The Best Read Fish And Chips In Scotland

My father worked by writing words
before our age of cut and paste,
computers and the world wide web.
Hot metal presses processed him

and all he wrote, which he then left
to artisans to justify for readers
of the latest Late Edition, satisfied
that he had made them all he could,

dissatisfied that time did not permit
re-statement before those deadlines
hit the streets, his work troubling him.
My father’s words had clever ways,

now and again eluding every effort
to tame them through his hard labour
of breaking stories that could capture
flagging interests in bored commuters

crammed inside old trains and buses,
heaving with humanity heading home
at the end of dull and ordinary days,
looking for the answers to six across

or twelve down or being disappointed
at tonight’s television or not laughing
with the cartoon strip characters and
much too tired to care for columnists. 
.

"If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony."
~ Fernand Point

Singing Before Breakfast

One word at a time. No more, no less.
Looking for the genuine.
The real.
That thing, which some call truth.

There are ways of seeing that cannot
be shared.
Unique perspectives,
personal visions,
that point of contact
between
what’s housed within the frame of this,
(which some would call a man)
and these:
the external
places,
people,
possibilities
and events
filling the world around us.

We see, hear, touch, taste and feel it all
with our senses.
But none of them
(alone
or all together)
teach us how to sing the song of life,
which,
if we are lucky,
needs not Choirs Of Angels,
nor any
Great Conductor
but only that
we open up our willing hearts
to all that might then follow,

eager always
to lend our voices
to each and every note. 
. 

Roll On

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean -- roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin -- his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown."

from Byron's Childe Harold. He was definitely not the cheeriest bloke on the planet but he did know how to write a line or two. Not that one's envious in anyway, you understand. Oh no, not the louse.

Bastard!