Autumn

Way - hey! it's epic cloud time again. The skies drift, roll and change. Mountains, banks, silver and gilt-edged, shapes and streaks. All awe-inspiring. I love it.
Still can't post pics. Damn! What has gone wrong?

I hate getting up ...

... but oh it is so worth it to see the sunrise before the day opens and shows all the flaws and soullessness (is this a word) of the area I live.
I seem to have lost the function for uploading pictures. Damn. The computer starts clicking and the upload box is blank.

New writing course with OU

I am completely taken up with and enjoying the new course. Happily I finally seem to have a tutor who engages. Time will tell.
My current obsession with my mother is once again spilling out into my writing, but I am not fighting it as I think that I need to indulge it to clear it. Until I do, it will continue to impinge on me like a scab that I keep going back to scratch.

Last night

Tuesday, 05 October 2010


Gosh did I feel an idiot last night. Monday nights are Costas’ boring Rotary nights and I usually don’t go. But he rang me mid-morning and said ‘it’s the German Ambassador tonight.’ So I said ‘okay I’ll come because he will speak in English.’

Thought nothing more, got tidied in the evening – nothing flash just smart-casual and went off to pick him up from the hospital. As we were driving something he said made me twig this was not Rotary we were heading to. No, it wasn’t – it was only a celebration cocktail party at the German Ambassador’s home to celebrate 20 years of German re-unification. We arrived and all the women were in their best party frocks, jewellery and carefully done hair – there was I looking like a country bumpkin. Men in white, long-limbed, blonde and dashing from the German Navy playing in a little orchestra, all the ambassadors, the Cyprus president and his cabinet and there am I with wayward hair, black trousers and a jaunty striped T-shirt and flat shoes and no sparkle. Costas told me I looked like someone from the navy myself. So we ate, drank and chatted before leaving pretty quickly. Costas is lucky he is still alive this morning.

I have booked for us to go to England for four days at the end of October (it’s another long holiday weekend here) to see the kids and for Costas to have a deserved break. I have booked us seats at the opera (yuk but he likes it). La Boheme by Puccini at the ENO. We are flying EasyJet - that should be interesting!

Where did the summer go?

I stopped posting because A215 assignments and life took over my world. But it is time to return. Summer has been busy, difficult, challenging and fun.
The good stuff - my daughter Sophie got married in July in what was probably the most perfect wedding ever - and she organised almost all of it. Now we have the  happy news she is pregnant. What a weird and unexpected feeling the the knowledge you are to be a grand parent brings. I thought I was ambivilent aout it - didn't mind either way. But the morning she told me a quiet nugget of joy crept into my heart and lodges there still.
We had two lots of visitors - family and friends and it was just lovely to share our tiny corner of paradise with people we love.
I acquired two puppies - one was planned, the second found abandoned 10 days after I got the first. Georgie my first is tan with touches of black and white and has kohl-rimmed Cleopatra eyes and very short piano legs and is named so because I got him on St George's Day. My Cypriot husband calls him Kokkos, which is a Cypriot nick-name for Geoge. Tina our second mutt was found on St Constantine's day - hence Constantina - Tina. She is long-legged (for a small dog) with charcoal grey curly fur and peeps out with dark olive bewildered eyes at you and at the slightest admonishment rolls over in submission. She is dumb but sweet. The good thing is they make me walk twice a day which helps the battle with the bulges no end.

Costas had a heart procedure in London which was challenging for a week or so but touch wood, fingers crossed and three spits to the wind the results so far are good.

I have just returned from three weeks in New Zealand where I spent happy hours with my father and sisters and every day was astounded by the sheer beauty of my homeland and its people.

Now I am about to start my next Open University module - a level 3 Creative Writing course and can't wait to get stuck in.

New Zealand Clouds

Nelson sunset

Why are the skies in New Zealand so magnificent?

Clouds are my thing. They fascinate, inspire and delight. Both here in Cyprus and especially in New Zealand. In NZ the skies are bigger, higher, wider - unattainable, limitless. I feel as if I am under a celestial dome. I have masses of cloud pictures so be prepared to be bored.

CromwellAbout to be beamed up because frederique and I are bad...smoking!

Tangahano

http://teaohou.natlib.govt.nz/journals/teaohou/issue/Mao34TeA/full.html

http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/johnt/001472.shtml


I was searching on Google today to see if I could find anything about my mother's first and best book, published in New Zealand in 1960. Apart from many sites offering copies for sale, I found these two links which offer some information about the book, TANGAHANO.

Spring

Spring is here. truly today. The chill has gone from the early morning walk. I fear there will be no more fires lit in the hearth this year.

In Spring, Cyprus turns green and gold. Yellow is the overriding colour. In buttery burst come the lapsanes, eagerly picked, sauteed in olive oil and drenched in beaten eggs with a squeeze of lemon to finish. The Lazarus daisies intensely yellow rise again in the fields and smother them.

Fluorescent yellow clumps of tiny oxynuthia grow and soon forsythia, wild fennel and golden rod will jostle for space.

