Category: exercise

Drawing, life

Later, in the break, I am not what I expect.

She, my aunt, supplies the robe. It is white, towelling, lemon bitter soft. I change behind the Japanese screen. I am wider than the Japanese women, but not split three ways. Not yet. I tuck my knickers into the pocket of my jeans. Fold my bra into itself.

The uncovering is awkward. They are careful not to look. Not looking, carefully.

They, five of them, have signed up for life drawing, and I, just me, have signed up for £15. I am twenty-two, recently dumped by a soldier boyfriend.

You told me to go back to her, he said, so I did.

What do you do with a black wooden hat stand with its felt array of goblin hats that you bought for the boyfriend you no longer have?

I stand beside the chaise longue, stretch my toes. My toenails are unadorned. I don’t look at myself or them.

How to disrobe? Untie the belt. Coil, coiling.

Uncoiled.

They are sharpening pencils, flattening paper on easels, pulling up sleeves. They are whispering. There is mention of how cold it is out.

Most of them will be dead now.

They are in caramel and beige and navy and white. Close-knitted fishermen’s sweaters, big jewels, thin necks that crease, pince, fold.

The room smells of turps, lavender, mineral, lead pencil, artists’ paper.

The art of seeing. I am naked.

She is the nude.

The tutor, my aunt, a painter, and someone important at the Edinburgh College of Art, directs me into a pose on the chaise longue.

After fifteen seconds I twitch, I itch, I pull, I stretch. Count down time on my toes, my nose, noes, so many knows.

Fifteen-minute bursts. Bursting to move.

The men don’t draw my face. The women shade my groin. I tour, in the robe at half time, a regal inspection, a glittering eye.

They use charcoal and pencil. Sweep the page. I am belly thigh chin calves. Some of them fill in the strawberry pattern of the chaise longue, the fabric more comfortable than a breast or nipple.

I feel them blunten flatten distemper perspective.

Sex doll, centrefold, still-life.

They catch the clutch of my clavicle.

I have nothing on my skin but shifting air. She is nude and I am naked.

Would you tank that canvas?

Object or subject. Take your pick.

I do not yet have the language of war.

In the break they circle me, close in, offer a custard cream. Take two, someone says.

I tongue the crumbs out of my teeth.

Why did I tell him to go back to her?

He holds his crayon up, measures me with a skewed eye. I am three inches. He calculates perspective. Block by anatomical block. There is gin on his breath. And olive.

Thumbelina.

Crawling shame where there is no shame and no need for any crawling, not at all.

My sighs hue and thigh.

Cindy Sherman in fractured flesh.

Disembodied, disempowered, disingenuous. Is it over yet?

I once drew the head of a dachshund, just the ears nose throat. I was rather pleased with the result.

In the flat next door a baby cries. The baby will cry for ninety minutes. The howls set teeth on edge, tighten wrists, diminish scale.

Five mannequin heads on the top shelf. Two without wigs. All with bats for lashes.

He said I put the idea into his head.

The ear that hasn’t been cleaned, the eyes veer swerve bend.

The woman at the near end of the five isn’t holding back. Her arms sweeps her mouth opens her hips wide and dancing. I want to smile at this woman.

I could give the goblin hats to the mannequin heads. Two each to the ones without wigs.

I don’t. Of course I don’t smile.

Never smile during the pose only at the end when I’m dressed and have three notes in the brown envelope.

And the tips.

This piece is written from the prompt ‘portrait’. The photograph is a section of a graphite and charcoal drawing ‘Sitting Woman’ by Jude Nixon, Edinburgh (2015).

Tags life drawing

blog exercise

Handiwork

In today’s writing class we considered excerpts from Sara Baume’s Handiwork. We discussed some of the themes of her book – labour, home, hobbies, inheritance – along with the craft of her writing. We also returned to Lopate’s work on the writer as character in essays.

The fragments below are from the writing exercises in the class.

Queensland 1987 in the last pass of the cucumber season. Twenty-two years old and leader of a chain gang. Picked up on a dusty violet dawn by a gang master outside a state government unemployment office. Back tray of his ute backward-facing leant on backpacks, towels tied around faces as dust jackets. Later, the conveyor shuffles the cucumbers in starts and fits. It’s the motor that’s distressed. Sacked by the gang master for the audacious act of fixing the conveyor belt chain.

