Increased traffic over the last few days at this website has been due to readers arriving from a Facebook address to see the review of Roddy Lumsden's recent book. While the device on my computer allows me that much, it doesn't say from whose Facebook they come.
I have found the review re-twittered on a Tweeting page but that isn't Facebook, is it. I'm afraid my Technical Dept is off sick at the moment and so I can't ask him.
I'd like to know mainly in order to see how it is introduced. It might say, OMG, Look at this. This bloke couldn't review his own gas bill or it might warm to my generous sentiments and endorse them. In either case, I'd probably just explain that such things are often written through a gathering haze of gin-flavoured guesswork and I sometimes have to go back a few days later and see what I wrote.
And so it is that I really don't envy the professional poet who has to show up and withstand the scrutiny of audiences at regular intervals, or the academic who presents papers on arcane topics for the meticulous botherings of their peers. I mean, why would you.
Whereas it really doesn't matter what I think and regular readers come here of their own free will, I hope, and know they can take it or leave it. There is much comfort to be had in taking a view from the boundary and not being out there in the middle.
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But the gin haze has abated since my birthday 11 days ago. I readily saw off a bottle of tequila by two falls and a submission before washing it down with white wine. But there is really no need of that. I'm sure it isn't doing one as much good as it feels like. It has been a great help to have Sarah Waters' novel to concentrate on and now Don Paterson's book on Michael Donaghy is here. Both are tremendous in their different ways and I am looking forward to explaining why here soon.
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Calliope, the Portsmouth Poetry Society booklet, went into a second print run and it is good to think of those poems being dispersed across various counties, and perhaps even to other countries. I'm very pleased with it and my part in it and if I didn't agree that pride was a sin, I would perhaps treat myself to being quite proud of it. There is great satisfaction to be had in plans being seen through successfully and I only wish it happened more often. Not poetry booklets, plans. I have actually seen enough of doing poetry booklets for a while.
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At work this week I was asked how to spell 'separate'. I'm not sure it was me that was being asked but, as chief scribe there, I volunteered the answer. And then, of course, googled it to make sure. And there I found that it is the most commonly mis-spelt word in the English language. And so here is an idea for a poem. Let's see if we can find the 10, or 12, most commonly mis-spelt words in the English language and make a poem out of them, spelling them all correctly, of course.
I'll let you know.