AUTUMN LEAVES

I love shuffling through the dead leaves that gather in clumps on pathways; the rustling is so soothing and it brings back memories of childhood when it was a forbidden pleasure because of the risk of dirtying new shoes. Now my adult foot revives those times - clad in my day-old purple footware.  Purple? Oh yes - something else I could not have as they were unobtainable after the war. I just had to buy them now.
PS I did clean my shoes afterwards in case of ash disease.

Oh that lovely purple shoe!

WRAPPED CUCUMBERS

I like cucumbers, their fresh smell, their deep green, the fact they are good for you in all manner of  gentle cucumbery ways. In fact, they are COOL. Yet I hate the way the distributers wrap them in tough plastic coverings, enclosing their delicate slender bodies in unbeathing man-made substances, causing them suffering and me wounded fingers. How do you get these coats off without slicing down their length, cutting into the vegetable and chopping at the hand holding the thing in place? Answers on the back of a postage stamp please!

FLU JAB

I LOVE having my flu jab and can't wait till tomorrow for it. I even like the process: the orderly long queue four-deep outside the surgery an hour early; the smell of antiseptic and the motherly face of the nurse whose expression says, unnecessarily in my case of course, "Come on, be brave!" Most of all I enjoy thinking of us as a band of soldiers fighting those horrid little viruses which plot to lay us low in our beds coughing and suffering.  Swine flu, bird flu - I defy you and your works and hold out my arm in readiness.

FROM HAMLET

Wearing my other hat as a poet, I sometimes like to take a quotation and build on it. Here is a short one derived from Hamlet's teasing of Polonius about the shape of clouds:

SKY-GAZING
Methinks it is not like a weasel;
                  methinks that a cloud is a cloud.
Let poets, priests, lovers and madmen
                  deem that fell death be not proud
and declare he shall have no dominion.
                  Methinks that a shroud is a shroud.

For my analysis of the play, wearing yet another hat visit: http://www.classicsenglishliterature.com