This is the desk that Scott built. Scott is dead. Killed, he said beforehand, by the genes of his father and the distractions of his doctor. I’ll not live past fifty he said, as he sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor building this desk from a John Lewis flatpack. He was right and I write here in amongst the skirmish of desiccated pens and never finished notebooks and mugs of hot water, mugs bought on the Wild Atlantic Way from an Irish woman in a yellow apron who threw in a fruit scone with the white tissue-paper wrapping. How to Write Like Tolstoy. March Was Made of Yarn. The Trip to Echo Spring. The Student Guide to Writing. Concise Scots Dictionary (nothing concise about it). Scott is dead but he built this desk and now he is rinsed from the Internet. A GoPro, a stapler out of staples, a dried-out Pritt Stick, a Christmas stamp yet to be used, a wash-blue ceramic plant pot crammed with pointless pens for a pointless whiteboard I never crown.

Bought. A red sandstone flat, listed, in an empire building named Windsor Mansions by someone who may or may not have been taking the piss in 1896. Bought from a couple who rode a motorbike over the Alps in 1949 and never invested in gas central heating. Inside the flat, plants clamber and vegetables spoil and there’s a red thing happening which all started with the purchase of a post-box red Bakelite phone, bought with the proceeds of a focus group payment.

Some people have hobbies. She has campaigns, diatribes, schemings, manoeuvres. It is said, in whispers, that she begs, cajoles, witters on. She crusades and yet she is no crusader. No tunic or tabard, no applique red cross or oversize brown leather gloves. There is a sword in a museum up the road. If push comes to shove.

Watching north is not the same as watching south. The accordion bounces chipper on the Macedonian’s knees, the wheeze of his instrument his wheeze, my wizard. His knitted hat turns bare head turns sun hat turns bare head turns knitted hat. A year in hats with a constant, three beat, bouncing wheeze. Or a tango. Hats and accordion watching north.

exercise fiction Flash fiction

Arch

She’d said he was arch. What did she mean? He wasn’t familiar with the word used like that. Was she referring to his eyebrow? The struggling dense heft of it? But it is straight, more or less, just the hint of a curve, with a blind summit that whips over the bridge of his nose.

He is sitting on the faux leather pouffe by the bay window in his dead mother’s otherwise empty house, turning and twisting arch in his damp hands.

Perhaps she meant his feet. She’d seen them naked when he’d leant against the bus shelter and stepped out of his sandals that first afternoon in Zadar. Rested the swell and pink of them on the cool of the veined marble. Wiped his brow with his handkerchief. That’s better, he’d said, spreading his toes.

She’d been sitting at the other end of the seat in the shelter, thumbing through a guide book. She’d put the book down and studied him, her eyes tracking his rough toenails, the tight skin pulled up hard under his fleshy soles, the bunion on his right foot, a gift from his grandmother. He’d flattened his feet on the stone, allowing the cold to travel up his ankles, up the back of his calves, willed the flow of cool in behind his sweating knees.

He’d put a hand to his face, peered at her over his thumb. Watched her lean over the hem of her yellow cotton dress, push her white ankle socks down, undo her heavy brown lace-up walking shoes, remove them, and rest her stocking feet on the ivory stone. You’re right, she said. It works.

She called him arch on their second date in a taverna near his hotel and he is still mulling over it three months later. It’s not like him to dwell. He’s never known a dwelling like it. But he can’t dwell on her. Not now.

Arch. Did it have a capital A? Would that have made a difference? Her hand was on his when she said it, her brown eyes skewed and her breath olive brine. There was a tension in her fingers but not the one he wanted. Not a ‘she held my hand in hers’ tension. No, a pressing, a forcing even. Was she building an arch? Between them? Over him?

There’s a dead pigeon in the middle of the street. It is flat, apart from one wing that sticks up, sail like, and flaps back and forward in the wind. Three crows circle the bird, hopping towards it in what is surely a choreographed dance. Purposeful. Uppity. A taxi draws up, the driver brakes hard, and the corvids scatter. But only far enough to avoid the vehicle. They are back as soon as the wheels have passed safely over either side of the corpse.

