⌗AtoZ challenge, April 16th 2019, letter N

Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !

I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWriMo ! So the challenge is
twofold !! But I'm behind in the NaNoWrite, 1500 words out of 10 000 because I'm concentrating on research and building bridges with my contacts.

Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.

If you would like to know more and maybe participate in the future go here

A special thanks to John Holton today for his post to make things easier for everyone and offer even more encouragement.

N is for Nothing

I had Nothing planned for today but I found a poem I wrote for one of my Open University Creative Writing courses (A 215) from back in 2009. This was for the Final Exam, along with another poem, My Father in My Bones, that you can find in my ⌗28days challenge MOURN post, on this blog, February 24th 2019.

The latter was published in the Program Anthology of December 2012, theme Remember. The former isn't as good, but I'm still fond of it, like all my little babies..The real ones I love much, much more, to the Moon and Back.

Between Two Nowheres

The other half of half-afraid opens many a door

Brenden Kennelly

Where does half-afraid stop

and half-not-afraid start ?

Where does despair end

and elation begin ?

Between sinking and floating

the edge is slim.

A spark, a smile, a hug

surges from stomach to mind.

And I'm on top of the wave.

The faster the surf, the fear

disappears, never even there;

but the crash in the foam

is all the deeper, as if I care.

Between two nowheres,

as somewhere can become

nowhere, in an instant.

A light out in the dark

switches off, suddenly.

And shadows creep

and smother me.

©susanbauryrouchard

Sorry it's a tat dark ! I'm in a better place now.

To cheer you up, here are some songs that I have been listening to these past few days.

Ring o' ring o' Roses from Charlotte Gainsbourg's Album REST, 2017. I got this for my Birthday on Saturday,  to see the video, go here

and the official video for the REST album as a whole in which her children appear, two girls and a boy,  go here

Nothing Else from the album SNOW, by Angus and Julia Stone, 2017. Also a Birthday present.

go here

I got a Woman by Ray Charles,  extract from the movie Ray,  2005,  go here

Another birthday present, (3 CD Album) as I've just seen the film and didn't have any of his.

A song which I find a bit sexest but symptomatic of woman's place in society in the 50's. Even more so for an African-American woman from the Southern States. The way Ray also treated his women !   go here

And to dream. Also listened to this morning, from the Blue Double Album, 1967-70.

Lucy in the Skies with Diamonds, The Beatles, 1967, all you ever wanted to know about the song,

go here   and to listen to the song in full, once more with the beautiful video from St Pepper,

go here

A Fool on the Hill, The Beatles, 1967, the video from the film Magical Mystery Tour, go here

for the full song,  go here

and  to link up with my poem : Nowhere Man, The Beatles, 1966, performed LIVE, Circus Krone Munich,  go here

That's all Folks for today, see you tomorrow. I have some time at last to visit more of the Master List. Thank you for reading and bearing with me ! Have a nice A to Z, ' N ' day.

Heavy rain all night and this morning, early, here in Toulouse, France. The Westerly wind is now chasing the clouds away, a slice of blue, here and there, the sun peeping, shooting rays on my desk in waves.

Braganza, Portugal, July 2017

Please comment and I will be sure to reply.

⌗AtoZ challenge, April 15h 2019, letter M

Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !

I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWriMo ! So the challenge is
twofold !! But I'm behind in the NaNoWrite, 1500 words out of 10 000 because I'm concentrating on research and building bridges with my contacts.

Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.

If you would like to know more about the challenge and maybe join us in the future go here

M is for Madness

You chase after A's like there's no Air.

You're right there isn't.

Busy like a Bee, you grope at straws.

You had C in Maths in 5th grade,

clinging to crumbs. But 20/20 in J. High.

You had A in French Grammar in primary,

0/20 in French spelling, a year Later.

Go Figure.

You were branded D for Dunce,

F for Fantasising, except everthing

that happened to you was true.

You loved to frolic in the fields,

climb trees.

Eat Doughnuts with Cream and Jam.

You grasped at every galvanating

experience , seizing the Day.

Ellation was your Elixir.

Halt there !

They Hollered. Hell is never far away.

Heaven, easy peasy.

Instilled by restrictions and blows,

your Life can't take Flight.

Lessons learnt the Hard way.

You watched Skippy the Kangaroo,

and dreamt of being a Koala bear,

a panda.

You sang ' Kookaburra sits on the old Gum tree, 

merry, merry King of the Bush is He ' ,

and Listened to ' Le Sud '.

' She's Half-Mad '. No,

the World Is.

©susanbauryrouchard

If you would like to listen to Le Sud,  go here

and Kookaburra. 

