On Saturday evening...

...we were having friends over to the house.

As we waited for them to arrive, my wife stood in the sitting room, head tilted slightly to one side, arms folded, watching me as I tidied things she had probably just tidied two minutes previously, as I rearranged things she had no doubt just rearranged herself.

When the doorbell rang, we both headed to the hallway to greet our friends.  She was ahead of me, so, as she got the door, I paused and hastily rearranged the flowers in the vase sitting on the hall table.

As she opened the door, she looked back at me over her shoulder, rolled her eyes, and said: "for your birthday I'm going to get you a Y chromosome".

At The Coffee Shop(Saturday 2 February 2008, 10am)

Women mostly.  Serious shoppers: arms full of bags already.  Mothers and daughters, both young and old.

A girl catches my eye.  She half-smiles and her eyes hold my gaze for a second as her face turns back to the conversation.

A couple of young guys reading the sports pages.  Nursing hangovers perhaps, while they wait for their partners to finish their shopping?

A tired-looking young couple fondly, jealously, watching their baby as she sleeps serenely in her buggy.

A barista clearing tables.  As he bends over, the curious toddler at the next table reaches from his booster seat and gently touches the proffered buttocks...

                         One coffee shop,

                         one americano -

                         so many stories.

The General's Dilemma(or "On The Perils Of Drag And Drop")

This blog might have been called "bloggerel", or even "Joe Blogs", but both of those names were clearly too obvious not to have been used before - and so, in acknowledgement of the way in which these words will be accessed (and of the new worlds that have opened up to so many of us since the advent of the world wide web) - I chose instead to take the name of the blog from a senryū that I wrote some years ago now.

It certainly isn't the first poem I ever wrote, but it is the oldest that I still have, and so, fittingly, it shall be the first:




                         Just beyond the glass
                         that which we seek lies hidden -
                         there amongst the trees.