If you're a poet or someone who enjoys poetry, and in the Wirral area, then here's a forthcoming event for you. Technically, National Poetry Day will be held on the 3rd October, but this event will be held a day earlier to fit around other activity events within the venue. This open mic event will run from 3pm till 4.15pm, in the lovely surroundings of the Chatterbox Tea Room within Oxton Grange Care Home, 51 - 53 Bidston Road, Oxton, Wirral, CH43 6UJ. The venue is located half way along Bidston Road, offers full disabled access, and has a car park to the front of the building. Several buses service Bidston Road from Claughton or Birkenhead, and there are bus stops very close to the home.

Five cygnets with their parents, Birkenhead Park, June 2019. Regular visitors to Birkenhead Park, here in Wirral, have been thrilled with the successful hatching of five cygnets, which all seem to be healthy. Their proud parents are keeping a sharp watch over their silvery-grey brood, who seem to be growing by the day. I also saw two newly-hatched coots, and a mallard who was chirping orders to her flock of tiny brown balls of fluff, seven or eight in number. I tried photographing them but they were too small and too far away for my geriatric Kodak. (Click on photos to see images larger). Canada geese with two goslings - feeling outshone by the swans, maybe? I did some painting; nothing artistic, though, more a case of putting a coat of paint on the chunky edging stone with runs around the front of our house. I've used Wilko's  Summer Rain , so it matches our front door. It looks a lot like chalk paint but is much more practical. Colour-wise it's hard to descr...

Birkenhead Park Visitor Centre, 7th April 2019, by Adele Cosgrove-Bray. My ongoing series of sketches in the park continues unabated, as is evident. On a few recent sketches I've added some simple washes of watercolour to bring another dimension to the scenes. I've long grown accustomed to sketching in public, and the few people who've passed any comment have always been encouraging. I've even unintentionally captured a tiny bit of park history:- I drew this lovely arching tree in February this year, and since then its own weight has pulled its roots out from the ground. Probably due to safety concerns, it has been brutally cut back so it's now little more than a stump, and the horizontal section, with all its vertical branches, has been removed. Hopefully the tree will survive this harsh treatment. "How can walkies please, when every step's a wheeze?" by Adele Cosgrove-Bray. Portrait by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; chalk and charcoal...

Sunset at the Beach by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; oil on canvas; 2019. I finished this oil painting just this afternoon. It's my largest painting to date; you can see it here, balanced tentatively on my wooden French box easel, which is marketed as being portable though it isn't really, not unless you're willing to carry an attache-case-size tonne weight which requires a master of origami to unfold its various extendable bits, and which is guaranteed to spill the entire contents of its storage drawers over the floor in the process. Light Approaches by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; watercolour; 2019. I've begun looking for an easel which is genuinely suited to painting outdoors. It needs to be light but not so light it'll blow over with the first breeze. It needs to be suitable for both oils and watercolours, i.e. it needs to be able to offer vertical, tilted and horizontal angles. It does not need to have integrated storage, as a bag is more useful anyway. Try fitting sa...

High Tide by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; oil on canvas, 2019. We've had builders here, taking several weeks over a fairly big repair job. Having re-pointed both chimneys and replaced a couple of broken roof tiles, the next task was to re-point the brickwork on the front of our house. However, when the building company owner looked at the wall he advised us to bring in a structural engineer as he thought something more serious was going on. The engineer discovered that water had been coming in from the roof level and instead of flowing away down the gutter it had been pouring between the two layers of the wall, causing structural damage. Re-pointing would have merely hidden the problem in the short term. Life drawing, Feb. 2019. It was suspected that the weight of our modern PVCU double-glazed windows was too great for the walls which were built in 1897 for the Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Apparently this is a common problem with older houses. A trial pit was dug imm...

My short story, Whatsername , was published in Flash Fiction Magazine, and you can read it online  HERE . This 500-word monologue comes from a conversation I had while sitting on a bench in Birkenhead Park. A lady using a mobility scooter began chatting to me, and all the time she talked I was thinking "This would make a story..." And so it was done - and now you can read it online. You can also download a free ebook of flash fiction by various authors at that same URL.