Rapid sketch of moorhens; 2016. I'm enjoying a spot of annual leave this week, which began with a lively and well-attended writers' event at Bebington Library on Saturday the 19th.  This featured members of Wirral Writers , Bebington Bards , the 3Ls Creative Writing Group and Riverside Writers .  I'm no longer a member of Riverside Writers due to constraints of time, but I had been invited to join in anyway. Due to there being so many writers and poets wishing to read, a strict time limit was imposed and so the audience only heard half of my 1,600 word story, Fame, which is about an obscure, ageing rock singer who has turned up on Facebook.  It's a story about reminiscing and unachieved ambitions which still tempt. My sister Evelyn came to the library event, and afterwards she and I travelled to my home with my friends Tim and Nigel, where we all socialised for a couple of hours and caught up on news. I've been generally tidying up the house.  It is now ...

Boathouse, Birkenhead Park. Saturday, 19th November will find me at Bebington Library, Wirral, when along with other writers I'll be reading one of my short stories.  The event starts at 2pm, so if you're in the area do come along. It's absolutely ages since I took part in a similar event, and I've yet to decide which story I'll be reading.  I've so many to choose from! I had my hair trimmed on Saturday, then decided to go for a walk round Birkenhead while I was there, reasoning that I'd be able to have a look for some new jumpers for the coming winter without hubby helping - which translates as him enthusing over monstrosities which only a neolithic troll might perceive as stylish. Great idea!  So I walked into the very first shop I came to, and who was the first person I saw?  Yes, Richard.  He was at the counter, buying the latest in Joseph Delaney's Spooks series. We both really enjoyed the Spook's Apprentice series, but didn't tak...

Here are a few short quotes from Fabian to tempt your appetite... Grief is a weird thing; it hides beneath the surface and rises like a shark from the depths of your soul when you least expect it. *** If a person worships money as their god and devotes all or most of their time and energy to its accumulation, feeding the spiritual with only fragments of their energies, then the spiritual will starve. Wealth in itself presents no obstacle to the spiritual. On the contrary, financial independence can bring freedoms which would otherwise remain beyond reach. And mastery of the material world is an often-overlooked facet of mastery of the self. There is no place in our Order for those who pretend to be an Adept when they can't even pay their own bills. *** For all those years, she had ached for the future. So much time had been spent imagining how life would be, how events would unfold, how perfect everything would turn out in the end if only she kept hop...