I'm writing this year's festive filibuster on the return journey from my mother's 80th birthday. I’ll try not to make it as long-lasting in its wordiness as its namesake). She's in fine fettle and we had a lovely time celebrating, just family and two old friends, because she didn't want any fuss. After some initial trepidation about entering her ( Read more... )

And yet I no longer blog, other than the occasional (and recurrent) post about the fact that I no longer blog. Any minor effort I have made to get my audience together in one place has failed and I know from experience that I don't write without one. (I continue to be grateful for those friends I still have on here-no denigration is implied for ( Read more... )

I'm keeping this account active, because I used to like thinking about thigns in writing. I still will, again, thus this post.
Sadly, facebook seems to meet most of my communication needs at the moment.

Normally I post a picture of dad on this day, but i am actually in situ for once, among my family, so the memorial pic will folow once i am back in the vicinity of my scanner ( Read more... )

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I'm writing a letter to my godmother Mutz, who's always been an important person in my life. She used to arrive with laundry baskets full of books for me from the library, where she was the librarian. She let me read disappear into the stacks, arrange three stools in a row and laze around reading all comics available (considered inappropriate ( Read more... )

Dear all ( Read more... )

What I like about travel by boat and train is a sense of the distance covered that somehow eludes me when flying, despite seeing countries zipping past below. The somewhat ponderous chugging of the ferry followed by the zippy passage across a chunk of Europe with long hours of landscape dulating and undulating (why does "dulate" not exist as a word ( Read more... )

...but I am feeling halfway there at the moment, just too much to do and too little time to think. I know this kind of thing ebbs and flows, but it's been mostly flowing for the past couple of months ( Read more... )

I do these every couple of years or so, to see where things have shifted, and where they haven't. It's a fairly well-validated test these days, or so I hear, but I've never bothered actually chasing it up. I find it an interesting way to look in the mirror, though it is, as always filtered through language in the first place and my self-perception ( Read more... )