Arch has no points to fix on. Arch is gallery and ecclesiastical and sandstone red. Arch is a nun’s habit and a choral hymn and night clubs and knock your head off if you stand up too quick in the dead end of the cave they still call Acheron. You’re arch, Peter, she said, pressing her fingers into his knuckles and forcing her teeth into his wrist. He had jumped and his free hand was sudden fist and clench and flying towards her.

I didn’t mean that, he said to her as they stepped out into the night. She didn’t reply.

Vampish, his brother George said, as they looked through Peter’s holiday photos on his phone in the airport carpark. There she was in her yellow dress and clackety shoes and teeth that had just too much point. George is a man of the world, has an Alexa, and bought him, Peter, the latest iPhone and one square metre of the moon for his fortieth birthday.

He rearranges the letters on his palms. Char. Char for charcoal. Charlady. At a pinch, churlish. She shouldn’t have bitten. She left a mark. He doesn’t do marks, indentures, fault lines. His was a life unblemished. Climate controlled. He was pure and she had soiled him. Did he dwell on the nip and tuck of her too white teeth? Only for a day.

It took twenty-two hours to decide.

Arch. Rach. Ratchet. Yes, he’d ratcheted up. Not with intemperate emotion. No. He took his time. Now he sits in his dead mother’s house and retraces every step in the dust on the bare boards around his naked feet.

The crows are sharing their spoils. There is enough to go round. They do it, he is sure, with good grace. They take it in turns to eye and peck and flutter and swallow and fly and return to eye. They would have done the same to his mother if they had found her first. He wouldn’t have begrudged them. Crows have a natural order of things. In an impudent, saucy way.

Maybe she meant saucy, when she said arch. Maybe she had a lazy eye and she was nervous and she meant saucy and she’d meant to kiss but had bitten instead.

Anyway. She is buried now. Under the arch with its scopophiliac view of the Katedrala Svetog Jakova. It was what she wanted. He had been sure of that at the time. Why use the word otherwise?

I wrote this piece off the back of the prompt ‘arch’ in the National Portrait Gallery cafe in a writing session with friends.

blog exercise musings

On curiosity

I am curious about the relationship between a living daughter and her dead father.

I am curious about fishmongers that fight to the death.

I am curious about the relationship between a single person and their ageing cat.

I am curious about people who choose a brush over a comb.

I am curious about black satin sheets.

I am curious about fibre versus salt.

I am curious about people born from the wrong parent.

I am curious about emergency avocados.

Here is a quiz. This is a quiz about me, not you. Answer quickly and honestly. Answer yes or no. Am I:

astute

patronising

loyal

a cheat

a liar

forgiven

forsaken

overwrought

unreliable (narrator)

selfish

deluded

stuck

Stuck! That’s it. I am curious about why I am stuck. Stuck in the middle of you. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle of me.

Did you tick yes or no on stuck? Go on, tell me. I can take it (or I can’t – believe what you need to believe). I need to know. I won’t hold a grudge, I promise. Grudge wasn’t on the list. Does Kirsty bear a grudge? Oh yes, she is the queen of grudge-bearing. Wraps them up in tissue paper and sprays them with lavender oil and cedar to keep the moths at bay.

I am curious. Is there anyone out there who is more stuck, with more grudges, than her?

Mrs Watson once told me to stack my characteristics in a pyramid. Your best at the top, she said, pointing to her jade encrusted crown, and your worst at the bottom, she said, pointing to her mud encrusted wellington boots. But I’m not daft. She meant I only had one likeable trait, and several that would be found wanting. Stupid old bat. So I inverted the pyramid. On the top line: Affectionate, Broad-minded, Compassionate, Dependable, Efficient, Forgiving, Generous, Honest, Imaginative, Just, Kind, Loyal. On the next line more in the same sequential vein with some unfortunate afflictions thrown in. Oppressive, Rigid, Secretive. And so on until I had just the one negative trait left to provide.

