Will the Red Red Robin be soon a bobbin along? Depending on where you live the sighting of a Robin is a sign of Spring. I don’t know about you but it seems old man winter doesn’t wish to leave us sometime soon. This makes for a long winter and spring birds excite us when we spot them, then we know for sure that Spring has sprung.

Robins have been pictured on UK Christmas cards, because in the past the British postmen wore red jackets and were nicknamed ‘Robins’, so they appear in their bird form as a icon of the deliverymen.

According to folklore the wren stole fire from heaven and returned to earth aflame, so the other birds all gave one feather each to replace the burnt feathers but the Robin was nervous and came too close to the poor wren thus he also caught fire, the remains…

Love is a subset of happiness. A subcategory, if you will.We love ourselves and other people because it makes us happy. Isn’t it ?

We don’t try to make someone happy because it makes us feel loved. It’s doesn’t make any sense.Meaning, you can be happy without love. But you can’t be happy without happiness.

Pretty weird. Yet, it’s true.

Photograph by Natalie Shau

‘We are our choices’ – Jean-Paul Sartre

Hellish hard to determine what, if any, section of a new book one should impart in an attempt to expose it’s blanket disposition when I am naught but a fanciful old fool and my co-author is currently glued to her weeding and seeding only taking short breaks to talk of family planning with the frantic copulating insects of all shapes and sizes who have set about constructing makeshift bordellos in her otherwise virginal yet rustic garden. Thus it calls for an executive decision of the sort I’ve never been good at. Best we start at the very beginning? Why not; 

 CHAPTER ONE EXTRACT

 ‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO EVE?’

by

Shirley Blamey & Michael Steeden  

“No one can hear you cry when the swifts scream overhead,” pertinent words pitched at the penitent yet unforgiven wailing dreadlocked martyr to…

I sat and watched a slow sunset
Darkness blinked as fading light danced
Wind drooled like a clarionet
Amethyst tones of gloam nuanced
Silken gloom turquoise stars caressed
In golden roam sweet dreams enchanced
Lunar rhythms poured euphoric
As amber stardust flamed auric.


# ottava rima

Beyond the terrace
I pace barefoot through
the garden past the blurred
flowers that bend their petals
as though they know me.
Brilliant in the starlight
the old tree stands apart
as if  having outgrown the
rest it needs space.
It sighs to the song of a breeze
limbs reaching to the sky.
I wonder if it has eyes
to hold such history.
I feel it is friends
with the moon
I  hear them laughing at us.