And there went May!

Well,  here we are at the end of May and once again I have been starved of ideas. Instead I am filled with trepidatious excitement at the prospect of almost an entire month travelling around Italy. This, despite the MONTHS  of planning that have gone into this trip. Although to tell the truth, I get nervous if I have to go to a new area in my own town when I'm not entirely sure of the route I will have to take, so perhaps it's to be expected that I approach a foreign  (ad)venture with similar anxiety. Flying always gives me butterflies, anyway.

This time, it's partly because I'm the one in charge, rather than relying on my husband  (dare I say it?) so I can just relax and tag along. However, he says he has had enough of travel, and in any case wouldn't manage the walking, or tolerate the exploring  (and shopping) we intend  doing, so once again I am sharing the experience with one of my daughters.

We are also sharing the irritation as we pack, of said husband and father repeatedly airing his  views on travelling "light, like Jack Reacher, with only a toothbrush"...

A haiku

A dozen doves dozing
In the green grass growing
By the rocky pool

Fridge Poetry

Does this count as writing?

A search for inspiration

I wish I could change the font on this thing to something more appealing...

A friend (who shall remain nameless to avoid accusations of incitement to purple prose) gave me a set of magnetic letters for writing notes on the fridge. I had previously thought that randomly extracting words from the box of Fridge Poetry and assembling questionable descriptions with them would ignite a spark of inspiration, but all that happened was the words slowly mounted and were abandoned, so my OCD kicked in and I arranged them in groups according to possible grammatical function. This ploy didn't work either, as thus arranged they still stubbornly refused to yield any sort of sense. However, the individual letters, as they were randomly released from the confines of their magnetic slab prison (a laborious task, as the letters, being in traditional typewriter font, have serifs that make it more time-consuming than one would at first have imagined) to form into words as the inclination struck each member of the family, were gradually rearranged so that eventually they almost made a sensible sentence and I was struck by a shaft of Snoopy inspiration. Snoopy never seems to manage to get beyond Edward Bulwer-Lytton's infamous opening line, but I thought perhaps I could use it as a jumping-off point for my own description of a storm, or perhaps compare his description with Sir Terry Pratchett's more erudite and fun contributions such as his anthropomorphised storm in Wyrd Sisters, which I have now, of course, just had to re-read... (And then I had to try and stick some of the loose pages back - maybe I should find a new copy.)

  

 

Then I decided to read a bit more of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's story, which started with the storm. I downloaded the ebook of Paul Clifford from Project Gutenberg. Apart from the text's being slightly annoying, (through no fault of the writer's, however, but the proofreader's) because of the odd grammatical and spelling error, I don't see why it has the reputation for purple prose. It is,  admittedly, full of clichés, but I actually find the writing to be fairly entertaining so far, albeit a bit florid, which I rather expected from a Victorian Penny Dreadful.

Another idea that has been in the back of my mind for years was to follow the variations on the story of Merlin and Arthur... But apparently I am extremely behind the times (and also incredibly naïve to think this was an original idea!), and will just have to make do with re-reading Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, and maybe even Mary Stewart's series, while watching the 2008 BBC series which seriously changes the story around, even having Uther bewitched into marrying a troll!

There's even a wiki about it...  

And 

An entire site for the clan MacArthur

Never mind the Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legend and several books about it in film, including this one: