Wee, I laugh as I soar across the sky. This is fun, much more fun than being a human. Wee…
“Would you stop that?” Says a grumpy voice who can be none other than my fun-sucker of a brother. “You’re making me want to pee.”
Mentally, I sigh as I mount myself atop a tree.
Continue reading at This is Another Story
Beauty beyond age
Serenity beyond grief
A delicate touch
Medieval mastery
Capturing a mother’s heart
*
The wall painting here can be found at the little church of All Saints in Burton Dasset… a place I visited with friends some years ago and wrote about here. There was just so much to see… from the wall paintings to the carvings…
Burton Dasset… One, Two, Three
A crow so happens to feature a lot in my latest work in progress, a humorous urban fantasy based on the exploits of a character that has appeared here before, Pearl Barley, trainee exorcist. I thought I’d share an extract from it. In this section Pearl and fellow trainee, Marge Wisp are to be shown a crow with Corvid Dementicus or mad crow’s syndrome by Borage Backflip who looks after the unpassed spirits and members of the fae that the exorcists bring back from their runs, pending dealing with them. Pearl is convinced (based on what she was told by Sharon, a deceased hairstylist who is currently in possession of Pearl’s hair) that a crow she brought in had jackdaws syndrome, an different form of possession experienced by members of the corvid family but it is something Borage has contradicted. This is part of persuading Pearl she is wrong. Eventually there will be three books, involving Pearl – I’ve written book one and book two is three quarters done; my aim is to finish all three before I publish the first
Borage waited while they donned their protective outfits.
While they helped each other, Marge asked, “Do we need these for the crows?”
“Nah. They’re safe enough. The danger comes from the rest of little sods we have to pass. They’ll spit and eject and ejaculate and explode anything they can, just to make a point. Mostly it’s harmless, like being sprayed with acrid-smelling mayonnaise but occasionally it can dissolve fibre, burn concrete and permanently stain pretty much anything. Some of them are so dextrous they’ll brand your neck with a pair of bollocks before you’ve begun to duck. Just don’t make eye contact. Many of them find that a threat and react. Mostly, if you ignore them, they’ll ignore you, whatever noise they make. You both got ear-buddies?”
Continue reading at TanGental
Reblogged from Jim Webster, aka Tallis Steelyard:
The front of the Shrine of Aea in her Aspect as the Personification of Tempered Enthusiasm is so modest it’s almost self-effacing. It refuses to dominate Exegesis Square. To be fair it’s not the most elegant facade. We haven’t got a portico, never mind an entrance pylon. There again, Maljie has always extolled ‘clean lines’ and a lack of ‘clutter.’
Once you get round the back of the shrine then we lack even the clean lines. The finest building is in point of fact the Mendicants’ Bathhouse. They raised the money for this and I suppose it does go to prove that whilst crime doesn’t pay; extortion, moral blackmail, and undue exaction in pursuit of a good cause may well pay excellent dividends.
Continue reading at Tallis Steelyard
“You do know the tide’s coming in….?” I did, but the rocks were too tempting and the water clear and shallow, reflecting the light of the setting sun at the end of a long day. It had been a good weekend, with plenty of chance to talk to our friends and, apart from the downpour on Friday evening, some really lovely weather.
For me, being by the sea had been a treat in itself. I see it too rarely and there will always be a sense of wonder and reverence, as well as all the excitement of childhood, whenever the journey we are taking takes me to the shores of this island that is our home.
The final moments of our last evening were spent on the beach at Beadnell, watching the colours shift and change, painting perfect landscapes, casting shadows on the sand and revealing ancient sea-worn faces in the rocks.
The obligatory black dog …. there is always a black dog… reminded me of Ani and, not for the first time, I thought how much I would love to bring her here, in spite of the three hundred mile drive.
Continue reading at France & Vincent
It has been surmised that the future enters our past in order that the present may form…
Sometimes it certainly feels a little like that.
For one thing it has been twenty-seven months since our last sighting of a Heron which, if memory serves, occurred immediately prior to our sojourn in Bryn Celli Ddu…
Continue reading at France & Vincent
*
We can understand something of what lies beyond our experience
by examining analogous cases that lie within it.
*
The relationship between the world,
divinity, and the divine source,
Continue reading at France & Vincent
(This post is 600 words, a five-minute read)
I loved the image… I’d credit its creator if I knew where it came from; but there it was in my in-tray. The cool black cat with the importantly steaming mug of coffee, and an engrossing book with covers in my favourite colour… all of it pushing back the awfulness of an English February.
There’s a certain involved-detachment about the cat. I’ve always been a sucker for cats – and that attitude. We have one: a beautiful rag-doll that emerged from a large bush and followed my mother and her dog home one day, then refused to leave. It turned out that the cat was close to starving and had been living in the bush for who knows how long, just a few streets from where my mother lives… lived.
Taking…
View original post 557 more words
Sue and Christopher were hiking slowly through the woods and looking with disappointment at the burned husks of trees. The fire had been many years ago as there was plenty of lush green trees and bushes scattered among the burnt out areas.
When they arrived at the warden’s office there was an officer who was appointed to oversee the area and point out ways to hike safely and with caution in order to try and avoid another fire like that one.
Continue reading at Tessa Dean
It is snowing again as I write. Have you ever watched a snowstorm and wondered just how many snowflakes were falling? Or how many had ever fallen? A million snowflakes, apparently, will only cover a patch two feet square by ten inches deep. A quarter of the land mass of the planet gets snow every year and how many winters have come and gone since the first snowflake fell? The mind boggles at the sheer impossibility of the number.
Yet, if one could ignore space and time and be everywhere and every-when at once it would, theoretically at least, be possible to count them. Even taking all future snowfalls for the projected lifetime of our planet into consideration, it would be a finite number. There was, once upon a time, a very first snowflake to fall. There will be a last. There would come a point where there were no more snowflakes to count.
Mind boggling as the concept is, the magnitude of that number is probably as close to the idea of infinity as our normal human thoughts can grasp. Yet it is so far short of an infinite number! Scientists calculate that there could be as many as four and a half billion planets similar to earth in the Milky Way galaxy. Each one of those with its own possibility of snowflakes. And it is thought that there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe. Yet are we sure that there is only one universe? Quantum physicists don’t seem to think so…
Suddenly our infinity of snowflakes seems a little puny compared to the possibilities that exist in this wider reality we but dimly perceive.
Continue reading at The Silent Eye
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 