never knowingly without a pen
I was worried - how could I not be worried, given the news reports of the rise and rise of new cases of Covid-19 across the UK? But my last eye-test was two and half years ago and my most recent pair of glasses continues to disintegrate after several repair attempts, and I have been… Continue reading Buying New Glasses in a Pandemic
I wrote a hybrid piece called 'Once Upon a Lockdown' - part poem/prose/diary - and submitted it to The Great Margin with thanks to a small commission from Paper Nations - which I've mentioned before. 'Once Upon a Lockdown' starts in March, when Boris Johnson announced there was going to be a lockdown, and roses… Continue reading Once Upon a Lockdown Rose: collage work and hybrid writing
Very little to write about this week. Where I live, in West Wiltshire, there is a vague sense that something is about to change, possibly because of the government's new slogan (Stay Alert!) and ahead of Boris Johnson's broadcast to the nation tonight. We've noticed more cars on the road and there seem to be… Continue reading Lockdown Week 7: Quiet and Slow
The Discover Prompts from WordPress have stopped now. I felt a little flurry of excited anticipation when they started up again for April but they never really lived up to my expectations, to be honest. Now they've gone, though, I miss them a bit. 'Lists' was one of the prompts that I didn't actually write… Continue reading Lists, including wrong lists
I'm grateful to the children, families and schools who've made pictures for windows and fronts of buildings as a way of saying thank you to NHS workers and frontline workers and as a means of expressing hope that things will get better. Here is a selection of artwork I've seen as I've walked around the… Continue reading Discover Prompts: Grateful for Rainbows in Windows
One person's method of focus is another person's route to distraction. Other people's rules rarely work for me. I need to find my own routine and sometimes, often, that isn't a routine at all. I listen to my own rhythms and they change daily. I write lists and this helps me to focus on what… Continue reading Discover Prompts: Focus
Now that I'm not going anywhere of any distance from where I live, I'm sometimes revisiting places in my head while I'm scrolling through the camera roll on my phone. I thought I'd share three photos with you here and tell you something about them. This photo of a glum-looking dog was taken on the… Continue reading Three photos from my camera roll
I'm thinking about new things happening during lockdown and one thing is unexpected subjects turning up in conversation now that we're spending more time at home and, for some of us, more time than usual with the same group of people. I'm here in Wiltshire with Andrew, my husband, and our two adult children who've… Continue reading Lockdown Conversations
Now that both of our university student children have come to live at home again during the Covid-19 crisis, I've given up my writing room (our middle reception room) to my daughter, currently revising for her final exams. I've decamped to the breakfast room, the room directly next to our kitchen, and I sometimes sit… Continue reading Writing while cooking
I've started reading and writing prose again after ten years of mostly reading and writing poetry. One big thing I've noticed, from a writing perspective, is that when I share my work with other people, they assume that my poetry is personal, written from my own experience, but they assume my prose is fictional. It… Continue reading Poetry and Prose
Josephine Corcoran 