The first ever Gloucester Poetry Festival is almost upon us - Saturday (21st Oct 2017) sees events starting off with an extra special Food for Thoughts at the Cafe Rene 2-5 pm. This is followed by the Gloucester Waterstones Villanelles on Sunday 2-4 pm complete with Poetry Roulette and me co-hosting!
Then on Thursday the Festival proper begins with a plethora of events 🙂 So check it out!
And then of course there is the really exciting news! The Gloucester Societies first ever poetry collection has arrived and is a gorgeous book!
Copies of Poetry Without Pretension will be at all the festival events and are also purchasable from my publishing group The WigglyPet Press.
Poetry pouches containing limited edition Poetry Festival 2017 badges will also be being given out at events until we run out!
Monday night I inflicted my childrens poetry on an audience in the Waterstones Cheltenham as part of the Villanelles series run by The Gloucester Poetry Society.
This beautiful photo of the reading was taken by Kurt Schroeder Photography which is a challenge as I can't really do flash photography and the light levels were poor!
The The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry has been getting out and about again - Last weekend saw me take the baby yeti (Alaric) to Cheltenham Library along with El Nosy Rat for the Fun Palaces Event.
It's interesting to note that the outfit Alaric is wearing is the reason there is a poem with the line "One Daddy dressed as a Yeti" in it and now he puts the outfit on for the poetry readings! It was originally made for a Yeti Hunt when we first started up the Cranham Scouting sections 🙂
At the poetry readings he is a naughty baby yeti who is also very shy and has a habit of hiding until the children call him to come out! This time the baby yeti stole Jean's shoes! When I took him to the climbing wall he kept hanging upside down! That baby YETI!
El Nosy Rat also features in one of the poems which he is a bit disgruntled about as it feels it gives rats a bad name! He is a relatively new member of the performance team and is also known as Ratty The Plague Rat/Black Death Rat when he comes out on Cuddly Science outings 🙂
He is a big hit with the kids and talks with a bit of an Eastend twang. In the photo above he his holding on of the lovely cloth patches of the Mummy Eating Cherry Pie (one of the poems and illustrations from the book). I had these made last year and they are in some of my surprise pouches! These were made by White Wizard Purple Elf who also made Jean's beautiful dark fairy hoody. Talking of surprise pouches I did kind of forget I they were also glitter bombs so covered the Children's Library in glitter 0.o
Last year I also spent ages tracing some of the pictures from the book so that I could turn them into black and white colouring sheets. The idea is that eventually all the illustrations will be up for free down load and maybe even as an actual colouring book. I tend to be a bit slow going with this as I do a little bit every September and October. But it did mean that this year I had lots of pictures ready for digital clean up and conversion to colouring in sheets 🙂
I am steadily popping them all on WigglyPets Press - including the older ones I made which have some colour traits like the pumpkin outlines being orange 🙂
There are still quiet a few to be traced and scanned still but that along with new audio files will have to await my new computer!
And talking of audio files don't forget you can listen to the poems on my bandcamp though it is still missing it's story and song to be a proper collection 🙂
Or you can watch a much younger Jeany reading the poems and a baby Mary trying to join in 🙂
I only have about 20 of my original print run left, after they have gone the book will be a more expensive print on demand thing on Amazon. And a second volume is also wending it's way to completion 🙂
But that will be a tale for another year!
But before I leave you I shall explain why it is the Spoogy book and not a Spooky book - when she was 4 yrs old Jean asked me if we could make a poetry book for halloween and so we did about topics she picked... that book was all hand drawn and written and did not contain all ten poems that later appeared in The Little Book it also got a cup of water knocked over on it shortly after it's creation as Jean has it in her tray table next to her bed - the tray table where she was allowed her night time water as if it was spilt it would all stay in the tray!
The 4 yr old Jean could not say Spooky - 4 yr old Jean said Spoogy and the book was for her, I've been asked to change it for "proper" publication but the poems are what they are - first and for most for my kids and the Spoogy bit is an essential part of that. If you are interested here is the blog post from when I made the book back in 2009.
My poor too old to update laptop is once again thwarting me - Etsy is still not working (prob. due to laptop this time), Pinterest is shaky, LinkedIn is crippled, drawing programmes cause regular crashes, FB keeps balking, garageband is now not working and the speakers are crackling like they have half the Sahara in them :/ This is really frustrating as today was the day I was going to finish off the Spoogy Collection on Bandcamp i.e. finally upload the story and the song but that is a def. no go 🙁 Thanks to Patreon and working all the worky stuff I should be able to get a new desk top that can do the graphics and sound stuff in November but.... ARRRRG!
I'm actually pretty hacked off about this - the laptop still functions (bar the speakers which either have got something in them or are on their way out due to Mary liking My Little Pony Thrash Metal mashups and playing them loud and repeatedly in the mornings) but due to the way Apple work it is now obsolete and has been so for ages now. It is too old to get updates so though it works it steadily can't work as it can't support stuff anymore - you'd think this would only be a problem for the web stuff which indeed it is a big problem for - I am slowly watching everything not work quiet right, work a bit and then die or just not work in the first place. I have no GIF bar on FB, I can't have Pinterest buttons installed...
But actually I could get round most of that with my phone interface though it is perilously old now two and is getting to the edge of obsoletion too and that is a great shame because again it works fine!
