4 o’clock and was rushing to get organised for it until, having a pee, I realised it was only Monday (and not Wednesday).

I can’t work out which is better: busy weeks, or free weeks. Free weeks I get to read poems, write poems, study (poetry) with little interruption. Busy weeks I have to fall in with others, which means doing things I wouldn’t do if there was no one to let down. Like leaving the house. This week contains three meetings: the first with a nutritionist (not for me), the second is a board meeting for the woodland I help manage, and the third is about a writing project I’m involved in. All this means is that I’m going to have to shake myself out of my insular little head and talk to people. And do the agenda for the woodland meeting, as I’m secretary. I actually downloaded a time management app to remind me to do these things, respond to emails and the like. But I’ve already become rather good at ignoring it.

I keep trying to work out a routine whereby I can do all my ‘for others’ tasks and my own work without letting either slip. But I keep failing. How do people do it, I wonder?

Halloween tomorrow. Normally I pay little attention to it, but this year Moffat Promotions asked everyone in town to decorate their windows for an event, so the image above is one of our two street facing (downstairs) windows. The other has a giant spider in it.

Here is a prose poem by Pierre Reverdy I’ve become rather fond of:

Under the Stairs

 

   Maybe I had lost the key, and everyone around me laughs and each shows me an enormous key hanging from his neck.

   I am the only one who has no way to get in some-where. They have all disappeared and the closed doors leave the street sadder. No one.

   I’ll knock on every door.

   Insults fly out of the windows and I withdraw.

   So, not far outside of town, on the edge of a river and a wood, I found a door. A simple gate with no lock. I got behind it and, beneath the night that has no windows but does have large curtains, between the forest and the river that protected me, I was able to sleep.

(translated by Ron Padgett)

On a side note: one of the things that really bothers me about WordPress is the insistence on double spacing between paragraphs. It’s dictatorial, and I am perfectly capable of hitting ‘return’ twice if need be. Is there a way of turning that function off, do you know, anyone?