Beyond these four walls...

There is a risk sometimes that working mostly from home might lead gently into a domestic rut.  Although I go to school two days a week, the other five still contain that blissful combination of central heating and a fridge, so I have to make an effort occasionally to break away from the village and its easy access to highly-calorific food and visit the outside world.  So successful was this effort last weekend that I went out not once but twice!

On Saturday, I attended a wonderful poetry dayschool with the amazing Jenny Lewis.  The focus for this dayschool was myth and magic, and as a starting point, we looked at a poem by David Harsent, 'The hare as witch animal'. You can find a recording of Harsent reading it, and the text, here.  Some of those attending found the poem distasteful, but I think the language used in wonderful and the concepts within it more supernatural than gross.  Better still, the discussion of myth and fairy-tale that we had, combined with thinking about Harsent's poem, triggered the first drafts for four poems; considering that I've had a bit of a dry spell poetry-wise since August, this was particularly gratifying.

And then on Sunday, it was back to Oxford again, this time to the Hogacre Common Harvest Festival.  The weather was perfect, especially for October, and there was a strong community feeling to the event.  We have events here in the village with a similar feel, but although we have our sports and social club with licesnsed bar and hall available for rent, the outdoor space next to it is the playing field, rather than a lightly overgrown field, and we don't, to my knowledge, have bee hives.  During the time we were there, two different bands played, there was a stall selling vegetables and we got the chance to watch someone pole-lathing.  A couple of brave people had a go at operating the machinery themselves but as with so many of these older skills, it's harder than it looks.

In the meantime, I've been tagged for the Next Big Thing meme. In theory, the deadline is tomorrow; I wonder how serious that is?