A day in mono

This continuing grey sky is getting us all down, here on the west coast. One effect is to merge the days into each other - we've not seen the sun since Tuesday - so that it's appalling to realise we're already at the middle of January. And I find it easy to take far too long to do things, so that it's become a habit that breakfast seems to segue effortlessly into elevenses without my having accomplished anything other than to get dressed ... life is already too short for such complacent squandering of it.

I tried to atone for lost time by doing some more work on the poetry workshop material; one of the poems I'm considering is nowhere to be found online and indeed is only in one anthology I possess, a school text book called (all in lower-case sans serif font) modern poems understood, published in 1965. The poet, Hilary Corke, was a lecturer in the English Department of Edinburgh University for a time, though his roots were unequivocally English, and he was unrepresented in any other collection I came across. This particular poem, however, was beloved of my pupils, containing as it does some powerful figurative language that spoke to them in such a way as to be useful for their own formation; it is still beloved by me because even after all these years lines and phrases from it still leap into my head at unexpected moments. Anyway, I had to type it out for the slide, and proof-read it before the struggle to get it all to fit in two columns on a single slide ...

Other than that, we went out in the drizzle in mid-afternoon, through the deserted streets and down to the West Bay where the only people out seemed to be either dog-walkers or child-entertainers. That's where I took this photo that looks at first glance like a pocket-shot; look carefully and you'll see the Gantocks light where once PS Waverley went ashore on the rocks and had to be hauled off by a US Navy tug. We got very wet, despite the seemingly innocuous nature of the rain.

This evening we watched the Oliver Stone documentary on the plot to assassinate Kennedy. I'm gobsmacked. Wonder if the whole story will ever be known - or will it remain unsolved till the end of history?