Fings Ain´t Wot They Used To Be.

Friday the 13th has come and gone and I´m still standing!! Hooray!
Not, of course, that I´m the least bit superstitious.
But I will say that I have this odd tendency to look behind me when I say that.
I reach for the salt and hurl some over my left shoulder and cross my fingers and the like.
After all, you never know, do you?
And it´s always best to cover all eventualities, isn´t it?
That´s what I say.

And now the best part of Saint Valentine´s Day has gone, too.
I got a huge card,a dozen long-stemmed red roses and a bottle of perfume.

And if you believed that, you´ll believe anything!
Well, I got a card, at least.

Oh, how things were once in days of yore!
Then there was passion!
No wearing of winter vests or hugging of hot water bottles in bed!

Besotted Lover.

You´re the one I want to marry
Come on, darling! Please don´t tarry.
For you a torch I´ll always carry!

You´re my sweetheart, you´re my petal
One look from you heats up my kettle
In your arms for life I´ll settle.

You´ll always be my hometown hero
I´d burn down Rome if you were Nero
You´re 12 on a scale of 10 to zero.

For me, you are the missing link!
I know you´ll dress me all in mink.
So let´s make love then champagne drink!

Those were the days.

Yippeee!!!!

After being told by an English friend who´d looked at the blog that they couldn´t comment because they didn´t understand the Swedish, I determined to hunt down a way of changing the language. And guess what? I have!! Aren´t I the clever one? I´ll become IT-literate soon if I´m not careful.

I wrote this a while back before I`d ever heared of Blog, URL or WYSIWYG.

It was the norm in days of yore
To speak of ghosts and blood and gore.
To stay bad luck, your fingers crossed
You said a prayer or salt you tossed.

But times they change and habits, too
The cyberworld craves more from you.
It´s not enough to step aside
To sign a cross, from danger hide.

The Email God demands a tithe
In language crisp yet tone so blithe.
For every mail that you receive
To cyberspace more you must heave.

The same it is with Internet
You learn, but greater grows your debt.
Each time you surf a hyperlink
You bow to Google or you sink.

Technology now takes its toll
Mozilla Firefox owns your soul.
Before you phone or go online
You kiss your hardware, make it shine.

You customize PC and cell
For if you don´t - your life is Hell!
Obey your Server! Pay his Fee!
To Microsoft now bend your knee!

Don´t do this and you´re in peril
" THEY´LL" exact a vengeance feral!!

With that pleasant thought, I bid you all good evening.

Chris

Fancy A Read?

Apart from trying to sort this blog( a time consuming task for the non-IT initiated), I´ve been doing quite a bit of reading. It struck me that maybe I´m reading stuff that you don´t know about and that you might find interesting.

Hence the following list:

RJ Ellory Ghost Heart

Jason Webster Guerra

Jude Morgan Passion

Kate Hickson Courtesans


I´m still in the process of reading the Jude Morgan book. All the above are (I think) Brilliant.

Two Swedish authors who are great:

Henning Mankell whose most famous creation, Inspector Kurt Wallander, appeared in a recent BBC (?) TV 3-week series. The last book I read of his was The Man Who Smiled.

Vilhelm Moberg is an older writer and wrote his series of 4 books beginning with
The Emigrants in the 1950s. It´s about a poor family emigrating to America in the 1850s. It was made into a film for Swedish TV in the 70s with Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow. I cut my Swedish Language teeth on these books and although it was very hard work for me, I simply had to plough on as the story was so compelling.

Other books, which I read last autumn, but thought I´d bung in here as great reads are:

Kazuo Ishiguru Never Let Me Go

Arturo Perez-Reverte The Flanders Panel
Queen of the South
( This writer lives in Catagena)

Ann Widdecomb An Act of Treachery

( She´s written a sequel to this but I can´t remember the title).

I actually wrote this blog very carefully, giving a potted story outline of the books then forgot to save it before viewing the blog!! (The air was alive with the sounds of cursing rather than music).