We sung it at school and made a record in 1972 with the British section of the Lycée International of St Germain-en-Laye, under the direction of Dilys Barré, our British Section's teacher. A book/record album recorded by RCA, a French record company, in association with Hatier the editor. She taught us to sing, to play the recorder and to dance. Later on, we performed a musical, The King and his princesses, I think it was called. All my year group got to be princesses, except for me who was an urchin, because I was too tall and skinny ! But I was the understudy of a Peacock, because I danced well and was a quick learner. As luck would have it, on the evening of the performance, she fell ill ! But she recovered before she was due to go on ! Oh ! Well ! I had my moments on the stage later, when I was 15,  in Our Town, as the sister of the Hero with a lovely speech, up on a ladder (at the window sill), about the Stars and the Universe.

Here is the song sung by a choir of children, as our record is not on You.tube and I don't know how, for the life of me, to transfer a vinyl onto MP3 !

go here

Our record

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share your thoughts, please comment below

and I will be sure to reply. Have a nice ' M ' day. Brilliant sunshine here in Toulouse this morning. Covered over now. Cool wind from the East.

#FMF April12th 2019, LACK

Hello, it’s Friday again. In fact, I’m only posting this on Sunday, 7.30  a.m. European time ! I’m participating in the A to Z challenge, 10th anniversary, this month. As well as the NaNoWriMo April.
So I’m lacking time this month !

Write five minutes flat every Friday with Kate and her ‘gang’, on a word prompt given Thursday evening. If you would like to know more or participate in the future. Go here


LACK

We think we lack time to do all what we need to or would like to accomplish. In fact, I think we just don’t take the time to complete the essentials. Take time to wake up in the morning: stretch, be lenient on your back, bring your knees up before lifting your head and roll out of bed.
Take time to eat and drink, just looking out the window, or listening to your loved ones around the table. Take time to wake up your body : light massages, warm up exercises, easy stretches.
Take time to finish tasks before going on to the next one : planning ahead is a very important one, that saves you time later. Accept to be interrupted but be firm. Switch off your phone or lock the door!

Most people in the world lack food and clean water, basic freedoms and rights. Modern slavery is very much alive in most countries rich and poor. In France, 12 year-olds and younger girls from North-African villages are sold by their fathers with the promise of a home and education in France, only to find themselves as slave-maids to wealthy city families. They often live in sculleries or even closets without enough food, clothes or warmth, let alone an education ! When they are older, they are the victims of sexual abuse and end up on the street. Even the children of these Bourgeois households are passive accomplices. One word to a teacher would send social services and the police in to free the slave.  Russian and Eastern European young girls often suffer the same fate in Western Europe, paying dear money to come over to receive an education and work, only to find themselves the slaves and whores to unscrupulous Business men and women !
We must endeavour to change all these breaches of freedom : but let us not lose our food and clean water in the process ! Let us not forget our rights, but also our duty which comes with these hard-fought rights. To save the environment in which we live, to save true democracy which is becoming scarce in our societies.
We must not give up from lack of determination and hope.

If you would like to know more about modern slavery in France in 2019 Go here

Copyrightsusanbauryrouchard


Have a pleasant weekend.
Please feel free to comment and I will be sure to reply.

⌗AtoZ challenge, April 13th 2019, letter L

Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !

I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWriMo ! So the challenge is
twofold !!
Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.

Thanks to Arlee Bird for hosting this challenge. We are nearly half-way there.
If you would like to know more  go here


L is for LONDON.

My eldest daughter lives and works in London at Be at One Cocktail Bar, Spitafields Market. On the weekend of the 26th-29th April, we are flying to visit her. The whole family is coming, even her Nana who is taking the Eurostar from Paris.

                          We have a very busy schedule. Algae Wrap Friday morning, in the afternoon visiting the London Times, curtesy of my good friend Russel Herneman, once flash-fiction writer, now award-winning Cartoonist. Friday evening, we girls are going out to a show : the Phantom of the Opera. We are musicals' fans and especially Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice aficionados . I saw Jesus Christ Superstar, the film, in 1974. My sister bought the record soon after and I have been listening to them ever since. My girls caught the bug. We saw EVITA, on stage in London in 2006, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Coat  in 2010 in Bournemouth ( I had already seen it back in 1976 or '77, in Poole). My children are hooked, they have seen the films too and enjoy listening to the music and singing along.

                          Saturday, the adventure continues, more packed than ever ! The Tate (old) in the morning. We have never been, although I have seen several Turners at exhibitions in Paris : my wooden desktop is covered with a Turner painting in the form of a puzzle under glass, that my husband and I completed when we lived in Barcelona. Then we have to rush to the Globe Theatre : I thought we'd take the boat to Banks. At 2.30 Henry IV, Part I starts. The girls didn't want to sit, on wooden benches, through a Shakespeare play for three hours, so only my husband, my son and I have tickets.