I chose irascible. At the base of the unstable wobbling toppling hierarchy of me I chose irascible. Irascible is a heavy lifter. Irascible has ballast. Irascible has toe holds and firm footings. Irascible will neither budge nor blether. Irascible is anchor and resistance and purchase.

Irascible is a top word that is best placed at the bottom.

When I am down I retrieve my grudges from their moth proof wrappings. I hold them to my face. Stroke them and stoke them. Stroke, stoke. Stroke, stoke. Stroke, stoke.

There’s a lot I could say about Dr Strangelove.

And charm bracelets.

I wrote these notes from today’s writing class. We discussed Philip Lopate’s essay ‘On the necessity of turning oneself into a character’ in To Show and To Tell.

exercise Flash fiction

A short story about roots

Post author By Kirsty Lewin
Post date February 2, 2022
No Comments on A short story about roots

Roddy’s mother made it her business to tell that story. To waiters and curators. To librarians and life guards. To street cleaners and pig weaners. To train drivers and vanguards. She told the visiting Minister to St Anne’s. She told Miss Shoal, his primary one teacher. And Dr Kenny Tempest, his second year philosophy lecturer. She even told the canny wee bloke in the betting shop that day she lost a fifty on a horse with his name.

He’d heard it so many times, with so many frills and fancies, that he’d stopped hearing it years ago. It was just part of his mother. Like her Yves Saint Laurent Opium perfume. Or her nude beige nail varnish (never chipped). Or the periwinkle and jasmine Liberty floral apron she wore to dust the piano.

He’d stopped hearing it until she told his new girlfriend, Sally. Sally was hot, fit and foreign. With French hindquarters, she’d said. Touch my roots. He wasn’t sure which roots she meant but he’d leant into her against the cleaning cupboard door in the community centre and snaked his tongue around her teeth and tasted mint and horse steak and flecks of tartare sauce.

His mother told Sally the story as they sat in the Queen’s Fancy patisserie eating afternoon tea off vintage china crockery on a white linen tablecloth. Sally’s hand was dancing incy wincy spider up his leg and he was groaning when his mother got to the end of the story. Sally’s eyes widened and her eyelash extensions flickered ultraviolet. ‘Slimey’, she said.

‘What?’ his mother said.

What?’ Roddy said.

‘It must have been slimey’, Sally said as her fingers pulled at the buttons of his fly. His mother reached for a thumb-sized chocolate eclair on the cake stand, inserted it into her mouth, and chewed. Droplets of cream escaped from each end of her lips.

‘Why would you say that’, his mother asked, once she’d swallowed the eclair.

‘It’s obvious. You said you found him in a bulrush basket in the mud.’ Sally was lacing her fingers through Roddy’s as he tried to push her hand away from his crotch.

‘Who said anything about mud’, Roddy asked. Mud was new. His mother had never mentioned mud before. She must have beeen trying to impress.

‘Your mother, darling. Clearly if you were in a bulrush basket on the Thames and your mother found you at low tide it must have been on the mud flats. And, she said, as she lifted her cup of Earl Grey tea to her lips and sipped, ‘it must have been slimey.’

His mother followed up the chocolate eclair with a piece of lemon drizzle cake cut in the shape of a star. She stared at Sally. Sally reached out with her spare hand and flicked a crumb from his mother’s chin with a slim ringed finger. Her fingernail was decorated with iridescent moons and suns.

Her mother raised her hand. It hovered by her shoulder. She stared at Sally.

‘Are you not telling the truth, Mrs Danders?’ Sally paused, and sipped her tea again. ‘Or was there some sort of miracle, you know, where the mud wasn’t slimey’.

Roddy forced the spidering fingers away from his groin. Looked at his mother. Looked at Sally. Something was loosening. Coming undone. His mother put her hand over her face. Her neck flushed pink. Her fingers shook.

Fuck, fuck. Could the whole thing, the mad tale, the fable she told to amuse, to charm, to entertain, the whole Moses thing. Could it actually be true? Who was he? Where was he from? She wasn’t his mother at all.

Slime. Slime.

Jesus Christ. He was a slime baby.

