It is just after 11pm and I have just finished adding today's quota to my Tesco order. Because I shop for six to eight weeks at a time, I have to do it in stints - Sunday night - drinks (non alcoholic) and non-food stuffs, Monday night - tins & jars, Tuesday night - dairy and tonight was for dinners, desserts and extras. Tomorrow it will be salad stuff, fruit & veg and then - thank goodness - I will be done till mid-June. Phew! Personally I prefer walking round the nearest superstore with a trolly - but that then wipes out a Saturday morning when Steve & I could be doing something more interesting. Somehow an hour a night for four or five nights is the lesser of the two evils! Shopping has to be done; end of! So that's tonight's stint out of the way and now I can indulge in two of my major passions - Writing and listening to Adele 21. Have you ever listened to this amazingly talented singer? Her voice is truly astonishing but it's the words of her songs that just tear my heart out! I also have Adele 19 which is brilliant but this one is what I would listen to all day every day given half a chance. In fact I listen to it so often I know most of the words to most of the songs now and there are a couple which I am sure she wrote just for me because I know exactly the pain she is going through when she wrote them! Amazing lady. Cheers to you Adele.
Found out today that our landline phones are no longer working. Don't know why. They were working okay yesterday afternoon. I think we might need to go out and buy some new ones. Bit of a pain; we have only had these a couple of years. Good job I have my mobile and laptop or we'd be completely cut off from friends and family. Honestly however did people stay in touch before telephones? No wonder whole families usually lived in little villages and hamlets all their lives!
So - what have I been writing? Well The Epic is marching on. Still no idea where it is actually taking me. Al I know is that I get lost in it every time I pick up my pen. And before I make good on my promise to include a little excerpt in my blog, let me give you a little bit of background info about it.
It kind of all goes back to Yucketypoo in a weird kind of way. The Yucketypoo books were written to help raise environment awareness in children. Environmental matters are something I hold very close to my heart because I truly believe our World is beautiful, Mother Nature is amazing and people are generally really nice and caring. Not sure when I first began to feel the world's pain but I have always been terribly sensitive to it. I hate waste, Any kind of waste. I hate seeing litter strewn everywhere. I hate thinking about wildlife getting caught up in nets and bags and the like and the fact that turtle often eat plastic bags because they think they're jelly fish. I hate seeing what is beautiful being made ugly.
I have been a vegetarian for about twenty years but even as a child I loathed the whole ethic of killing animals to feed us. Now don't get me wrong. I understand about the food chain and everything. People have to eat; look at what I was saying earlier about six week's worth of shopping! But I never liked the idea and, as I grew up, I found I was eating less and less meat until one day I realized I was eating more non-meat than actual meat. I always went for the veggie option if one was available so I decided one day - ironically when I was having lunch in a pie & mash shop with my mum that from that day forward I would never eat meat again.
But getting back to The Epic - I became very angry a few years ago when I went to catch my morning tram and found that some bright spark from the council had come along in the night and chopped down all the trees on the bank leaving a tangle of logs and wood cuttings in their wake. I'd seen the wildlife down there - foxes, wrens, jays, magpies, ring-necked doves, robins, butterflies of every hue. Had anyone actually thought about them as they ploughed through nests and habitats? I don't think so.
Anyway a few days after this monstrous event, I spotted a cat down there and not just any cat - a manx cat. I spotted her a whole lot of times over the next few weeks and suddenly this idea began to germinate in my mind - how about a story based on the tram tracks about all the animals living down there? So I did a bit of research and found a lot of species living on them I'd never considered before - rabbits up on the common, rats, mice, foxes, badgers - and - as it turns out - lots of other cats who either live there or in the houses nearby. Add to this the demise of the trees and my environmental thing and you'll kind of get where I am going with it.
So now I have given you the basicalities (I think I just made that word up) I will include my excerpt next time, I promise.
But it is now close to midnight and Adele's stopped singing. Time to switch off the CD player ...
Nighty-night!
No comments:
Post a Comment