So, a long quietness from me – a bit like the skies, which are slowly gathering their plane trail criss-crossing again, but are still very, very quiet, especially for East London, where we usually have a whole queue of planes turning the corner, dropping altitude, getting into the stack for Heathrow. Every time there’s a memorial event, we see the old bombers and the Red Arrows right above us – once even, Concorde, flanked by her escort jets – heading straight for central London. It’s always a bit unnerving, having fins in the sky, but I hadn’t realised how…accompanied… I felt, any time I looked up, until I wasn’t.
What a strange weekend it was. Something missing and I couldn’t work out for ages that it was the air traffic.
Anyway, a lot has happened since I last posted:
I taught with Jane Draycott on an Under-18s course up at Lumb Bank (it was fab, the young people and their teachers were fab, Jane is great and I am in love with Lumb Bank…I even wrote a new poem), and before that, spent some lovely time with my dear friends and their cats and little daughter up in Glossop.
I still have my part-time job, despite stringent “re-structuring” at work.
And publisher number 2 has finished considering my sample of work and very cordially rejected it.
I’ll probably write more about all/some/none of that later. The biggest news is that a dear friend – one of my “other sisters”, you know, the people you know are kin, even if you don’t share any genes – has lost her father, suddenly. He was a lovely man – I know it’s customary to say these things when we hear of a death, but he really was, a really really great bloke – and I can’t believe he’s gone.
Wherever you are, give your loved ones a kiss today.
Furtive11 