Two pictures which define last week: sunshine glinting through the gloriously abundant mossy fronds on trees by the river in Vallis Vale, and Frome's community responding to lock-down status with window enhancement for the NHS support applause from doorways on Thursday evening. Frome's Window Art is part of the international #FromMyWindow online gallery.
As we all get used to this life of heightened screen-staring, it seems that never have so many connective opportunities been offered by - well, so many, actually. New groups are springing up like mushrooms and the internet is heaving with opportunities varying from pyramid posting of poems and sharing images of art to participating in yoga sessions and downloading classic productions at the National Theatre, and much more. You've probably already found enough to make you wonder how you ever had time to do the any of the stuff now prohibited, but here's a few more ideas to mull, mostly word-related.
• Rediscover 'Morning Pages'. If your eureka moments are sticking, get hold of a copy The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, at one time the bible (or possibly Quaran) of every writer. The theory is that in order to find/recover/release your creative flow, you must write freely for ten minutes each morning, even if - especially if - you feel you have nothing to say. The free-flow of exasperation is just as effective as lyricism or even coherence. It works: not by magic but for two logical reasons: it establishes self-expression as a prioritised habit, and more importantly, it downgrades the importance of the self-critic thus allowing free flow of ideas and feelings. (And you can tidy it up as a blog from time to time! )
• Keep a Plague Journal. You can call it something else, but it's about taking time to express & explore your feelings, to celebrate your epiphanies, acknowledge your anxieties, and generally to grasp the pattern of your moods. Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo brilliantly explains and illustrates the power of therapeutic writing. She took the view that "Writing about difficulties enables us to understand that our greatest shocks do not separate us from humankind. Through expressing ourselves we establish our connectedness with others and the world."
• Frome Poetry Cafe page offers you a space to post your own original work in a virtual 'open mic'. Your poems don't have to be on any specific theme, but our April theme of Revenge or Redemption seems appropriate...
• And of course there's Zoom. Bath writer Clare Reddaway, who devised Story Friday and runs the very successful writing events and workshops, is running her spring series of sessions this way.
The first Zoom meeting for the weekly writers' group I usually join in real-time was on Thursday and we spent most of our time grappling with logistics. I'd stuck tape over my camera years ago, such is my aversion to face-calling, but I've scraped that off now. O Brave New World.
And to finish, a new feature:
This Week's Little-known Character launches with H G Matthews, philosopher, raconteur, and critic.
Enid Blyton celebrated post-war all-girls schools as fun places of learning but that was not my experience and my lasting education came entirely from an erudite, melancholy, misogynistic, writer-manque of extreme and irrational prejudices: my father.
He read to me nightly from early childhood from the books in his own library: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Yeats, Auden, Eliot, Larkin, Keats... he took me with him to watch plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Synge - even Osborne and Brecht. He taught me that language is the highest of the arts, above even music, and that no time spent absorbing it from written or spoken word is ever wasted. I'm not saying he was totally correct in this, and certainly some of his views would be extremely unpopular today - in fact even as a child I would argue with him, using skills of logical analysis he'd taught me, which he found very annoying. He was out of step with everyone, proud of his prejudices, clever, sad, and kind. Anyway, to conclude this week here's a selection of Things My Father Said, which I hope you don't find depressing - I heard them all daily yet emerged as an optimist - extracted from a booklet I compiled years ago and rediscovered while clearing my study for its new windows (installation of which is of course another victim of the present situation...) He looks in this photo - apart from the smile, which unlike the bow tie is unusual attire although he had a good line in sardonic mirth - just as I remember him.
"There is nothing new under the sun."
"All politicians are either knaves or fools"
"Malthus was much misunderstood"
"We are not here to enjoy ourselves. We have to share this universe with a multitude of other species whose interests are at variance with those of ourselves."
"Democracy is impossible"
"Sadness is a luxury"
"Life is nasty, brutish and short - if you're lucky."
"You can say what you like, if you know the language."
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