This piece is from this morning’s cafe writing. The prompts were ‘slime’ and ‘moses’ and we had fifteen minutes for the exercise.

exercise Flash fiction

Pep Talk

A pep talk, Harriet says to Gordon. It’s time we had that pep talk.

Here, he replies, in an airport? Stay classy, love, he says. He blows her a kiss.

You always get to pick the place for the pep talk, she says.

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? Gordon is laughing at her. She hates him laughing at her. She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her blue floral dress and looks around. There’s only them and a man holding hands with a little boy in red dungarees on the other side of the hall. The boy is staring at Gordon and picking his nose with his pinky. The man is checking his phone.

Behind Gordon there’s a clunk and a revving and a whirring. He adjusts his position on the large fluorescent pink trolley suitcase. His jaw tightens. He puts his hands on his hips. Plants his feet hip-distance apart on the floor of the carousel. He and the bag move off. A jolt first. Then an increase in speed, and a steadying. As he passes her, his pale blue eye stands on hers. Out on a wheaten stalk.

Did I mention he has just the one eye?

Paris was a mistake. Paris is always a mistake. But they go anyway. For birthdays. For their anniversary. And for every Black Moon. He throws armfuls of leaves at squirrels in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and howls like a wolf. He sits down on the pavement in La Huchette, takes his shoes off, and plays piano with his bare toes along the tarmac. He does handstands in the hydraulic lift in the Louvre and pockets the euros the tourists tuck under his thin spread fingers. He does a headstand in front of the Mona Lisa. We need to talk, she says to his upside down form. We are unaligned, undetermined. We can’t go on like this. He spins three full revolutions and folds back onto his feet. Takes her arm. Kisses her elbow. Pulls a new Hermes scarf out of her ear. They eat escargots in Café de Mars. He makes her an anklet out of the shells.

Her crotch itches. Candida. Always after Paris. And they haven’t even made it home yet. You should go commando style, he says, if he catches her hand creeping her groin. He is heading towards the black curtain flaps where he’ll burst out of sight for a few seconds. She rubs at her groin through the thick cotton of her dress.

She looks around for the security guards. No walkie talkies. No running feet. The airport is small, rural. It had been her idea to move out here. Parochial, Gordon always says. Properly Parochial. Only twenty people on the flight and the rest of them had hurried on, exiting with carry-on luggage only.

Daddy, the child shouts. I want to ride the carousel like that man! The man puts a hand over the child’s mouth. Whispers in his ear. Takes something out of his pocket and waves it in front of the boy’s face. Whatever it is, is on a heavy glinting chain. It swings back and forward in front of the child. The child’s face follows it. Tick tock. Tick tock.

He’s never told Harriet how he lost his eye. Or why the remaining one is stuck on the end of a wheaten stalk. In their twelve years together she has never asked. He bursts back into the hall through the black curtain flaps, still astride the pink trolley suitcase. He has lifted his legs up and is balancing just on his bum. He no longer has his shoes. His Union Jack socks are on his hands, aloft. The eye on the wheaten stalk swings and dips on the shuddering ride. She should buy yoghurt for the itch. There was no plain yoghurt in Paris. But then, nothing is plain in Paris. Nothing at all.

I wrote this piece off the back of the prompt ‘pepper’ in a café with a friend this morning.

exercise fiction writing

Raspberry Origami

Aye, he can do it alright. Practicing hour after hour in his mother’s bedroom mirror. The vanity mirror above the scrawl of lipsticks and powderpuffs and rusting rings and the jingling bangles tied together with a baby blue plastic crucifix.

He sits on the velveteen stool with its bandy legs, hunched forward, his face dead centre, steaming the mirror, lips pursed, a pout, a scrunch of his forehead, a deep inbreath, jaws tight, hands on hips, a further lean in, and brrrrrrrrrr. Blows the perfect potted raspberry. Again and again. Two minutes between each one. The two minutes break is important although he no longer remembers why.

He doesn’t tell the rest of them. The gang. Jesus they would kill him, not for the raspberries, they love the bloody raspberries, heh Kent, go on, look at the copper, rasp him, mate, rasp him! No they’d crucify him for the practising, the urging on of his facial facias, the vanity mirror, his thin boned hands on his thin boned hips.