King Lear, 2007 with Sir Ian McKellen and The Merchant of Venice, 2006 with F. Murray Abraham

King John, 2013 with Pippa Nixon, as the Bastard (Rosalind in As You Like It, 2014)

                           I have been enjoying live performances of The Bard all my life it seems. One of the first was Henry V in Stratford in 1978. I also remember seeing As You Like It at the Royal Albert Hall. In 1987, I took my future husband and a Business school friend to A Midsummer's Night Dream in Regent's Park, magical. Since 2006 I have been enjoying yearly sprees to Stratford-upon-Avon. I attend a seminar with talks, voice classes, Q&A with actors and Directors, but most importantly 3 to 4 live performances. Some plays from the Canon still elude me, others I have seen several times: Royal Shakespeare Company and at times international theatre companies. It has been my breath of fresh air, my week away from home, a time to muse and write, an opportunity to visit my Auntie Ann and her husband Ron, my English golf partner/mentor.

                        In the evening, we will be at the Old Vic for Arthur Miller's All My Sons. My mother, son and husband will accompany me. The girls will go out on the town ! I remember seeing Murder at the Vicarage in the late ' 70s but it wasn't at the Old Vic, my mother tells me.

                               

                             Sunday morning, the National Portrait Gallery awaits. The magnificent 'political' paintings of Queen Elizabeth I, the first ' propaganda ' art, and to show my children the historical portraits. Full house for this outing. Lunch ' sur le pouce ', as we say in French. In the afternoon we'll laze around and visit my daughter's apartment for tea, and meet her Australian boyfriend. Birthday dinner at a laid-back Italian of her choosing, then onto drinks at Be at One Cocktail Bar. The night : the sky's the limit !

                              All good things must come to an end eventually. My mother has her train at one on Monday; our flight is only at 6 p.m. 

My A to Z will lag a bit behind but who's counting !

©susanbauryrouchard

My friend the Cartoonist, go here


The Phantom of the Opera, trailer, go here

Westminster Abbey, July 2016

National Gallery and Big Ben, July 2016

My favourite Turner

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share your thoughts, please comment below

and I will be sure to reply. Have a nice ' L ' day. Brilliant sunshine here in Toulouse. Birthday Lunch on the terrace/garden at the VIRGIL restaurant in Fenouillet (Toulouse), Michelin and Gault et Millau guides.

⌗AtoZ challenge, April 12th, letter K

Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !

I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWrite ! So the challenge is
twofold !!
Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.

If you would like to know more, and maybe join in the future  go here

K is for Kathleen ARTER

                            Kathleen is the name of my big sister, who died in 2011.

But she was named after  my mother's mother Kathleen ARTER, from Yorkshire, born 12th December 1901. She grew up just outside of Malton, East of York, on the road to Scarborough, on the North Sea.  My great-grandfather, Charles Arter was a coachman and gate-keeper.

                            Kathleen Arter's mother was Ada Arter, born Clarke. My grandmother had many
brothers and sisters. I remember two mostly: Nelly and Edward. When we were little, my sister and I used to spend a month in the summer in Bournemouth, where my mother was born and raised. A few times we visited Aunt Nelly, as she was called, in Yorkshire. I remember her Yorkshire teas fondly : cucumber sandwiches and all sorts of cakes and buns. A real High tea !

                              In 1993, just after I married, I took a trip to Yorkshire and met up with both Aunt Nelly and Uncle Edward who were still alive, but very old. They both lived in their own homes though and were fairly fit. Kathleen Arter, my grandmother had died young, in 1969, at age 68. We were living in New York (Staten Island) at the time and she had visited us with my grandfather the year before. I do have a few memories, kept up thanks to photographs. I remember playing in her garden on the swing and she used to cuddle me a lot. My sister had many recollections and she was sorely affected by her death.

                               Kathleen Arter lived with her family in the lodge of a Manor House. Uncle Edward's son Peter took us there in 1993, but unfortunately I haven't got a picture on paper, only in my mind.

                               One day, when Kathleen was small, her father Charles went out early, as was his custom, to hunt in the nearby woods, part of the domaine. There were probably hare, small deer and also pheasants. He never came back. The alarm was raised. They searched high and low but never found a body. There were marshes in the area and they supposed he was probably swallowed whole. When I tell this story to my children, my husband jokes and says that Charles Arter abducted and moved to Australia where he had a whole new family ! That's just darn cruel, I say, to smear his memory like that ! I don't think my mother appreciates either...

                               Anyway, here Ada was, with a flock of small children, no husband, no place to live and no means. She had to work to make ends meet but I don't know what she did, maybe she took in laundry.

