Haiku for the New Year

 

 

Another year-

hat in hand

sandals on my feet

Matsuo Basho

Win a reindeer

Yes, that’s the prize for Gert’s Xmas Pun-ch quiz. Give your guests a mental workout after the fourth helping of pudding with these brain-teasers, one for each of the twelve days of Christmas:

Radiant Shimmering Light by Sarah Selecky

Lilian Quick is forty years old and struggling. Her ability to see animal auras and incorporate them into pet portraits does not pay well and she can barely scrape up the rent on her Toronto sublet. Most of her life is lived digitally, and she is constantly taking selfies and deleting then because she doesn’t like the way she looks. Every matcha latte is Instagrammmed, and Yumi, with whom she shares a studio (for a small fee) is about the only person she sees.

Nick Gadd: Death Of A Typographer

Field of Poppies by Carmel Bird

 

What a beautiful book Transit Lounge has created for Carmel Bird’s latest novel. Rich dark red wallpaper on the end papers, and a gold-framed image of Monet’s Field of Poppies in the centre of each page, close ups of red poppies on the cover. One instantly wants to buy it for a gift for those who would appreciate it. And isn’t that everybody? Well maybe not.

Boris visits the NHS

We notice that Boris is spending a lot of time visiting hospitals these days. That reminded us of our very own Boris, Minister for Ageing Alastair Endacott, visiting the Frank Packer Memorial Hospital:

Baa Baa Wordsworth

 

 

 

….turning, saw, as one sees in a dream,

It was a Sheep had broke the moorland peace

With his sad cry, a creature who did seem

The blackest thing that ever wore a fleece

 

I walked towards him on the stony track

And, pausing for a while between two crags

I asked him,’Have you wool upon your back?’

Thus he bespake, ‘Enough to fill three bags.’

 

Most courteously, in measured tones he told

Who would receive each bag and where they dwelt;

And oft, now years has passed and I am old,

I recollect with joy that inky pelt.

 

 

To read more of this nursery rhyme as it might have been written by William Wordsworth, or Hickory Dickory Dock in the style of T S Eliot, seek out Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis by Wendy Cope ( ff Classics)

Elliot Perlman: Maybe The Horse Will Talk

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

 

This was something nobody talked about: how death could make you petty. And how you had to find a new arrangement among your friends, shuffling around the gap of the lost one, all of you suddenly mystified by how to be with one another. p 7