Belles-Lettres

It was Thursday and hence, he would walk in in another two minutes. She would reach her desk within a minute, having powdered her nose and cradled her bodice into position (where it already was, but never seemed thus at 8:55 a.m. on Thursday). She had arranged the letters neatly on the top right corner of her table, with the hard wooden grip of the rubber stamp leaning slightly against them. Once it had rolled awkwardly and landed on her lap marking her skirt with concentric blue circles containing Saint-Valéry-en-Caux.

"Aah! Mlle, were you planning to be parceled somewhere?"

She blushed and laughed and nearly cried before he offered her his handkerchief. She took it from him but didn't know what to do with it and kept alternatingly staring at her stained skirt and the stainless kerchief. She mumbled a thanks and made several attempts to at least wipe the mark on her skirt but the distance between one hand holding her skirt and the other holding his kerchief never closed. He waited for a while before wishing her well and leaving the post-office.

As she was smiling at the smoothened grip of the stamp, he walked in. She watched him enter, but quickly looked at other customers, before stealing a glance at him and back to the old lady who also caught her eye. Goodness, I hope she doesn't walk over here, she thought to herself while her heart beat to the rhythm of his steps as they grew louder, both beat and step.

"Bon jour, Mademoiselle!"

She gave him a surprised look before returning the greeting.

"Bon jour, Monsieur Perrot!"

"I hope I am not disturbing you?"

"Not as much as it would be had you come after the post-office shuts."

He smiled using them as reins to hold back his praise for such a smart parry.

"Letter to your wife, Monsieur?"

Pause dear reader, and while the air and breath in the post-office is held, return to what you have now forgotten. It wasn't too long ago when you had heard the same question asked albeit in a different tone. Recall that Thursday, a couple of months ago. It was when M. Perrot had met with an unreported accident on the highway leaving him with a tender right arm in a cast, and a more tender urge to write to his wife in Versailles, telling her lies about his well-being, lies which are always pardoned by the romantic people of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux. You do recall, don't you? You probably thought he was a hen-pecked husband as he walked up to our lovely Mlle. Audrey Henri, sitting prettily behind her desk and stamping letters to their fated destination, and requested her to don the role of a scribe for a poor (though not financially) maimed man. She was startled at this unusual request and had asked the same thing:

"Letter to your wife, Monsieur?"

"Yes, if it is not a severe pain and distraction from your duties."

"Certainly it isn't, Monsieur. But..."

"But? I shall surely pay for stamp and your service. Rest assured."

And he quickly poured several francs from his breast pocket on to the desk. She rapidly rose and prevented them from rolling to the ground and under some sack of letters to Paris. She pushed them back the honest man with a cast and said, "That I am certain you will Monsieur..."

"Perrot. Phillipe Perrot. I am a surveyor commissioned by the French government."

"Aah! You are here to survey?"

He smiled. So did she and for a second there, I thought they forgot that a letter had to be written. After explaining his job to her, he tilted his head towards the sheets of paper fluttering impatiently on her desk.

"Oh yes! Sorry. Please let me know what you wish to write to your wife."

"Dear Gloria, How are you? I have reached here safely and find the place beautiful. The people are beautiful but all this beauty reminds me of you. I wish you were here. My little drop of honey! I have bought you some wonderful handmade soaps and some lacy..."

He paused long enough for her to look up.

"Perhaps you should just write lacy personals?"

"As you wish M. Perrot"

And with great tenderness, he had continued to dictate to her his letter. She was thrilled to play Cupid of a rather mundane sorts, but every bit of woman in her was moved. You saw her eyes glaze that day, didn't you? And ever since, every week he begged her to write amourous, love-drenched letters to his wife. Mlle Henri eagerly cooperated.

All this you know. What you didn't know was that those letters were never sent Versailles. Not one of them. Even the one in which he described his weekend covering the coast and marking several rock formations there. He did end it with a "My apologies to my sugar-dipped plum. I got carried away. See what your absence does to me?" and paused long enough to wait for Mlle Henri to look into his anxious eyes.

"Never mind, M. Perrot. I am sure she will enjoy learning about your work day as much as I did."

He smiled and continued about the stalactites in the cave near the gulf. None of those letter ever reached Versailles. She also kept a vigil for any letters for M. Perrot arriving from Versailles. Even the one that contained some magazine for sepulchral aficionados was repacked after a thorough investigation revealed no letter from Gloria.