‘What are you doing up there, Kent?’ His mother’s voice hovers up the stairwell, drifts into the bedroom. The words barely make it; his mother is tired.

‘You in my room again.’ It’s not a question.

‘I’m not, Mum.’ Kent stands up, shakes his head, and turns for the door. Takes a last look at the mirror and pulls his lips in over his teeth. Two new freckles above his lip. He searches for something to blot them out, finds a dried-up concealer stick and rubs it across his skin. Now he looks like he’s diseased. No tissues anywhere. He rubs at it with his sweater sleeve. Jumps down the stairs three at a time. Blows a raspberry at his school photo that’s pinned to the hall wall at a jaunty angle with a red tack.

Kent is fourteen. He has facial fluff and growing pains and feet that are too big for his legs and cheek bones born of angels. Kent is an only child of an only parent in the only house without a hedge in the only street without street lights in the only suburb without a bus or a train or even any hint of a promise of a levelling-up.

Other kids do fags like Kent does only. He picks up only and rolls it between his fingers, holds it up to his mouth, sucks, breathes in deep and coughs and splutters.

When Kent’s only mother is at work in the club she tells men to fuck off and tells women to keep their titties in their blouses there’ll be none of that round here. There’s no voice-hovering with these exhaltations. Titties and fuck offs are forbidden in the only house without a hedge, though, and Kent whines that it’s unfair and his mother says there’s nothing fair about this world now eat the bran flakes to keep your ‘tines rigorous.

Kent learnt the raspberries off his mother and his mother learnt origami off Youtube. The only street without buses is also the only street without the drone drops. Does his mother steal the coloured card that comes in packs of a hundred, ten sheets each of ten rainbow colours? There’s no money for meat so how come there’s money for origami paper and how does it arrive without the drones?

As it’s Sunday, and his mother isn’t working, they sit together in the room with the table, folding the thick clean-smelling card. Out in the street, there’s a drive-by shooting. The walls shiver and they turn their heads briefly to look through the lined shadows of the window security bars, then return to the folding, eyes down, nails carefully scrubbed and trimmed. You have to respect the paper, his mother always says. Clean hands make mean origami.

Pink flapping cranes pop out of Kent’s hands and stalk across the broken television and step down the piles of old music magazines. The cranes do not have eyes but they see, Kent is sure of it.

Bethany, Kent’s mother, sits on the floor, her legs long, her eyes crossed, her fingers deft and magic. She twists orange dragons and green wizards and glorious bulbous crimson toads. She uses the wrong coloured card for the right kind of mystery and blows a raspberry at Kent for every finished creature.

Kent folds a kitten out of brown card that will lie on his hard pillow behind his head at night and purr and purr and purr as Kent hides his heart from the livid bloody blasts that rampage across the night city.

The tap tap tap at the window is all yellow beak and irridescent feathers. Small. Persistent. Bethany looks up at the bird and back to the dove taking shape in her hands. She hasn’t seen a live bird in months. Not since Kent’s birthday. Even then, she’d only caught the shadow, and afterwards, had doubted she’d seen anything live at all.

‘Look, love,’ she says to Kent. ‘The poor wee thing is blowing raspberries.’

This piece was from a two word prompt exercise: raspberries and origami.

exercise writing

Greyfriars Bobby

In this constraint writing exercise I typed out the first chapter of Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson, but removed all the sentences that did not start with ‘he’ or ‘Bobby’. The purpose of the exercise is to consider sentence structures, and how we might vary them. While removing many of the sentences changes the meaning of the original text, and in this case, results in a loss of whole scenes, it is still possible to understand the gist of the story.

He was only a little country dog – the very youngest and smallest and shaggiest of Skye terriers – bred on a heathery slope of the Pentland hills, where the loudest sound was the bark of a collie or the tinkle of a sheep bell. Bobby had heard it many times, and he never failed to yelp a sharp protest at the outrage to his ears: but as the gunshot was always followed by a certain happy event, it started in his active little mind a train of pleasant associations. Bobby knew, as well as any man, that it was the dinner hour. He did not know the face of death and, a merry little ruffian of a terrier, he was ready for any adventure.

