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Showing posts from December, 2018

Winter Buds

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Naturally the idea that wouldn’t leave me be this morning while I needed to get ready for work has gone off in a sulk somewhere. It will return when it needs to be written. I will drink coffee. Coffee with a rich silty aftertaste. Coffee that gives me that moment of pause, which when I’m busy maybe I neglect? The warmth of it welcome too, as I’m letting any old words wander out, as the rain pools under a cold push of wind and the sky is so dull and flat it’s like no sky at all. I’m sat by a wall’s length of glass, drafty, good view of the greenery flailing, chewing up my coffee dregs, thinking about lunch not because I’m hungry but because there’s no food. There’s pennies in my pocket, lunch can happen, an improvement on previous days. Fair to say I have bemoaned and embraced low income life - only first world poverty after all - and am loving moving on. Car, chromebook, a lit fire, lunch, a long list of things I am happy to have. Soon we can start to look for land

Yule Tale 2018

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Shelf-Elf Barry And The Ugly Christmas Jumper Situation Shelf-Elf Barry wished he worked on the Christmas production line. Okay the hours were long - September through to December, and you had to be ambidextrous to avoid serious repetitive strain injury, but once you got to that Christmas Eve deadline it was sherry and mince pies and eight months holiday. And no thinking required! Most production elves would look at the shelf-elf hours and scoff, of course. A mere 25 days! But they never once had to think about work, they could just do it. Barry worked all year to storyboard 25 unique scenarios, and how to get in and out of each one without being seen, and then there were the incessant training drills and fitness routines that were a core part of being on special forces shelf-elf detail. He felt like he was getting too old for this nonsense. Retirement, alas, was hundreds of years away, and Santa never sacked an elf without also turning them into stuffed toys, which wa