Anyway, there you are. Happy reading.

If any of you have good- read titles, puttem on the TWC blog.

See you

Chris

Blog - itis.

In the Writers´group yesterday, I was advised to set up a blog of my own. I have spent several frustrating but entertaining hours doing just that. It´s really been hit and miss - some things have worked, others just haven´t. A Garfield gadget I wanted to add had ERROR written all over it, a Shakespeare quotation gadget was BROKEN (!!), and however I tried to customise my local live weather, it just wouldn´t change from New York.

So I went out for a bit to clear away my irritation. The summer market at Campoamor has moved to the paseo behind the Playa Flamenca Strip and has only been going for a couple of weeks.The traders were still setting up when I arrived at 10 o´clock. They would have been trading for much longer if it had been summertime but it is, after all, early February, and the weather today, although sunny, is much chillier than it was yesterday .

There were lots of fresh vegetables and fruit, including huge strawberries and cherries but at a price so I stuck to the usual mandarins and pears and will wait till later in the season. To my delight, I found a stall with an English lady selling sweet and savoury pies and bought steak and kidney, steak and ale, chicken and mushroom, and even apple crumble and rhubarb. Eating one of her delicious sausage rolls, I ambled off to the car and back once more to the blog.

I realised, reading my post from yesterday, that I had spelt blog the Swedish way with a double g and also that the date of the blog is in Swedish.
All this is down to:

a) My years in Sweden and the language leaking through into English

and

b) The fact that my computer software is Swedish and I can´t always change the language settings.

I´ve had enough for today wrestling with Google so I´m going of to have a soothing coffee. I´ll have to get a bit of help from the cavalry to sort out my bloggy gliches so I´ll close now with the following:

Eulogy to the Costa Blanca.

Costa Blanca sun so bright,
How I love you, day and night!
Sitting at a seaside bar
With some friends I have a jar.

In the daytime toast both sides
Watch the flags for dangerous tides.
Eat paella, sip some wine,
Snooze until it´s time to dine.
How glad I am that I live here!
Churros, olives, ice cold beer!

My life down here is one big high
I don´t feel blue, I rarely sigh.
The only thing I wish I´d done
Is retired sooner to the sun.

Another Lovely Costa Day

Woke up to my favourite weekday - Wednesday. It´s the day I go to the Torrevieja Writers´Group, of which I´ve been a member for several years.
There were quite a few of us today and it can be a problem to get round all the members and hear what they´ve written. We spent the first hour doing that - today there were more poems than usual. Most people write short stories or are in the throes of a novel and some write articles of different kinds.
I started writing first when I moved to Spain in 2002 and mostly wrote short stories to start off. I then was hit by the poetry bug and write short, sometimes comic, poems. My poems rhyme and I say that with no shame at all.I sometimes have the impression that rhyming poetry is regarded as not quite the thing - as if you´ve really shown an appalling lack of good taste. Ho Hum!
Anyway I read out a couple of short prose pieces and then one of my poems, which I´ll post in a tick. We also had a speaker today, Penny Legg, who has written all kinds of articles in magazines all over the world. I felt quite exhausted listening to her achievments and wished I had a bit of her energy.
It´s actually due to her that I´ve started a blogg. She advised me to start one of my own after reading some stuff I´d posted on the Torrevieja Writers´circle´s own blogg.
Well, this is the poem I wrote for today:

Housewife´s Revolt.

I really don´t feel
Like a 3-course meal
Meat to roast and veggies to peel.

To be quite honest, I´d like a snack
Simple and easy -- no steak to whack.
A soft-boiled egg and a piece of toast
Is what I really fancy most.

So I´ll send the kids to the Pizza Hut
Where they can have an unsupervised gut.
I´ll stay at home and won´t have to cook
Enjoying my egg and reading a book.

After the group finished I came home and joined my husband for a drive out to a bar overlooking the sea where we had a glass of wine and some tapas.
Another Costa day draws to a close.