Spent this morning editing for Goldenford and I'm now up to Chapter 23 of Jackie's upcoming novel. The plot continues to thicken indeed!

Have also just finished the marvellous Unrequited by James Bennett, which I thought was hugely enjoyable. If you like gay psychological thrillers, it's the book for you!...

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Struggled round the golf course with Marian today - not so much due to the standard of our game (which was better than last weekend), but we were flummoxed by leaves. Hmm, there might be a poem title there somewhere, but I'll have to think about it. I do love the word "flummoxed". Anyway, because of last night's wind (careful, people ...), there were so many leaves all over the place on the course that it was virtually impossible to find your ball once you'd hit it. Yes, yes, I know the non-golfers out there will be thinking: what? Golden leaves and white balls - you must be joking!! But with the winter light as it is and half the leaves showing the white undersides, you have to be standing on your ball (careful, again ...) before you can see it. At one point, in the hunt for Marian's ball - which had ended up in a ditch stuffed full of autumn leaves - I found myself hitting the leaves with my club and snarling, "Don't worry, Marian, I'm going to beat the damn ball to death which will save you having to hit it", whilst giggling helplessly. Never say I am not a supportive and professional golf partner ...

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It's been my week for metaphors. We think of them as sophisticated, a step further than a simile in literary cleverness, something we have to explain before children see them in their English set texts. Anna in The Mathematics of Love is intelligent and articulate, but young and not highly educated or well read. I decided in finding her voice that she doesn't use metaphors but similes, where the disjuncture between the actual object and the image is made clear: 'the light was like gold and blue velvet,' she says, not 'the velvet light.'

But in Music and the Mind Anthony Storr talks about how metaphorical language perhaps came before objective, scientific ways of describing things:: "When human beings [first] looked upon the external world and tried to describe it, it was natural that they did so in terms of their own subjectve, physical experience". Hence 'the mouth of the river', 'a neck of land', 'veins of minerals', 'murmuring waves'.

And then I heard Ros Barber talking at Goldsmiths about the novel she's writing...

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The Short Review is a week old. And what a week it has been. I am overwhelmed at the response. Stats so far: 544 hits to the site… and counting. Hits from the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Israel, Japan, the Phillipines, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, Russia, Australia and New Zealand. Seems like there are a lot of people hungry for reviews of short story collections. I’m so glad - for years we’ve been hearing that the short story is dead, that no-one wants to read them let alone buy them. I’ve never believed this, and our stats this week seem to bear that out. Thank goodness!....

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It was a surprise to learn that my piece of flash ficiton won. Then, having to set the new challenge, I've have enjoyed reading the entries. All wonderfully creative. On Tuesday, I must pick the best which will be hard as they're all good. Trying to write. Hoping to send off my novella entry this weekend but time is tight also there are 2 short stories buzzing around in my head. Quite unusual.

Yes, you've guessed it - I've spent a day at Mother's (arrgghhh!!) with my newly-widowed aunt, and we've actually had quite a nice day. I think my aunt manages to diffuse the normal family tension a little, which can only be a good thing. Though I do suspect that the older we get, the more we do become terrifyingly like Macbeth's witches. If the rest of the family start losing body parts and there's a cauldron brewing, they will know who to blame ...

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I just stumbled across this, I think it's fantastic:

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.....

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Trogged my way through today, sorting out agendas and attempting to look efficient and professional. Ho ho. I’ve even been brave enough to ask for papers for one of the meetings – always a scary move. Lord preserve us but some punter might even give me a set of them. Horrors! Ah well.

Posted a copy of A Dangerous Man to Lisa Glass, author of Prince Rupert’s Teardrop as we both write in a similar dark and twisted area so thought we may as well swap products. Am looking forward to reading PRT, Lisa! I’m sure it will be just my sort of thing … Mind you, getting back from the University post office was something of an obstacle race – the automatic doors refused to open for me and I had to bang on the window with my nose in order to get the attention of the person on the other side, who did at least seem able to open them. Which proves my thesis that I am indeed not of this planet. Even the electronics don’t rate me as human …

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A scholar recently visited my Allan Cunningham Project at www.Artuccino.com. How do I know he is a scholar . . . well . . . anyone who is seeking information about the history of a plant collected in New Zealand in 1838 and can lay down a sentence like the request that follows must be a scholar . . .

"When you go to the Sydney Herbarium (NSW), I will be most grateful if you will look for the sheet of the Allan Cunningham specimen of this species [Polypodium dictyopteris] for me, which might be filed under the genus Anarthropteris (Polypodiaceae) or might be filed as Loxogramme, and then perhaps as Loxogramme lanceolata or Loxogramme dictyopteris."

If you can make a request like that you would have to be a scholar, wouldn't you agree!

You never know where your journey will take you and you never know who you will meet along the way. A scholar to me is like Justin Timberlake is to a pop star fan. Well not quite but nearly. Silly I know but it's fun. Before we go any further, I must tell you that I’m not really a person who is interested in botany in a serious way. It’s more the idea of it that gets me. I’m interested in the “how” of it and the “why” of it. The idea of someone quietly focusing on a plant captures my imagination. Life is so hectic with little time to rest, some people live their lives studying plants, how interesting. Plants are so quiet and so very beautiful, as nature is.

One of the joys of writing non-fiction is the research, the serendipity of discovery. It would have been nice to report that I found a specimen of Polypodium dictyopteris collected by Allan Cunningham in 1838 only months before his death and it would have been nice to say he discovered the plant on such and such a day in such and such a place. Unfortunately my opportunity for 15 seconds of fame has flitted in and flitted out of my life, like a butterfly. Never daunted, it will remain on my list of challenges and one day I will be able to reply to the request in the affirmative because I am on a quest. A quest to tell Allan Cunningham's story.

The challenges set for my quest don't include finding a sword embedded in a rock so I can slay the dragon. Thank goodness for that! I've been given a challenge with a minor obstacle . . . time.

As time goes by and the various challenges are met and obstacles overcome, somewhere somehow, while I'm looking for something else, Polypodium dictyopteris will suddenly appear and that will make me smile.

"Jump and the universe will catch you!"


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Was much bemused by the new duck-cams on “Autumnwatch” last night. Is Bill Oddie on drugs?? Surely no self-respecting duck will allow it anywhere near them? Or perhaps we’ll have lots of videos of ducks falling about laughing as they attempt to get away from the stranger in their midst … However, it’s good to see beavers back in the land again (as it were …).

And talking of nature, Lord H and I were wondering about whether we should have some sort of purpose in life, apart from running around looking at birds (us), attempting to write (me) and avoiding being social (him – well, us really, to be honest). He did suggest that maybe we should simply avoid the issue entirely and Adopt a Porpoise (rather than a Purpose ... - groan!) instead. It would save all that moral complexities/meaning of life stuff for sure ...

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