Tag Archives: books

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Thoughts about Thursdays

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I have been posting something on this blog on Thursdays for longer than I care to remember. I’m not sure how I picked the day. Perhaps it picked itself.

In this post I am thinking about Thursdays in literature, Thursdays I remember and Thursdays in the Church calendar.

In the literature with which I am most familiar there is the Nursery Rhyme in which ‘Thursday’s child has far to go’. G K Chesterton wrote a book entitled The Man who was Thursday: A Nightmare. Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy couldn’t get the hang of Thursdays. Thursday Next is a character in a series of books by Jasper Fforde. On Twitter, which is a haunt of writers if not a source of great literature, #ThursdayThoughts and #ThursdayMotivation may encourage those five days a week workers, who need a boost before Friday.

The Thursdays I particularly remember are ones where train travel went wrong. Years ago there were two Thursdays in a row when this happened to me travelling with my children. On one occasion we had to leave the train at an unfamiliar station in South London and decided to continue our journey by bus. It took at least an hour longer. Fortunately it was on a day out and not a journey with luggage for a holiday. As far as I recall it was the following Thursday that the express train we were travelling home on was delayed by a broken-down train ahead of us. These are relatively minor inconveniences.

Thursdays have often been a busy day for me. There is an opportunity to socialise in the morning. For many years there was a prayer meeting in the afternoon. Sadly that has not restarted since the lockdowns for Covid-19.

Maundy Thursday is the first of two days in the Church calendar, which are always on a Thursday. (The other is Ascension Day.) I have mentioned Maundy Thursday in a number of earlier blogposts: Palm Sunday, and three of my posts for the Blogging from A to Z in April Challenge in 2020 when my theme was Easter, Letter H, Letter I and Letter W.

On Maundy Thursday one year hubby and I were delayed on a train journey. As the delayed train we were travelling on pulled into the station where we had to change trains we saw the train we should have been able to catch set off without us. As there is an hourly service on that route, that was our delay. Fortunately it was a lovely sunny spring day and we enjoyed sitting in the fresh air watching trains.

This year Maundy Thursday is on 6th April. I will be spoilt for choice with a coffee morning, an organ recital in the afternoon by our organist and choirmaster, and a service in the evening. I may not manage all three! I am publishing this post in advance due to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge beginning on 1 April.

How do you feel about Thursdays?

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How do you know what to write?

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At a Christmas party a young man asked me, ‘How do you know what to write?’

My quick reply was, ‘I write book reviews’. Another friend said, ‘She writes poetry too.’

Round the turn of the year I ran out of book reviews and haven’t any poems I wish to share at present. My two most recent posts have been summaries or roundups. This one is attempting to answer the question I was asked.

Scrolling through Twitter, questions sometimes appear. Someone was asking for book recommendations about the Lake District. I realised that I have read and reviewed dozens of books either about the Lake District or written by authors living in the area.

I decided that a page collecting all these together might be useful. Pages on blogs do not appear in the WordPress reader, so this post is to introduce you to my pages. They appear in the menu for this blog, but that is more easily spotted on a computer than on a mobile device.

Here are links to my pages (and some more information below the links):

My A to Z Challenge 2013 used alliteration and linked to passages in the Bible. In 2021 I picked important words from the Bible for each letter. (Space did not permit longer titles in my menu.) I already have an idea for some very short posts for the 2023 A to Z Challenge.

I have recently overhauled my pages, checking that all the books I have reviewed appear in the Author Indexes, and editing a post, which had broken links. It is possible I have missed a few posts from my contents list. If you do find anything not quite right, please let me know. One or two authors appeared in the wrong place alphabetically!

I enjoyed reminding myself about some books I had read, but not thought about recently.

If you are a blogger, do you use pages? In my opinion every blog should have an About and a Contact page. Any other pages are at the discretion of the blogger.

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Paint chip villanelle

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This week’s prompt from Linda Kruschke is for a villanelle.

The definition in the poetry dictionary Linda is using for these prompts is very long. Do read her post for the definition, colours and the poem she has written as well as links to other villanelles.

She writes:

‘My challenge to you today is to write a villanelle with octosyllabics. I’m a big fan of the eight-syllable line. You may, as John Drury mentions later in the definition, alter the exact wording of your refrains if you choose. I think the original theme of country people has long since been left by the wayside, so I don’t expect you to follow that part of the definition, but you can if you want to. Just remember that you had better really like your first and third lines because you’ll be repeating them.

‘My tip for you, as you write a poem in this interesting form, is to write the following rhyme/refrain scheme down the margin of your paper to help you keep track. A1/b/A2, a/b/A1, a/b/A2, a/b/A1, a/b/A2, a/b/A1/A2.

‘The paint chip words and phrases you have to work with in crafting your villanelle are marigold, ice cap, deep-sea vent, Earl Grey, porcelain, elephant, and euphoria.

‘I would like you to use at least three of these paint chips in your poem. You can also use your own descriptive words for the colors of the paint chips. For example, you might think marigold looks more like day lily or summer sun. I mean, what fun is it to have colors as part of the chips and not get to play with those too?’

How to be Well-versed in Poetry
How to be Well-versed in Poetry

For this challenge I have written my second poem about Earl Grey. My first poem was dramatic monologue.

I found an entertaining villanelle consisting of instructions for writing one in the book, How to be well-versed in poetry, which I mentioned previously.

Tea-drinking villanelle

Bergamot in tea pleased Earl Grey
When the weather was ice-cap cold
(Tea’s best from fired porcelain clay)

Or on a glorious summer’s day
When the sun set like marigold
Bergamot in tea pleased Earl Grey.

Some add milk or sugar; say
Whether you drink it hot or cold!
(Tea’s best from fired porcelain clay)

Others add lemon or ice – hey!
Not the fashion in days of old.
Bergamot in tea pleased Earl Grey,

Remembered for it to this day,
But how he drank it we’re not told –
Tea’s best from fired porcelain clay.

I take my tea decaffeina-
ted sooner than it might go cold.
Bergamot in tea pleased Earl Grey;
Tea’s best from fired porcelain clay.