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DAILY PROMPT: Everything I know about his/her body in 6 minutes

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 She weighs 39 kilograms and is 1.6 metres tall. Her skin is pale but not totally because there are areas that rarely feel soap or water. Those patches, beyond her cuffs, collars and hems, are grubby, grey and would benefit from a brillo pad scrub. Her toes have wide spaces between them where there should be some flesh with nails growing at odd angles and screaming for attention by thrusting themselves against her socks, drilling holes. She has long hairs on her legs, probably Mother Nature’s attempt to keep her warm in the absence of subcutaneous fat. Her buttocks are concave, her rib cage hangs over her lower body and we can’t resist counting, just to check that the numbers of pairs are as we have been led to believe. Her breasts have dropped back to pre-puberty but with dark hairs around her nipples. The beauty therapist has waxed away every strand from her underarms leaving red sore areas. Her complexion is acneed and the circles like twin black eyes threaten to paint themselves down her entire cheeks.

DAILY PROMPT: Finish the sentence, “I can tell you about…,” as many different ways as you can. 6 minutes

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I can tell you about me, people, kids, dogs, Exeter, Devon, books, chocolate, England, therapy, plants, beads, jewellery, dogs, art, travel in India, Nigeria, love, talking, anger, tears, pain, death, birth, still birth, cheese, fabric, fruit, food, rain, water, fish, fairy tales, visual impairment, autism, music, maps, where places are, skin, hair, asthma, polymer clay, being vegetarian, taking photos, facebook.

Day the fourth

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Well that last blog was a bit of a cop out because I wrote it ages ago. I felt I had to blog something but couldn’t think what and I guess I always wanted that piece to be ‘out there’ so why not here and now?

Yesterdays warble about the office window caused a bit of a stir when the returned retiree read it. Of course he had to comment, he told me to go forth, we had considerable fun at each others expense and so did a couple of our colleagues. It brightened up a very slow day at the end of a slow week when our systems have been down.

Borneo was my first attempt at travel writing despite a nice amount of travel in slightly unusual places. Like a million others, I would love to travel write seriously. I’m sure the world needs a middle aged adventure traveller, to do a telly series aimed at silver topped gappers. And think how beneficial it would be for tourism in Mali, if I inspired a huge increase in visits by well heeled seekers, to their stunning country. Mali is my ultimate dream destination. I first heard the name Timbuktu, Timbuctoo, Tombouctou as a small girl when it was short for the ends of the earth, about as remote from anything or any place as it was possible to go. Back then I had no concept of what it may be like,  but it sounded magical and still does. I need to go there, and to Djenne, Mopti and Bamako. I also need to go to the Ethiopian highlands and the Namib and strangely the £15k or so that would make that happen seems to be missing. So far, the tourist boards of those wonderful countries have failed to see how powerful an investment it would be to invite me!

The Queen wore yellow

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So Queenie went to Ireland this week. The Queen is a lady that is there for looking at. Day after day she travels the world so that we, the people can look at her. I’ve looked at her twice. Once as a young child I was taken to the bottom of the road to look at her as she passed. We were all there, hoards of council house kids, to wait for a huge, shiny car. I was bemused, I knew that Queens were very important people and we were supposed to curtsey. When the car drew closer I was vaguely aware that a yellow hat was there, and then, and then . . . I gathered my full, knee length skirt into wings, looked down,  and slowly bent my knee.  Rising upwards, still very slowly as practiced, I just spotted . . . the back of a yellow hat, as the car wheeled on down the road. At six years old, that was my look at Queenie.

The next forty years flew by in a whiz of not looking at Queenie, except on the telly where she often wore yellow. Daffodil, primrose, lemon, mustard – English of course, sunshine and acid. With never more than a linear foot of leg showing at the hem of her signature dress and coat, hands gloved in white, and a head and neck shaped cubic foot of person, showing between collar and hat.

The barriers were up outside the railway station. Queenie and her Royal Train would arrive at 11am so I could choose between leaving my office building across the road to ‘look at the Queen’, or, sit at my desk and work. Of course I couldn’t resist seeing if she matched the sunshine, so off I went to stand behind the barrier with the rest of the huge crowd of twenty. Now in those four spent decades we had both got older Queenie and I, and there was even less chance that she would recognise me and wave, without her specs. I squinted across the forecourt at a flash of yellow that scooted from door to car. She may be a lady for looking at, but I didn’t have my specs either.

Or not so lucid

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as the case may be. That remains to be seen.Well, here I am in the mire having submitted the final assignment of an Open University module, A363 Advanced Creative Writing which means that I am half way to my degree and can claim the Diploma in Creative Writing. ‘What next?’ I posted as my Facebook status and a reply came from Rachel that I should keep on writing, join Friday Flash and start a blog. I have fiddled with the idea of a blog before, and lost patience with the process, but the wonderful WordPress.com is very user friendly. So this is my opportunity to write creatively instead of writing box tickingly Is that a word? It is now, I’m writing exactly what I want! And there’s one of the dreaded exclamation marks.

It really is what now for me, I seem to have scrawled three chapters of my first novel but have no idea where I’m going with it.  Of course it’s discipline that I lack, and it’s precisely that I need to improve.