However my frustration is the automatic updates mean that all the applications are slowly dying on my laptop - iTunes was the first to go, this meant that last year when I put the poetry up for The Book of Spoogy onto Bandcamp I had to do some techno wizardry to get the files I had already made out of iTunes and into a programme my computer could still use and then put it all up on Bandcamp - a simple job that I had already laid the ground work too thus was a complete nightmare and took ages. This year I can't even do that... there is no work arounds that me and Al can find this time - I just can't upload or record new things at the moment 🙁
To me this is horrendous, it is part of driving a wedge between the rich and poor (it is the Robots movie, it is iRobot (yes I know the film wasn't true to Asimov I think we'll be waiting a long time for such a film but I still look forward to it!) but it is also bad for the environment - it is forced obsoletion, it is taking tech and making it not work so that it has to be scrapped - this electronics with their increasingly rare metals making up their components and the chugging fume costs of the PCB factories. They are often sealed units so that when there is a hard ware failure they are almost impossible to fix....
If I was starting from scratch knowing what I know now - I would go Open Source I would go for some sort of UNIX thing... but I am content locked... my stuff is in apple programmes, and due to head injury stuff I kind of want to stick with stuff I know how to use. One good point about the apple stuff is I've always found them far more intuitive to use than Windows machines. I will I think try and have some sort of duel system going so I can wean myself from apple dependence but the next machine is still going to have to be some sort of Mac.
I am highly frustrated at the moment especially as it has basically taken me two years to save up with help (bitcoin yummiiness) for this damn new computer - I still have stuff stuck on an old out of date drive as well - but I had to choose between paying for data extraction on that and getting a new computer so I can continue to work. And that is another rub - there is potentially something we can do to the laptop to make it work nicely again but it might break the laptop and as it is currently my only computer that is most def. a no go. Once I have the desktop we can attempt to salvage the laptop and then I'll have a mobile computer again I can take to coffee shops and write ins and meetings and hackathons and so on - right now I don't really like moving it incase I drop the damn thing - this completely negates the point of it being a laptop!
Yes I've tried using tablets - even with external key boards I think my eyesight just isn't up to long data/word entries on such small screens.
Anyway - just finding the whole damn thing a little chaffing right now! There are so many projects that just need that final push and I can't do the final push because of tech problems!
Ok so seriously are there going to be any women who wouldn't be eligible to write "Me Too" on their statuses?
For those who don't know there is a Status meme and has tag going around social media to highlight the amount of sexual harassment and abuse that women get (including trans etc).
And there is a lot of it - especially if you include catcalling - that's kind of it as soon as you walk down a street on your own and as for public transport at night... I've lost count of the number of willies that have come out for a waggle. And these are not "serious" things, then there is crowd groping, the old rubby rubby which again are kind of hazards of travelling, followed by school yard bar pings and skirt lifts and then we are into the deathly serious rape area which if it hasn't happened to you tends to be a thing you fear will happen to you - hence all the special kits given out to female students when you start uni and the "rape" alarms put in the toilets in the student unions though obviously you aren't officially allowed to call them that though all the staff do. And why bus drivers give me warnings about which stops to get off at at night and so on.
There are reasons that we considered self defence to be a high priority to teach to our kids and that Jean knows protocols for being followed on her way home from school or being approached etc... and the issue doesn't end at us letting her out on her own - I am a small woman - last summer saw us being surrounded by teenage boys and having verbal sexual and horrible (mistaken) racial slurs thrown at us (shortly before they covered our van in shit). Initially they hadn't seen Alaric, and from a distance he is often mistaken as a women anyway and you can see peoples body language and aggression levels change when they realise he is a man and one who is not going to back down - interestingly it didn't even occur to me to report the intimidation and verbal abuse it was only because we called in to report the poo incident that it got reported.
But even when she was much younger we were getting catcalled resulting in me having to explain certain words to her.
When laid out bare like this it makes our society look pretty sick and ill at ease with itself and quiet frankly not very advanced.
Recently I discovered that some universities in this country only started admitting women in 1987 and that was protested at! I was six years old in a country being led by a female PM and a Queen - I still need to chase the facts up but between that and single mothers still forcefully having their babies removed in the 70's it is a rather slower march to equality than I had envisioned.
Bless her - I need to sort new ballet classes for Mary - she informs me her shoes are now too small so she can't practice in her room properly anymore and she wants to be really good when she goes back - main issue all the "schools" I've found seem obsessed with putting shows on which I don't think is a good attitude for ballet and certainly wasn't the attitude of the original class (one of the reasons we picked it).
We all loved the dance school at the Guild Hall but her orig ballet teacher had a baby and has moved to Bristol and that was before the summer :/ Am I being over cautious? Elderly ballet dancers I knew thought that pushing shows too early was bad news for proper technique.
The school the teacher recommended is in Cheltenham which seems a bit of a trek every week with everything else the kids get up too :/ Again part of the attraction of the orig class was I could walk to it if Alaric wasn't here, which I did several times. I was hoping the drama group would fill the gap but she still wants to ballet her little heart out and I often find her in her ballet outfit doing summersaults on the trampoline or lining her teddies up to show them how to dance.
I don't think she's talented as such, she's just a bouncy 6 yr old who happens to love ballet and has done since before she was out of nappies so I don't really want her to be getting stressed about shows but to be having fun and learning about her body and exercising in a way she truly has a passion for :/ I never did any of the dance malarky as a kid so am kind of wading about in unknown waters.
Books, Events and Outings, Poems, Wiggly Pets | sarah | 
Fri 20th Oct 2017 9:48 am | 
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