Today, M. Perrot has an arm healed two weeks ago, but Mlle Henri still collects his letters and keeps them to herself. She reads each and every one of them while wearing nothing but her favourite cherry blossoms patterned négligée. She reads them aloud to herself - "Dear Audrey, ... my honey lipped Audrey... I have bought you nice brooches to pin on your blushing bossom ...." Oooh la la! How I wish! And she'd plunge into a deep gloom about not having ever found a lover like him. She'd scold Mme. Perrot for not writing even once and concluding that that woman in Versailles surely didn't deserve this lovely man, her lovely M. Perrot.

Several such weeks of echoless love passed before unimaginable guilt overwhelmed our pretty Mlle Henri. She decided that the only way she could make up for this immense crime of separating lovers was to play imposter and deliver an equally lovely letter to M. Perrot from Mme. Perrot. Since he never did receive letters from her, he, perhaps, might not recognise her handwriting anyway. She who played scribe to one could certainly play the same for the other. She wrote several drafts and even consulted some of the finest (although dead) writers of the French tongue, before settling for a seventeen page treatise on longing addressed to M. Perrot by Mme. Perrot.

When M. Perrot walked in at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, pretty Mlle. Henri extended the slight bundle to him as he opened his mouth to start saying something.

"For me?"

"Oui"

"From where?"

"Versailles"

A puzzled look turned to quivering joy when he heard that. He kissed the envelope several times before gripping the edge of the desk in confused excitement. He kissed the envelope again and then the air and then clasped it to his breast while Mlle. Henri laughed and cried into her (actually his) handkerchief.

"What a delight! What a delight! I am the happiest man today in Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, why! in the whole of France."

She nodded, holding back tears with the pink of her nose and cheeks.

He abruptly stopped his tizzy and placed the bundle on her desk. She gulped in the fear that he may have noticed something amiss and quickly looked around hoping no one would hear his accusations when they did come. He simply shook his head.

"Such irony!"

"Why? What happened M. Perrot? Surely you are happy to get this letter from your wife?"

"Indeed, but such irony it is."

"What is?"

"I broke my spectacles today at the basin."

"Oh dear!"

"And I shant expect one to be delivered before the weekend."

"Oh dear!"

"Perhaps all I could do is smell these pages till I can read what she wrote to me."

"Oh dear!"

He kept rubbing his nose against the envelope while she thought her efforts wasted.

"Not unless if you can help me."

"How M. Perrot?"

"By reading it to me."

"I? Certainly there must be several things private that a woman might want to share with her husband. How could I read them out aloud?"

"But it is to me that you will read?"

"But others will hear too."

He placed the bundle on her desk.

"None will if you be kind enough to read this to me over a cup of tea. The address is on the envelope."

So saying, he bowed and walked away before she could protest. She held her letter in her hands and wondered how she would ever manage to read what she had written a million times.

But as you expected, she did reach his place at 6:00 p.m. He was humming an old folk song while preparing tea.

"Aah! Mlle. Henri. I am delighted."

"M. Perrot."

"First, let's have some tea."

And they sat down to have some tea. He chatted about various things and she simply nodded where appropriate and shook her head when more so.

"And now, for the letter."

She slowly extracted it from her bag and handed it to him.

"Surely you jest!"

"Sorry."

She looked up at him one more time.

"Please.. please do open it."

And she did. She cleared her throat and began -

"Dear Philippe, How..."

"She always called me sugar-buns."

"Oh! Perhaps... perhaps she was in a different mood when she commenced writing"

"I prefer Phillipe. Please go on."

Mlle. Henri slowly read the long treatise, her mind flooded with images of sweet love with the man in front of her. She kept reading while he sipped his tea. She blushed where the words grew amorous and lowered her voice when her need for him sailed as paragraphs of yearning.

"Do return soon, my love. Your choco-lips, Gloria"

"Audrey"

"I beg your pardon!"

"Nothing. I was just about to thank you."

"Oh! You are welcome."

"I hope the tea was good."

"Splendid."

"Thank you for taking the pains to come here, Mlle. Henri"

"I couldn't let you suffer the lack of spectacles or the love of your wife."

"You are kind."

She rose to leave.

"Mlle. Henri?"

"Yes?"

"Certainly you know this place well enough."

"Yes."

"I think I have nothing more to survey here."

"Oh! Then would you be leaving?"

"I might if there is nothing left to survey for the government."