Today the sky is blue and empty, white cabbage butterflies drift across the fields and birdsong fills the air. Already there are smatterings of mauve anenomes and red poppies. I'm told the snakes are emerging from their hibernation.

oxynuthia

Lapsanes

Assignment result

I was thrilled last week to get my final Play Writing assignment back and found I had scored an amazing 95%. It gave me an enormous rush of confidence and pleasure.
I had meantime contacted the only local to Nicosia, theatre company in English to ask if I can sit in on their new production from start to finish to get a feel and understanding of theatre in the real so to speak. They hope to start a new production late April and are very welcoming to me (it is also perfect timing for me).
http://www.alphasquare.com.cy/productions

Have also spent the last week or so transfixed by the New Yorker short story podcasts. The sheer pleasure of hearing good writing from across a span of time, read by writers and discussed by them about what makes them and the writers so good has been wonderful and instructive. The downside is that you feel that there is little point in 'picking up your own pen' so to speak. But I do.

Poetry and the New Yorker

Cover of New Yorker

At the moment it is Poetry with a capital 'P' on the course. My assignment is due in a couple of weeks but I think I've cracked it this week. I dreaded it but finally it wasn't so bad and I found something to write about which I enjoyed and I think was suited to the poetic form (or at least the form I created). To tell the truth I actually enjoyed it. But in the long run poetry is not for me, I think.

As a result I have spent too long this morning downloading from the New Yorker, audio files of authors reading the short stories of other authors, which they then discuss with the literary editor of the New Yorker. My thinking is that these are current and quality, something to aspire to, something to learn from.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction

I also subscribed to the magazine which at 80Euros for 47 issues delivered to my door is a pretty good deal I feel.

I tried revisiting my incomplete Nano novel this week and still cannot work up enough interest to return to it on a serious basis. I think there is some good writing in it but there is also a lot of wordage done just to pad out the word count. One day....

Second assignment

I got my second assignment back this morning from the OU Creative Writing course and was nearly in tears when I read a 90% mark for it.

It is a short story called The Smell of Plums.

Now I just need to write the assignment for Start Writing Plays course, which is due by 28/01.

I keep changing my mind about it but time is running out.

I am also wading through the Poetry part of the Creative Writing course. Poetry is not really my thing but find it disheartening how many people think they are poets. Good poetry is wonderful. I love Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney. I particularly love a poem called The Great Horned Owl by Charles Simic. Rhay, my friend and writing mentor lent me a book of poems by Cynthia Rylant called God Went to Beauty School. It is a short collection of short poems about God in human situations - it is simply beautiful, and I don't believe in God but it is funny, true and human.

Yes like the little girl with the curl, poetry when it is good is very very good but when it is bad it is horrid.

Rhubarb winter sky

A couple of evenings ago the evening sky was saturated with this intense rhubarb colour. It left me open mouthed with awe. The whole world felt domed by this light.

At last!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6952353/Positive-thinking-making-us-miserable-says-author.html
Finally someone has put their head above the parapet and voiced what a lot of us have been thinking. I hope the world listens. Am off to see if I can order the book.

I thought I was the only twisted soul who wanted to puke everytime a pink ribbon appeared on my screen.

Oh I wish...

Am I the only one who finds this funny?

Athalassa Park

Yvonne, the woman responsible for my aching muscles and early morning rise today resulting in a 20 minute circuit of the neighbourhood before the sun was up!! I don't know whether to thank her or curse her.

She took me for a 'walk' in the Athalassa Park yesterday - 6kms and an hour and a half later I got back to the car amazed and delighted by the area. I have known it was here on the outskirts of the city, near to where we live but never bothered to explore it.

It is an oasis of green, trees, water and wildfowl. A place to walk and think among birdsong, empty paths and intriguing aromatic smells - except for the last cattle-dung waft - we could see no cattle but it was suspiciously near the army camp on the perimeter of the park.

The Park is about 840 hectares, and forestation was started around 1904. It has approximately 500 species of trees and shrubs and is effectively the lungs of Nicosia. Birds, fowl, owls, foxes, rabbits and lizards populate the park as well as cats and as Yvonne told me occaisionally young National Servicemen on exercise amongst the trees.

There are several bodies of water which resound with the sound of birds and frogs. Costas tells me there are a lot of fish in it as well. Below are black shags(?).

Truly a sward of green - the like of which rarely seen in this country.

Another waterhole - after a recent visit to South Africa I half expected to see hippos and elephants venturing forth.

Farm land on the edge, part of the Ministry of Agriculture I think, and the air was heavy with the sweet smell of cut grass.

Winter sun and shadows dappled the area, still lush after recent heavy rains in December.

Yvonne thinks these are berries from a pepper tree. The tree looked a bit like a weeping willow.

Such persistance of greens is a rarity here but all the more treasured because it is rare.

Below this bridge, sad to say, the lake was dammed with debris and rubbish.

What a delight the park was. It is 10 minutes from where I live and there are spots and vistas with seating and shelter which should make me go more often. It is the ideal place to gather thoughts and think about the writing away from the distractions and noise of everyday life and the internet. But will I go?