With the dampness lately, we’ve had a lot of midges. Too many. And with the warmth, we’ve had bigger insects around here in recent years than i’d seen in this country before.
This (autobiographically-inspired) bit of doggerel would be chanted to accompany playground prancing, say, or a clapping game.
THE MOSQUITO SKIPPING RHYME
© 2009 mmSeason
Mozzie, mozzie, buzzing round –
Think this is a feast you’ve found?
Mozzie, mozzie, taunting us,
Making folks exclaim and cuss!
Mozzie, mozzie, you can’t sneer –
You should not have come in here.
Mozzie, mozzie, snigger not:
I’ve a book with which to swat!
Mozzie, mozzie on my wall,
Which way will your body fall?
Mozzie, mozzie in my tea –
Struggling will not soften me.
Mozzie, mozzie on my finger,
T’flick away I shall not linger…
Mozzie, mozzie, now compost:
I’ll forget your humming ghost.
…
Mozzie, mozzie had to win!
You’ve left us with itchy skin!
… until the Bill Hussey review is ready to go.
Both of these were taken about a week ago, in that lovely summer weather we were having.
Bees, apparently, keep wiggling when on a flower in order to dislodge the pollen. They do it on purpose, which may be clever but isn’t fair – if you’re a photographer. Especially one of us amateur types without the fancy lenses and shutter speeds. On DAB Photography Online i’ve just found a pertinent tip: to spray a sugary solution onto the plant. That should keep a bee interested just long enough to photograph her.
Insects in general are not well known as good sitters, so altogether i feel very lucky to have got these shots a couple of weeks ago.
Funny how the colours come out differently with the angle the camera’s at. I know it’s not funny, but it amuses me anyway.
This is one of the whites, but if you can properly identify it i’d love you to let me know in a comment.
Here’s a closer look if it helps:
And this is my favourite of the pictures (twelve in all!) that i took.
But i’m neither a photographer nor an entomologist, and am in awe of the winners of the UK Butterflies 2008 Photography Competition.
BETTER THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU GIVE UP
Last week, i mentioned the phenomenon of an audience (for which read viewer, listener, reader, and other alternatives) getting a completely different message from a piece of work than what the author (artist, speaker) thought they were conveying.
For me, this is one part of how art works. The genesis of an idea may be in one place but its realisation arrives somewhere else, and carries each reader to another destination. If those readers are also writers, lo and behold your story becomes someone else’s idea’s genesis and so the circle of life continues.
Happy accidents become part of and improve the creating, and more of them are part of and improve the reception of the work.
The immature creator feels they have failed if they haven’t represented their original concept accurately. The child bewails their ‘wasted effort’ if the colours on their paper come out not quite like the swirl of shades in the real sky. Then you grow up and realise that this is the point, in fact. What it’s actually like is already out there. What you need to produce is your own take on it, which will be unique because you are.
This makes me happy.
Apart from being the whole point, it’s inescapable. And apart from being inescapable, it’s fun. I can illustrate this with an incident from real life.
I had a single taste of commercial success in my teens. It wasn’t commercial, but it tasted like it. Not counting the school magazine and the occasion when i was seven and the local paper printed a letter about my budgie, i hadn’t submitted my writing anywhere (so at least i didn’t know the flavour of rejection either). I’d been on stage as a consequence of doing ballet lessons – and there was the time i was on the tv news cos i’d had my picture taken with a police horse – but otherwise i hadn’t come across fame. So this let me know what it might feel like, if it happened.
I was the kid who wrote the long stories, the ten-page marathons when everyone else was producing a few paragraphs. Unlike some young writers, i was too shy to show them so most of the time no one but Mrs M, the English teacher, saw them.
Some people find themselves attracted only to those who are already in a committed relationship. Knowing a guy’s hitched (it seems to be mainly heterosexual women that have this problem) makes him instantly more desirable; finding he’s available turns him boring.
I have never suffered in this way so I pass no judgement. I like to think I wouldn’t act on the wish, but what if you never got the hots for anyone single…? I’m not getting into the ethics, just observing that for some, this is how it is.
I’ve always been glad that’s not how it is for me.
But a Truth struck me about myself. In romance, I’m off that particular hook but in writing – aaagh. I only noticed the other day but I realise it has been so all my life.
A friend and I were talking about colours and the wide range of associations they have. They affect mood; they relate to the chakras; some form an international language of warning (eg traffic lights); and all that other stuff. Plus the physics of the spectrum, of course. My friend mentioned that for years she’d had an idle feeling she would one day put together a book with a chapter for each colour, covering every single aspect – since even with all the books that exist on the subject, none takes in all of it; some are more New Agey and some more sociological and so on.
The idea stuck in my head. I have found myself planning a rough outline. So far I’ve resisted putting anything on paper and I’m certain it’s not a project I will ever follow through. But I realised: the thing that lifts this possible above the morass of maybes is the fact that another person has given it serious thought.
In other words, the idea is hers and that in itself makes me want to make it my own.
It’s well known that a creative writing tutor can give a title to a class of twenty and the next week will receive twenty completely different pieces of work. This takes the immoral edge off my impulse: even if I did use that idea, the book I produced would not be anywhere near the same as my friend’s. Does that let me off?
Next time someone asks me where I get my ideas, I’ll know what to reply. At least in some cases – I nick ‘em. You?
RSS - Posts