"There surely would be something."

"I shall list them out tonight."

"I wish your list grows long."

As she was descending the stairs, he said, "Isn't it funny that my spectacles which didn't break during my accident had to break today?"

"Yes"

"Mlle. Henri?"

"Yes?"

"I won't be writing letters anymore."

She hurried up a couple of stairs and burst out.

"Why? What happened?"

"Because there is no need to write anymore when my love and labour has created a beautiful Mme. Perrot out of thin air."

"I beg your..."

And then she realised. The weight of recollection left her unsteady on her feet and M. Perrot rushed to help her.

"But... but you could have said so."

"I would never have received such a coronation of love had I been vulgar to disclose my heart's tell."

He slowly helped her back into the house where they had another cup of tea.

This post is dedicated to Parvati-ji who always felt that I couldn't write happy love stories. I still don't think I am good at it for the psychological play that posts-noir offer is usually hard to conjure in such happy tales. Nevertheless, here is to Parvati-ji.

A friend's words

How ironic it is sometimes when beautiful thinkers and writers remain largely unknown. A very dear friend of mine said the following things but this friend is relatively unknown to the world. Does the world deserve the likes of who write nowadays or these silent gems?

since i learnt french, my dog barks only in french

in the flowing rivers of eternal perfection is unending silence...

and the most beautiful of all:

Innocence is Truth's nascent light.

Life's Bricks

How beautiful the

Moon looks tonight. The horse moves -

Change in scenery.

Stupid Me

As I observe laconic people around me, I wonder what let's them stay silent even when they have something to say. One thing I have never mastered is to stay silent when I know what is right. Knowledge is poor shackle for the tongue. I recently came across the quote below and loved it.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people. ~ Seneca

And for all of you who feel that it is politically incorrect to call dumb people dumb, wait for the next post.

Perhaps

How often I hear

Promises of her return

In a good-bye's wake.

Winter's fool

Piles of wood well trussed

But you cry over what's burnt

And seek warmth from ash.

How many Horaces I've been

Fernando Pessoa is one of my favourite writers for this year. He was probably the father blogging way before terse personal writing on different topics became fashionable and long before electronic computers were invented (let along the Internet).
In one of his "posts" he writes wonderfully about an experience that is common in my life. There has hardly been a day when I would be seated at a lunch table, watch someone poke at their food with a fork and wonder "how beautifully those steely legs glide through ..." before someone calls me to check about something mundane. But I can speak later. This post has Pessoa as the cynosure. This is an excerpt from his delightful book called Book of Disquiet. Read on.

If you liked this, then you might also like this: http://inagardencalledlife.blogspot.com/2007/04/idle-writers-apology.html

How the world changed due to computers!

A lot of people think that software engineers are boring. I think that would be true to a great extent. There are exceptions and I think most of the exceptions created new stuff (languages, frameworks, tools, etc.) which made normal conversation difficult.

My greatest gripe against the software industry is what they did to English as a language. Perhaps we should have picked Aramaic and coined all terms from that vocabulary. At least most of conversation would seem normal then. Consider walking up to a geek, pointing to the bed bug on his sleeve and saying, "Hey Bar! There is a bug there!" and he retorting "My watch runs the latest Android and is bug free!" I often insist on using words for what they were originally intended. Sadly, this leaves people confused or rolling their eyes (when the confusion is resolved). Most of the time it is just to pull a leg, but often it is to make a point that we can still talk like non-software engineers.

How annoying it is look at that loud, pushy software engineer who thinks every woman is his, and tell your colleague sipping diet coke, "Foo is such an alpha-male" only to have your buddy look at you and then at Foo and say, "If that is the alpha version I don't want to see the final release"!?

Consider the chubby boy's cries of anguish when he finds out that we hid his snack box. "Where are my cookies? Where are they!? Waaah!" and someone sneaks up to him and meaningfully says, "If you click on Tools then preferences, you can set the directory where the browser stores your cookies. That way you won't forget!"

Speaking of tools, no office conversation goes without a giggle when some frustrated engineer screams in the middle of his debugging "My tool is simply not showing up." Viagra, anyone!?

And with tools and cookies comes the really abused word "Menu". Wasn't it something we flipped through at the restaurant? The menus software engineers talk about is so boring.