He had learned that by bitter experience. He could go no farther himself, but the laddies took up the pursuit, yelling like Highland clans of old in a foray across the border. Bobby dashed back, barking furiously, in pure exuberance of spirits. He tumbled gaily over grassy hummocks, frisked saucily around terrifying old mausoleums, wriggled under the most enticing of low set table tombs and sprawled exhausted but still happy and noisy at Auld Jock’s feet.

He learned that he might chase rabbits, squirrels, and moor fowl, and sea gulls and whaups that came up to feed in ploughed fields. He was no lady’s lapdog. Bobby had the leavings of a herring or a haddie; for a rough little Skye will eat anything from smoked fish to moor-fowl eggs, and he had the tidbit of a farthing bone to worry at his leisure.

He might have been carried to the distant farm and shut safely in the byre with the cows for the night, but for an incautious remark of the farmer. Bobby pricked his drop ears. He yelped at the crash of the gun, but it was another matter altogether that set his little heart to palpitating with alarm.

Bobby stood stock still for an instant.

Bobby forgot to dine that day, first in his distracted search, and then in his joy of finding his master. Bobby barked as if he would burst his lungs. He barked so long, so loud, and so furiously, running round and round the car and under it and yelping at every turn, that a latternly scullery maid opened a door and angrily bade him no to deave folk wi his blatterin. Bobby’s feathered tail drooped, but it still quivered, all ready to wag again at the slightest encouragement.

Tags exercises

exercise writing

Periodic snippets

She hadn’t meant to do it, hadn’t noticed that her feet had fed her into the church, into the dark stray mauve of the granite slabs, up the blotched red of the worn carpeted aisle between the pews, up to the coffin sat aloof on its wooden bier, but she opened the lid anyway, and in she climbed.

It wasn’t the first time she’d lied to him, but the strength of the lie, the sheer unadulterated outrage of it was a shock even to her on her first full day in the cellar of the convent, shackled.

The frog was not from here, not with those iridescent turquiose spots, the pearl pink toes, the foreign croak, but she wasn’t xenophobic, no sirree, and so she popped it into her mouth, and swallowed.

She was driving, one hand on the wheel, the other hand lipsticking, Trevor the toddler screaming in the back, the rain swimming across the windscreen, when they announced it on the radio, her husband George was born again.

exercise writing

Periodic Proverbs

Two writing exercises; one on periodic sentences and one on reworking a proverb.

Periodic Sentences

He stood under the tree, sheltering from the wind the rain his trammelled mind, and ate his shoe.

She passed through aisle after aisle, cat food for the seven plus, shampoo for nits and scales, she stared at her reflection in the coolers, she listened to the hum and throng, she frowned at the whines and shrieks of dragging toddlers, and then she saw it, tucked behind the pyramid of half-price sweetcorn, a home-made bomb.

He was only three, skipping down the pavement, his mother shouting on her phone, his sister playing hopskotch, when he accidently stepped on a crack, and disappeared.

Molly and Maureen were selling cockles and mussels from a wheelbarrow, singing Alive Alive O, hoiking their spits and hoisting their petticoats, when, from ten storeys above them, a thirteen tonne dragon fell.

From the upstairs bathroom window, little Tommy watched the little bird that went to sleep early and woke up early and flew down to the lawn and pecked up the little pink worm and hopped this way and that, and sang a little song and Tommy squinted his rogue eye, raised his catapult, and shot it.

Reworking a proverb

The early bird catches the worm.

If you push your way to the front, you’ll get what you want but folk will holler.

The starling is the woodpecker’s competitor and, with the collapse of the starling population, the woodpecker is making a comeback, especially in the morning on the birdfeeder.

Get up early to win.

Long sleepers are big losers.

Better the raucous ring of an alarm than a growling belly.

A rich man leaps like a salmon in the pink pools of dawn.

Late is slovenly, late is starving.

I’ll pick you up at six tomorrow morning, the Asda worm sale starts at seven and there’ll be dangerous queues.

The bird that goes to sleep early and wakes up early gets to the lawn first, gets the first worm and is never hungry, nor is he popular with his compatriots.