                                Kathleen Arter moved to the South as soon as she could and started working at Woolworths in Bournemouth as a shop clerk. She met my grandfather Albert Dunckley in Bournemouth. Albert was from Hackney, East London and an electrician. His father had a shop in Hackney, repairing wheels, bicycles and then the first cars.

                                Albert was four years younger than Kathleen, so she lied about her age, saying that she was born on 12th December 1905. Nobody ever found out in our family until her death in 1969, when going through her things, Albert found her passport and looked at the dates. It was a shock for her husband, Patricia (my mother) and her little sister Ann (may she rest in peace).

                                Patricia Baury, my mother, will be 87 this year and still going strong but she lost her mother when she was only 37, her husband Jean-Louis Baury, when she was 73 and her eldest daughter, the second Kathleen,  at age 79. She has me...and I'm not going anywhere ! And her three grandchildren, mine.  

©susanbauryrouchard

On the Yorkshire coast, Whitby, 2016.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share your thoughts, please comment below

and I will be sure to reply. Have a nice ' K ' day. Brilliant sunshine here in Toulouse. Not a cloud in the sky. Warmer too, laundry drying outside on the terrace.

⌗AtoZ challenge, April 11th 2019, letter J

Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !

I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWrite ! So the challenge is
twofold !!
Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.

If you would like to know more  go here

J is for  JAM

It's my Birthday on Saturday and I'm going to make a cake.
A raspberry jam sponge with whipped cream.


Put the kettle on to boil.
As soon as the bird whistles,
pour into a large glass bowl.
Place the cake basin on top.
So the base heats with the steam.

My mother stopped doing this.
Now she wonders
why her sponge doesn't rise
light and fluffy ! She has forgotten
her own lessons, Nana's recipe.

Measure out the sugar : 3 oz.
Dump it in the bottom, swoosh.
The same amount for the flour.
Break an egg and beat it up
with the sugar, snug in the warmth.

Another, then another. Three,
three, three, easy as pie.
Beat till bubbles bob
on the surface. It makes a racket.
You gotta do what you gotta do.

Sieve the flour, sprinkle, falling
snow. Fold in. Gentle, soft.
do not offend the bubbles.
Butter the round half tins.
Ripple the mixture back and forth.

An equal amount in both.
Stick in a scorching oven.
Quarter of an hour, risen,
light brown. " Lick the bowl ? "
You holler, up the stairs.
Patter of feet, smacking of lips.

Proceed with the rest of your life,
while the sponge halves cool.
Have a nap in the spring sun.
Slice the two pieces out,
thanks to the built-in device.

Whip the cream, whole fat.
Spread the raspberry jam.
Dollop the whipped. Sandwich.
Sprinkle with icing sugar.
Decorate with fresh strawberries.

If you're not born in July !
Decorate with the fitting
number of candles, or not !
A sugared message, Happy Birthday.
Easter chicks and eggs.

©susanbauryrouchard


A Children's story : It's my Birthday and I'm going to make a cake, by Helen Oxenbury    , Walker Books Ltd, Abbey Broadcast Communications plc
go here

and another one of my favourites : Surprise, Surprise by Michael Foreman. The video is unavailable online, but for the references to the book,
go here

It's about a little panda who wants to make a surprise for his mother's birthday. And what a surprise !

Alice's third Birthday, 18/4

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share your thoughts, please comment below

and I will be sure to reply. Have a nice ' J ' day. Raining today, here in Toulouse. Thunder storm yesterday evening with a magnificient rainbow against a prune sky as the setting sun peeped under the clouds.

⌗AtoZ challenge, April 10th, letter I

Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !

I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWrite ! So the challenge is
twofold !!
Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.

If you would like to know more about this challenge and maybe participate in the future
go here


I is for

INDIGO

a Poem inspired by Joan Baez's song Forever Young, originally sung by Bob Dylan.


May your skies always be blue.
May your heart always be strong.
And may the wild violets always bloom
underneath your window.

May the bamboo always grow.
May the panda always thrive.
And may the spring always flow
into your open hands.

May the wind always rise.
May the sail always swell.
And may the waves always push
your boat to a haven.

May the lion always roar.
May the robin always sing.
And may the rain always patter
onto your Indigo tree.

©susanbauryrouchard

for the song Forever Young, go here

Indigo plant     picture.

To know more about the Indigo plant  go here

Carnaval Limoux, March 2019.

In my garden, March 2019.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share your thoughts, please comment below

and I will be sure to reply. Have a nice ' I ' day. Sunny again today, here in Toulouse, some rain in the night, a slight drizzle this morning, bath mats drying in the breeze. April showers bring May flowers ! Still the Iris and Roses to flower.