I really wonder what stupid frustrated brainwave those engineers must have had when they named peripheral devices as mouse and bus. Mice ran, not clicked (or double clicked). Buses carried people in them and not tripped people who weren't familiar with the layout of your room. Keys!? You either forgot them and locked yourself out or gave your girlfriend a copy before you regretted it. Since when did people hit keys and have keystrokes!? And you connect everything to a port which was once the domain of sailors and pirates. In England port is also a kind of wine. Try going to a tavern in England and telling the barman that you think his ports have a problem.

If the outside is confusing, come on in. You get data in bytes (12 bites make a Mac, I mean McDonalds burger) and bytes in nibbles and nibbles in bits. Why is this not on the software engineer's menu? Perhaps his tool is in the wrong place? Caches were secure and concealed places of storage before they got attached to the CPU to increase your performance (does that make sense? To most software engineers it doesn't though you will always hear them say "Increase the cache"). Oh! by the way, when any software engineer says he doubts your performance, he isn't speaking for your wife but he probably is speaking about your application development. A true software engineer will get offended only when you suspect the performance of his application.

There is a lot of memory in there but it remembers things only when turned on (much unlike the male of the human specie, who remembers nothing when turned on, not even that he is already married). This kind of memory is called RAM. Hindus will bow down to that name, and invaders used it as the receiving end of their long log which they used to break down fort doors. And then the motherboard (no, not an abusive term) has many chips on them which contain registers. No one other than a computer geek will understand that motherboard is something legal to sell. And what on earth are chips doing in a computer? Johnny! come here at once and clean the poor motherboard. 

The kind of memory that remembers for a longer time is called a hard disk. I had a friend from Orissa who for some strange reason could never pronounce hard disks properly. He always interchanged the S and the K and we always would wonder whether his presentations had sexual underpinnings. Most other north Indian friends of mine find it difficult to say desktop. They too get the K and S exchanged but to boring effects. 

The disks are called devices (as if one name wasn't enough) and devices have drivers but you can't call them chauffeured devices. It doesn't make sense and offends the devices (which give out sad beeps or crash your data) much like in the Intel advt. You will hear some hardcore hardware engineer or storage expert say "The spindle slipped and the disk crashed" making you think that someone had a back problem. 

The world of Unix geeks will be familiar with a kernel though they aren't the ones you pop in the cinemas to get your bagful of popcorn. These terminal based systems required you to login (and no, it is not the same as throwing the log into the fireplace) and work in a shell. Later on, there was a shell called Bash and where you typed was called a bash prompt. If someone bashed me, I would be prompted to do more than type. Still these systems were solid and good in spite of all their terminologies. System designers avow that if only Windows had a kernel (not your OS kernel but the English kernel) of good design in them, there would fewer crashes. Army officers still shake their head and avoid places where software engineers frequent.

"Lad, meet Colonel Foo Bar."

"Gee! cool. So you were written in C or assembly?"

Speaking of crashes, jars crash to the floor, your favourite China would be crashed to the floor by your boss's kid, stock markets crash, cars crash, lovers have a crash (oh! sorry, that was a crush) but since when did my computer do anything that resembled a crash? No noise, no plummeting of indices but still you will hear, more often than not, that someone's system crashed and actually hear nothing on the floor. Some would describe it as a blue screen, but that's only if you are running Windows. 

Windows followed the trail of companies naming themselves and their products funnily. Bell Labs, Apple, Mac (or Macintosh, either way it is silly), BASIC, LISP (isn't that how the dork spoke and we teased her?), Oracle and many more made these words difficult to use without people wondering about the computer configuration.

This might all seem the domain of computer scientists (but go tell a software engineer that s/he isn't a computer scientist and he will hit you with all the bits and bytes s/he has). The true software engineer (the ones who talk Agile and laugh at Waterfall) finds me stupid when he tells me he is an Agile programmer and struggles to move his French fries aside and even get up from his chair! The software world is filled with proxies and servers (not the restaurant ones) and models (not your ramp ones) and frameworks (which don't work). They are the ones who believe that an extra layer of indirection can solve any problem and then go ahead to name those layers funnily. They speak of inheritance (not the one you didn't get because you were Uncle Bar's favourite nephew) and normalisation (not why you were sent to the asylum) and dirty writes (nope, not porn) and encapsulation (come again!?).

But then all this makes conversations funny in the office and outside and only a few of us laugh at them. Bookmark this one without using a bookmark! :-)

One Day On Earth

One Day on Earth Participant Trailer from One Day On Earth on Vimeo.

