News/No News in April

I’ve fallen off the blogging bus and I’m struggling to climb back on. I’m not sure why because it isn’t travelling very fast. Perhaps it’s my dodgy knee/s. Anyway – Hello! – even if it’s already May.

I’m fully recovered from my first Covid-19 jab (Oxford AstraZeneca) and waiting for a date for my second. In April I put the new play I’m working on to the side for a while and returned to poems. Rejections came in from two journals, Perverse and Poetry Review, and I got nowhere in the Poets and Players competition or The Ginkgo Prize. Two poems were accepted by The North (hurray) and will be published in their next issue. I wrote reviews for books by Maria Taylor, Jackie Wills and Katherine Stansfield and these reviews will also be published in The North.

I want to get back to my play but play energy isn’t with me at the moment. Poem energy is with me, after a fashion, so I’ve written and sent out to two more journals and I’ve recycled one of my rejected poems for another competition.

I made two poem/collages/word and image pieces in April and I posted them on my Instagram page. I posted a few more pieces in April but quickly deleted them because I realised I wanted to try them in a print magazine. They might be more prose than poems, I’m undecided.

I’ve been walking every day, mainly around the streets of Trowbridge, where I live, but also in more rugged nearby places: along canal and coastal paths (Bristol estuary), across fields and through woods. We visited Avebury again, a lovely place to visit, with (I think) much more to see than at Stonehenge.

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I try to cycle on my static bike most days, or every other day, to strengthen the muscles that support my dodgy knee/s. The static bike is a good time to catch up with either music or a radio programme. Most recently I’ve been listening to an adaptation of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington. I also loved an In Our Time episode about Ovid.

Andrew and I are watching a lot of telly in the evenings, mainly box sets of series we’ve never watched before, or films streamed through one of the streaming services. We don’t see much of each other during the day, since Andrew works full-time from his office at the bottom of our garden and I write in our house, in the room we used to call the children’s playroom.

Generally, no news is all the news I have at the moment. Blogging has been replaced with writing for the time being. But I’m still here and I hope all is well with you.