Back blogging

The week has flown. My husband and I had a day at the shops, which we both hate, but the sales were tempting, although just about everything left was for very tiny or very large people - it doesn't pay to be of average height and build at sale time.

Also went to the Naked Portrait exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait gallery.
It had an interesting mix of painting and photography on the subject of being bare.
I enjoyed some of the more abstract pieces, where unusual poses and angles left you wondering which bit of the body you were looking at. Lots to savour when I come to set up shots in the future. My favourite is in the clickable highlights above, it's called family self-portrait.

These pictures are of the Edinburgh Internation Festival street scenes, the queue outside the Warhol retrospective at the National Galleries etc.

It is such a time of change around here, son going off to uni, MIL having to sell her house and decisions required on where she should stay, provided she can continue to manage on her own with support. Funny how both ends of the equation, young and old, are going through huge change at the same time, while we're in the middle trying to help them both.

Rob, Barbara and Colin having been doing the Guardian workshop producing poems using first lines from the poetry of WS Graham, the idea is to write dramatic poems with a good tone.

While stuck in the car this week, between places, I wrote these two pieces:


Talking out of turn


I leave this at your ear for when you wake

- the gift of silence.

No barely audible radio prattle seeping out

beneath the bathroom door.

No cup of lukewarm tea at arm’s length

from your lips.

No smell of scraped toast, no cooling iron.


And tonight, when you turn a key on the dark hall,

and fumble for the light

the sound of absence will part the quiet, split the hush.


That’s when you’ll hear me,


that's when finally I’ll have my say.




This is a short note



Just for the sake of recovering,

for the sake of holding on

to some vestige of you,

I’ve decided not to keep

up with these reports

of your final days. After all

it’s not as if this pattern's

unknown to me.



Life narrows, to a mattress

width,

and your circle shrinks

to form a vacuum seal

comprised of nearest,

hopefully dearest,

and a few caring,

competent strangers.

Shoes - even pretty ones -

are suddenly redundant.



This shouldn’t be happening to you.

I, for one, won't let it.