Enjoy this trailer and participate in the project. I am going to.

Hug O' War

Shel Silverstein is one of my favourite poets. Contrary to my usual preference for the serious and stoic, SS has the quality of being deep while being light or even funny. I think that is rare and widely unappreciated. Most people fear they might be called amateurish or dilettantes for picking someone like SS. Here, have a lollipop and meditate on that.

This poem I share because it is exactly how I feel everyday morning when I wake up before I go back to bed at night realising that it can never be realised in this world. Nope, not at all... :-(

I am a big fan of hugging, but only kids appreciate it. Men think I am homosexual (I hate using the word gay in this context because gay has a beautiful meaning which has been perverted by the kings of perversion - Westerners) and women think I am hitting on them, hence, neither of them receive hugs till they are good friends with me. Kids, on the other hand, understand hugs for what they really are - bringing hearts together.

A poem, revisited

I was recently asked to explain a poem featured on this blog. After hunting down the poem, I realised I had no clue about it. Then I read through the comments with Parvati-ji's comments helping me a bit (and making me blush with the generosity of compliments). So I wrote back to this gent with whatever I could make of that poem. In case, any of the then commenters or present ones feel/see something different, please do respond with your thought.

Here is the poem: http://inagardencalledlife.blogspot.com/2007/01/for-love-of-me.html

And here is a snippet of the email I wrote, explaining what I understood from this:

The reason why I sent you the link is two-fold; one you can get some hints and two, I don't have a clue why I wrote that poem. Frankly, I usually do not remember why I write anything. Apart from articles which present a perspective about human life and living (aka nonfiction), I have no clue what made me write any story or poem. It gets worse, sometimes I don't even remember having written them. I have had some embarrassing episodes on the blog too when someone actually quoted my own lines and I complimented the commenter for writing them! :-o

So any expectation about my recalling why I wrote it (or any other poem) is quashed. I am going to re-read it and give you what I think and hope that that doesn't influence your mind's eye.

Ok! Done. Here goes. I think the protagonist is a loner and finds solace in words and penning them. He (has to be a "he" because there is a "she" who speaks about marriage) is not merely an assembler of words but someone who connects to them at various levels. He actually specifies the colour of the ink to use for specific words! Interesting chap! And the reason is perhaps this, when the ink is still wet, turquoise can generate various colours when seen in different coloured lights. This is unlike with black or blue or red ink. He seems to use the image of drying both for the actual ink (and the beauty in that) as well as the entire world and emotion that surrounds a word. What I found amazing is that he seems to simultaneously and individually admire and appreciate the ink as a physical entity and the word as a representation of what he feels. Each is given its due, because he doesn't merely mention the quality of ink or paper and then move on to words. Am I making sense? He is able to simultaneously enjoy both. To simultaneously hold two emotions at two different levels is the quality of mad men and I envy them. It is like being able to hate a woman but still appreciate her form and seductiveness, equally truly. Enough on that!

He picks words like "betrayal", "longing" all of which take long to be created (you can never feel betrayed by someone you met an hour ago) and equally long to subside. Another point to note is that these words only make sense when sufficient time has elapsed before or after the realisation of the feeling (of longing or betrayal). Am I making sense? See, if you didn't feeling the longing for a year or so, it doesn't stoke the emotional cauldron of the audience. Try telling a gathering that you longed for success for the past 2 days. They will just return to their gossip. Both of these need time to be spent marinating these feelings.

But then he picks a word - "trickle" which is always a quick phenomenon. A trickle is always short and quick. Ganga doesn't trickle nor the Yang-tse-qiang. Here you see him return to appreciating the ink and the slow drying for a word in itself and for any grand philosophical meaning it brings. Hence, he also takes the liberty of shaping it like a trickle. Playful, alternating and enjoys beauty, both of the ironic kinds and the mundane kinds.

In the second stanza he describes the entire process of ink drying on paper. You would have surely noted that too. When a blob of ink is observed under a magnifying glass it does seem to slowly settle down and runs its length through the fibres of the paper. He does lend it a touch of melodrama when he says "heave and breathe" as if that ink is dying (which it is, if you consider wetness to be the indicator of life). "Desiccated earth" brings us back to the world of human beings where the wetness of genuine emotions and feeling struggle hard and eventually die only to become patterns that others admire (like a love story but not the love in it).

