I am so genuinely honoured to be placed with these writers. My thanks to Stride and Rupert Loydell for this, and for the consistent support throughout 2020.

Someone tweeted today how the ‘Effects on Land’ of the Beaufort Wind Scale can read like a poem, and as it was presented it does, and wonderfully so.

This prompted me to find, through cut-up, a rampant narrated poem of both the ‘Effects on Water’ and ‘Effects on Land’ of this scale.

My apologies for not remembering the origins of the tweet.

The Storm:

The following is a ‘Christmas Eve’ chapter in the first section of my mini-autobiography That Last Of May from the finished first draft completed yesterday. I have had a number of interesting experiences/events in my life, and these are collected here in generally short descriptive pieces, limited as much as possible to a single side of A5. I hope it will be out there at some time and readers will enjoy.

#19

Al was popular on December the 18^th, on this blog anyway – and allegedly.

But, of course, he wasn’t. It’s a scam of some sort, to be followed up by a sudden influx of offers to improve the marketability of my blog on the back of this ‘popularity’. The spam folder on the blog is full of complimentary if blatantly generic observations of any particular post to which the accolade is attached.

The worst is how the elongated spike on my viewing figures for that one exceptional day makes all of the other daily and wholly moderate visits seem so diminished…

#18

#17

Falling

things
sinking

drop
down

fall
fall

dreaming
expecting

sink
down

all
things

sinking
sinking

asleep
sleeping

lie
down

wishing
dropping

sleeping
asleep

all
things

lie
dreaming

lie
lie

#16

Smile

The soul’s reason
a smile after sickness,

light dropped
by glow-worms

stretching after stars.

Sickness smiles, then,
half-willingly,

half by system
and the other

whirling for joy.

This is the system
for reasoning,

light at an end
through looking-glass

the reason it displays.

A prayer
of the human species,

a force of the gust,
kissing itself in

tales of continuance.

#15

#14