never knowingly without a pen
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
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
While I'm busy not going anywhere, below my feet, down on the ground, there there are insects journeying through the weedy jungle of our garden, in and among the weeds sprouting up on the patio. What I call 'weeds' are really wildflowers, pollen-givers, insect-enablers. Last year, we left our lawn unmowed until August and loved… Continue reading Look Down
Have you finished eating the pasta, baked beans and tins of tomatoes that vanished from supermarket shelves when news of the Covid-19 emergency first broke in the UK? Are you eating all the eggs, which were nowhere to be seen in the supermarket this morning, or perhaps you're baking many cakes? My Instagram feed is… Continue reading Food, food, food
The best thing about the street I live in, as well as many wonderful neighbours, are the plane trees that line both sides of the road. They are planted in the road so they can make parking a bit awkward but they are always changing and beautiful, and they bring birds to the neighbourhood which… Continue reading My Street
In this strange time of lockdown, I'm noticing more birdsong. Are you? We live on the edge of a semi-rural town in West Wiltshire, near to a road but not far from deep countryside, so birds are generally forthcoming. Recently, even more so. I was trying to assemble found materials from my garden last weekend… Continue reading Birdsong
Josephine Corcoran 