It's A Sheep's Life ... Baa

Christmas has passed, Santa Claus is having a well deserved break and life is slowly returning to some normality before New Year celebrations kick off. But for Santa, this also means the renewal of his driving licence in preparation for next year’s delivery. So, inspired by this thought and my elderly Dad’s own renewal of his driving licence, here’s a piece of flash fiction that I recently won a Commended award for from the fab Friday Flash Fiction house: The Driving Clause . And … from me, Santa and all the elves … a happy and safe New Year to you. (Photo by Lynda Hinton on Unsplash )

When we lived in Portsmouth, Halloween was a community event. Doorsteps were decorated with pumpkin lanterns, fake cobwebs and plastic spiders. The street breathed in the excited chatter of witches, their cats and spooks, including the odd devil.  I always took my daughter and her friends out for the evening, but as the cold cut through their flimsy witchery and their pumpkin lanterns swung to reveal the next door to knock on, they would forget about their little red noses and icy toes and shout, ‘Trick or treat!’. Occasionally their call was answered by a ghost or a werewolf but after a nervous scream, fruit lollipops, chocolate buttons and squishy jelly eyes would be on offer for their little red fingers to pick at. After we had exhausted all the well-known bounty streets, we’d return home to the instant warmth of our gas fire. Now, I only heard the tinkling of a spoon as it stirred steaming cups of hot chocolate along with the rustle of sweet wrappings being torn open to unleash tha

It’s getting darker earlier, my sugar snap pea plants are dying and my cat is gaining his winter teddy bear coat. I can’t believe the summer is drawing to an end. It seemed to start so late this year and now the first leaves are turning yellow and falling. Since moving to Scotland, I’ve felt and seen the seasons clearly. Down on the south coast of England, they seemed to merge into each other, the winters so mild they felt autumnal-like. I was in awe at the colours of our first autumn here and I no longer view leaves as a slippery nuisance, but food for the worms. Hard frosts and snow are welcomed because their nature’s way of killing off the circulating bugs and germs. But the beginning of autumn is a chance for me to change into my winter socks, sit in front of a log fire and make time to read a book or scribble away on old notebooks. Let’s all hunker down and wait for all the good things autumn and winter bring. (Photo by Matt Seymour at Unsplash)

The inspiration behind stories, like a recipe, is often a combination of different sources: pictures, experiences and even conversations. My story, Good Food Budgie , was loosely based on two of my mother-in-law’s budgies. One that was too terrified to leave the cage, but would often aggressively peck at his reflection in his mirror as if he was picking a fight with an intruder, and another loved flying around, dropping poos and small plastic ornaments on you as he did so. The aboriginal origins of the word budgie came from a small information plaque on a budgie enclosure in a Girvan public park. Black Wings Are In was inspired by a photograph by Jerzy Górecki at Pixel Images posted by a writer friend, and having just finished reading the YA novel, Out Of The Blue by Sophie Cameron, where angels mysteriously start falling to earth. Even going for a short walk in the countryside helped me to decide what to write in this blog. So, look around you, listen, reach out, taste and sm

Earlier this month, I spent some time in Kent visiting old friends. But as the weather was sunny and dry, my husband and I decided to go for a walk to see Chartwell House. This was once the home of Winston Churchill and now owned by the National Trust who charge a princely sum to view it. The walk started at the small town of Westerham and took us up a gentle incline, but on our way, we came across a small metal gate. A gate not connected to a fence. A freestanding gate, in fact. Why was it there, I wondered? Was it a gate that didn’t get on with the other gates, and had been told to stand in another field? Was it a gate that would only appear when strangers crossed the field; tricking them into taking the wrong path? If I had walked through the gate, could it have taken me to another dimension or back in time, or even sucked me into vortex from which I would never have returned? I’ll never know, because I walked straight past it (after stopping to take a photo). But I do k

Since moving to Scotland, my biggest garden foe is slugs.  The rich, damp soil mixed with an abundance of greenery makes the best slug haven in the UK. The size of a stick of gum and black, they mooch unseen at night amongst the undergrowth searching for their next meal. That usually means my plants, my fruit and my vegetables. I view this onslaught as personal. Last year, to prevent invading weeds from the field behind my house, I planted fast-growing ground cover plants. To protect them against slugs, I put the plants in slug collars and surrounded them with pine needles and crushed eggshells. But Scottish slugs are as hard as. They felt no pain crawling over the pine needles. They pushed aside the crushed eggshells as if they were a trivial nuisance. They had no fear of heights as they ascended the slug collars like Spiderman. Then, they feasted on my plants. As we have a cat, I can’t use the traditional chemical methods of slug annihilation and having just Irn Bru in th

To celebrate the coming of spring, my writing group wrote a series of short stories and poems with the help of four single word prompts. I chose galoshes, but I still didn’t know what to write. At the same time, I was working on a science fiction short story and planning a screenplay for my Open University creative writing course. I was also dealing with family demands and adapting to working from home. My battery levels were running low. Seeking comfort, I delved into my ‘to read’ pile of books and came across a book my sister-in-law had slipped into my bag last year while whispering that she thought I would enjoy this one: Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. The shape and simplicity of one particular poem inside this novel, inspired me to write a poem that didn’t drain the battery levels any further. My version of ‘We Are’ was inspired by the times I would spend a rainy Sunday afternoon with my toddler daughter splashing in the puddles outside our garage. The Sundays when

Brave New Words, based at The Stove in Dumfries, put out a feeler in November last year for poetry and stories inspired by the theme of ‘What Now’ from writers in Dumfries and Galloway. The project was to create their first newspaper type anthology of new writing. It was a hard subject to write about without falling into cliches, and I’d been reluctant up until this point to express anything about my lockdown experience. But, I did, in the end. It’s not a feel-good poem. It’s not a sad poem. Just a questioning one. Further information on the anthology entitled 'What Now', in which my poem appears along with work from two other members of my writing group and other great writers, can be obtained from info@thestove.org The Now Winter now? Black branches silhouetted against grey skies, jackdaw’s sermons dominate the dawn chorus, snow covers the hills like a lost white sheet from the washing line, and short days and long nights eat away at nature’s workaday. And n

After listening to a BBC Radio 4 series recently on the art of storytelling, I realised how fortunate I am to be able to have this blog to express my opinions, view of life and even my values; albeit creatively. For some, they would agree that the speech in our society has become too free and that people believe anything that is posted on social media without question. Those that post an alternative view, are trolled into submission. Yet for many, there is no free speech … still. And when they do speak, it has to be written in a way that the meaning is hidden; understanding only for the sympathetic. The questioner is facing imprisonment and death. They’ve had to become creative, where we choose to. So as we welcome in 2021, perhaps we should be grateful we can express ourselves without fear, and support those that … can’t. To listen to the BBC Radio 4 series, What is a Story? written by Marina Warner, please go to:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0628b74/episodes/guide