The 3rd stanza is dizzying. He weaves back and forth from words to real world human emotions and back. He seems to be referring to the import of the word "love" when he tells us how he knows that it lives on - because it got wet again and smudged on the paper when he ran a wet finger (clearly, he has been crying) over it! So we start the stanza thinking that he means that emotions like "love" live on but then he returns to the physical word on the paper which seems to be alive because it got wet. But how did it get wet? Because he was recalling a love interest of his which made him shed tears. So the feeling also lives on and not just the physical word on the paper. Back and forth and back and forth...

In the 4th stanza he introduces the woman - (cherchez la femme). Someone who seems to be practical (and hence, boring to him) and who also seems to have tried to bring him out of his affair with words, but has clearly failed. The first line is quite a philosophical truth. It is also the opening line in the Tao Te Ching. She proceeds to elaborate - half in what they portray and half in what they wish to convey. No word (even when entirely read, written or spoken) is the completeness of what was felt. A cow is sufficient to describe a cow, but never complete in conveying the image of the real cow that was seen. She (or he) gives an example of "joy" which can never ever describe the completeness of what a person feels when they confess to being joyous. The last line there is interesting. Need is not put in quotes. Joy was written as "joy" but need was not written as "need" but as need. Hence, the protagonist seems to be giving a rebuttal ( which might imply that "joy" was her example). He seems to be retorting that her needs are always half in their enumeration. Today there is one, and one thinks that that is it, but tomorrow gives you another. But is that need or want? For the person wanting it, it does seem to be need, and hence, the perfect word for rebuttal to her retort that words are just half good. And he replies, "Well, so is all your practicality which seems to only create needs and wants, which are in half too". Husband wife quarrels!!

She then gets personal in the penultimate stanza. She accuses him of not wanting the real thing but being satisfied with words that represent them (lexical porn!?). And she gives examples, but look at how he ties them together to "a cold Autumn night" which seems to represent the state of his soul in spite of having a physical woman by his side. A strange mind it must have been which had something but still couldn't experience. Like walking away from a burning house looking for a warm place.

The last stanza is eerie. How could he know what people said once he was dead? Either that is a technical error on the part of the poet or the protagonist is again playing with words referring to the loss of "life" and not life. It could very well be that, because he "licked to oblivion" the very words he loved, thus ending what he thought was life - the presence of wet words. Not sure. Makes sense?

This is the best I could think. If you ask me again a year from now (and please re-send me the link so that I know what poem you are talking about) I might give you a different story, but isn't that the fun of all literature - Having many stories in one and then many lives to live them! :-)

Since, this was written back in 2007 I can't imagine what made me write it. I don't think I ever felt like the protagonist (2007 or any other year) so this is surely not candidate for "Oh! you must have gone through something like that and hence, your sub-conscious mind wrote it" or any such Freudian crap. 

Boy! Actually quite a long email. I realised that only after pasting it in here!

A Fantastic Illustrator

I am fortunate to be introduced to Sinu C who is an artist (the kinds that first comes to your mind when someone says artist). His works are amazing and beautiful ranging from the voluptuous styles of some artists to the boney large eyed ones of several modern artists to Manga-like works. His sheer range is a delight and I have been spending all morning going through his site. Please do visit his works here: http://sinustash.blogspot.com/ Here are some samples to form basis for what I call "variegated". (All the works below are taken from his site)

Aren't they beautiful!?

What is it to relate?

We are always in a relationship, aren't we? But what does it mean to relate? This post discusses just that. For a change I decided not to type out the post but write and scan it. Been ages since I wrote with my pen (Sheaffer). My handwriting is abysmal. Please be kind and tolerate this idiosyncrasy of mine.

This is way past my bedtime and hence, I haven't proof-read this piece. Without a spell-checker and proof-reading, there are bound to be errors which will embarrass me tomorrow, but I'd rather live with that than not write with my pen. Hopefully future posts will have less opportunities to complain.

I realise that this makes my post less searchable (hence, not available through Google), but it's ok. I have only a handful of readers and myriad viewers who land on this blog by mistake! :-)

You might have to click on each image to read them (another inconvenience). Some readers had asked to know the writing process. I really thought there was something like that. When I read the Original of Laura, I thought perhaps there was something similar that happened with me when I wrote. I thought it would be amusing at least to me when I later visited these posts to see how the writing emerged. I have even numbered the paragraphs so that I could re-order them in case I need to. As you see, there was nothing done to that effect. Perhaps my poetry posts would have something interesting.