It's only words

I laughed last night as I lay in bed trying to get to sleep while listening to the BBC's "Today in Parliament" programme. Normally it gets me off to sleep a treat, but last night the commentator kept speaking about Shaun of the Remaining Peers (SoTRM). Now I've heard about Shaun of the Dead, so is SoTRPs a close relative?

Alright I know he was really saying "shorn", but did gave me a laugh.

I've been typing up an order of service for my dying friend. I went round to see her with another member of our group and it was so heartbreaking to see such a decline in her in such a short time, and to see how frustrated she is with the way the morphine is affecting her ability to think (hopefully they'll get the dose sorted out, as this doesn't need to be the way of things). We agreed to help by typing up the readings and poems that she's selected so she can see them all of a piece. I must admit that I shed a few tears doing it.

We all love language, but the real power of words only truly comes through at times like this. Her two favourite poems are both by American poets, Emily Dickinson and Theodore Roethke. Somehow it feels fitting that Spring has stalled and we have snow on the ground today.

I'm still ploughing through my next photographic submission. I wish I had a more powerful pc so I could write a batch instruction for the file interpolation, it takes forever for my pc to crank out one file. And I reappraise every shot, checking there's absolutely no colour cast etc, etc.

I find it easier to operate in colours, I wish words were colours and then shades of meaning etc would be so much easier to spot and alter. I think I have always had a mild form of dyslexia, in that I taught myself to spell by memorising the shape and pattern of words on the page - but I've a problem in getting the sound of a word off the page if I don't already know what it should sound like. With plants I've also had to teach myself the shape and pattern of the Latin names, but again I can rarely make sense of how they should sound, unless I listen in to a programme like Gardener's World. Add to that my chemobrain problems, which get worse when I'm tired and words can feel pretty challenging at times.