Giant babies and all that

Most days I like to check out what people have been searching in order to come across my blog, usually it is something that brings up my most viewed posts, like 'Margaret Atwood poetry' or 'Will and Lyra's bench' or, strangely, 'galapagos'. Sometimes people just coincidentally search the precise passage from a book that I have quoted in my review. The Cooking and Sewing post from April is still getting visitors almost every day though I can't fathom out how people are coming across it. The most peculiar search I came across was 'giant baby+ squashing' which brings up our visit to the Manchester Art Gallery back in January, I rather liked that one. But today someone searched 'martine frampton', and now I am just completely freaked out!

In other news I have made a firm decision to participate in National Novel Writing Month (more commonly known as NaNoWriMo) in November. Creature and I signed up last year but since we moved house I failed to write a single word, Creature wrote a few chapters, and she likes to do it the hard way, by hand in a real book with a real pen. I am working on the principle that if I tell people it is more of a real commitment. The only problem is my complete lack of inspiration. I read so many great books and each of them inspires me in a different way, so I am trying to pin down what makes each of them worth reading. I went in search of Margaret Atwood's 'Negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing' on the bookcases downstairs and got 'A Novel in a Year' by Louise Doughty from the library that has some interesting writing exercises to get me started. While rooting around my shelves I picked out 'These are my rivers' by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, as is invariably the case, I got completely distracted from the job in hand, so I thought I would share this, it being a long time since I posted any poetry:

People getting divorced

riding around with their clothes in the car

and wondering what happened

to everyone and everything

including their other

pair of shoes

And if you spy one

then who knows what happened

to the other

with tongue alack

and years later not even knowing

if the other ever

found a mate

without splitting the seams

or remained intact

unlaced

and the sole

ah the soul

a curious conception

hanging on somehow

to walk again

in the free air

once the heel

has been replaced