http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/rss.php?w=new New Blogs in Tusitala - Teach! Teach! Teach. en-gb Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:52:21 -0500 Tusitala - Teach! Teach! Teach RSS mike@24-7easyweb.co.uk http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=913 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=913 Tea For Two (L'Artisan Parfumeur Type) Warm fragrance of lapsang souchoung tea vapours with its smoky, woody aroma. A blend of spiciness, smokiness of slowly brewed tea. Notes of aniseed, gentian, bergamot, ginger, cinnamon, honey and vanilla     One of my favourites at the moment. Sumptious and arresting! Goes wonderfully well with her mexican vanilla which leaves an rich exotic trail wherever you may chose to go! Even supermarkets are transfromed! Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=912 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=912 Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth's human shores,Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors--No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever--or else swoon to death. Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=911 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=911 Anthony had given up on love. He preferred punctuation and expecially he conceded the deft pauses of the semi colon. Such pauses allowed time to still itself momentarily and then to procede with a calming symmetry towrds the final stage of revelation. Anthony adjusted his tie and turned with his (much remarked) on boyish charm towards the stately mirror which framed the hallway to St Ursula's. Someone had mentioned the murky origins of this monumental tribute to a previous head and although Anthony was never one to gossip, he had to admit a certain thrill whenever he caught his profile on the way to Staff meetings and would rememeber Mrs Hardcastle's singular passion for Charmaine. For that was the name they said of the beguling French mistress whose loose vowels had nearly  brought this celebrated private school to its knees. To ruination they said, shaking their heads in wonderment at the small photograph of Charmaine hidden in the store room, with her eyebrows raised at the sight of something they could not see. She was small and very French. Marseilles her letter of aplication had  stated.But that was the trouble of course. It was her very origins that had started it all and so they went on, had made Mrs Hardcastle so very progressive. Dr Whitstable stroked her compact leather holdall and sighed in her deliberate way, counting out the breaths before reminding whoever was sat in the red window seats that Mrs hardcastle had never worn pink before her staff and that morning, when she paraded her vision for the new extensions before the assembled staff,  the glimpse of the pink camisole beneath her dark grey suit was enough to confirm her own so -so  very reluctant suspicions. Of course it had all started with the incident of the mexican vanilla and things had just spiralled so inevitably one had to say, that everything became out of control within days. Everthything except of course one had to say, Mme Charmaine. For Dr Whitstable loved poetry and found the words of those long dead a strange comfort to the daily routine of school life. Whenever she had acquired another significant and excellently bound edition of a poet close to her own heart and the syllabus in question( how opportune their close relation) she would make her way to the head's vast mahogany study and leave the crisp edged copy for Mrs hardcastle  insightful persual. On this day in question it was a leather bound copy of the Complete keats( with letters) which had arrived via Sergeant at morning break. Geoffrey Miller combined just the right amount of bluff civility with humility for Dr Whistable( and she was not alone) to enjoy their two minutes discussions about the playing fields, the new cook and so on. He would always leave at just the right moment and then Dr Whitstable would open her new book and begin reading, a model of academic diligence and curiousity;something the school would rely upon in the stormy days to come when Charmaine's effect became so very clear. Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=910 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=910 Sickness has its pleasures. I had spent a cold night vomiting up  throat stinging red stuff which  had once been a  meal and then  I rested , stretched  out on the landing waiting for the next inevitable wave of sickness. But everything comes to an end and so next morning I asked my daughter ( busy with her holiday cardboard) to bring the extension lead and find my favourite detective and balance him on  my knees. He fitted so well. The battered car, the cuban cigar and that familiar squint. His hair even darker  than before. And this time he was chasing a man in black who had done his time and wanted more. Much more. Many more places to imagine and to sing into life, to sing unto   death.  He sang some evangelical rally call and all these doe eyed creatures of the late 1970s swayed in time to his guitar and I knew that this was new. This man was more than celebrity guest, killing his way to his arrest by the man with the knowing eye. This man caught at something in me. He laughed deeper than any human should dare and even his pursuer would stop and nod, knowing this guy could reach. He could reach you, me, all of them. I couldn't decide if he was mocking all the walls of convention shakily closing in or if he just didn't care. Because he had a voice that knew more, knew why and where we have to go places where we might be scared but then we go anyway, all ways, where the false light just fades away. I started to smile like him, broader than it was polite, I felt this parting of my head-my soul rippling and then all these sounds yippeeing out, soaring above and laughter, yes laughter, consoling everything, my fever richer, wilder, a  crazy pixie skip and dance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQIrxhNkiAs Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=909 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=909 Coral had never combed her hair before. Each long thread of dark red hair lay basking in the failing sunshine of the September afternoon. She was now a second home to a busy family of small ants who had deserted her elder brother when he was moved. The girl had given her this bright yellow comb, holding it out to Coral's hand across the ditch when everyone else seemed far more fascinated by their  lunch than this short creature from Sumatra. But the girl had liked her. She had looked steadily at Coral and Coral had looked steadily at her, head to oneside, taking in the girl's pale face, her solitary pride, her sharp white teeth. A purple light began at the girl's wrist, spreading out along her fingers to the yellow comb which she held out to Coral, whose pink palms suddenly scooped up the comb and put its handle into her mouth. Her eyes never left the child's once.   Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=908 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=908 Perhaps if she could give these  worn words a little nudge in another direction then the tired old anchors about the past might fly again.But a sort of magnolia ink dripped steadily from her pen and nothing she read raised even half an eyebrow. She craved turquoise. In everything.   Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=907 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=907 A wet smudge of green lime and dark chocolate across the  back of my hand  recalling my grandmother's wooden back stairs down to her walled garden  overlooked by a Quaker Meeting House with  three children  shy enough to listen to my stories and the  rain... Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=906 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=906 1940's York, the wintry river and a dark weedy bend stretches ahead; me face down, submerged, covered with his cloak. I am Hunted by these rigid men in black, their drooling animals leashed tightly against  hard gloved wrists, as they patrol what has never been theirs, nor ever should be.      Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=905 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=905 This freezing week made comfort reading an absolute imperative and I abandoned anything too demanding for the wonderful comfort of a well built country house where strange goings on, lead to murder and the arch intervention of a detective whose predatory 'eye' is as attentive as a hungry bird of prey. Details, maps and illustrations of burnt documents conspire to lull the reader into a sleepy passivity that is challenged by the revelation of Hercule Poirot's veiled briliance. We can never know what this reader of humanity knows. His tidy mind seeks out the anomalous and rearranges chronology so that what is becomes slippery and profoundly untrustworthy. This was Christie's first novel, written whilst involved in her unhappy first marriage. As a novel of the 'Golden Age' of Detective fiction it gives ample representation to the art of reading 'signs' and I found the novel's accumulative weight of detail a perfect balance to the cold! Sometimes like the overwhelm of Milton Eriksson, I felt almost 'entranced' by this detail which brought about satisfying sleep! I am fascinated by the capacity of a Detective writer to carry so many details forward in their narratives and their consummate ability to redirect an ostensibly plausible narrative in another direction. Instability proilferates until the healing sesne and 'eye' of the Detective returns the fallen unstable world to stability and a more serene relationship between the 'sign' and its meaning. I think Stig Larsson may be next... Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=904 http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/blog.php?bid=904 Janet LewisonBoltonUK Untitled Late July and the  grey tarmac was melting. A fat girl stole the cabbage white butterfly from my yellow  bucket and squashed it because she could.Barefoot, my brother and I bickered  over becoming Huck  Finn. Bravely, we climbed the hot garage roof, sailed down the Mississippi and spat.  http://miniwords2009.sharedspace.org/ministories/ministories5.html   Just learnt before Xmas that I had a commended place in the miniSTORY competition where you have to write a 50 word tale. Apparently nearly 2000 entered so I am very pleased with this story and even more so as it is true and about me and my brother Duncan! I can still feel the heat of that summer with its tarmac and my anger at the girl who came uninvited to my garden and squashed my rescue butterfly living harmlessly  in my Dad's wheelbarrow lingers on...! Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500